A NAME THAT RARELY RESONATES for readers of mystery fiction is May Edginton, the nom de plume of May Helen Marion Edginton Bailey (1883–1957), though she was a prolific writer of romances and has a connection to the American musical theater of perhaps greater import.
As H. M. Edginton, she wrote a novel, Oh! James! (1914), which inspired the 1919 stage play My Lady Friends, which lives in infamy in Boston because the owner of the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees to finance it. The play in turn was the basis for the musical No, No, Nanette (1924), which, continuing to recycle the story, was adapted for film in 1930 and 1940 before again becoming a hit when it was revived on Broadway in 1971.
Among the many films based on her stories, novels, and plays were The Prude’s Fall (1924), a silent film written by Alfred Hitchcock, who also was the assistant director; Secrets (1933), starring Mary Pickford, based on Edginton’s play of the same title; and Adventure in Manhattan (1936), starring Jean Arthur, based on her story “Purple and Fine Linen.”
The central character in The Adventures of Napoleon Prince (1912) has help, in the best tradition of Raffles, with his sidekick, Bunny, and, on the other side of the legal fence, Sherlock Holmes with his Watson. Aiding Prince in his nefarious schemes are his beautiful and devoted Gerda, described as his sister, and Dapper, his discreet and faithful servant.
“The Eyes of the Countess Gerda” was originally published in The Adventures of Napoleon Prince (New York, Cassell, 1912).
AMONG THE NEW TENANTS in the new block of very desirable flats not far from Victoria were a lady, young, charming and alone; a semi-paralytic man of any age from thirty to forty, accompanied by a pretty sister; and a tall, bronzed young man, who had apparently nothing more serious to do than to organise beautifully his bachelor housekeeping. The first named lady had been installed in Flat 24 for a month when the invalid and his sister moved into No. 20 of the flats below; the bronzed young man entered into possession of No. 23 a few days after the occupation of No. 20.
The young man, whose name, as testified by the indicator in the vestibule, was Mr. John Luck, had not been there many days before he made the acquaintance of the invalid and his sister. It was begun in quite an accidental fashion, as the hall porters saw—the trio most obviously never having met before—and it progressed casually and as politeness demanded, beneath the eyes of the same porters and a lift attendant of inquiring mind—just a “Good-morning, again!” or “Fine weather!” or “Beastly day!” and the like. A few days of these vestibule meetings resulted in the discussion of a camera which the invalid man was taking into the Green Park for the purpose of snapshotting winter scenes. It appeared Mr. John Luck knew a good deal of that make of camera; the invalid—Mr. Napoleon Prince, as testified by the indicator—had not used it before.
“You were just going out?” said the little paralytic pleasantly. “Only for a walk? Walk our way, won’t you, for a few minutes, and go on telling me about this machine?”
So that Mr. John Luck walked out by the chair of Mr. Napoleon Prince, which he wheeled himself, and by the side of the very pretty girl, his sister. All of which was seen and observed by the porters and the lift-man.
“If people of our profession only realised, Johnnie,” the little man in the chair observed as they passed out of the quadrangle, “what a deal depends on these seeming trivialities, there would be more genius rewarded, and fewer police triumphs.”
“We have nothing definite in view, Nap?” the young man hazarded.
“No, no!” Napoleon replied. “Why should we? We are gourmets, not gourmands. We have enough for the present, n’est-ce pas, mes enfants?”
“Let’s be good for a while, Nap,” said the girl.
“You hear that, Luck,” said Napoleon, smiling. “Mary tells us to be good. We will settle down for a few months, and be beneficent citizens, then. We’ll do the theatres, and you shall take Mary to the races, and we will make the acquaintance of our neighbours, and entertain them innocently.”
“Hurrah!” cried Mary. She wore a high-waisted coat of clinging lines, furs, and a wide hat, and she looked exquisite.
Johnnie Luck walked with freer step.
“Good!” he agreed. “Very good!”
“I believe,” said Napoleon, glancing at them, one on either side of him, as he wheeled along past Buckingham Palace, “that you are both wretchedly respectable at bottom.” They turned into the Green Park. “Leave me to run about and take my photographs, and philosophise on the profits of respectability, while you two take the brisk exercise that is good for you, and philosophise on—anything you like.”
There was the faintest trace of a smile—a little grim or wistful—on his large pale face as he steered away from them. They walked about the Park for an hour, seeing nobody but each other, hearing nothing but their own low-toned talk, and forgetting entirely the size of the world—theirs being populated by two—until running wheels beside them brought them back to realisation of Napoleon.
“I am sorry,” said he, “but I have used all my plates, and want my lunch. Johnnie, our acquaintance has ripened sufficiently, I imagine, for me to ask you to share the lunch.”
The trio went home, and lunched together in the Princes’ dining-room. After the meal:
“Mary is going to shop,” said Napoleon. “She is going to the Stores, because it is so respectable. But you, Johnnie—”
Johnnie Luck looked hopefully at Mary, who, in the sweetest of frocks à la Joséphine, was standing to warm one small slippered foot at the fire.
“Don’t take him with you, Mary,” said Napoleon whimsically. “I want someone to talk to.” Adding: “And you don’t know him well enough, either.”
She laughed, told Luck to stay, and left them.
