"Doing? Why, Mrs. Gaster, of course. She is after the Gaster jewels."
"Humph!" I said, gloomily. "That cuts us out, doesn"t it?"
"Does it?" asked Henriette, enigmatically.
It was about ten weeks later that the newspapers of the whole country were ringing with the startling news of the mysterious disappearance of Mrs. Gaster"s jewels. The lady had been robbed of three hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars worth of gems, and there was apparently no clew even to the thief. Henriette and I, of course, knew that Fiametta de Belleville had accomplished her mission, but apparently no one else knew it. True, she had been accused, and had been subjected to a most rigid examination by the Newport police and the New York Central Office, but no proof of any kind establishing her guilt could be adduced, and after a week of suspicion she was to all intents and purposes relieved of all odium.
"She"ll skip now," said I.
"Not she," said Henriette. "To disappear now would be a confession of guilt. If Fiametta de Belleville is the woman I take her for she"ll stay right here as if nothing had happened, but of course not at Mrs.
Gaster"s."
"Where then?" I asked.
"With Mrs. A. J. Van Raffles," replied Henriette. "The fact is," she added, "I have already engaged her. She has acted her part well, and has seemed so prostrated by the unjust suspicion of the world that even Mrs.
Gaster is disturbed over her condition. She has asked her to remain, but Fiametta has refused. "I couldn"t, madam," she said when Mrs. Gaster asked her to stay. "You have accused me of a fearful crime--a crime of which I am innocent--and--I"d rather work in a factory, or become a shop-girl in a department store, than stay longer in a house where such painful things have happened." Result, next Tuesday Fiametta de Belleville comes to me as _my_ maid."
"Well, Henriette," said I, "I presume you know your own business, but why you lay yourself open to being robbed yourself and to having the profits of your own business diminished I can"t see. Please remember that I warned you against this foolish act."
"All right, Bunny, I"ll remember," smiled Mrs. Van Raffles, and there the matter was dropped for the moment.
The following Tuesday Fiametta de Belleville was installed in the Van Raffles household as the maid of Mrs. A. J. Van Raffles. To her eagle eye it was another promising field for profit, for Henriette had spared neither pains nor money to impress Fiametta with the idea that next to Mrs. Gaster she was about as lavish and financially capable a householder as could be found in the Social Capital of the United States. As for me, I was the picture of gloom. The woman"s presence in our household could not be but a source of danger to our peace of mind as well as to our profits, and for the life of me I could not see why Henriette should want her there. But I was not long in finding out.
A week after Fiametta"s arrival Mrs. Raffles rang hurriedly for me.
"Yes, madam," I said, responding immediately to her call.
"Bunny," she said, her hand trembling a little, "the hour for action has arrived. I have just sent Fiametta on an errand to Providence. She will be gone three hours."
"Yes!" said I. "What of it?"
"I want you during her absence to go with me to her room--"
The situation began to dawn on me.
"Yes!" I cried, breathlessly. "And search her trunks?"
"No, Bunny, no--the eaves," whispered Henriette. "I gave her that room in the wing because it has so many odd cubby-holes where she could conceal things. I am inclined to think--well, the moment she leaves the city let me know. Follow her to the station, and don"t return till you know she is safely out of town and on her way to Providence. Then _our_ turn will come."
Oh, that woman! If I had not adored her before I--but enough. This is no place for sentiment. The story is the thing, and I must tell it briefly.
I followed out Henriette"s instructions to the letter, and an hour later returned with the information that Fiametta was, indeed, safely on her way.
"Good," said Mrs. Raffles. "And now, Bunny, for the Gaster jewels."
Mounting the stairs rapidly, taking care, of course, that there were none of the other servants about to spy upon us, we came to the maid"s room. Everything in it betokened a high mind and a good character. There were religious pictures upon the bureau, prayer-books, and some volumes of essays of a spiritual nature were scattered about--nothing was there to indicate that the occupant was anything but a simple, sweet child of innocence except--
Well, Henriette was right--except the Gaster jewels. Even as my mistress had suspected, they were cached under the eaves, snuggled close against the huge dormer-window looking out upon the gardens; laid by for a convenient moment to get them out of Newport, and then--back to England for Fiametta. And what a gorgeous collection they were! Dog-collars of diamonds, yards of pearl rope, necklaces of rubies of the most l.u.s.trous color and of the size of pigeons" eggs, rings, brooches, tiaras--everything in the way of jewelled ornament the soul of woman could desire--all packed closely away in a tin box that I now remembered Fiametta had brought with her in her hand the day of her arrival. And now all these things were ours--Henriette"s and mine--without our having had to stir out-of-doors to get them. An hour later they were in the safety-deposit vault of Mrs. A. J. Van Raffles in the st.u.r.dy cellars of the Tiverton Trust Company, as secure against intrusion as though they were locked in the heart of Gibraltar itself.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "HER SLIGHT LITTLE FIGURE CONVULSED WITH GRIEF"]
And Fiametta? Well--a week later she left Newport suddenly, her eyes red with weeping and her slight little figure convulsed with grief. Her favorite aunt had just died, she said, and she was going back to England to bury her.
IV
THE PEARL ROPE OF MRS. GUSHINGTON-ANDREWS
"Bunny," said Henrietta one morning, shortly after we had come into possession of the Gaster jewels, "how is your nerve? Are you ready for a coup requiring a lot of it?"
