Chapter ELEVEN: My Father’s Story

While I was still sitting in argument with Joan, her father--stout, hale, and hearty--returned.

“Hulloa, Lionel!” he exclaimed, greeting me in his usual cheery manner. “Back again, eh? Joan said you’ve been to Rome. How are things there? We were there at the Grand two years ago. I had to appear in a bank case, and I went over to get some information.”

“Oh, Rome is always Rome, you know,” I laughed. “Sir Richard Kingscliffe and Lady Betty are well. We spoke of you.”

“He wrote me a month ago, saying they were coming over on leave in a few weeks. My wife has invited them to stay with us, instead of going to a hotel.”

“Lady Kingscliffe told me so.”

“I expect Sir Richard finds his post pretty difficult under the Mussolini régime, eh?” remarked the great King’s Counsel, whose name was so well known throughout the land. A stout, clean-shaven, bald-headed man, with a somewhat arrogant manner when in Court, he was a terror as a cross-examiner. From the Recordership of Reading, he had been invited twice by the Lord Chancellor to accept a judgeship, but had refused on both occasions. He had told me that a judicial seat did not appeal to him after his constant work at the Bar, for his briefs were among the most highly marked of any man in the Temple.

To become a judge meant a loss of quite fifteen to twenty thousand a year. Hence, the reason was not far to seek. One often regrets that English judges are so poorly paid, and that when they attain the plums of the legal profession they are given a rather worthless knighthood, and receive only a living wage, considering the dignity they are compelled to support So, often the greatest legal men prefer to remain at the Bar, while others of fewer mental attainments wear judicial robes.

Everyone knew John Gell. He dined out a great deal, his ponderous personality being a most lovable one. He had the habit of smoking unusually large cigars, and when he laughed his stomach rose and fell, until his hilarity became contagious. In all London no after-dinner speaker was more witty. The reporters were ever on the alert for some _bon mot_ from his lips.

He took me from Joan’s side into the dining-room and compelled me to have a night-cap with him--a gin and soda with half a lemon squeezed into it, and a chunk of ice.

Suddenly he turned to me, and asked:

“Do you feel better than you did, my boy? Before you left you complained of bad pains in the head. Joan has been very anxious about you.”

“I feel better,” I replied. “But I suppose it is the result of my accident.”

“You certainly had a very narrow squeak,” replied the great lawyer. “When I heard you were at Guy’s I went down at once to see you. Bellamy, the surgeon, had very little hope of your recovery. Still, that’s all over, and you seem fit enough, or you wouldn’t be able to do the long journeys to the capitals.”

How I wished I dared confide in him all that had happened to me, and my strange awakening in Rome. I thought it best, however, to confide in no one except my own father.

I had rung him up before dinner and learnt that he had gone down to Bulwick on the previous day.

Therefore, early on the following morning I left King’s Cross, and at noon the car met me and took me up through the park to my old home.

The spacious old Tudor mansion, with its tall, twisted chimneys and castellated turret, was unchanged, though for over two years, to my knowledge, I had not seen it. The dear old governor, in his gardening suit and faded straw hat, came out to greet me.

In town he was always well dressed, even dandified, a well-known figure in the Park on Sundays, and often declared to be one of the smartest of the elderly brigade in the House. But at home he always enjoyed the ease of old clothes, with the comfort of old slippers in the evening.

“Well, my boy!” he cried. “I’m so glad to get you home again. You seldom come down here nowadays. But there! You surely have sufficient traveling.”

We walked through the open French windows of the old-fashioned morning-room, with its cool chintz covers--the room which my poor mother had so dearly loved. In the centre of the polished table stood a great bowl of yellow, sweet-scented roses, while upon a side-table stood a blue china bowl of pot-pourri.

We threw ourselves into deep arm-chairs opposite each other, and then I exclaimed:

“The reason I’ve come home is because I want to speak seriously with you, dad.”

“My dear boy. Just say what you like. If you wish to confide anything to me, you know that I am always discreet in your interests.”

I paused, hardly knowing how to begin.

“You were good enough to obtain for me a post abroad, were you not?”

