Chapter X: A Curious Truth

The pair had walked on beyond Alum Chine, towards Canford Cliffs.

For a long time the man had remained silent, while his well-dressed companion, holding her skirts daintily with one hand, her sable muff swinging in the other, strolled at his side.

When in those warm summer days she had first met him, in that smart hotel in Vichy, she had admired him with an admiration almost akin to affection. But she had discovered that his heart belonged to that pretty French singer whom she had followed to Semmering, and whose pearls she had, at the instigation of her friends, attempted to secure.

That theft had, she had afterwards admitted to herself, been prompted a good deal by jealousy, for she saw the singer constantly in the Englishman’s company, and had been told that they were lovers.

The woman was beautiful, it was true. Her photographs were constantly appearing in the illustrated Press. She was the idol of Paris, where she reigned as queen of the variety stage, while in winter she lived in her pretty white villa on those sheltered, olive-clad slopes above Beaulieu—that quietest and most lovely spot on the whole of the Cote d’Azur.

More than once, indeed, Alza had shed silent tears because of the Englishman’s infatuation for this woman. But she had always hidden the secret of her heart. She had hidden it until now.

He had told her—confessed to her—that he loved Thyra.

What had really occurred on that afternoon in Christiania puzzled her, and at the same time aroused her suspicion. She knew too well that Paul Grinevitch and Richard Jervoise were bitter enemies. Had not Grinevitch arrived suddenly at Semmering, and had she not overheard the quarrel between them, from which she had learnt to her surprise that they were rivals for the hand of the pretty French singer?

What had occurred afterwards she knew not. The young Russian had left suddenly for Italy next morning, while the singer still remained in her apartments. Six months later she had heard a strange story, which she could hardly believe. But Love is a purblind, and Justice a squinting deity.

It seemed that the two men had, by a strange vagary of circumstance, again become rivals for the hand of the same woman. Grinevitch had died. What more natural than by the hand of the tall Englishman?

That thought had occurred to her more than once. Yet her suspicion was not confirmed by the confession her friend had made regarding his love for the fair-haired Norwegian.

“Alza,” he exclaimed at last, “I do urge you to have a care of yourself. If Bourtzeff discovers you he will certainly seek to protect himself.”

“He is your friend, M’sieur Dick,” she pointed out. “He knows that you allowed him to escape from Semmering, where he was posing as Professor Max Krause of Cologne, and has more than once referred to your generosity to us both.”

“That does not alter his attitude towards you, mademoiselle. He has already turned police informant, and at any moment he may denounce you. I suppose, if he chose, he could make some revelations—eh?”

“Yes,” sighed the girl, “ugly ones. I have been, nay, am still, their catspaw, as you know.”

“Because of your good looks,” he remarked quietly. “Men admire you, and——”

“And afterwards regret the folly of falling in love with me,” she added bitterly in French, at the same time sighing. “Ah, M’sieur Dick! How can I help it—how can I avoid it? They hold me in bondage—a bondage from which I can never free myself.”

“Except by reforming—by becoming an honest woman,” he suggested very quietly.

“An honest woman,” she echoed, her gaze fixed blankly upon the grey, wintry sea, her oval, purely French face pale and drawn. “How can I ever become that? So habituated am I to a life of movement and excitement that I could never exist without it.”

“Unless you loved a man, and became his wife.”

“And who, pray, would ever love me, or would respect me if they knew the truth concerning my past?” she cried. “No, M’sieur Dick, that is impossible—quite out of the question. I may love, but I can never be loved in return. My future is hopeless—only shame and imprisonment. I know it. Therefore I make the best of my liberty while I may. Ah!” she went on, “you do not know how full of subterfuge and adventure is my life; how, sometimes, I meet unexpectedly men who have much bitter cause to recollect the day when they declared their love to me. Sometimes I am threatened with exposure and prosecution; I am upbraided and cursed by those who have fallen victims of those heartless blackguards who, speaking a dozen languages and travelling everywhere, direct my actions. Yet I am defiant, even though at heart I am full of compassion, of compunction and regret.”

“I know, Alza,” he said, still sympathetically. “Your position is a tragic and regrettable one. You are a thief and an adventuress against your will, against your better nature. Your father was a thief, and you were trained to be one from your early youth. Not a woman in all London, or in all Paris, is cleverer than you. You can gauge a man’s intellect and read his thoughts, and you can exercise over him a power almost hypnotic. I know it—I have seen it. And I know how, to you, reform and honesty must seem well-nigh impossible.”

“I loved—once,” she exclaimed hoarsely, “you know.”

“Victor Laurillard.”

“Yes—the man who, through Nicholas Bourtzeff, is now at hard labour in Cayenne because, at Bourtzeff’s own direction, he assisted me!” she said hoarsely. “I dare not appear at the Assize Court of the Seine to give evidence in his defence.”

“But why did Bourtzeff treat you thus? At Semmering all his craft and cunning were directed towards assisting you. From what you afterwards told me, I understood that the operations of the association of criminals were directed by a man named Enderlein and himself.”

