Walker of the Secret Service/Chapter 10

“Will there be a bobby to hear her scream, north of the Zambezi?”

There were two persons in the room.

It was a small room, looking out over St. James’s Park, and attached to the library of the great London house. It was meant for the comfort of one who wished to withdraw from the library in order to examine some book at his leisure, or to make some annotation. There were a table, two comfortable chairs, and a painting, rather large for the room, representing an affair of honor on a snow-covered highway in the rear of a French column, presumably Napoleon’s army in Russia.

The conversation between the two persons in the room, Lord Donald Muir and Walker, of the American Secret Service, had passed its preliminary stage.

The youth seated in one of the great chairs was a typical product of the aristocracy of England. He was little more than a boy, but he had already something of the reserve, the almost pretentious restraint, of his race. But he was not entirely within this discipline; an intensity of feeling broke out. It appeared now and then in a word, in an inflection of his voice, in a gesture.

He sat very straight in the chair, in his well-cut evening clothes—his gloves crushed together and gripped in a firm hand that could not remain idle under his intensity of feeling. He was a very good-looking boy, with a single startling feature, his eyebrows were straight and dark, while his hair, weathered by the outdoors, was straw-colored. It gave his blue eyes at all times a somewhat tense expression.

Walker had come to London for a conference with the American Ambassador on the passport forgeries, and he had remained a guest at the Embassy ball. And when the Ambassador had asked him to hear the boy and help him if he could, he had gone with Lord Donald Muir into the little room beyond the great library.

The Ambassador had explained the matter. He had given him each detail; the girl’s mother was American; she had married the Earl of Rexford; she was dead; Rexford was dead, and here was this dilemma. Walker knew each of the persons in this drama, especially Sir Henry Dercum, who had been in the English foreign service, and at one time attached to the Embassy in Washington.

Walker was standing, now, before a window, looking out into the night that enveloped London. The boy continued to speak.

“Will he not have the right to take her anywhere he likes?”

The Secret Service agent made a slight gesture, as of one rejecting a suggestion. The gesture was unconscious. The man was thinking of what Lord Donald Muir was saying to him.

“I suppose he has the right to take her anywhere he likes, provided he remains within the jurisdiction of the English law.”

“Surely,” replied the boy. “Dercum is a clever beast; he will keep within the jurisdiction of the English law.”

Walker turned slightly, his face was outlined against the black square of the night framed in the window.

“Then why do you have this fear about it?” he said.

There came a sudden energy into Lord Muir’s voice.

“That is all very well as a theory,” he said, “but it is quite different in fact. … The English law runs in South Africa; that is the theory It is a very fine theory, as it used to be lectured into us at the Hill—a great empire providing precisely the same measure of protection for its subject at the most distant point of its dominion that it provided for him in the very capital itself. That is as nearly as I can remember it. It is a fine theory.”

“It is a magnificent theory,” replied the Secret Service agent, “and England has always endeavored to maintain it.”

Lord Muir twisted his gloves; his brown hands gripped them.

“But England can’t maintain it; that is the very thing I mean. What protection can the law of England give her in northwestern Rhodesia? The law of England will run there in theory, but it’s Dercum’s damned will that will run there in fact.”

He gripped the gloves suddenly with both hands, as though he were about to destroy them.

“Will there be a bobby to hear her scream?”

He leaned forward in his intensity.

“And what will she be when she comes out? And she won’t come out until Dercum’s ready. I will tell you what she will be, she will be what Dercum intends her to be.”

He looked at the Secret Service agent, his face covered with sweat. Then he continued:

“Do you think this fine English law will do her any good then?”

Walker came a step or two away from the window. He looked down at the boy. His face was composed, with that vague expression it always took on when his interest was very much awakened.

“Sir Henry Dercum,” he said, “will have some instincts of a gentleman.”

“If he has any instincts of a gentleman,” replied the boy, with a sudden energy, “he has kept them so far concealed. London does not know about this man. I have had him looked up. He was unspeakable in Hongkong. No members of the English colony came down to the boat to see him off, although he did represent the empire. But he is a clever beast; one can’t get at him.

“I wanted my solicitor to resist his confirmation as guardian, but he said I was not a party in interest.”

The boy’s voice was charged with an intense vigor.

“I wonder why the law is always so helpless about anything that is important. I had rather see her go to the devil than to Dercum. The devil has a reputation for what he is, and Dercum has a carefully built up reputation in London for what he is not—an explorer, with that sporting instinct that is dear to the English, and a gentleman, when the fact is, he is a crook, a thief when it comes to the accumulation of scientific data, and a bounder! But he is not a fool, and that’s what makes him so damnably dangerous; he is infinitely clever.”

Walker remained where he had been standing, looking down at the man in the chair, his face in its vague repose. The dilemma of Lord Donald Muir profoundly impressed him.

