An Amiable Charlatan

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"I'm afraid there's going to be some trouble," I said to Eve. "Let me go
and see if I can help. It looks as though the whole thing were a trap."

I followed quickly. It is only fair to Mr. Cullen to say that he conducted
the affair with great discretion and with every consideration for the
feelings of the management. He stopped Mr. Parker and Mr. Moss as they
reached the end of the line of stalls.

"Please come with me," he said. "I have something to say to you outside."

Mr. Moss showed signs of an attempt to escape. He stooped for a minute as
though to run, but a kick from Mr. Parker induced him to alter his mind.

"Wotcher want?" he asked belligerently.

The old gentleman had now reached them, red-faced and incoherent. He
addressed himself to Mr. Cullen, and I no longer had any doubt whatever
that the affair was a plant of the detective.

"I've been robbed of my pocketbook!" he exclaimed. "One of these two has
got it--brushed up against me just now on the way out of the stalls.
Where's the manager?"

Only a few people in the immediate vicinity were conscious that anything
at all unusual was happening. The promenade just at that particular spot
was almost deserted.

"This gentleman is certainly mistaken," Mr. Parker declared with dignity.
"Neither my friend nor myself knows anything about his pocketbook."

"I am sorry," Mr. Cullen said politely, "but I shall have to trouble you
to come with me to Bow Street at once--and you, too, sir," he added,
addressing the old gentleman. "I am a police officer and we will go into
the matter there. You will agree with me that it is well not to make a
disturbance here. I have two assistants with me."

He indicated by a little gesture two men who had emerged from somewhere in
the background.

"I will go with the utmost pleasure," Mr. Parker consented. "At the same
time this gentleman has obviously been drinking and his charge is absurd."

It was precisely at this moment that I felt something hard pressed against
my hand. With a dexterity that was nothing short of miraculous, Mr.
Parker, who apparently was standing with his hands in his pockets, had
suddenly forced one of them through some secret opening in his coat.

In those few seconds it seemed to me I lived a year. I had no time to
think--no time to realize that if I failed nothing could save my
appearance at Bow Street on the following morning as a common pickpocket.
I gripped the pocketbook from his hand and, without changing a muscle,
dropped it into the yawning overcoat pocket of the bucolic gentleman.

The moment was over and passed. Mr. Parker, with a movement forward, had
covered my proceedings. I had been face to face with death years before,
but I had never felt quite the same thrill.

"This way, gentlemen, if you please," Mr. Cullen directed softly.

"You will not object to my accompanying you?" I asked.

"Certainly not," Mr. Cullen replied; "I, in fact, am not sure that it
would not be my duty to ask you to come."

"One moment!" I begged.

Mr. Cullen paused.

"The gentleman who made this charge," I went on, "seems to me to be in a
very uncertain condition. Might I suggest that, before you commit yourself
to taking these people to the police station, you just make sure he really
has been robbed of his pocketbook?"

"Had it here," the old gentleman declared; "right in this pocket! Look for
yourself--gone!"

"The old gentleman scarcely seems to me," I remarked, "to be in a fit
condition to know which pocket it was in."

Mr. Cullen, who had been walking carefully between him and the other two,
smiled in a superior way.

"Please feel in all your pockets," he told his accomplice.

The old gentleman obeyed. Suddenly he stopped short. A blank expression
came into his face.

"What have you got there?" I asked.

He brought it out with ill-concealed reluctance. It was, without doubt,
the pocketbook. I shall never forget Mr. Cullen's face! He was bereft of
words. He stared at it as though he had seen it come up through the floor.
Mr. Moss simply stood with his mouth open. Mr. Parker alone appeared
unmoved by any emotion of surprise. His manner was serious--almost
dignified.

"I want you to take this from me straight, Mr. Cullen," he said. "I am not
a man who loses his temper easily, but you're trying us a bit high."

Mr. Cullen remained for a moment or two speechless. He looked at me and
drew a long breath. I knew perfectly well what he was thinking. He had had
a man on either side of Mr. Parker and Mr. Moss. The only person who could
have transferred that pocketbook was myself. I could see him readjusting
his ideas as to my moral character.