“Get cigars, Johnnie,” said the little man, “draw up that chair, put your feet on the mantelpiece—because it must be such a fine thing to be able to do—and make yourself generally comfortable.”
They smoked at ease, each looking into the fire silently. Presently:
“Like your place, Johnnie? I’ve never asked.”
“All right, thanks.”
“I mentioned you should take number twenty-three or twenty-four. Better not to be on the same floor, you see.”
“I see. Oh! yes, these little cautions are worth observing, of course. Number twenty-four was taken before we came, you know.”
“So I suppose,” said Napoleon, looking into the fire. A quarter of an hour ticked by before he roused himself to say anything further. Then it was, gently:
“Johnnie, you’re seeing something in the fire, ain’t you, old man? Don’t be ashamed to be sentimental; be proud of it. I was seeing much the same sort of thing, I guess.”
John Luck had seen the Joséphine girl’s little face, of course, gleaming up at him, but—
“You!” he said, confounded, to Napoleon. “You, Nap!”
“Yes, I,” said Napoleon, with a snap, looking up. “I’ve got a man’s heart, I suppose, if I’ve only got half his body. And at that time, you see, I was whole. It was seven years ago, nearly.”
Luck nodded, and looked at him in a man’s silence of sympathy.
“It was the only time I’ve ever been done, Johnnie,” said the little man. “Done, and not got my own back. You see, it was a woman. Like to hear? I’d like to tell you. I was travelling in Italy for the Cosmopolitans’ gang I’ve told you about, and we’d got a great scoop on. I was their smartest man, and they gave the chief part to me. Well, I was in the Opera House in Florence one night, when I saw one woman among all the others. It was a crowded house—Royalty there—but after I’d looked at her I didn’t see much else—you know. She was young and dark, with marvellous eyes; dressed in white with a scarlet cloak. She was with a man, and they sat close to the orchestra. I managed to follow them out, and to see her close. My word, Johnnie, magnificent! But, I thought, not happy. She had no gloves on, and there was no wedding ring—so she was, that far, free. I went home and dressed. Next morning— Ever been in Italy, Johnnie?”
Luck shook his head.
“Such mornings as you get!” said Napoleon. “It was spring, I remember, about March— Ever read poetry, Johnnie?
‘….white and wide,
Washed by the morning’s water-gold,
Florence lay out on the mountain side.’ ”
The little man’s voice caressed the words melodiously. He went on:
“I met her in the square, riding down to the river. I kept her in sight all the morning, and followed her when she rode at a foot pace back to an hotel. So I learned her address. I forgot all about the Cosmopolitans, and all that sort of truck. There seemed only one thing that mattered….She was evidently staying at the hotel. I learned her name: the Countess Gerda di Veletto. I wrote to her, signing myself: ‘A very mad Englishman,’ and giving an address. Johnnie, boy, that same evening a page from the hotel brought me an answer. I have it here in my letter case. I’ve always carried it. Like to see it? Because I’d like to show it to you.”
The folded sheet that he pulled out was worn almost to tatters at the creases. Johnnie Luck, feeling rather foolish and rather intrusive, read:
My Dear Stranger,
Your tribute pleased me. Did you suppose it would not? Don’t you know that a woman can never receive too many kind words? Where did you sit in the Opera House? And I wonder if I saw you as you saw me? I do not think it, because, if so—— But I do not think I had better write what I was going to write. It would not be wise. I only want to thank you for the pleasure of your assurances, which come to me in a time of deep trouble and anxiety. And although I have never met—and never shall meet—my very mad Englishman, I am pleased to sign myself,
His friend,
Gerda di Veletto.
Luck passed this back in silence, and Napoleon returned it to the letter case, and thence to his inside breast pocket. He went on evenly.
“Johnnie, by that time I was loving her as I never loved a woman before, and never shall again. Her ‘deep trouble and anxiety’ gave me thought. I wrote her, crazed. Could I do something? Might her mad Englishman meet her at any hour and any place? Any way, would she command him? She wrote back that she could not see me that evening, as a friend would be dining with her. A friend? Who was this ‘friend’? I got half mad with jealousy, and watched the hotel, as if I could pick out her visitor from the crowds. But when I saw the man who had been with her at the Opera go in, I knew that I had picked him out.
“I went home and wrote to her again. I begged her to make an appointment with me, let me do something for her if I could. She answered at once, as before, saying that I could call the next day, but she could see nobody till then. She was at her wits’ end to escape from some trouble. I read a good deal between the lines of that letter, as she meant me to do. She knew how to leave room between the lines—which is an art, my dear Johnnie, of the highest order. I saw despair and fear in it. She said recklessly at the end that it was only monetary, her trouble. Five hundred pounds, after all, would clear her, and she was going to ask her friend for it that night. I remember phrases such as: ‘I’m not that kind of woman, either, you very mad Englishman….It goes cruelly hard…but there! he will be only too eager to give, as it will be only too bitter for me to take.’ And then, with a sort of sudden return to formality, she added that she would be pleased to give me a few minutes’ interview the next day.