“I am very much puzzled about this matter,” he said. “I cannot say that I trust Dercum, but I can say that I have no reason not to trust him. In fact, he has acted, the American Ambassador tells me, with extreme delicacy. The property which the girl takes from her mother lies in America. He has made no effort to exercise any control over it; he has, in fact, advised the Ambassador that he would be pleased to have the trustees of her mother’s estate continue to administer this property until the girl comes of age to receive it. That did not sound like a man with a design.

“It was quite possible for him to obtain the sale of this property in America and the transfer of the funds into his custody under the English law, but he takes the other course. This does not seem precisely consistent with your estimate of the man.”

There was a note as of a bitter laugh under Lord Muir’s answer.

“It’s precisely consistent with my estimate of him. What the brute’s after is the girl; when he gets her, he will get everything with her. Why hurry? When Dercum has degraded her enough, he will get all the rest of it; he knows what he is doing.”

The boy got up suddenly.

“And I can’t stop him,” he said, “unless I go and kill him; and the beast is too clever to be killed except in the nastiest way. ‘The duel has gone out with the lace coat,’ he laughs at me with his little reptilian eyes under the heavy eyelids. ‘Have a bit of patience, my boy; I have no objection to you, if you please my ward. But you must wait a little; she is quite young. It is admirable to be youthful and impetuous, but it makes life difficult for a guardian.’ That’s what he says. And I know what he thinks, and I know what he is going to do.”

The Secret Service agent interrupted:

“What, precisely?”

“It will be just what I told you a moment ago,” replied Lord Muir. “He is laying plans now; she’s quite keen to get into any queer corner of the earth. It is easy enough to get a girl worked up, especially when she has a big legend of her father before her. He will do precisely what I have said, take her into South Africa.”

He got up with sudden energy.

“The law can’t stop him, but there must be something, and that’s why I come to you, sir,” he added.

“To me,” said Walker, “—because you believe in providence?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy continued, “that is precisely the reason I came to you. It is true that the American Ambassador has a point of attack with Dercum because of these American properties, but that is not the thing I depended upon. My uncle, when he was chief of the criminal investigation department of Scotland Yard, used to say when we had a perplexed thing to take up with America: ‘We can unravel it, if Captain Walker comes up with one of his inspirations from heaven.’ Well, sir, I have come to you for one of these inspirations.”

Walker laughed softly. The reputation was perhaps his greatest asset—a sort of intuition arising at certain complicated stages of an affair, the sudden swift realization of some essential hitherto unobserved.

Walker continued to smile.

The young man was looking at him with a tense, serious expression.

“You will have one of these inspirations, Captain Walker?”

The Secret Service agent began to walk about the room.

He was disturbed that Lord Donald Muir should come to him with this affair. It was not a thing in which he ought to take any part. Outside of some courteous discussion at the request of the American Ambassador, he did not see how it was possible for him to have anything to do with the matter. And further, it disturbed him that this youth should come depending upon what was to him the absurd phase of a detective reputation.

Scotland Yard called his sudden swift insight into some complicated matter, “the inspirations from heaven of the Chief of the American Secret Service,” and not precisely with a complimentary accent. The thing annoyed him. But he smiled at the youth in the chair—that vague, placid smile for which the man was famous.

“I do not see what I can do, my dear Lord Muir,” he said; “but I shall be receptive to any inspiration that may arrive. Let us go down.”

They went out of the little room into the great library.

It was a long, immense room, and the doors were closed. As they passed through, the music from below ascended, and the vast confusion of human voices, like the hum of some distant insect hive. Walker opened the door, and they were at once above an immense sea of human figures, gay, brilliant.

The crowded Embassy ball moved below them. The jewels, the gowns of women, the color of uniforms gave the thing the aspect of an almost barbaric saturnalia. The dense crowd overflowed onto the bronze stairway.

Lord Muir entered and was lost in the immense throng, seeking the one about whom he was so greatly concerned. The Chief of the American Secret Service went slowly down the stairway, moving his hand along the mahogany rail under which, in a magnificent frieze, a wood-nymph entangled in a flowering vine fled from the pursuit of satyrs. He was more disturbed than he had been willing to admit.

This girl was the daughter of that charming American woman who had married the Earl of Rexford.

Captain Walker had not cared greatly for the Earl of Rexford; he was too typically an Englishman, following conventions that seemed a trifle out of modern times; but he was compelled, in a measure, to admire him. While other men wasted their fortunes in the frivolities of London, this man had spent what he could get in exploration, in fitting out expeditions to discover unknown places of the earth. And he went with them, enduring the hardship and peril.

He had died in his greatest venture. The whole expedition had perished on one of the windswept plateaus of the Antarctic. It was Dercum who had gone in to find him, and he had found him frozen to death—the very dogs frozen, in one of those fearful depressions of temperature that sometimes descend in an immense blizzard on this wind-swept plateau.