“I managed to get you a good opening in the diplomatic service, my boy, and I confess I was sorely hurt and disappointed when you refused to accept it. I can’t make out your motive even now.”

“Neither can I,” was my reply. “For the first time last night had I any knowledge of it.”

“What?” cried my father. “What are you saying? For the first time last night you knew about it? Why, my dear boy, you must be dreaming.”

“I have been dreaming for over two years,” I admitted. “And only now do I find myself fully awake.”

My father arose and stood erect in front of me.

“Look here, Lionel,” he remarked very seriously, “are you joking? If so, it is misplaced humor.”

“I am not joking, dad,” I said. “I’m terribly in earnest. And it is to--to tell you what I know that I am here to-day.”

“What do you know?”

“Of what happened to me on that night you met me at Denmark Hill.”

“You were run down in the Old Kent Road, and narrowly escaped being killed,” my father replied.

“Has there been any suspicion that I am the man the police wanted for the affair in Bloomsbury?” I asked eagerly.

“No. You have never been identified. Therefore dismiss the whole miserable affair from your mind for ever.”

“Ah! That’s just it! I cannot dismiss it because--well, something happened to me after I left you that night--something very serious, a mystery even to this moment; something which has connection with the tragedy in Bloomsbury. For some unknown reason I exist to-day in deadly peril.”

“Tell me all about it!” my father said anxiously. “In what peril are you?”

For the next half hour I sat revealing to him the whole truth, just as I have already written it down in these pages, while he sat staring at me in surprise, scarcely uttering a word.

Except the facts that I loved Joan Gell and that I had received letters from the mysterious Illona, who declared herself my wife, I concealed nothing. I described all that had happened--my strange awakening in Rome, my meeting with the Little Countess, and the sudden realization that she was none other than the humble typist, Lisely Hatten, one of a desperate gang of shop-window jewel-thieves, who had made that cruel and inhuman suggestion to put out my eyes, so that I could never identify her or her criminal associates.

“But she must be exposed, my boy,” my father declared. “Now that you have recognized her, Kingscliffe should be informed at once. Why is she masquerading in Italy as the daughter of an Italian Count?”

“Ah, that is yet another mystery!” was my reply. “I confess that I am utterly and completely bewildered.”

“My dear boy, and so am I! If I were you I would see the Foreign Secretary. Shall I see him for you? He is a great friend of mine, as you know.”

“No, father. Let me solve the mystery. I will remain alert, and try to discover what plot is afoot. There must be some great and well organized conspiracy which takes a girl member of a criminal gang to become a guest at the Quirinale.”

“Through Sir Richard, you can always have private audience with His Excellency the Duce,” my father remarked. “But all you tell me bewilders me, my boy. I can’t make head or tail of it. What can have happened to you after the girl Lisely gave you that injection?”

“Ah, that I don’t know! From that very moment until I fell beneath the dining-table at the Embassy, I was entirely unconscious and oblivious of everything. Yet the girl who gave me the injection--that wild girl who suggested that I be blinded--was, on my return to my normal senses, most charming to me. No doubt she had realized that I did not know her; hence she felt herself safe and sent me upon that sentimental mission to her lover.”

“The strangest story I have ever heard!” declared my father, who, after all, was a hard-headed man, a figure in post-war politics. As an English country gentleman, he was, too, a whole-hearted hater of the Russian Soviets and all their ways.

“Yes,” I said. “It is all strange, all inconceivable, that I should by no fault of mine have earned the deadly enmity of those who now pose as my friends.”

I wondered whether to tell him of the strange communications from Illona. Surely it were better for the present to keep the matter to myself!

We had lunch in the big old dining-room, where, around the dark, paneled walls, were portraits of my ancestors. My father spoke little, apparently absorbed in the strange story of my misfortune, and my consequent unconsciousness.

Both of us ate little, being too full of our own perplexed thoughts.

Afterwards, when we smoked over our coffee on the front veranda--which overlooked the lawn, with its border of lilacs and roses, and the delightful woods beyond--my father suddenly asked:

“And what do you now propose to do, my boy?”