“Johnnie, Gerda knew her book, boy. She realised, as very few people of our profession realise, what an important study is your book of psychology. Women, as a rule, are better at that game than men. Criminologists trace crime to heredity, to suggestion, to physical phenomena, to environment. But women go one better than that. They use the emotions; they know the weight of an eyelash, the value of the turn of a head, of a word, and more, of an unsaid word. It was what she did not say in that letter that made me see red and shake with absolute bestial rage. I thought of the chap at the Opera—recalled his face—his tricks of gesture, his age, all about him. He was a nice-looking, young dark fellow, but I got a vision of Mephistopheles. I imagined him driving a bargain with her for the five hundred. I had plenty of money—the Cosmopolitans’ money—on me. I got notes for five hundred and put them into a letter, begging her to take them from the very mad Englishman, who would not even ask to see her in return, rather than from her ‘friend.’ But how I hoped for that meeting she’d promised! She sent an answer filled in between the lines—you know. I was to call and be thanked in person for ‘the loan.’ The next evening, at seven, I was to dine with her.”
“And?” Luck asked, after a longish pause had fallen.
Napoleon replied tersely.
“I went, blindfold as I had acted, and shaking with excitement, to her hotel at seven o’clock. I came out at seven ten, sane. She had left early in the morning with, presumably, several articles of jewellery missed by other visitors, and my—or rather the Cosmopolitans’—five hundred pounds. Police inquiry—from the other victims, not me, Johnnie—elicited the fact that she had left Florence with her ‘friend,’ but they could not be traced. I cursed solid for some while—imagining her laughter.”
Luck nodded.
“It must have been the softest thing she’d ever been on,” said Napoleon, “and yet she was dealing with the cleverest man she had, in all probability, ever met with.”
He made the assertion ruminatively, and with no conscious arrogance.
“Since then,” he resumed, “I have relied less on science in my profession, less on logical sequence, and have recognised that chance, emotion, and adventure are very potent contingencies to be reckoned with. Her eyes had melted me. My science, my logic, my ingrained suspicion of the world, went by the board. It was, as I say, a very soft thing. She could not have expected to draw the money before she had granted me an interview, at least. And how she must have laughed when she did it! She and her friend! It must be the joke of their lives. And when you come to think of it, Johnnie, it is excruciatingly humorous that I—I—I—should have tumbled into that!”
There was nothing in the little man’s pale face to betray that he had ever felt the excruciating humour of the situation, so John Luck did not laugh either.
“Logic is a fool to love,” said Napoleon.
“It is an interesting story,” Luck remarked.
“What reminded me of it,” said Napoleon, turning his head, and fixing his auditor with his brief bright glance, “was seeing her eyes in the fire just now, as you were seeing someone else’s, eh, Johnnie? I’ve never, these seven years, forgotten Gerda.”
“Nor forgiven her?”
He evaded that. “And what called up those eyes, Johnnie, was seeing another pair very like them as I came out of the building this morning. She was a pretty woman named Muswell, the lift-man told me.”
“My neighbour, I expect, in number twenty-four.”
“That so? Do you know her? She looked wistful, worried, down on her luck, though Mary tells me her frock must have cost exactly ten pounds nineteen and eleven pence halfpenny.”
“No, I don’t know her. Often met her going up or down, of course. I’ve noticed the worried air. Perhaps she’s just lonely. Seems a sin for a pretty woman like that to be living all by herself.”
“She has eyes just like Gerda’s,” said Napoleon softly. He looked into the fire again, his chin sunk a little, his face merely a pale mask. Then he asked:
“Have you ever credited me with weakness, Johnnie?”
Luck smiled so broadly at this question that a spoken negative was unnecessary.
“Yet all men are weak,” said Napoleon, answering the smile, “and my weakness, my soft spot, my tenderness, is for eyes like Gerda’s. I loved her—and she hurt me. She had never set eyes on me—I just worshipped from my distance. Never mind. I loved her, and love is love, and, as I say, above all the logic in the world. I had a charwoman in Paris once with eyes a little like hers, and I did what I could to help that charwoman because of Gerda. Gerda wouldn’t have done it, but never mind. Now I meet Mrs. Muswell here in these flats, and she has eyes that are the very duplicate of Gerda’s. She looks lonely, unhappy, unlucky. Convention forbids Mary to call on her, and offer her some palliation of her loneliness, because it seems that she arrived here first. Apparently she will not call on us. And I want to do some good turn for a girl with Gerda’s eyes. Arrange the matter for us, Johnnie.”
“How?”
“Make her acquaintance, as she’s next door. Make her talk. Make her tell you she’s lonely. Then beg her to call on those nice people, the Princes, whose acquaintance you have made since coming here. And so on.”
“How do I make her acquaintance, Nap?”
“Oh! run along, Johnnie!” said Napoleon, vastly tickled at this helplessness. “You are a very pretty young man—don’t blush! You have the ordinary social gifts, and a pair of eyes to appreciate the blessings the gods grant you in the way of alluring neighbours. You have a charming flat next her own, and you are both solitary young people. The conditions are so favourable as to allow of positively no interesting obstacles to surmount at all.”
Mary here returned from the Stores, and voted her shopping dull.
“Polly,” said her brother, “Luck, here, is going to bring his neighbour, Mrs. Muswell, to call on you tomorrow afternoon. It is an old love-story——”
Mary looked frostily from one to the other.
“Of mine, child, not Johnnie’s,” Napoleon continued, preparing to wheel from the room; “an old love-story of which her eyes remind me. So we are going to be exceedingly kind to Mrs. Muswell, child, please.”