"Well," I replied, pluming myself a bit, "I don"t wish to boast, Henriette, but I think it is pretty good. I managed to raise twenty-seven hundred dollars on my own account by the use of it last night."
"Indeed?" said Henriette, with a slight frown. "How, Bunny? You know you are likely to complicate matters for all of us if you work on the side.
What, pray, did you do last night?"
And then I unfolded to her the incidents of the night before when, by a.s.suming at a moment"s notice the position of valet to young Robertson de Pelt, the frisky young favorite of the inner set, I had relieved that high-flying young bachelor of fifteen hundred dollars in cash and some twelve hundred dollars worth of jewels as well.
"I was spending the evening at the Gentlemen"s Gentlemen"s Club," I explained, "when word came over the telephone to Digby, Mr. de Pelt"s valet, that Mr. de Pelt was at the Rockerbilts" and in no condition to go home alone. It happened that it was I who took the message, and observing that Digby was engaged in a game of billiards, and likely to remain so for some time to come, I decided to go after the gentleman myself without saying anything to Digby about it. m.u.f.fling myself up so that no one could recognize me, I hired a cab and drove out to the Rockerbilt mansion, sent in word that Mr. de Pelt"s man was waiting for him, and in ten minutes had the young gentleman in my possession. I took him to his apartment, dismissed the cab, and, letting ourselves into his room with his own latch-key, put him to bed. His clothes I took, as a well-ordered valet should, from his bed-chamber into an adjoining room, where, after removing the contents of his pockets, I hung them neatly over a chair and departed, taking with me, of course, everything of value the young gentleman had about him, even down to the two brilliant rubies he wore in his garter buckles. This consisted of two handfuls of crumpled twenty-dollar bills from his trousers, three rolls of one-hundred-dollar bills from his waistcoat, and sundry other lots of currency, both paper and specie, that I found stowed away in his overcoat and dinner-coat pockets. There were also ten twenty-dollar gold pieces in a little silver chain-bag he carried on his wrist. As I say, there was about fifteen hundred dollars of this loose change, and I reckon up the value of his studs, garter rubies, and finger-rings at about twelve hundred dollars more, or a twenty-seven hundred dollars pull in all. Eh?"
"Mercy, Bunny, that was a terribly risky thing. Suppose he had recognized you?" cried Henriette.
"Oh, he did--or at least he thought he did," I replied, smiling broadly at the recollection. "On the way home in the cab he wept on my shoulder and said I was the best friend he ever had, and told me he loved me like a brother. There wasn"t anything he wouldn"t do for me, and if ever I wanted an automobile or a grand-piano all I had to do was to ask him for it. He was very genial."
"Well, Bunny," said Henriette, "you are very clever at times, but do be careful. I am delighted to have you show your nerve now and then, but please don"t take any serious chances. If Mr. de Pelt ever recognizes you--and he dines here next Wednesday--you"ll get us both into awful trouble."
Again I laughed. "He won"t," said I, with a conviction born of experience. "His geniality was of the kind that leaves the mind a blank the following morning. I don"t believe Mr. de Pelt remembers now that he was at the Rockerbilts" last night, and even if he does, _you_ know that I was in this house at eleven o"clock."
"I, Bunny? Why, I haven"t seen you since dinner," she demurred.
"Nevertheless, Henriette, you know that I was in the house at eleven o"clock last night--or, rather, you _will_ know it if you are ever questioned on the subject, which you won"t be," said I. "So, now that I have shown you in just what shape my nerve is, what is the demand you are going to put upon it?"
"You will have to bring to the enterprise all that ability which used to characterize your efforts as an amateur actor, Bunny," she replied.
"Summon all your sang-froid to your aid; act with deliberation, courtesy, and, above all, without the slightest manifestation of nervousness, and we should win, not a petty little twenty-seven hundred dollars, but as many thousands. You know Mrs. Gushington-Andrews?"
"Yes," said I. "She is the lady who asked me for the olives at your last dinner."
"Precisely," observed Henriette. "You possibly observed also that wherever she goes she wears about sixty-nine yards of pearl rope upon her person."
"Rope?" I laughed. "I shouldn"t call that rope. Cable, yes--frankly, when she came into the dining-room the other night I thought it was a feather-boa she had on."
"All pearls, Bunny, of the finest water," said Henriette, enthusiastically. "There isn"t one of the thousands that isn"t worth anywhere from five hundred to twenty-five hundred."
"And I am to land a yard or two of the stuff for you in some mysterious way?" I demanded. "How is it to be--by kidnapping the lady, the s.n.a.t.c.h and run game, or how?"
"Sarcasm does not suit your complexion, Bunny," retorted Henriette.
"Your best method is to follow implicitly the directions of wiser brains. You are a first-cla.s.s tool, but as a princ.i.p.al--well--well, never mind. You do what I tell you and some of those pearls will be ours. Mrs. Gushington-Andrews, as you may have noticed, is one of those exceedingly effusive ladies who go into ecstasies over everything and everybody. She is what Raffles used to call a palaverer. Where most people nod she describes a complete circle with her head. When a cold, formal handshake is necessary she perpetrates an embrace, and that is where we come in. At my next Tuesday tea she will be present. She will wear her pearls--she"ll be strung with them from head to foot. A rope-walk won"t be in it with her, and every single little jewel will be worth a small fortune. You, Bunny, will be in the room to announce her when she arrives. She will rush to my arms, throw her own about my neck, the ornaments of my corsage will catch the rope at two or more points, sever the thread in several places, pearls will rain down upon the floor by dozens, and then--"