Part 12

We promised, and soon afterwards she retired. Her bedroom adjoined the sitting room, and after she had passed through the connecting door we heard the click of the turning key on the other side. The outside door, opening upon the corridor, was secured by a bolt. It certainly seemed as though she could have no cause for fear. Leonard and I, however, took up our vigil behind a black lacquer screen at the farther end of the room. We heard the slow dying away of the footsteps upon the pavement below, the lessening scream of the electric cars, and finally silence. One o'clock struck, and half-past. We had both of us given up the idea that anything was likely to happen, when the door of the sitting room was quietly opened, and Creslin, in his dressing gown and slippers, entered. He stood listening for a moment, as though to make sure that he had not been followed. Then he turned on the electric light, drew a key from his pocket--a new, shining key--rubbed it with a little oil, and stole across the room towards the door which led into Rose's apartment. He essayed no knock, no whispered invitation. He fitted the key noiselessly into the lock, turned it softly and disappeared. In five seconds we heard the sound of her muffled cry. In ten we had dragged him out into the sitting room. He lay on the carpet, looking at us with frightened eyes, and that expression upon his face which had so often puzzled me now made clear. The man was a coward.

"What are you going to do?" he whimpered.

"Horsewhip you first," I told him, "and afterwards punish you. I shouldn't call out, if I were you," I added, as he opened his lips. "There's the skeleton key still in the door there, and the hotel is full of journalists. Better make up your mind to go through with it."

"If you do me an injury," he cried, "the people to-morrow will tear you limb from limb."

"Get up," I ordered roughly. "We're taking our chance about that."

* * * * *

Mr. Thomson presided over our usual banquet, a few evenings later, in the dining room of a suite at the Ritz. He was a little gaunt and pale, but otherwise showed few signs of his indisposition. By the side of the plate of each one of us was an envelope, which he begged us not to open until the end of the festivities.

"You three," he said musingly, "especially you, Lister, have put your finger upon one of the quaintest features of the psychology of these days. Reason and argument, common sense, statesmanlike appeal, may all fail. It is ridicule alone which kills. You three, my trusted confederates, have probably prevented a revolution. You have brought to an end in ridicule and disgust a great social upheaval."

"Helped by the Press," I reminded him.

"Helped by the Press, without a doubt," he assented. "Their tone was in every respect admirable. The _Daily Hour_ cartoon of Creslin, the pure-minded idealist, staggering to his feet from the bench in the Town Hall Square, tarred and feathered, a disgraced debauchee, with fragments of his pamphlet sticking in pieces to his body, and another copy of it hung around his neck, was the most wonderful thing in educational journalism. All the same, Lister, you had a narrow escape. It was the women who saved you."

"The women and again the Press," I reminded him. "Just as the people themselves were hesitating, the morning papers came out with a humourous recital of the true story and a digest of the pamphlet. Creslin could never again present a heroic picture to any one. The only earthly chance he ever had of posing successfully as a prophet of the new social law would have been the possession of a personal character of unblemished purity."

"At the same time," Mr. Thomson observed, a little gravely, "I want you to remember this. Creslin has many friends of his own ilk, friends who knew his real character and who were indifferent. I think a short sea voyage would be good for you and Miss Mindel, at any rate. I will speak of that again presently."

I met Rose's eyes, and with the knowledge that our compact ended that evening I attempted no more concealment. She looked for a moment startled--and then I knew.

"As this is our last official reunion," our host continued, "I am reminded that there are a good many questions which you have asked me at various times during our association, the answers to which I have postponed until this evening. Question me now as much as you will."

"Let me start," Rose begged. "I asked the first question, remember. When you arrested Mountjoy, for whom were you acting? Were you for the police, or just an ordinary informer?"

"For neither," was the calm reply. "I have been for ten years the head of the Home Secret Service, an institution, I believe," he added, "which is never mentioned, and which not one person in a thousand knows anything about. The Secret Service still possesses the minute book I found on Mountjoy. If it had come into the hands of the police, they would have been compelled to have taken indiscriminate action and the results would have been disastrous."

"The jewels which you took from Kinlosti?" I asked.

"They were sold, and the amount stands to the credit of the Secret Service funds."

"What became of the treasure which was found in the Spens chateau?"