A quite beautiful woman opened the door of her flat to Mr. John Luck the next morning. She was tall, dark, slight almost to leanness, and vivid; she looked any age from twenty-five to thirty, but it was most probably thirty. She wore an artful gown. Her eyes were very lovely—big, straight, innocent, appealing.
“I am sorry to trouble you,” said Mr. John Luck, with his engaging smile, “but I have lost my kitten, and I think she must have come in to you, with the milk, or something. May I look, please?”
The lovely apparition looked Mr. Luck over.
“Come in,” said she simply, and, closing the door behind him, led the way to a little drawing-room as artful as her frock. A very queer Eastern little drawing-room. She motioned him with frank kindness—her absence of all conventional mannerism was refreshing—to a seat, and inquired the name and description of the kitten.
“She answers to anything, but is generally called ‘Puss,’ ” replied Mr. Luck admiringly, “and she is about the most spiritual cat I have ever met.”
“What colour is your dear little kitten?”
“She is white,” said Luck. “All spirits are, you know. I am sure you would love her. Are you fond of cats?”
“Very,” she answered, smiling softly and doubtfully.
She stared at him much as a puzzled child might do. Then they rose and looked for the kitten all over the flat, but it could not be found. No answer came to any appeal of “Puss!” or any other name. The search proving futile, they returned to the drawing-room, and sat down again.
“I am your next-door neighbour, you know,” he said, when one or two topics had been exhausted, and she gave him no unkind hint to go.
“Oh!—yes?” she said doubtfully.
“They are jolly flats, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“But even a flat is very lonely for one person, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” She added with great simplicity: “I am very lonely.”
“What a sin, Mrs.—Mrs.——”
“Muswell,” said she, hesitating over the name. He registered the hesitation. “I have no friends at all in London now.” And she sighed.
“Why not call on some of the people here? The newer comers, you know.”
“Oh, do you think they——”
“Would love it?” said Mr. Luck. “I do. There’s a charming pair, brother and sister, just below you, whose acquaintance I’ve made since coming here. They’d be delighted, I know they would. Their name is Prince.”
“Oh! Do you mean the poor little invalid gentleman, Mr.——?”
“My name is Luck. And I do mean the invalid and his sister. I say, are you very, very conventional?”
She shook her head, still smiling her doubtful, half timorous smile.
“No, I’m afraid I’ve lost touch with English conventions. I—I’ve been out of England so long.”
A faint sigh again, and the words seemed to call up to the dark wells of her eyes some best-forgotten thing from fathoms deep.
“Then,” he said, “do let me take you down to call this afternoon, Mrs. Muswell. Will you?”
After the necessary preliminary hesitations, she consented.
“Although,” she said, “I am afraid of making friends. I——”
“Why should you deprive people?”
“My story,” she said after a pause, “is rather an extraordinary one. I—I could hardly tell such a stranger, but——”
“Certainly not,” replied Mr. Luck, promptly rising to take his leave. They skook hands by a sort of mutual impulse, she looking at him very straightly, he looking back very reassuringly. So he returned to his own demesne, anticipating with pleasure the hearing of this pretty woman’s extraordinary story at a very near date, for he was but human. “In here after dinner,” said he, looking thoughtfully round his drawing-room, “over coffee, with a dim light. Almost any cushions would suit her as a background.”
He took her down that afternoon to call on the Princes, as prearranged.
The visit was a success. Afterwards Mary said, but kindly, that she looked like a woman with a story.
Luck assented grudgingly to the possibility.
Napoleon, with his mysterious smile, agreed with Mary. The young widow certainly had a story. He looked remotely into the fire. Probably he was seeing Gerda’s eyes.
The young widow’s extraordinary story was not long withheld from Johnnie Luck.
That same evening, having dined in his flat, he was seated at his piano, playing softly, and singing softly in a voice worth better things, some doggerel nigger melodies, when a lady was ushered in on him by the very discreet servitor whom Luck had engaged.
It was Mrs. Muswell.
She was in a simple black chiffon gown, and she looked appealing.
“You will think this very strange, I suppose,” she began, as he jumped up with every manifestation of pleasure to meet her. “At least, I suppose you will think it strange—I forget just exactly what one may or may not do in England. Can I sit down?”
“I am sure you may do that,” said he, smiling, and hastily dragging forward a chair which held cushions of the right colour for her complexion.
She dropped a soft black roll which she carried—it looked like a small hearthrug—and sank into the chair.
“You were so very kind to me this morning and this afternoon,” she said hesitatingly, “that I would like to—to tell you about myself, unconventional as I suppose it seems. But then, as I told you, I have forgotten how to be properly conventional like your nice English girls.”
She bit her lip, and her eyes looked as if they held tears.
“My dear Mrs. Muswell,” he said interestedly, sitting down near her, “conventions are always wrong, because they indicate a state of things that calls for unnatural restraint. Whereas things are not in the least in that most deplorable state. Why can’t we all be natural, and say what we like to each other? Why make acquaintance by the almanac?”
“Why, indeed?” she echoed innocently. “Can I, then, tell you everything, and ask your advice upon the situation, because I have no older friend than yourself here? Would a nice English girl do it?”
“She would love it,” replied Luck earnestly.
