Chapter TWENTY-NINE: Conclusion

The night was hot and stifling in London.

Everyone who could manage it was away in the country, or at the sea. The West End was like a deserted desert, and half the clubs, including my own, were closed for cleaning. We had hospitality at the Royal Automobile, which I, as a club man, liked only for its cock-and-hen restaurant.

I had been up at home--for the governor was at Hipwell during the recess--and had arrived back at Sackville Street only at eight o’clock that evening. At nine, while I ate my dinner alone at the Automobile, a waiter called me to the telephone.

It was Joan’s father, who asked me to meet him at the Carlton Club, close by, in half an hour.

“I must see you, my boy,” he said urgently. “Something has happened. I can’t tell you over the ’phone. Don’t fail to come over to me.”

Such a message I could not disobey. Punctually I met him in the great hall of the well-known political club. Forthwith he took me up into one of the private rooms.

“Look here, Lionel,” he said very seriously. “You’ve never been frank with me! Now, tell me the whole truth.” And his big dark eyes fixed themselves on me--the eyes of the greatest legal cross-examiner of his time.

Under that keen, searching glance of his there had flinched murderers, and criminals of more or less notoriety who had gone down in the police annals of Great Britain as notorious cases. As a cross-examiner no one had ever superseded him at the criminal Bar. The late Sir Edward Marshall Hall had been acknowledged to be a great criminologist and a marvelous advocate. But stout old John Gell, with his jelly-like stomach when he laughed, was declared to be on a par with the dead pleader who had been such a prominent member of the Crimes Club.

John Gell, K.C., had taken Sir Edward’s place in the public estimation, and perhaps deservedly so. He had been called to the Bar on the same day as Sir Hawley Hayes, the Director of Public Prosecutors, and they had been life-long friends, ever since both were glad enough to have their briefs marked with two guineas to appear in County Court cases.

“Joan has gone with her mother to dine with Lady Tickencote,” he said, glancing at the closed door. “I should have gone, but I wanted to see you on a matter of extreme urgency.” I noticed on his broad, clean-shaven face a look of mystery that I had never before seen there.

“Now, look here, Lionel!” he said again in a hard voice such as he used towards a hostile witness in court. “Why haven’t you been quite open with me?”

I sat staring at him, unable to utter a word.

What could he know?

“Ah, I see you hesitate, my boy! And, after all, quite naturally,” he said, with a faint smile. “Read that!” And he placed in my hands a typed memorandum headed: “From the Assistant Commissioner, Metropolitan Police, New Scotland Yard, S.W.”

My eyes fell upon a statement which held me breathless. I sat staggered, speechless, as one in a dream. The words I read were:

“The prisoner Dufour, on remand to the London Sessions yesterday, made a statement to the Governor of Brixton Prison, that the criminal Tuggy Wilson was shot by a jealous woman known as Illona Hipwell, a member of the criminal gang. In consequence Superintendent Nethersole this afternoon went to the house in Sheen Lane, where the woman was in hiding, but before he could arrest her on suspicion she committed suicide by swallowing prussic acid. A marriage certificate found in the dead woman’s possession shows her to have been the wife of Mr. Lionel Hipwell of Sackville Street, Piccadilly, who is well-known to you.”

Below was scribbled “C.L.,” the initials of Mr. Cunningham Lee.

The typed words danced before my eyes. Death, the penalty of a crime, had broken the fetters that bound me to the ill-shapen woman who had so cleverly deceived and enmeshed me, and I was free--_free to marry Joan!_

After the first few moments in which I realized all that the tragic occurrence meant to me, I turned to my love’s father, and in very lame, halting sentences, I fear, told him of my many strange and bitter experiences, of the two years’ blank in my life in which I had become an expert jewel-thief. I told him, too, of my accident in Rome which had reunited the threads of my lost memory, and brought me to realize the ghastly truth of my own impossible position.

Without seeking to conceal one single fact concerning either my follies, my offences, or my undesirable friends, I poured out my soul to the one man, save my father, in whom I trusted, and begged of him his advice.

He heard me through, making few comments. At last, after a brief silence, in which his legal mind worked quickly, he said:

“Lionel, you certainly have been more sinned against than sinning. I feel certain that the world would forgive you your offences which were committed while your brain was in an abnormal condition on account of that drug administered to you with malice aforethought. As regards the criminal Felix Zuroff, guilty though he is, no doubt, we must recollect that it was through his warning to you of the woman Illona’s intentions that we discovered poor Joan, just at the crucial moment when delay must certainly have resulted in my poor child’s death.”

“But Zuroff has refused to release me!” I pointed out despairingly. “Already Illona has cast suspicions upon me by denouncing me as being in possession of Lady Rathgormly’s pearls.”

