Glittering palaces of Agra, gloomy caves of Elephanta, the light and lovely Mohammedan architecture, the dark haunts of Kali and Bowanee, the thronged Ghats of the sacred rivers, the color medleys of the vast cities, all these busied her as she passed her days alone in study over the secretly gathered up collection of polychrome views which had taken her from the Neilgherries to Cape Comorin. Her dreams of all her subtle plans to counteract all of Johnstone’s schemes, her tender intrigues to silently entrap Nadine Johnstone’s girlish heart, her carefully plotted line of future action, all of these things vanished in a moment, at Aden, when a government launch steamed out, and an officer of the vessel led up Her Majesty’s Consul to address the mysterious lady passenger.
There was a rush of volunteers when the woman, always brave in sorrow and ever fate defying, fainted away in a deathly trance as her eyes eagerly scanned the brief dispatch of the Viceroy. They were underway again when she realized the fearful decrees of a merciless fate! She read with a shudder, the lines again and again, whispering: “Can it be?”
“Hugh Johnstone murdered by persons—unknown at Delhi? Hasten on to London. Anstruther will have full details. Please acknowledge!”
And it was half an hour before the beautiful Nemesis who had clouded Hugh Johnstone’s life had penned her simple answer. Only at night, on the voyage afterward, did she ever leave her splendid staterooms, and when Brindisi was reached she vanished with her loyal servants so quickly that even the veriest fortune hunter could not follow on her trail. “Some terrible row—some sad family happening,” was the general smoking-room verdict! But, with a heart strangely yearning to the orphaned child, Berthe Louison hastened, without stopping, by Venice to lovely Munich and on to gay Paris. “She shall be mine now—mine to love, to cherish, my poor darling!” vowed the woman whose eyes shown out in an infinite pity! The cup of vengeance was dashed away from her lips for, behind the arras, the waiting headsman of Fate had struck in the night and laid low the man who would have compassed her death!
Madame Alixe Delavigne was only a gracious memory to the sympathetic men passengers who hastened on to London via Mont Cenis, but the chattering gossips of the Rue Berlioz noted, with an eager Gallic curiosity, the return of the mysterious occupant of No. 9. Jules Victor and his wife were seen, however, for only one day, busied about their usual household avocations, and then the returning travelers vanished once more to baffle the chatterers. “Diantre! Comme ils sont des voyageurs!” cried the coachman who took the wanderers to the Gare St. Lazare. There was need of haste now, for Madame Louison had received three foreign dispatches, besides a letter from Captain Anstruther, now waiting impatiently at London, and chafing over his unsuccessful queries at Morley’s Hotel. The gallant Captain’s letter was pregnant with governmental mysteries, and yet the beautiful woman sighed as she saw the vein of personal interest but too clearly evident in the long communication. A single glance at her tell-tale mirror reassured her, and she blushed, as she murmured:
“He believes me younger than I am!” But her brow was grave as she revolved the situation. “There will be a long struggle, a fight of love against craft and and greed! Who will win?” The fact that the Government Secret Service had already traced the delivery of the heavily insured shipment, “ex. Str. Lord Roberts,” to Professor Andrew Fraser, was a first victory for the enemy! “If the old nabob wrote directly via Brindisi to his brother, then the acute old Scotch Professor may be on his guard now! And—the will?—the will? What does it provide for Nadine’s future? If he had already taken the alarm-then I may have yet to fight my way to my darling’s side! The black curtain of the past shall never be lifted by my hand unless—unless Andrew Fraser forces me to strike hard at his dead brother’s paper card house of honorable deeds!”
As Madame Louison watched the rich moonlight silvering the broken wake of the channel steamer, she pondered over the telegrams. “Major Hardwicke and Alan Hawke are both en route to London, charged with different missions. And I am to beware of Hawke. They have only sent him away, perhaps, to veil the official game of the Indian authorities. And Alan Hawke truthfully warns me of his coming by private dispatch. Is he trying to regain his lost status? Douglas Fraser, the second executor, on his way back to India. He has passed Brindisi already. Ah! The sorrows for the dead are quickly assuaged when the ‘property interests’ furnish a fat picking to solicitors and the holders of dead men’s gear.
“Nadine is only eighteen—she has three years to remain under legal tutelage. Perhaps Andrew Fraser may have been already coached upon his course by his unrelenting kinsman. And there is a fortune waiting for father and son in the perquisites.” Madame Louison fell asleep in a vain quandary as to the precise age when men ceased to value wealth and to sell their souls for gold. That question was still undecided when the steamer Sparrow Hawk sped into Dover harbor.
The beautiful wanderer was now clearly resolved as to her future treatment of Alan Hawke. “My foe dead, the theater of war is transferred to Great Britain. He is not necessary to my own campaign, but, in watching him, I may be able to shield Nadine from his crafty plots. If he should try to secretly make friends with the Frasers, and to return to India, to aid the nephew, he might assist in robbing Valerie’s child of this mountain of miserably gotten wealth.
“Thank God, I can make her rich. But Captain Anstruther will know the Viceroy’s whole mind, and I can trust to him.” But her cheeks were rosy red and her dancing dark eyes dropped in a sudden confusion, as the handsome aid-de-camp leaped aboard the steamer at Dover Pier.