She was very charmingly full of doubts and indecisions, half smiling. “I was brought up in England,” she said; “my mother was English, but my father was Italian. You can see the Italian in me, can you not?”
The discreet servitor here brought in the coffee tray, to which he had discreetly added a second cup and saucer, and withdrew. Luck ministered to his guest; she tasted the coffee and gave a little exclamation.
“How good! I have not had it so good since I escaped from——”
She stopped. “We used to eat sweets with it there,” she said rather faintly. “Rich, delicious sugary things like chocolate, marrons glacés, almond paste, crystallised violets, and Turkish delight all rolled together.”
A box of chocolates, bought for Mary, was pushed away behind the furnishings of an occasional table. Luck found this, and, untying the ribbon, offered the sweets.
“It is the nearest thing I can do,” said he apologetically.
She helped herself. She had very white teeth, over which her red lips crinkled back prettily. “Not that I want to remember anything about it,” she sighed. “It is all too painful—too degrading—too——”
“I assure you that I will give you the best advice in my power.”
“I know it, and I am going to tell you my story.”
He sat before her, holding the open chocolate box; she began to talk, stopping now and again to help herself and nibble at the bonbons as a child may nibble sweets and tell a fairy tale.
“My mother, as I told you, was English, my father Italian. I was brought up during my childhood in England, but when I was eighteen I went with my parents to Paris. There my mother died, and I was left entirely to my father’s care. It was not good care. Heaven forgive me for speaking ill of him, but it was very bad care. So bad for a girl of only eighteen, straight out of a convent school in England.”
“A convent school?”
“Yes. I spent my holidays there as well as the terms. It was very peaceful and sweet; I loved it. One lived asleep. When I came out of that dear place the awakening was very sudden, crude, bewildering. But then I realised the world outside, and that I was alive in it. I simply threw myself into all the excitement my parents provided. When my mother died, my father went on providing excitements. I played, like a child still, with everything and everybody, till at last, seeing that I could not or would not understand that I was grown up, and what were his aims for me, my father spoke. ‘Julie,’ he said—in Paris it was, after a ball— ‘when are you going to marry?’
“The question was a horrid shock. I had not thought of marrying. I was happy. My world was Arcadia—not a dull one, of course, in Paris—but mentally Arcadia. ‘I shall always stay with you, papa,’ I said to him lightly. ‘I have other plans for you, ma chérie,’ said he to me heavily. And the next day he introduced me to Prince Mustapha. The prince had just come from Constantinople on a diplomatic mission, I understood. He was quite young, charming, and polished like our own men. I went about with him a great deal, my father dropping chaperonage when possible. I let the prince, as it were, into my Arcadia among all my other friends. I had very few women friends; but that, of course, was my father’s fault. You believe me that it was Arcadia?”
She looked like a child afraid of the construction which may be put by an irreverent elder upon the truth which it is telling.
“I see you believe me,” she resumed. “You are good, kind. Then came a horrible day; my father storming and telling me that I was talked about in every club and café in Paris; and Mustapha proposing marriage. I was so afraid of my father, so anxious to escape from such a blustering parent, that I accepted the prince. We were married in Paris—I, like an ignorant girl, not questioning the validity of the rite between one of his religion and one of mine, and we—my husband and I—travelled back together to Constantinople.”
A long pause.
“I do not really think that I can go on,” she said very faintly. But when she had dried her eyes and eaten a few more chocolates she insisted bravely on doing so.
“The prince had a harem——”
“Good heavens!” cried Luck.
“A harem. And I was one of his—called by courtesy—wives. I had been in his house twenty-four hours before I knew. I reproached him passionately. I said: ‘If my father knew of this——’ He replied: ‘Your father knew well. I paid him twenty-five thousand francs to help him with his debts.’ So I understood that it was a question of buying and selling. I, a free girl with English blood in my veins, had been sold! I saw what a broken reed I had to lean on in my father—my only reed, too! What could I do? I had been with Mustapha for a week. I—I stayed. I became one of the harem. One of the sleepy, fattening, decorated pets and slaves. I was that for eight years, and suddenly I revolted strongly enough to devise, with all the odds against me, my escape. I planned it for seven months, watching every sign and listening to every sound of life I could catch from outside to help me build a scheme. One thing I was resolved on: I would not go penniless.
“Just at that time there was a craze among us in the harem for making mats of black silk and wool an inch and a half thick. I had been for eight years Mustapha’s favourite, and he had lavished jewels on me. As soon as I began to plan my escape, I commenced to hide these chains and necklaces in the weaving of my mat. One by one, very cunningly, I put my ornaments away, always keeping up to the last something to wear when Mustapha sent for me. I quarrelled with the other women, who had hated me from the beginning, and for seven months we hardly spoke, so I could sit away from them, and they never came to look at and handle my work, and chatter about it, as they did with one another’s. By the time the mat was nearly finished my plans were ripe, and occasion came. We always walked at will on the roof garden. I went up alone with my mat one evening, and dropped myself right down from the roof into the top of a big fruit tree underneath. It seemed a sickening distance. I lay there and looked over the wall into the street. It was a comparatively quiet spot, away from the market place and principal squares. At last I dared to climb down and over the wall by the aid of the fruit trees that were trained along it. So I walked out free into a street for the first time in eight years. As free as I could be, that is. Of course, I went veiled. I got my passage money and an escort privately from the British Consul, and so I came back at last to England and to London.”