From Dercum’s report he had very nearly reached Rexford alive. The expedition had evidently held out for days against the blizzard. The Earl of Rexford had been the last man to go. In the snow hut, on the canvas table, was his diary, written up. Beside it, on the blank sheet, were a dozen paragraphs in which he had directed the appointment of Dercum as guardian for his minor daughter, with all custody and direction of his estate.

The Secret Service agent passed these things through his mind as he descended—the brilliant laughter, the murmur of voices below, making a swirl of noises. He remembered some of the details arising in the formal matter of Dercum’s appointment after his return. A solicitor or some official authority had ventured a doubt about the handwriting on the page beside the last entry in the diary. But it was shown to him that the writing of innumerable pages of the diary varied, due to the cold or to the physical condition of the writer at the time.

The persons in Dercum’s expedition, persons whose integrity could not be doubted, had been but a few minutes behind him in entering this snow hut in which the Earl of Rexford had been found, and they had at once, at Dercum’s direction, written their signatures at the bottom of the page.

The diary had been immediately authenticated. It could not have been afterward changed. And it was shown that these signatures, written in that immense cold by benumbed fingers, varied from the normal signatures of the individuals returning to their common environment of life. In fact, no one could have said who had written these signatures if the men who had written them that day, at Dercum’s direction, in the snow hut on the canvas table, had not been present in England to establish the fact. The diary, the ink, the pen were there on the canvas table, and these men had established by their signatures the authenticity of this writing beyond question.

At this moment a tall man wearing a distinguished order passed the Chief of the American Secret Service.

“Sir,” he said, “are you perhaps receiving an inspiration from heaven on our Hyde Park murders?”

Walker smiled.

“It would be my only hope,” he said, “against the superior intelligence of Scotland Yard.”

And he went on. He was annoyed by the incident. Would he never escape from this ridiculous pretension!

As he entered the crowd overflowing on the bottom of the stairway, he caught a glimpse of Sir Henry Dercum and the girl in an eddy beyond where the great newel post turned. Dercum’s big shoulders would be anywhere conspicuous. He was a massive Englishman, with a wide, Oriental face, purpled by good feeding, and little reptilian eyes under heavy lids that very nearly obscured them. The man had a habit of lifting his head when he was very much concerned, as though to get a better view of his subject without the effort or the danger of raising his eyelids.

The girl before him was in the splendid lure of youth; her dark hair was lifted, by some subtlety of the coiffeur’s art, into a beautiful, soft back ground for her face; her dark eyes and her delicate skin were exquisitely brought out by it. She was in the first bud of life, and she was very lovely. But there was more than mere physical beauty; there was the charm of inexperience, the charm of adventurous youth that does not question, and, like charity, believeth all things—that inexperience which is gayly ready for any adventure into what it beautifully imagines to be a fairy world.

The Secret Service agent saw the expression bedded into Dercum’s heavy face, and he knew what it meant. He heard also the sentence he was speaking.

“You will need a bit of change from all this artificiality.”

“Do I look stale so soon, Sir Henry?”

The girl laughed.

His eyes traveled over her, his head thrown back in a slow, heavy-lidded expression as though it were a physical caress.

“Ah, no,” he said; “but you will have inherited some of your father’s interest in the waste places of the earth. How would you like to go with me and find a lost river?”

“I should love it,” she said. “Where is your lost river, Sir Henry?”

He looked about him.

“Let us find a seat somewhere,” he said, “and I will show you a map.”

They got out of the crowd, traversed the long hall that runs parallel to St. James’s Park, and entered the conservatory.

Walker followed. Dercum’s words had almost the sting of a blow. It was the verification of Lord Donald Muir’s anxiety. If love were blind, Walker reflected, it had surely the intuition of the saints. Dercum’s plan, the plan which Walker had considered academic and unlikely, was practical and on the way.

The Chief of the American Secret Service went on into the conservatory, through fringes of the gay crowd floating everywhere like gorgeous butterflies disentangled from the mass. He stopped beside an immense vase filled with Japanese chrysanthemums of a peculiar color, huge like a shock of hair on an immense stem. They entirely obscured him, and he did not move.

It was not in any definite plan that he had entered the conservatory and stopped behind this mass of flowers. He had been surprised, shocked by the swift verification of this boy’s fear, and he wished to reflect on it. It was not that he had followed to hear what Dercum said; the details of what he said would be now unimportant. It was the man’s intention alone that mattered, and this intention required no further explanatory word.

He felt a sudden and desperate anxiety. This girl, lovely and inexperienced, was entirely at Dercum’s will; as her guardian he would have exclusive control of her, and, with the man’s cleverness, what he wished he would accomplish. The English law, having put the girl into his charge, would not concern itself about intentions that could not be established. It would concern itself only with the overt act, and when Dercum resorted to that he would be beyond a running of the King’s writ.

