The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ®. Морис Леблан
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the antecedents of the Latours, except that they had taken “The Cedars” furnished a year before, and very rarely received visitors. Mr. Latour was believed to be French, but even of that nobody was certain.
A week afterwards, after taking Bindo up to Nottingham, I returned to London, and watched daily for some communication, as Clotilde had promised. Weeks passed, but none came, and I gradually became more and more convinced that I had been the victim of an adventuress.
One afternoon, however, I received at my rooms in Bloomsbury a brief note in a woman’s handwriting, unsigned, asking me to call at an address in Eccleston Street, Pimlico, that evening, at half-past nine. “I desire to thank you for your kindness to me,” was the concluding sentence of the letter.
Naturally, I kept the appointment, and on ringing at the door was shown up by a man-servant to a sitting-room on the first floor, where I stood prepared again to meet the woman who held me entranced by her beauty.
But instead of a woman there appeared two dark-faced, sinister-looking foreigners, who entered without a word and closed the door behind them. I instantly recognised them as those I had seen in the passage of the “Bell” at Stilton.
“Well? So you have come?” laughed the elder of the two. “We have asked you here because we wish to know something.” And I saw that in his hand he held some object which glistened as it caught my eye. It was a plated revolver. I had been trapped!
“What do you want to know?” I inquired, quickly on the alert against the pair of desperate ruffians.
“Answer me, Mr. Ewart,” said the elder of the two, a man with a grey beard and a foreign accent. “You were driving an automobile near Alconbury on a certain evening, and a woman stopped you. She had a boy with her, and she gave you something—a packet of papers, to keep in safety for her. Where are they? We want them.”
“I know nothing of what you are saying,” I declared, recollecting Clotilde’s injunction. “I think you must be mistaken.”
The men smiled grimly, and the elder made a signal, as though to someone behind me, and next instant I felt a silken cord slipped over my head and pulled tight by an unseen hand. A third man had stepped noiselessly from the long cupboard beside the fireplace, to which my back had been turned.
I felt the cord cutting into my throat, and tried to struggle and shout, but a cloth was clapped upon my mouth, and my hands secured by a second cord.
“Now,” said the elder man, “tell us the truth, or, if not, you die. You understand? Where is that packet?”
“I know nothing of any packet,” I gasped with great difficulty.
“It’s a lie! She gave it to you! Where did you take her to?”
I was silent. I had given my promise of secrecy, and yet I was entirely helpless in their unscrupulous hands. Again and again they demanded the papers, which they said she had given me to keep for her, and my denial only brought upon me the increased torture of the cord, until I was almost black in the face, and my veins stood out knotted and hard.
I realised, to my horror, that they intended to murder me, just as they had assassinated Latour and his wife. I fought for life, but my struggles only tightened the cord, and thus increased my agony.
“Tell us where you have put those papers,” demanded the younger of the villainous, black-eyed pair, while the third man held me helpless with hands of steel. “Where is the boy?”
“I have no idea,” I replied.
“Then die,” laughed the man with the grey beard. “We have given you a chance of life, and you refuse to take it. You assisted her to escape and you will share the fate of the others.”
I saw that to save myself was impossible, but with a superhuman effort I succeeded in slipping the noose from my hands and hooking my fingers in the cord around my throat. The fellow behind placed his knee in my back, and drew the cord with all his might to strangle me; but I cried hoarsely for help, and clung to the fatal cord.
In an instant the two others, joined by a fourth, fell upon me, but by doing so the cord became loosened, and I ducked my head. For a second my right hand was freed, and I drew from my belt the long Italian knife which I often carry as a better weapon in a scrimmage than a revolver, and struck upward at the fellow who had sentenced me to death. The blade entered his stomach, and he fell forward with an agonised cry. Then slashing indiscriminately right and left, I quickly cleared myself of them. A revolver flashed close to me, but the bullet whizzed past, and making a sudden dash for the door I rushed headlong down the stairs and out into the Buckingham Palace Road, still holding my knife, my hands smeared with the blood of my enemies, and the cord still around my neck.
I went direct to the police-station, and within five minutes half a dozen constables were on their way round to the house. But on arrival they found that the men, notwithstanding their severe wounds, had fled, fearing the information I should give. The owner of the house knew nothing, save that he had let it furnished a fortnight before to the grey-bearded man, who had given the name of Burton, although he was a foreigner.
The shock had upset my nerves considerably, but, accompanied by Blythe and Bindo, I drove the car down to Dover, took her across to Calais, and then drove across France to Marseilles, and along the Riviera to Genoa and Pisa, and on to Florence—a delightful journey, which I had accomplished on three previous occasions, for we preferred the car to the stuffy wagon-lit of the Rome express.
Times without number I wondered what was the nature of those documents, and why the gang desired to obtain possession of them. But it was all a mystery, inscrutable and complete. And I told the Count nothing.
Our season at Florence was a gay one, and there were many pleasant gatherings at Bindo’s villa. The season was, however, an empty one as far as coups were concerned. The various festas had succeeded one another, and the month of May, the brightest and merriest in Italy, was nearly at an end, when one afternoon I was walking in the Cascine, the Hyde Park of the Florentines, idly watching the procession of carriages, many of whose fair occupants were known to me. Of a sudden there passed a smart victoria-and-pair, among the cushions of which lolled the figure of a well-dressed woman.
Our eyes met. In an instant the recognition was mutual, and she gave an order to stop. It was the sweet-faced wayfarer of the Great North Road—the woman who had enchanted me!
I stood in the roadway, hat in hand, as Italian etiquette requires.
“Ah! I am so pleased to meet you again,” she said in French. “I have much to tell you. Can you call on me—to-night at seven, if you have no prior engagement? We have the Villa Simoncini, in the Viale. Anyone will direct you to it. We cannot talk here.”
“I shall be delighted. I know the villa quite well,” was my answer; and then, with a smile, she drove on, and somehow I thought that the idlers watching us looked at me strangely.
At seven o’clock I was conducted through the great marble hall of the villa, one of the finest residences on the outskirts of Florence, and into the beautiful salon, upholstered in pale-green silk, where my pretty companion of that exciting run on the Great North Road rose to greet me with eager, outstretched hand; while behind her stood a tall, white-headed, military-looking man, whom she introduced as her father, General Stefanovitch.
“I asked you here for seven,” she said, with a sweet smile; “but we do not dine until eight, therefore we may talk. How fortunate we should meet to-day! I intended to write to you.”
I gathered from her subsequent conversation that we might speak frankly before her father, therefore I described to her the exciting adventure that had happened to me in Eccleston Street, whereupon she said—
“Ah! it is only to-day that I am able to reveal to you the truth, relying upon you not to make it public. The secret of the Latours must still be strictly kept, at all hazards.”
“What was their secret?” I inquired breathlessly.
“Listen, and I will tell you,” she said, motioning me to