She stopped to eat chocolates, and for some time there was a silence.
“Poor, poor girl!” said Johnnie Luck at last.
“You are good, kind,” she said softly. “Advise me.”
“What to do with your life? I couldn’t.”
“No, no!” said she. “What to do with my jewels. They represent my capital, you see. I have no money. I must sell them, yet very privately, because I could not bear anyone to hear this story—except you, of course, my good friend. The English are so prejudiced. I want to start a new life among them fairly. Besides, there is another reason why I must keep my secret.” She looked reserved.
“Your story is, of course, perfectly safe with me.”
“I know it. To return to the jewels, there must be at least ten thousand pounds’ worth in the mat.”
Luck looked respectfully at the soft black roll lying at their feet.
“Would you confide in the Princes?” he asked. “Napoleon Prince knows a great deal about—er—the—the curio markets of the world, and he might be able to assist you.”
Reluctantly she consented to confide in Mr. Napoleon Prince at the earliest opportunity—on the morrow, if possible.
After she had gone, leaving a faint aroma of some Eastern perfume clinging to his cushions, Luck descended to No. 20. He found Napoleon up, smoking before a gorgeous fire, but Mary had retired early to bed.
“News, Johnnie?” said the little man, smiling slightly.
Luck related Mrs. Muswell’s story. “Preposterous, eh?” he asked.
Napoleon had listened through it, merely nodding and commenting, with very little amazement. “Preposterous enough to be true,” he replied oracularly. “You will learn not to discredit melodrama, Johnnie, presently. All the melodramas ever written are nothing to the melodramas that are lived every day.”
“She’s going to ask your advice on my recommendation, Nap.”
“She couldn’t come to a better quarter,” replied Napoleon, looking into the fire.
“You will help her, then, in some way, like a good chap?”
“I shall help—Gerda’s eyes!” said Napoleon, smiling.
“Good-night, Nap.”
“Night-night, Johnnie.”
And he was left looking at the eyes in the fire.
The tenant of No. 24 came, according to arrangement, the next afternoon to the Princes’ flat. She carried with her a rolled-up black bundle—the mat woven, according to her story, in the harem of Prince Mustapha. Luck was there. Mary was charmingly kind. Napoleon pressed her hand in his left one, and said that he hoped she would not be vexed to know that Mr. Luck had already told them the story. Mr. Luck thought she might be glad to be saved the very painful recital.
No, she was not vexed. Yes, she was glad—thank you, kind people. She unrolled the black mat.
“Feel!” she said to Napoleon.
He felt, among the softness of the silk and wool, chains and layers here and there of hard, lumpy substances.
“Necklaces?” he queried.
She answered eagerly, frankly: “Two necklaces, nearly a dozen brooches, a girdle, a chain, many pairs of earrings, ruby, emerald and topaz. The necklaces are diamonds and pearls. How can I sell these things so as not to excite suspicion and call attention to myself? Mustapha may be looking for me, and I dare not attract his notice.”
“He could not touch you in England, dear child,” said the little man, with a fatherly air.
“But the story!” she said passionately. “The story! That would come out! And it must never be known—because I—I have so much at stake—I——”
Suddenly she put her handkerchief to her face and sobbed, her shoulders rocking. Napoleon watched her thoughtfully. Luck was really distressed. Mary administered what comfort she could give to a stranger and rang for tea.
During the dispensing of it the visitor recovered somewhat, and looked up with a quivering smile through tears that made her black eyes shine like jewels.
“What must you all think of me?” she gasped. “I am sorry. I am very sorry. But, as I said, I have so much at stake. I—I am going to be married.”
She sipped her tea, while Mary and Luck looked at her with exclamations of mutual sympathy and interest.
“You see,” she said in a low voice, “I am not really Mustapha’s wife. The marriage in Paris was not valid. In spite of my—my degradation, I am free. Let me tell you.” She caught Mary’s hand, looking with great understanding from her to Johnnie Luck. “You, dear girl, you will feel with me. On my way home to England I met, in Austria, a young officer of the Austrian army, on leave. We—we”—her eyes drooped—“we loved each other from the first moment,” she said in a strangled voice, “and I promised to marry him. I tried to forget my story. Then I saw everything in what seemed its hideous impossibility, and I went on, without a word of good-bye to him. I dared not trust myself to say good-bye. But he followed me here.”
“Delicious!” cried Mary warmly to Luck. He looked back at her as if to say: “Exactly as I should do!”
Their visitor went on: “And he found me yesterday. I renewed my promises to him, and we shall be married as soon as I have sold these and provided myself with a little money, and bought a trousseau, and so on. You see, ostensibly I am a young widow in comfortable circumstances. I am so afraid of the least hitch—of any inquiry leading to knowledge of what constitutes my capital”—she indicated the mat—“and then as to how I came by these Eastern-looking jewels—even if Mustapha does not trace me as I dispose of them. You understand—it’s not a wicked deception? It is the happiness of two lives—mine and Friedrich’s—that——”
“We understand perfectly,” said the Joséphine girl sweetly. Napoleon was looking at the black roll.
“May we see some of the things?” he asked.