"It was all returned to its various owners. The Baroness sought my aid because she, too, is a member of our Secret Service."

"And Naida?"

"There was one of our complete successes," Mr. Thomson replied. "No court could have tried Kansky. There was no possible way in which he could have been brought to book for his crimes. The Secret Service undertook to dispose of him and it did."

"And what about the boy Arthur Dompers and his tutor Duncombe?" Rose asked.

"A little outside our ordinary course of business," Mr. Thomson admitted. "Some one or other, however, managed to convince Scotland Yard that Duncombe meant mischief, and I took the matter up to oblige them."

"What about the Duke and the Lorringham jewels?" Leonard enquired.

"That affair was passed over to my supervision," our chief explained, "because the Lorringham jewels are looked upon as a sort of national asset in the country, and their retention here is considered advisable for diplomatic reasons."

"Tell us," Rose begged, "exactly the meaning of the attack upon you in the Landsdowne Passage."

Mr. Thomson made a little grimace.

"It simply means," he admitted, "that the agents of the Black Peril have a secret service almost equal to our own. They flattered me so far as to believe that I was the only man likely to render abortive the great stroke which Creslin intended to deliver here. Hence their endeavour to anticipate my activities."

"You seem to have unlimited powers," Leonard said thoughtfully. "Doesn't it ever occur to you, sir, to make wider use of them? For instance, every Englishman knows Creslin was a terrible danger to the country. He stood for revolution, disorganisation and anarchy. Why didn't you have him secretly put out of the way?"

"Because the men who share with me the responsibilities of my position," Mr. Thomson replied, "my lieutenants and coadjutors, are men of imagination. We try to see a little beyond the actual circumstances with which we are confronted. It would have been the easiest matter in the world for us to have wiped Creslin from the face of the earth, but if we had done so, his principles would have lived after him. Everything except the man's corporal frame would have survived. To-day, a certain amount of the fascination of his doctrines has perished in the morass of ridicule which has sucked the man under. His doctrines never had a moment's chance in this country unless they were preached by a man of personal purity. We did better than slay Creslin. We made him ridiculous."

"What made you first approach us at Cromer?" Rose asked, with a touch of feminine curiosity. "What was there about us, I mean, which made you think we might be useful?"

"The fact, perhaps, that you looked so innocuous," was the smiling reply. "I have agents in many walks of life, and the one thing I aim at as much as possible is to select recruits who not only appear simple-minded and innocent, but who actually are. You are none of you intriguers by disposition; you are simple English gentlepeople. You have escaped suspicion many times for this reason and have therefore been able to succeed, when any ordinary agent would have been suspected from the first."

"I see," Rose murmured.

"You will gratify me," Mr. Thomson suggested, "if you open your envelopes."

We obeyed. Then I saw what I had never dreamed of seeing in my life--not one but five thousand-pound Bank of England notes.

"I have treated you all the same," our benefactor said. "I hope that you will never regret this year out of your lives. I have answered all your conundrums. I will now ask you one. What are you going to do with your money?"

"I don't know," Rose gasped.

"I am going to buy a share in my father's business and go back to the wine trade," Leonard decided. "Half this money will make a new man of him."

"I am going to marry Rose," I declared.

"But you haven't asked me!" she protested indignantly.

I glanced at Leonard.

"The year's up, I suppose, old fellow," he said, with a sigh. "We both ask you to marry us, Rose."

"Bolshevists!" she exclaimed.

"I mean we ask you to choose," he corrected.

She gave me her hand. Leonard drank a glass of champagne in gloomy silence and afterwards shook hands with both of us. Rose and he exchanged a few earnest sentences. Mr. Thomson spoke a valedictory word.

"My friends," he said, "to-night we part. I have helped, I hope, to bring colour into your lives. I ask but one thing of you in return, and that is--silence for twelve months."

We promised, and we kept our word.

THE END

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note:-- | | | | Punctuation errors have been corrected. | | | | The following suspected printer's errors have been addressed.| | | | Page 11. insufficent changed to insufficient. | | (an insufficient audience) | | | | Page 113. Gomorroh changed to Gomorrah. | | (Sodom and Gomorrah) | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------+

End of Project Gutenberg's The Seven Conundrums, by E. Phillips Oppenheim