“Happily the public knows nothing of your connection with these people, my dear Lionel--neither are they likely to know. Nethersole is in ignorance that it was the woman now dead who denounced you anonymously, so why should we disclose anything further?”

“I may be denounced by others,” I remarked despondently.

“Not if you make your peace with Zuroff,” replied the eminent counsel. “And surely that need not present any great difficulty. He is apparently living in retirement on his ill-gotten gains. Therefore a promise of silence on your part will effect a firm compact between you. Appeal to him again--and I feel you will not do so in vain.”

“I will follow your advice,” I declared promptly, full of heartfelt thanks for his generous counsel.

“As for myself, knowing all that I do, I shall at once make excuse and withdraw from the prosecution of the prisoners,” said the well known King’s Counsel. “I could not act in such circumstances.”

He returned his brief next day.

At the trial on the following Monday, Owen, Dufour, and Booth were all three found guilty of the smash-and-grab jewel raid at Appleyard’s and sentenced. The first got five years’ penal servitude. The others got three years each. While Dufour’s wife and the woman who had held Joan in bondage--though nothing came out in the trial concerning my love’s sufferings--each received a sentence of eighteen months as accomplices.

A few days later I carried dispatches again to Lord Oxenwood at Geneva. And, after delivering them, went on to Lausanne where, on the same night, I had a long interview with the notorious bandit Zuroff.

His first words were to congratulate me on my freedom from the woman who had been my most bitter enemy. Then, after I had begged of him to release me, pointing out that my further association with him must inevitably prove a danger to us both, he at last reluctantly consented to a firm agreement which secured absolute silence for silence. This we exchanged in writing, but in a very guarded way, of course.

When he handed me what was really my passport to peace and happiness, I took it, I think, with perhaps the greatest satisfaction I have ever experienced. Besides, when a few days later I handed it in confidence to Joan’s father, he unhesitatingly gave his consent to our marriage.

That same night of our public engagement Joan, when alone with me, put two questions to me which I had much difficulty in answering. Apparently she had received an anonymous letter telling her of my marriage with Illona, and she asked me for the truth. The second question concerned the stolen bracelet she had discovered in my pocket.

Both were, indeed, matters which I found considerable difficulty in satisfactorily explaining. However, I called her father into the room, and before him told her the truth, which he himself corroborated.

Afterwards I held her in my arms and kissed her passionately--the first kiss since she had received her parents’ consent to our union.

* * * * * * * *

With greatest pleasure I here record that on the day of our wedding at St. Mary Abbot, Kensington, my father and my father-in-law became reconciled, a fact which gave all of us the most supreme satisfaction.

Felix Zuroff, the most daring and desperate jewel-thief Europe has ever known and whose ramifications ran through the whole Continent, restored Lady Rathgormly’s pearls to her, at my suggestion. Shortly after that he died suddenly of heart-failure.

Visitors to the Black Museum at New Scotland Yard, where pieces of evidence of great crimes are preserved, will find the actual piece of sparkling aquamarine with the Double Nought upon it, which I carried from Rome to the man Owen in London. They will find, as well, the three double noughts of the key to one of the most ingenious of criminal secret codes ever devised.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. cats-paw/catspaw/cat’s paw, Jove/jove, motor-bandit/motor bandit, etc.) have been preserved.

Alterations to the text:

[Chapter One]

Change “of Hipwell Hall, near Bulwick, _Northamtonshire_” to _Northamptonshire_.

[Chapter Two]

“Oh! I suppose it was a crime of _jealously_” to _jealousy_.

“They were discussing it in the office _today_” to _to-day_.

[Chapter Four]

“upon the table was a quantity of old-fashioned _jewelery_” to _jewelry_.

[Chapter Five]

“held my shackled hands in front of my face to _word_ off her attack” to _ward_.

[Chapter Seventeen]

“with dispatches for _Brusssels_, Berne, and Vienna” to _Brussels_.

[Chapter Eighteen]

“my signature, which I _scribbed_ off, hurriedly” to _scribbled_.

[Chapter Twenty]

“the thief would not _atempt_ to go by train to London” to _attempt_.

[Chapter Twenty-One]

“And, peer and _politican_, magnate and mechanic, lawyer and laborer” to _politician_.

“I’ll be really angry _wtih_ you in a minute” to _with_.

[Chapter Twenty-Four]

“we reached the little landing-stage of Evian-les-_Baines_ to _Bains_.

[Chapter Twenty-Five]

“I quite _inadvertantly_ stumbled into your private affairs” to _inadvertently_.

[Chapter Twenty-Seven]

“My orders are to arrest him on _supsicion_of being implicated” to _suspicion_.

[End of text]