“So they were. But Bourtzeff quarrelled with Enderlein—who is a landowner and lives unsuspected on his estate near Cochen, on the Moselle. The disagreement arose over the divisions of the proceeds of a big hotel robbery at Cannes. Victor took sides with Enderlein, with the result that Bourtzeff severed himself from us and gave information to the police. Poor Victor was arrested for an affair at Toulon, and condemned. And on the night of his sentence Bourtzeff came to my studio and laughed in my face. I swore vengeance,” she added, with clenched hands, “and I am here in England for that purpose!”

“But are you perfectly confident of your own power?” asked Dick seriously, fixing his eyes upon the girl, who, though an adventuress, was nevertheless his friend.

“If I go to prison he will go also,” she responded. “He is ignorant of the true extent of my knowledge.”

Jervoise was silent for a few moments. They had nearly arrived at the new hotel on the summit of the Canford Cliffs.

“And as regards the connection of Grinevitch with this man?” he asked presently. “What is your surmise?”

She looked at him quickly. The mention of Paul’s name reawakened all those terrible suspicions within her heart.

“How can I surmise anything?” she stammered, in an endeavour to evade his question.

“What connection had Grinevitch with Bourtzeff?” he asked.

“They were both Russian,” she said, “and they were friends.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because, when Grinevitch arrived at Semmering, Bourtzeff recognised him in the hotel garden, and coming to me quickly declared that neither of us must be seen. Don’t you recollect that we both suddenly disappeared from the hotel, and were absent four or five days? He evidently did not wish to meet the new arrival.”

“It seems much as though Grinevitch had made his peace with Bourtzeff, and intended to join him.”

“Certainly. That is my theory.”

“You have no knowledge of the relations which previously existed between the two men?” asked Jervoise, recollecting how vigilant had been her watch upon the house in Keppel Street, and how, from the first moment, she had been ready to assist him in prosecuting his inquiry.

She hesitated. On her part she was still suspicious that the story he had told her regarding the events in Christiania was not exactly the correct one. He loved Thyra, and had been the bitter enemy of Grinevitch.

Alza Dresler was a girl of exceptionally keen intellect. To practise any deception upon her was, indeed, difficult, for her own life was wholly a fraud and a deception. In Dick’s story she had from the very first recognised a flaw. He had not told her everything, and that fact piqued her; for was she not his friend, was she not acting wholly and entirely in his interests, acting in disregard of her own peril, performing for him a service in return for his own generosity when he had caught her a thief red-handed?

“Bourtzeff was evidently in fear lest your friend should recognise him,” the girl remarked at last. Then, when they paused together in their walk a few moments later, she turned her eyes to his again, saying:

“You were very devoted to Helene Marquet in those days, M’sieur Dick. What happened afterwards? She no longer sings her song, ‘Ma Fanchonnette,’ I suppose? Do you remember how fond you were of it?”

“Ma Fanchonnette,
Svelte et simplette.

Revets tes atours gracieux;
A la folie,
Fais-toi jolie,
Et le charme de tous les yeux.”

And she glanced again into her companion’s troubled face.

“Yes,” he answered, in a thick, husky voice. “I remember, alas! I remember only too well.”

“And you are recollecting—as I, alas! am recollecting—those moments when you found me in her salon,” she said, in a slow, pensive voice.

“No, Alza; I am not,” he protested. “No. That is a memory long past and forgotten. I am thinking of something else—of what happened afterwards.”

“And what did happen?” she inquired, recognising from his drawn features that whatever was the memory it was a painful one. “I know that you and Paul Grinevitch were rivals in Helene’s affections.”

He started, staring at her.

“How did you know that?” he gasped.

“I overheard your quarrel in the hotel on the day I returned,” she answered frankly.

He stood rigid, as though turned to stone. Even she, the woman criminal and a thief though she be, had become suspicious—she was reading in his eyes the tragic truth!

“Where is Helene?” repeated the girl, without affecting to notice his agitation.

“Surely you know? Why ask me?” he protested in the same hoarse voice.

“I do not know. I have never seen her since you and she left Semmering.”

He was silent, his face turned to the low-lying coast across Poole Harbour.

“Helene is dead,” he answered in a low tone scarce above a whisper.

“Dead!”

“Ah! yes, Alza!” he cried despairingly. “You knew her—you knew that she was once my dearest friend; therefore you may know the end. That winter she went to her villa on the hillside at Beaulieu, while I lived at the Bristol, down on the bay. She went there to rest, prior to fulfilling an engagement in New York. Well—how shall I explain it? Paul Grinevitch came unexpectedly, and lied to her about me, as he had lied before. In consequence I was dismissed. She, to whom I was devoted, gave me my _conge_, and Paul usurped my place in her affections. He proved heartless and cruel, like all his race, who would rule their women with the knout. I know it, for she wrote me a pitiful letter of farewell, and in it told me the painful truth. I have that letter now, Alza,” he added, looking straight at the girl who stood facing him. “The hand that penned it was, half an hour later, lifeless! She took her own life with chloral, because Grinevitch—the accursed blackguard that he was—had wrecked her life and afterwards deserted her!”

“And that man,” remarked the girl in a slow voice, full of hidden meaning, “has received his deserts! The debt is paid!”