The Mysterious Three

“You have heard the latest about Miss Thorold, of course?” he said, as we passed into the Yard, which at this hour – about four o’clock – was crowded with well-dressed men and women.

“The latest? What do you mean?”

“Dear me,” he exclaimed, smiling. “Why, we country cousins know more than you men about town after all, sometimes. She’s at Monte Carlo.”

“At Monte? Vera Thorold!”

“Yes.”

“What is she doing there? Who is with her?”

“I don’t know who’s with her, or if any one is with her. She is pretty independent, as you know, and well able to take care of herself – a typical twentieth century girl.”

“But who told you she was at Monte?”

“Several people. Ah! there’s Lord Logan! He’ll tell us. He was speaking of her yesterday. He returned from the Riviera only a couple of days ago.”

Chapter Twelve

Gossip from the Sunshine

“Oh, yes, that’s right enough,” Lord Logan said, when we questioned him. “I saw her the night before I left. She was playing trente-et-quarante – and winning a bit, too, by Gad!”

He was an ordinary type of the modern young peer – well-set-up, unemotional, faultlessly groomed. He produced a gold cigarette case as he spoke, and held it out to me. I noticed that the cigarettes it contained bore his coat of arms.

“These cigarettes are not likely to be stolen from you,” I said lightly, indicating the coat of arms.

He smiled.

“You are right. I was the first to start the fashion – get ’em from Cairo every week – and now everybody’s doin’ it, haw, haw! I’ve got my cartridges done the same way. At some places where one shoots the beater fellers rob one right and left – the devils. I said to one of my hosts the other day, I said: ‘Your cartridge carriers are a lot of bally rogues.’ ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, bristlin’ up like a well-bred bull-dog. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you make ’em all turn out their pockets, and you’ll see,’ I said. And he did!”

“And what was in them?”

“In them? Damme, what wasn’t in them? My dear feller, every beater who had carried cartridges had a dozen or two cartridges in his pockets then – it’s a fact. And we’d done shootin’, and the beaters were goin’ home, so they couldn’t pretend they were just carryin’ the bally cartridges in their pockets to have ’em handy. But there wasn’t a cartridge of mine missing among the lot. They knew only too well they wouldn’t be able to sell to the local ironmonger cartridges with a coat of arms on ’em – eh what? And that’s why I now have my cigarettes tattooed in the same way. I believe my servants used to rob them by the hundred. They don’t now, except perhaps a handful to smoke themselves, and of course that’s only natural. What was it you were askin’ me just now? Ah, yes, about Vera Thorold. She seems to be a flyer.”

“Did you speak to her?”

“Oh, yes, I talked to her right enough. She did look well. Simply lovely. White cloth frock, you know. She’s all alone at Monte, stayin’ at the Anglais.”

“Did she say how long she’d be there?”

“No. I didn’t ask her. She was winnin’ the night I saw her. I never saw such devil’s luck – never. I lost over a thousand on the week, so I thought it time to pay my hotel bill – what?”

The three of us made the tour of Tattersall’s together, admiring, criticising, fault-finding. Among Thorold’s horses was the mare I had ridden on that last day I had been at Houghton. What a long time ago that seemed! I felt tempted to make a bid for her next day, she had carried me so well.

Then I thought again of my well-beloved. What an extraordinary girl she was! Ah! how I loved her. Why had she not told me that she meant to go to the Riviera? Why —

An idea flashed in upon me. I was getting bored with the mad hurry of London. This would be a good excuse for running out to the Côte d’Azur. Indeed, my chief reason for remaining in town had been that I believed Vera to be there still, either in hiding for some reason of her own, or, what I had thought far more likely, forced against her will by that blackguard Paulton to remain in concealment and keep me in ignorance of her whereabouts.

Instead of that she was “on her own” – how I hate that slang phrase – at Monte Carlo ‘winnin’ a fortune,’ as Lord Logan had put it.

