Gabrielle and Mrs. Tennison had remained in Lyons, for Professor Gourbeil had suggested that his patient should, as a desperate resource, remain under his treatment for a few weeks. He gave practically no hope of her recovery. The dose of orosin that had been administered was, he declared, a larger one than that which De Gex had introduced into my drink on that night of horrors.
The effect upon me had been to muddle my brain so that I had accepted those Bank of England notes as bribe to assist the mystery-man of Europe in his foul and mysterious plot.
My companion Harry Hambledon was still earning his guineas at Hammersmith Police Court, gradually establishing a reputation. He had bought a small two-seater car, and each Sunday he took Norah out for runs to the Hut at Wisley, to the Burford Bridge Hotel, where the genial Mr. Hunt—one of the last remaining Bohemians of the days of the Junior Garrick Club—welcomed them; to the Wooton Hatch, or up to those more pretentious and less comfortable hostelries on Hindhead.
Motoring had roused a new interest in my friend. I loved the open road, but with the heavy expenses I had recently sustained I could not afford it. Besides, my firm had just secured a big electric lighting contract with the corporation of Chichester, and I was constantly travelling between that city and London, sometimes by rail and sometimes in Mr. Francis’s car.
I suppose I must have carried on my work satisfactorily after the generous leave the firm—one of those stately old-fashioned ones which have still survived the war—had accorded me. But my thoughts were ever of my beloved Gabrielle, the beautiful girl whom, though her mind was so strongly unbalanced, I yet loved with all the strength of my being.
Every few days we exchanged letters. Sometimes Mrs. Tennison wrote to me from the quiet little pension in the Rue Paul Bert, in Lyons, but her letters were always despairing. Poor Gabrielle was just the same. She still had no other vista in life than her immediate one, and she still in her reflective moments gave vent to that strange ejaculation of those mysterious words: “Red, green and gold! Red, green and gold!”
I confess that I went about my business in a low-spirited, despairing mood. More than once I passed by that dark forbidding house in Stretton Street, the blinds of which were drawn, for ever since the winter it had been closed with the caretaker in charge. Pass along Park Lane and the Mayfair neighbourhood in August and you will see the Holland blinds drawn everywhere. The window-boxes filled with geraniums and marguerites are drooping, for they have served their turn and “the families” are out of town, enjoying themselves in Scotland, in Norway, or at the French Spas. Honest Londoners may sweat and toil with their begrudged fourteen days at the sea or in the country, but Society, caring nothing for unhealthy trades or ill-paid labour, unless a strike perchance affects their pockets or their comforts, drifts to where it can flirt, dance or gamble amid gay surroundings denied in London by our sanctimonious kill-joys.
Whenever I passed along Stretton Street there spread over my mind the strange and inexplicable events of that night when De Gex’s man-servant Horton had dashed out after me, and suddenly implored me to see his master. Ah! I saw the amazing cleverness of the whole plot—a plot such as could only be conceived by a master brain.
De Gex’s dark, sinister, half-Oriental countenance haunted me in my dreams. True, he was a man who swayed the finances of Europe, suave, smiling, and with an extremely polished and refined exterior. But why Suzor had purposely become acquainted with me, and why I had afterwards been enticed into that house of tragedy were, in themselves, two points, the motive of which I failed to grasp.
Late one evening I passed the house, going out of my way purposely to do so, when, to my amazement, I saw standing upon the doorstep, and about to enter his car, no other person than Oswald De Gex himself. Behind him stood a strange man-servant, who at the moment seemed to be taking some instructions.