The visitor assented, and cutting the strands of the mat, they brought some of the ornaments to light. They were much as she had described them—rather roughly cut gems, some in heavy Eastern settings. Napoleon examined them one by one with the air of a connoisseur. He took little implements out of his waistcoat pocket, and tapped the stones, looking at them closely, their owner meanwhile looking closely at him. She grew a little pale during the examination, and spoke of the devotion of Mustapha, who would lavish ornaments to any value upon her.
“I think,” Napoleon said at last, “that I might get you three thousand pounds for these in various markets that I know of. I am a bit of a traveller, as you may know, and through buying art curios I have been in touch with many dealers in Europe and Asia.”
Her face fell. “You think they are not worth more?”
“They may be,” he replied, “but that could be ascertained when they have been examined by experts. Sleep on the matter, my dear lady, and then let me know if you will put it into my hands.”
“You are good,” she said gratefully. “Good and kind, all of you. We may be able to talk further of it tomorrow. Friedrich is coming to dine with me tonight. Would you——” She looked from one to the other.
“Would you,” Mary responded, “bring him down to us for coffee? We should be charmed.”
The invitation being accepted with thanks and beaming smiles, Mrs. Muswell withdrew, Johnnie Luck accompanying her to carry the black roll to the flat above. She extolled the kindness of his friends and himself.
“Is he rich?” she asked plaintively, “your Mr. Prince?”
Receiving a cautious reply, she said childishly: “If he is, perhaps he would like to buy my jewels himself, and dispose of them at his leisure, at a big profit. It will be so hard for me to wait. So very, very hard. And I will not go to Friedrich without what they call a dot.”
Accepting with a smile the compliments obviously to be turned on this, she vanished into her flat, and they saw her no more until nine thirty, when, charming and excited, she brought down Friedrich for a few minutes to be introduced to them. He was a dark, spruce, military-looking man, extremely smart. After coffee she took him back to her own flat again.
“Darling things!” said Mary. “Be kind to them, Nap.”
“Yes,” said Luck, “be kind to them, Nap.”
“Children,” said the little man, drinking a third cup of coffee in unwonted absence of mind, “I am already devising extensive plans of benevolence and philanthropy. All the world loves a lover. Here is to our pretty friend and her gallant Friedrich!” He drank the toast in coffee. “I anticipate that we may see her quite early in the morning.”
It was comparatively early in the morning when Mrs. Muswell called at No. 20. Mary had gone out betimes to buy some articles of which her brother professed himself in instant need, for which she had to go half across London, and so would not be back before lunch. Johnnie Luck had, in response to a message from the paralytic, descended to No. 20. When he came, Napoleon had little to say, however, beyond desultory chat. He seemed to be listening. When a ring was heard, his face cleared and he smiled.
“I would lay you a hundred to one, Johnnie, that is the heroine of the Harem Melodrama.”
“Do you mean to imply that you do not believe——”
“My dear Johnnie, I discredit nothing and credit nothing. I tell you she has Gerda’s eyes, which is ample reason for my doing what I am about to do.”
She was ushered in.
“Ah, my dear lady! We were speaking of angels. A very good morning to you!”
But she looked as though the morning were far from very good. She was distraite, worried. Under her arm she carried the black mat in a roll. When, seemingly too abstracted to give any formal greeting to either man, she had sat down, she said impulsively:
“Mr. Prince, I come to ask your immediate help in my trouble. Friedrich”—her eyes looked wet—“is ordered to rejoin his regiment. He is leaving England tonight.”
They were all attention, making little murmurs of sympathy. She went on:
“He implored me yesterday evening—it was after we left you—to marry him before he left, to return to Austria with him. But first I want to get rid of these. I will not go to Friedrich’s family—his cold, proud family—without a penny. Mr. Prince, what shall I do? Who will buy at a moment’s notice?”
“Very few people, I am afraid, dear lady,” said Napoleon.
She bit her lip and trembled. Her eyes were magnificent.
“I told you yesterday,” he said, taking her unresisting hand, “that you could probably get three thousand for the lot without much haggling. Probably—not certainly. I do not trust my judgment to say certainly. You might get more, as I also told you, if you were content to wait and submit them to the really best experts——”
“No, no!” she exclaimed hurriedly. “I could not wait—now. Who would give me three thousand for them?”
“That,” he replied, “I could not say at such short notice. I should have to find out. But I will give you two five for them down now, here, if you are willing to take it.”
“Two thousand five hundred?”
“Yes. I do not offer you the full three thousand I suggested as their value, because, dear lady, I am a hard business man underneath my soft side, and you must give discount for cash, and for the trouble in store for me in disposing of the jewels. Also I may get barely more than my own money back, or even not as much. There might be a great deal more, I own, but the chances are as much for one as t’other. You see all this?”
“I see—I see.” She began breathing lovely gratitude, but he stopped her.
“Don’t thank me. I mentioned just now that soft side of mine, and my softness is for your eyes.”
She looked at him, beautifully. He looked back full at her, appreciatively.
“You have the eyes,” he said softly, “of someone I once loved. Luck, an errand, please.”
Luck came forward.
“My bedroom is next door, and there’s a little dispatch case on the table by my bed. If you don’t mind—my wretched helplessness,” he explained to her, as Johnnie Luck left the room. When the door closed, he added: “I want to claim a tremendous boon of you, dear lady, because you have the eyes of the girl I once loved.”
