These were the thoughts with which I was harmlessly and unsuspectingly amusing myself as Miss Million and I walked along down the white Suss.e.x highroad in the golden evening light.
And in the middle of this maiden meditation, in the middle of the peaceful evening and the drowsy landscape of rose-wreathed cottages and distant downs, there dropped, as if from one of Mr. Jessop"s machines, a positive bomb!
The unexpected happened once more. The unexpected took the form, this time, of an un.o.btrusive-looking man on a bicycle.
When we met him, slipping along on the road coming from the direction of Miss Vi Va.s.sity"s "Refuge," I really hardly noticed that we had pa.s.sed a cyclist.
Miss Million, apparently, had noticed; she straightened her back with a funny little jerky gesture that she has when she means to be very dignified. She turned to me and said: "Well! He"ll know us next time he sees us, that"s one thing! He didn"t half give us a look!"
"Did he?" I said absently.
Then we turned up the road to the "Refuge." Neither of us realised that the man on the bicycle had turned his machine, and had noiselessly followed us down the road again.
We reached the white gate of the "Refuge," under its dark green cliffs of elm. I had my hand on the latch when I heard the quiet voice of the cyclist almost in my ear.
"Miss Smith----"
I turned with a little jump. I gave a quick look up at the man"s face.
It was the sort of quiet, neutral-tinted, clean-shaven, self-contained ordinary face that one would not easily remember, as a rule.
Yet I remembered it. I"d seen quite enough of it already. It was burnt in on my memory with too unpleasant an a.s.sociation for me to have forgotten it.
I heard myself give a little gasp of dismay as, through the gathering dusk, I recognised the face of the man who had wanted to search my trunks at the Hotel Cecil; the man who had afterwards shadowed me down the Strand and into the Embankment Garden; the man from Scotland Yard.
Mercy! What could he want?
"Miss Million----" he said.
And Miss Million, too, stared at him, and said: "Whatever on earth is the meaning of this?"
There was a horrified little quaver in her voice as she said it, for she"d guessed what was afoot.
I had already told her of the manager"s visit to her rooms the day before I came down from London, and she had been really appalled at the event until Miss Vi Va.s.sity had come in to cheer her with the announcement that she was sure this was the last that would ever be heard by us of anything to do with having our belongings looked at.
And now, after three or four days only, this!...
Here we stood on the dusty road under the elms, with the man"s bicycle leaning up against the white palings. We were a curious trio! The young mistress in a pink linen frock, the young lady"s-maid in black, and the "plain-clothes man" giving a quick glance from one to the other as he announced in his clear but quiet and expressionless voice: "I have to arrest you ladies----"
"Arrest!" gasped Miss Million, turning white. I grasped her hand.
"Don"t be silly, my dear," I said as rea.s.suringly as I could, though my voice sounded very odd in my own ears. Million looked the picture of guilt found out, and I felt that there was a fatal quiver in my own tone. I said: "It"s quite all right!"
"I have to arrest you ladies," repeated the man with the bicycle, in his wooden tone, "on the charge of stealing Mr. Julius Rattenheimer"s ruby pendant from the Hotel Cecil----"
"Oh, I never! I never done it!" from Million, in anguished protest. "You can ask anybody at the Orphanage what sort of a----"
"I have to warn you that anything you say now will be used in evidence against you," concluded the man from Scotland Yard, "and my orders are to take you back with me to London at once."
CHAPTER XXIX
LOCKED UP!
WHO could ever have antic.i.p.ated this?
Who would have dreamt, a night or two ago, of where Miss Million, the American Sausage-King"s heiress, and her aristocratically connected lady"s-maid would have had to spend last night?
I can hardly believe it myself, even yet.
I sit on this perfectly ghastly little bed, narrow and hard as any stone tomb in a church. I gaze round at the stone walls, and at the tiny square window high up; at the tin basin, chained as if they were afraid it might take flight somehow; at the door with the sliding panel; the ominous-looking door that is locked upon me!
And I say to myself, "Vine Street police-station!"
