Hugh Johnstone measuredly betook his way to Douglas Fraser’s lodgings.
Before the old man was settled on Douglas’s cozy wicker lounge, the pilot engine was tearing away with the young voyager, who had simply stepped out of his own life to make a sudden fortune.
“Now, damn you, Alixe Delavigne,” hoarsely muttered the old man, when alone, “I will see you to-morrow! You shall rule me until I get these two coffers out of the bank, and until our home-coming at Delhi. Then, you jade,” he growled, “Ram Lal shall do the business for you, even if it costs me ten thousand pounds!” which proves that an old tiger may be toothless and yet have left to him strong claws to drag his prey down. “Money will do anything in India or anywhere else!” the old nabob growled, forgetting that even all the yellow gold of the Rand or the gleaming diamonds of the Transvaal will not avail to fill the burned-out lamp of life!
The prolonged absence of the embryo Sir Hugh Johnstone was a matter of public comment in Delhi, while the knowing ones winked significantly at the almost triumphal departure of Madame Berthe Louison, whose special car and ample retinue made her a modern European Queen of Sheba. “Tell you what, fellows,” said “Rattler” Murray, otherwise known as “Red Eric, of the Eighth Lancers,” “the old Commissioner will return superbly ‘improved and illustrated’ with her, a new edition of the standard old work. You see, there’s a French Consul-General at Calcutta, and then and there the matrimonial obsequies will be performed. But I’ll give him just a year’s life,” and the gay lieutenant struck an attitude, quoting the menacing jargon in “Hamlet”:
“In second husband, let me be accurst; None wed the second, but who killed the first.”
“What infernal rot you do gabble, Murray!” suddenly cried Alan Hawke, dropping a double barrier of the newest Times, as he prepared to leave the clubroom in disgust. “Hugh Johnstone was only called down to Calcutta on some important financial business some days ago, and he went there simply to rearrange some of his large investments. Madame Louison is only a stranger here, a tourist traveling incognito, and connected with some of the best noble families of France.” With great dignity Major Hawke stalked away to his rooms, leaving the club for a long drive in disgust.
By the next evening Madame Berthe Louison had been discovered to be a noble relative of the Comte de Chambord, “traveling incognito,” and then the clacking tongues of gossip rose up in a shrill chorus of greater intensity. Immense investments of the Orleans fortunes in Indian properties to be managed by Major Alan Hawke were discovered to be the object of her Indian tour, with wise old Hugh Johnstone as an infallible financial adviser. But Alan Hawke smiled his superior smile and said nothing.
All this and more soon reached the ears of Capt. Harry Hardwicke, whose fever of gnawing curiosity and romantically born love was now strong upon him. A second conference with his old friend Simpson enlightened the engineer officer upon many things, as yet “seen in a glass darkly.” He began to fear that Alan Hawke was growing dangerous as the secret juggler in the strange social situation at the marble house. With the vise-like memory of an old soldier, Simpson had retained various anecdotes not entirely to the credit of the self-promoted Major Alan Hawke, and had partly supplied the hiatus between the sudden disappearance of the desperate lieutenant, a rake gambler and profligate, and the return of the prosperous and debonnaire Major en retraite. “Don’t let him work too long around Miss Nadine, Major Hardwicke,” said the wary Simpson. “Sly and quiet as he seems, he’s surely here for no good. I know him of old. He’s forgotten me, though.”
That night, the night when Berthe Louison, in her special car was nearing Calcutta, at last, Captain Hardwicke was haunted in his dreams by the sweet apparition of Nadine Johnstone, and her lovely arms were stretched appealingly to him. It was the early dawn when he awoke, and sprang blithely from his couch. “If that graceful shade crosses my path to-day, I’ll speak to it in the flesh—though a dozen Hawkes and a hundred crusty fathers forbid,” he gayly cried, for his entrancing dream had given him a strangely prophetic courage.
In the ambrosial freshness of the morning, a long gallop upon his pet charger, “Garibaldi,” restored the equilibrium of the young officer’s nerves. He had neatly taken the strong-limbed cross-country horse over a dozen of the old walls out by the Kootab Minar, and with the reins lying loosely on Garibaldi’s neck, he rode back to the live city by the side of its two dead progenitors.