“Ask it,” said she, all softness.
“A kiss,” said the little man.
In a moment Johnnie Luck would be back. She gave herself time for a little murmur of hesitation, surprise; then she rose from her chair, came close, and bent and kissed him. Her lips were very soft, and she kissed Napoleon on the lips. She sat down again. A flush swept up all over his pale face, passed, and was gone. The face was serene again when Luck came in with the dispatch case.
Napoleon unlocked it with his left hand, and found three crackling notes.
“I don’t often keep this amount of money out of my bank,” he explained. “It is pure coincidence, accident, what you will, that I have it to hand this morning. Later in the day it would have been paid to my account. They are three thousand-pound notes. Could you oblige me, somehow, with the change, dear lady?”
“Five hundred pounds,” she considered.
“If you will hand over that, I will hand over this,” he said with such charming apology that there could be no insult in the caution. “I am, as I said, a business man, and I do things in a business-like way.”
“I can give you the notes, I believe,” she answered. “I have about that amount, and I will go to get it. It is absolutely my all, of course, and it would not have been a dot fit for an Austrian officer’s wife.”
Luck sprang to open the door. She passed out smiling—not to her own flat, though, but hastily down to the street. Near the Army and Navy Stores her Friedrich waited.
Napoleon sat waiting her return, the fingers of his left hand drumming on the notes on the table, his eyes fixed rather absently on space. The black mat lay on the floor.
“Nap,” said Luck, “ain’t it risky, old man?”
“Her eyes, Johnnie!” said Napoleon. “Her eyes!”
He would say no more. In perhaps ten minutes the beautiful visitor hurried back. She was flushed and a little breathless, which condition she explained by the fact of the search she had had for the notes. She had put them securely away, under lock and key, forgotten where, and been terrified—so terrified—in consequence. But here they were, all safe and sound. Would Mr. Prince count them?
Mr. Prince counted them, thrust them into his breast pocket, and handed over three thousand-pound notes, enclosing them first in an envelope out of the dispatch box. He stretched out his left hand, and she put hers into it. He looked up at her, standing tall, vibrant, glowing, victorious.
“My congratulations to Friedrich,” said he. “My felicitations to yourself. A very pleasant journey. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, kind, good friends.” She shook hands with both. “I am going out now. Guess for what?”
“To be married?” Luck hazarded.
She nodded. “To be married. We leave for Austria to-day.”
“Happy Friedrich!” said Luck.
“Happy Friedrich!” cried Napoleon.
The graceful creature went out, making an emotional leave-taking. The two men were left together, and the black mat lay on the floor. Napoleon’s face had grown deathly.
“Mary will be amazed,” began Luck.
“Oh! Ah!” He looked down at the mat. “Cart that truck away, there’s a good fellow.”
“Truck? I suppose you’ll see your money back again all right?”
Napoleon looked—laughed noiselessly.
“Stuff’s simply ‘fake’ all through, Johnnie, my dear good fool.”
“What, Nap? And you knew it? Well, Nap, who’s the fool?”
“Not I, Luck. ‘Friedrich,’ perhaps, and she. My notes were ‘fake,’ too.”
Johnnie sat down.
“Ah! I can do notes. One of the things I’ve learned. Those were three of the kind the Cosmopolitans use, though, and were ready to hand.”
“Her five hundred?”
“Real. Screaming humour? Rattling farce, eh?”
“So, after all—you cheated Gerda’s eyes?”
“I cheated Gerda’s wits.”
Light began to show through for Luck. He gazed at the little man, now beginning to tremble in his invalid chair.
“We’ve been dealing with Gerda, you see, John Luck. And with her ‘friend.’ Who do you think, Johnnie, was the man she brought in to drink my coffee and liqueurs? The chap of the Florence Opera House! And what do you think is written inside the flap of that envelope I put her notes in?”
Luck shook his head.
“ ‘To Gerda, from her very sane Englishman.’ Funny, eh? Any questions, Johnnie?”
“Yes, Nap. Did you take these flats because you knew she was here?”
Napoleon nodded.
“Did you mean all through to get back at her, as soon as you had the chance?”
Napoleon nodded.
“Did you know what kind of story she’d come out with this time?”
Napoleon shook his head. “Know? Who does know, John Luck, what a woman plots and plans? Women lick men—they lick the rest of creation—at tricking. They don’t work by logical sequence, but by accident. You can’t insure against that kind of accident, either. There’s no policy obtainable. Women—they haven’t human science, but they’re given monkey minds. Their mischief is more nimble than ours. They lay a plot like a three-volume novel about princes, and harems, and troubles and anxieties and love, and start creation playing their absurd melodramas and believing they’re real. They feel your pulse, and they know all about you. And nature aids a woman—saturates her in the part she’s taking. She can laugh and cry and quiver—her brain plays on her body like a bow on fiddle strings—and she’s given lips that are so cursed soft, Johnnie—and eyes! And I’ve got my own back, Johnnie. There’s no laugh any more, except for me. But do what I will, I’ll never get the feel of her lips off mine—nor her eyes out of my heart—never exorcise her away.”
Johnnie Luck got up very suddenly and quietly, and left the little man swayed against the table with his head on his arm.