Then, without waiting for an answer, she questioned further:
“But tell me, what has happened to you?”
Ascott faltered in broken words that betrayed his confusion of mind:
“A calamity, madam, an appalling calamity has befallen me and still crushes me.”
He drew from his pocket a crumpled telegram, the tears welling to his eyes:
“Read, madam,” he cried, and could not articulate another word.
Lady Beltham glanced through the message; it announced that, in a motor-car accident, Ascott’s father, the well-known peer and member of the Upper House, and his son, the young man’s eldest brother, had been killed! The tragedy had occurred in Scotland, in the Highlands, without a soul in sight!
Ascott was sobbing bitterly. “When I heard of this terrible blow, madam,” he declared, “I had a presentiment, nay, all but a certainty, that the death of my loved ones was not due to mere accident. For, I must tell you this, I am the victim of a hideous plot, a prey to the most poignant anxieties. Madam,” he went on with an effort, “I was married quite lately, as you know.... I married an ‘unfortunate,’ an abandoned creature.... I am the victim of Fantômas’ villainies, who showed himself to me under the repulsive guise of the old usurer known by the name of Père Moche. The monster of superhuman guile has me in his toils, which he draws tighter and tighter every day! The wife he made me marry has run away, she has robbed me, ruined me; but that is nothing, would be nothing at all, did I not guess that my father’s death and my brother’s must be yet another outcome of a plot contrived by Fantômas!”
Lady Beltham was in a better position than anybody to realize that the rich Englishman must be right; assuredly, the further she went, the more she would hear set down to her baleful lover’s account the most appalling revelations.
Ascott, harking back to his first idea, again demanded an answer to his question, adjuring her to tell him where Tom Bob was.