Ten minutes later, the roaring Calais-Rome express, the limited train of three wagon-lits, dining-car and baggage-car, ran into the great vaulted station, and, wishing the queer old Babbo farewell, I climbed in and was allotted my berth for Calais.
To describe the long, wearying journey back from the Mediterranean to the Channel, with those wheels grinding for ever beneath, and the monotony only broken by the announcement that a meal was ready, is useless. You, who read this curious story of a man’s secret, who have travelled backwards and forwards over that steel road to Rome, know well how wearisome it becomes, if you have been a constant traveller between England and Italy.
Suffice it to say that thirty-six hours after entering the express at Pisa, I crossed the platform at Charing Cross, jumped into a hansom and drove to Great Russell Street. Reggie was not yet back from his warehouse, but on my table among a quantity of letters I found a telegram in Italian from Babbo. It ran:—
“Melandrini has left eye injured. Undoubtedly same man.—Carlini.”
The individual who was destined to be Mabel Blair’s secretary and adviser was her dead father’s bitterest enemy—the Englishman, Dick Dawson.
I stood staring at the telegram, utterly stupefied.
The strange couplet which the dead man had written in his will, and urged upon me to recollect, kept running in my head—
“King Henry the Eighth was a knave to his queens. He’d one short of seven—and nine or ten scenes!”
What hidden meaning could it convey? The historic facts of King Henry’s marriages and divorces were known to me just as they were known to every fourth-standard English child throughout the country. Yet there was certainly some motive why Blair should have placed the rhyme there—perhaps as a key to something, but to what?
After a hurried wash and brush up, for I was very dirty and fatigued after my long journey, I took a cab to Grosvenor Square, where I found Mabel dressed in her neat black, sitting alone reading in her own warm, cosy room, an apartment which her father had, two years ago, fitted tastefully and luxuriously as her boudoir.