Walker felt himself pressed for reflection, and he stopped here unmoving, without a plan. But as chance would have it, he stopped precisely at the place he would have selected if he had followed in determination to hear every word that Dercum was about to say. Sir Henry and the girl were just beyond him—beyond the screen of flowers, on a bench by the window. Their words, although under-uttered, came clearly to him; and in his vague reflection, the skill with which Dercum moved in his plan was conspicuously evident.

The man was getting the lure of a land of mystery into his story; he was deftly stimulating the girl’s fancy; he was calling her interest in her father’s adventures to his aid; he was making a wonder expedition out of this thing he had in mind. No element of thrill, or color, in this adventure was lacking.

Walker could almost see Dercum’s finger on the map. But the map would be only a property of the thing he was staging. He did not explain precisely where this river lay, or the route to it. But on some golden afternoon they would unship at a seaport, assemble a fantastic company and go into some lost country that would be like the Wood beyond the World, or the waste regions of some fairy kingdom. And they would go now, this very summer, when the London season had slacked a little.

Dercum was beginning to specify dates. Walker could not see him, but he knew that the bit of pencil moved on the map; he would arrange everything. From the few words of the girl, reaching him across the Japanese chrysanthemums, she was entranced. A butterfly entangled in illusions—she was ready to go, and she would go.

And with his clear vision, the vision not accustomed to be obscured by detail, the Chief of the American Secret Service saw that the thing could not be prevented. One could interfere with the custody of a guardian only with an established intent in an English court. This intent must be based on evidence, and there would be no evidence; there would not be even the knowledge that the thing was contemplated. With infinite cleverness Dercum had drawn the girl into a conspiracy of silence. They would arrange it; they would keep their own counsels, and they would go. It would have all the secret, alluring charm of a fairy adventure.

Walker heard the pledge of silence, and knew that they were coming out. He saw, also, looking down the long hall toward the drawing-room, Lord Donald Muir advancing in his search. He would be here in a moment; the three of them would meet, in a moment, just beyond where he stood behind the chrysanthemums. Already Dercum and the girl were very nearly up to him.

What would he do?

There was something surely to be done. The world behind its harsh, indifferent machinery must be controlled by some immense considerate impulse. All the operations of life could not be abandoned to a mere physical fatalism, to laws that were unthinking, or to a tendency that could not change. There must be something in the universe to interfere against the iniquity of human intentions and this indifference of nature! And suddenly, with a flash of vision, Walker saw what had happened in Rexford’s snow hut, on the plateau of the Antarctic, during the twenty minutes that Dercum had been there before his expedition had come up—he saw it as clearly as though he had been looking on.

He called to Lord Donald Muir, and he advanced to meet Dercum and the girl.

“Sir Henry,” he said, “will you release these young people to the dance and walk a moment with me?”

Dercum lifted his big Oriental face, looking out under his heavy eyelids. He moved the tips of the girl’s fingers to his lips, and he nodded to Muir.

“You will be a very brilliant couple,” he said. “I shall be charmed to observe you.”

And then he turned to the Chief of the American Secret Service.

“Ah, Walker,” he said, “I have not seen you since the old days in Washington.”

The Chief of the American Secret Service put his hand through Dercum’s arm and drew him along beside him, down the hall, with an ease of manner as though he were the warm companion of a lifetime.

“My friend,” he said, “I am going to ask you to release this guardianship and go on your expedition alone.”

Dercum stopped suddenly, his body rigid.

“You have overheard,” he said.

Walker smiled. He made a slight gesture.

“It is one of the perquisites of the Secret Service,” he said. “You will grant my request, Sir Henry.”

“Your request?” Dercum’s voice was almost a stutter. “I grant it?”

The Chief of the American Secret Service took a firmer hold of his arm.

“Walk with me,” he said; “we may be noticed. … Ah, yes, my friend, you will grant it.”

“Why should I grant it, pray?” said the amazed Dercum.

“You will grant it,” replied Walker, “because you will not wish to answer in the English courts—in the English criminal courts—a question that has just occurred to me.”

The Chief of the American Secret Service laughed; two persons connected with a Continental Embassy were regarding him. Then he went on:

“How did it happen, Sir Henry, that when you came on Lord Rexford’s expedition on the Antarctic plateau, that morning, when you entered his snow hut some twenty minutes ahead of the other members of your expedition, and in that low temperature, in that deadly Antarctic temperature, you found everything frozen, the food, the very mercury in the thermometer, the bodies of the dead—how did it happen, Sir Henry”— and his hand moved on Dercum’s arm like a caress—“how did it happen that the ink on the canvas table was not also frozen?”