“I really don’t know, dad.”

“Well, your first effort to discover the truth is to approach this strange woman, the Little Countess,” he said. “It was she who injected into your body some drug which caused you that long period of loss of memory. Still pretend that you do not recognize her, and no doubt you will discover some clue to the amazing situation in which you find yourself to-day. At the bottom of it all, you will find that the friends of the man who accidentally shot himself in Bloomsbury instead of murdering you, and who was afterwards identified by his finger-prints as a notorious criminal, have some great interest in hounding you to your peril.”

“But why?” I asked, puzzled as ever. “I did nothing. I raised no hand except in self-defense.”

“You saw him--you saw the others associated in that house on that foggy night. For that reason they fear you; hence their hands are raised against you. No, my dear boy, you must exercise the greatest discretion and precaution, or you may still fall their victim.”

I recollected that strange letter penned by my anxious wife, the mysterious Illona. She held the same opinion as did my dear old governor, that I was in some deadly and mysterious peril.

Quite late into the afternoon we both sat in the long cane lounge-chairs drowsily thinking.

“What you have told me to-day explains much, my boy,” my father said reflectively at last. “Often I have watched you, and wondered in anxiety at your strangeness of manner and your apparent obliviousness of the past. Sometimes I grew impatient because I could not follow the trend of your thoughts. You seemed ridiculously regardless of the past, and more often than not you made statements which, on the face of them, were absurd. Look here, my boy,” he said, laying his hand upon my shoulder with paternal affection, “I confess now to you that I often wondered if you had really taken leave of your senses. Now, I know too well that you have not been yourself. Hence I apologize to you for my shortness of temper.”

“There’s no need for apology, dad,” I declared. “I’ve never been in a fit state of mind to appreciate even your love for me, or your suspicions of my demented state--for, after all, I must have been half mad all these many months.”

“My poor boy, I really think you must have been,” he said, gripping my shoulder with his tender hand. He and I had always been the firmest friends ever since the death of my dear, sainted mother, whose pet I had always been since my Eton days.

I, however, told him nothing of that dark shadow on me--the discovery that I was married to a woman whom I did not know.

We discussed the curious warning I had had concerning the evil intended by a blind man, and the sightless individual who had called on me during my absence.

“You should not meet him, but keep alert and watchful,” he advised. “When he comes, follow him, and see where he lives and with whom he associates,” the governor suggested.

That was my idea, for I resolved to leave no stone unturned to solve the inexplicable mystery.

All was bewildering. The more we discussed it, the deeper seemed the plot against me. But with what motive? What had I done, save to stumble on that foggy night into a meeting of crooks who were no doubt in the act of dividing their spoils prior to distributing them to the “fences?” Of course they took me to be a “squealer” or a police informer. For that reason Lisely, whom I had believed to be my friend, had made that diabolical suggestion of destroying my sight. Yet, in my powerless position, she had surely administered to me some strange insidious injection, and allowed my sight to remain normal.

Why?

The effect of that injection had been to make me unconscious of what I did, of what I said, or even of my life and surroundings, for two whole years. Had other persons been served the same? I had read in the newspapers of many cases of complete loss of memory, which had greatly puzzled medical men, sometimes restored by sudden shock, and I wondered whether my own case was on a par with others. Had others fallen into the hands of that desperate gang, and been subjected to the fatal hypodermic needle as I had been?

Late that afternoon I wandered through the gardens of my old home accompanied by the governor, who took great interest in his exquisite cherries grown under glass. Politics and committees occupied his whole life, but his recreation was a delight in horticulture, and especially in the rearing of flowers.

Every day in the year old Blake, our head gardener, sent him a basket of flowers for his rooms in London, and, more often than not, he appeared in the House wearing a rare orchid grown at Hipwell.

In the fading afterglow we dined together and, in my honor, he opened a bottle of one of his choicest vintages.

Then, when he had wished me every luck, and had given me many words of advice which I highly valued, I took my leave, and just before eleven o’clock alighted again at King’s Cross and drove back to Sackville Street.