That"s where I am. I, Beatrice Lovelace, poor father"s only daughter, and Lady Anastasia"s great-granddaughter! I"ve been taken up, arrested!
I"m a prisoner. I"ve slept--that is, I"ve not been able to sleep--in a cell! I"ve been put in prison like a pickpocket, or a man who"s been drunk and disorderly, or a window-smashing suffragette!
Only, of course, the suffragette does her best to get into prison. She doesn"t mind. It"s a glory to her. She comes out and "sw.a.n.ks" about in a peculiarly hideous brooch that"s been specially designed to show that she"s been sentenced to "one month," or whatever it was.
She"s proud of it. Oh, how can she be? Proud of having spent so much time in a revolting place like this! "I think," gazing round hopelessly once more--"oh, I don"t believe I shall ever be able to get the disgusting, bleak, sordid look of it out of my mind, or the equally sordid, bleak, disgusting smell of it out of my skirts and my hair!"
And I clasp my hands in my lap and close my eyes to shut out the look of those awful walls and that fearful door.
I go over again the scene yesterday down at the "Refuge," when we were arrested by that Scotland Yard man, and when I had just enough presence of mind to ask him to allow us, before we went off with him, to leave word with our friends.
A group of our friends were already gathered on the gravel path outside the house under the lilacs. And there came running out at my call Miss Vi Va.s.sity, half a dozen of her Refugette girls, Miss Million"s American cousin, and--though I thought he must have taken his departure!--the disgraced Mr. Burke.
In the kind of nightmare of explanations that ensued I remember most clearly the high-pitched laugh of "London"s Love" as she exclaimed, "Charging them, are you, officer? I suppose that means I"ve got to come round and bail them out in the morning, eh? Not the first time that Vi has had that to do for a pal of hers? But, mind you, it"s about the first time that there"s been all this smoke without any fire. Pinching rubies? Go on. Go on home! Who says it? Rubies! Who"s got it?" she rattled on, while everybody stared at us.
The group looked like a big poster for some melodrama on at the Lyceum, with three central figures and every other person in the play gaping in the background.
"Oh, of course it"s Miss Smith that collared Rats"s old ruby," went on Miss Vi Va.s.sity encouragingly. "Sort of thing she would do. Brought it down here to the other little gal, my friend, Miss Nellie Million, I presume? And what am I cast for in this grand finale? Receiver of stolen goods, eh? Bring out some more gla.s.ses, Emmie, will you?"--this to the Acrobat Lady.
"What"s yours, Sherlock Holmes?" to the detective. Then to Miss Million, who was deathly pale and trembling: "A little drop of something short will do you no harm, my girl. You shall have the car to "go quietly" in, in a minute or two----"
Here the American accent of Mr. Hiram P. Jessop broke in emphatically.
"There"ll be no "going" at all, Miss Va.s.sity. I don"t intend to have any nonsense of this kind regarding a young lady who"s my relative, and another young lady who is a friend of hers--and mine. See here, officer.
The very idea of charging "em--why, it"s all poppyc.o.c.k! Miss Million is my cousin.
"Steal rubies--why on earth should she steal rubies? Couldn"t she buy up all the rubies in little old London if she fancied "em? Hasn"t she the means to wear a ruby as big as that of Mr. Rattenheimer"s on every finger of her little hands if she chose? See here, officer----"
Here the young American caught the Scotland Yard man by the upper arm, and sought to draw him gently but firmly out of that Lyceum poster group.
"See here. As you must have noticed at the Cecil, Mr. Julius Rattenheimer"s a friend of mine. I know him. I know him pretty well, I guess. I"ll go to him right now, and explain to him that it"s absolutely preposterous, the mere idea of sending down to arrest a pair of delicately nurtured, sensitive, perfectly lovely young girls who"d as soon think of thieving jewels as they would of--well, I can"t say what.
Here"s where words fail me. But I guess I"ll have fixed up how to put it when I get to Rats himself. I"ll come along right now to him with you.