“A strange world, my masters!” Never were truer words spoken. The longer I live the more I realise its strangeness. When I arrived at Monte Carlo by the day rapide from Paris, rain was pelting down in torrents, and a fierce storm was raging. Wind shrieked along the streets. Out at sea, lightning flashed in the bay, while the thunder rattled like artillery fire. I was glad to find myself in the warm, brilliantly-lit Hotel de Paris, and when, after dinner, I strolled into the fumoir, it was so crowded that I had difficulty in finding any place to sit.

Among the group of men close to whom I presently found myself, conversation had turned upon the pigeon-shooting at Monte. From their remarks I gathered that an important event had been decided that day, the Prix de – I forget what, but the prize appeared to be a much coveted cup, with a considerable sum in added money. This had been won, it seemed, by a Belgian Count, who had killed twenty-seven pigeons without a miss.

“Mais c’est épatant – vraiment épatant!” declared an excitable little Frenchman, as he pulled forward his chair. He went on to explain, with great volubility and much gesticulation, the difficulties that some of the shots had presented. This Frenchman, I gathered further, had backed the Belgian Count every time from his first shot to the last, and had in consequence won a lot of money.

Time was when trap-shooting appealed to me. I have shot pigeons at Monte, at Ostend, and here in England at Hurlingham at the Gun Club, also at Hendon, but it has always struck me as being a cold-blooded form of amusement – its warmest supporters can hardly call it sport. Not that there is more cruelty connected with pigeon-shooting than with game-shooting, as some would have us believe. Indeed, I have always contended that trap-shooting is less cruel than game-shooting, for pigeon-shooters are one and all first-rate shots – if they were not they would lose heavily and soon give up the game – with the result that the greater proportion of the birds shot at are killed outright, a thing that cannot be said of game, where one’s tailor sometimes takes out a licence.

But why is it, I wonder, that pigeon-shooters, considered collectively, are such dreadful-looking men? I have often wondered, and I am by no means the only man who has noticed this feature of pigeon-shooters. Glancing carelessly at the crowd seated near me now, it struck me forcibly that I had rarely set eyes on such a dissipated-looking set. Men of middle age, most of them, obese, fat-faced, with puffy eyes and sagging skin, they looked capable of any villainy, and might well have been addicted to every known vice.

One man in particular arrested my attention. His age was difficult to place. Lying, rather than sitting, back in a softly-padded leather chair, with crossed legs, and with one arm hanging loosely over the arm of the chair, he talked in a singularly ugly voice between his yellow teeth, which clenched a long cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth.

“Another twist, and he would have cleared the boundary,” he was saying to his companion, a good-looking English lad of five-or-six-and-twenty. “The second barrel cut him to pieces; it’s extraordinary what a lot of shot a blue-rock can carry away. How did you come out on the day?”

“Badly – shocking,” answered the young man. “I backed the guns to start with, and you know how badly the whole lot of you shot. Then I started backing the bird, and you began to kill every time. My luck was out to-day – dead out.”

I saw his friend smile.

“Dago was the one lucky man this afternoon, I should say,” the first speaker remarked presently. “But there – he’s always lucky.”

Instantly my interest was aroused. “Dago!” Could it be – surely – ?

“Yes, he’s lucky enough,” the other answered. Then, after a pause he added: “That’s a man I can’t stand.”

“Can’t stand? Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The fellow gets on my nerves. How does he live? Have you any idea?”

“You mean, what is his source of income? I’m sure I can’t tell you. But for that matter, how do half the men we meet here at Monte manage to live? It would not be well to ask. They have money, and that is the main thing. All we require is to transfer to our own pockets as much of it as we can.”

The young man looked at him thoughtfully for some moments, then said —

“Yes, I suppose so.”

The tone in which he spoke was ironical, but his companion didn’t notice it.

“Do you know Paulton well?” the elder man asked himself.

“As well as I care to. Why do you ask?”

“Only just out of curiosity. Many people form an unfavourable impression of him when they meet him first, and afterwards they come to like him.”

“That’s the reverse of my case,” answered the young man quickly. “The first time I met him I rather liked him, I remember. But after I had met him several times – well, I changed about him. He may be all right! I dare say he is. I suppose our personalities are not akin, as I have heard some one put it.”

“He’s a fine shot.”

“You are right. He is. I thought he would win the cup to-day.”