Then an impulse seized me.
All day long I had wrestled alone with this trouble of mine. I hadn"t consulted Mr. Brace. I had kept it from the Honorable Jim. I had put up all sorts of pretences about it to the people at the hotel. But I felt now that it would have to come out. I couldn"t stand it any longer.
I turned to Miss Million"s cousin.
"Mr. Jessop, I must tell you," I said in a serious and measured voice.
"The truth is I don"t know!"
"What?" he took up, startled. "Are you telling me that you don"t know where my cousin is at this moment?"
I nodded.
"I wish I did know," I said fervently. And as we stood, a little aside from the gla.s.s doors in the vestibule, I went on, in soft, rapid tones, to tell him the story of Miss Million"s disappearance from my horizon since half-past eleven last night.
I looked up, despairingly, into his startled, concerned face.
"What has happened to her?" I said urgently. "What do you think? Where do you think she is?"
Before he could say a word a messenger came up to me with a telegram.
"For Miss Smith."
I felt that this would be news at last. It must be. I seized the wire; I tore it open.
I read----
"Oh!" I cried quite loudly.
One of the commissionaires glanced curiously over his shoulder at me.
I dropped my voice as I said feverishly: "Yes, it is! It"s from HER!"
And I held the telegram out, blindly, towards the young American.
The telegram which my mistress had sent ran simply and superbly thus:
"Why ever don"t you bring my clothes?
"MISS MILLION."
There was no address.
The wire had been handed in at half-past seven o"clock that evening at Lewes. It left me silent for a moment with bewilderment and dismay.
After waiting so long for a message! To receive one that told me nothing!
"What is the meaning of this here?" said Miss Million"s cousin, repeating, in the accent that makes all our English words sound something new and strange. ""Why ever don"t you bring my clothes?" Well!
I guess that sounds as if nothing very terrible had happened to her. Her clothes! A woman"s first thought, of course. Where does she want you to "bring" them to, Miss Smith?"
"How on earth should I know?" I cried, in desperation. "When I still don"t know where she is, or what she is doing!"
"But this place, Lewes. Surely that"s some guide to you?"
"Not the slightest," I said. "We don"t know anybody at Lewes! At least, I don"t know that she knew anybody there! I don"t know who on earth can have taken her there!" This with another nervous thought of young Lord Fourcastles. "I shall have to go at once--no, it"s too late to-night.
To-morrow I shall go. But----
"She may not be there at all. She may have been motoring through when she sent this absurd wire!"
"Maybe," said the American. "But it"s a clue, for all that. Lewes! The post-offices at Lewes will tell you something about her."
"Why, why didn"t she tell me something about herself?" I stormed softly.
"Here she is taking it for granted that I know exactly what"s happened and where she"s gone! Does she imagine that she explained that to me last night before she went out? Does she think she gave me any orders?
Here she is actually asking "why?" to me!" I concluded, stammering with indignation. "She sounds quite furious because I haven"t brought her clothes to her----somewhere in s.p.a.ce!"
"What clothes was she wearing, may I ask?" demanded the American cousin, in his simple, boyishly interested manner.
And when I told him of the bright, cherry-coloured evening gown, and the creamy restaurant coat, and the little cerise satin shoes with jewelled heels that Million had on, he put back his head and laughed gently.
"Poor little girl! Poor little Cousin Nellie! I guess she must have been real mad with herself and you for letting her loose in that get-up," he said, "prancing about all day in the bright sunlight in that outfit.
Enough to jar any girl of taste in dress, I guess!"
Then his alert face grew grave again. He said, glancing over his shoulder at the groups that were coming and going in the vestibule: "Well, we"ll discuss this. Come into the lounge, where we can talk quietly."
We went into the lounge, where only yesterday I had perceived for the first time the sumptuous apparition of Miss Vi Va.s.sity pouring out tea for my now vanished mistress.
It seemed to me that everybody there looked up at me as we pa.s.sed in. I bit my lip and frowned a little.
"You are right. This is no place for a quiet chat," said the American softly. "It will have to be my cousin"s sitting-room again, I reckon."
Upstairs, in Miss Million"s sitting-room, that I seemed to know as well now as a penal-servitude prisoner knows his cell, the American said to me gravely and quietly: "There is one thing, I daresay, which you have not thought of in connection with that----"
He nodded his smooth, mouse-coloured head at the tantalising wire that I still held crushed in my hand.
"Now, I don"t know much about your police system," said young Mr.
Jessop, "but I reckon it won"t be so very different from our own in a matter of this nature." He nodded again, and went on gravely:
"That telegram will have been read all right! The people here, the manager and the Scotland Yard man, they will know what"s in that."
"Know what"s in it?" I gasped, staring at him. "Why, how can they? Do you mean," indignantly, "that they opened it?"
"Why, no! You saw for yourself the envelope was not opened when you got the thing. But that is not to say that they could not get it repeated, as easy as winking, at the post-office," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, of Chicago. "So I"d be ready to bet that everybody here knows what you"re up to when you leave this hotel to-morrow. My old acquaintance, Rats, and all of "em. They"ll know you"re taking something to your young mistress--your confederate, they"ll think her!--in Suss.e.x. You may be quite sure they"re not going to allow you to take any trips into Suss.e.x--alone. Nope. Somebody will go with you, Miss Smith."
"Go with me? D"you mean," I said, "that I shall be shadowed all the way by that odious detective man?"
"Well, now, isn"t it more than probable, Miss Smith?" said the young American shrewdly. "They"d their eye on you two girls from the start, it seems. You aren"t a very usual couple. Noo to me, you are. Both of you seemed noo to them!"
"I knew they gossiped about us!" I said ruefully.
"Sure thing; but don"t say "gossip" as if it was something n.o.body else did only the folks around this hotel!" protested the American, twinkling. "Well, to-day after the great Jewel Steal you aroused considerable suspicion by refusing to let Rats and the others do the Custom House officer"s act through your wardrobe. This wire will have raised more suspicion this evening. And to-morrow--d"you think they"re going to let you quit without further notice taken? Think!"