"Mr. Parker--gentlemen," he said, removing his hat, "pray accept my
apologies. You are free to return to your seats whenever you choose. This
gentleman was evidently mistaken," he added, speaking with withering
sarcasm and turning sharply toward his coadjutor. "You oughtn't to come to
these places in your present condition, sir. Take my advice and get along
home at once."

The bucolic gentleman, who had completely lost his appearance of
inebriety, mumbled a few incoherent words and departed. After his
departure Mr. Parker assumed a more genial attitude.

"Well, well! I suppose you only did your duty, sir," he remarked, with a
resigned sigh. "We were on our way to the bar. Will you join us, Mr.
Cullen?"

I did not hear the detective's reply, but somehow or other we all drifted
there. Mr. Moss at once found an easy-chair, which he pronounced to be "a
bit of all right" and in which he assumed an easy and elegant attitude.
Mr. Parker, Mr. Cullen, and I completed the circle, which now included a
professional gutter-thief, a disappointed detective, Mr. Parker and
myself. It was a unique moment in my life!

The wine affected the spirits of no one except, perhaps, Mr. Moss; and
him, when we finally broke up our party, we thought it advisable to get
rid of in quick order. To my surprise Mr. Parker seemed in a particularly
despondent frame of mind. He needed pressing even to come to supper.

"You were quick-witted, Walmsley," he admitted as we rolled away in the
car, "quick-witted, I'll admit that; but you were dead clumsy with your
fingers! I could see what you were doing from the back of my head."

"Really!" I murmured. "Well, I suppose that sort of thing is a gift. I
only know that I hope I may never have to do it again."

Mr. Parker sighed.

"I fear," he said, "that your troubles with us will soon be over. Eve has
been telling me about that young idiot of an Englishman who visited the
Bundercombes out in Okata. If there was one man whose name I thought I was
safe to make use of it was Joe Bundercombe!"

"It seems," I admitted, "to have been an unfortunate choice. What do you
think of doing about it?"

Mr. Parker apparently had no immediate answer ready for me. During our
brief ride in the motor and in the early stages of supper he was afflicted
by a taciturnity that made him almost negligible as a companion. And then
suddenly a light broke over his face. He had the appearance of a
shipwrecked mariner who suddenly catches sight of land in the offing. His
lips were a little parted, his boyish face all aglow.

"Walmsley, my dear fellow!" he exclaimed. "Eve, dear! The problem is
solved! Raise your glasses and drink with me. Here's farewell to Mr.
Joseph H. Parker and Miss Parker. And a welcome to Mr. and Miss
Bundercombe, of Okata!"

"That's all very well," I said; "but Reggie will be on your track."

Mr. Parker beamed on Eve and me.

"We shall see!" he declared didactically.

CHAPTER IX--THE EXPOSURE

The next morning at twelve o'clock I took a taxi-cab round to Banton
Street. The hall porter, who was beginning to know me well, seemed a
little surprised at my appearance.

"Is the young lady upstairs?" I asked.

He was distinctly taken aback.

"Mr. Parker and his daughter have gone," he told me. I stopped on my way
to the stairs.

"Gone?" I repeated.

"Went off this morning," he continued; "two taxi-cabs full of luggage."

"Aren't they coming back?"

"No signs of it."

"Did they leave any address?"

"None!"

"Are you sure?" I persisted. "Please ask at the office."

The porter left me for a moment, but returned shaking his head.

"Mr. Parker said there would be no messages or letters, and accordingly he
left no address."

I turned slowly away. The hall porter followed me. He was drawing
something from his waistcoat pocket.

"I wouldn't do a thing," he declared, "to get Mr. Parker into any trouble
--for a nicer, freer-handed gentleman never came inside the hotel; but I
don't know as there's much harm in showing you this, being as you're a
friend. I picked it up in the sitting room after they'd gone."

He held out a cablegram. Before I realized what I was doing, I had read
it. It was handed in at New York:

"Look out! H----sailed last Saturday!"

"Pretty badly scared of H----he was!" the hall porter remarked. "Ten
minutes after that cablegram came they were hard at it, packing."

I gave the man a tip and drove back to my rooms, where I spent a restless
morning, then lunched at my club and returned to the Milan afterward, only
in the hope that I might find there a note or a message. There was
nothing, however. Just as I was starting to go out the telephone bell
rang. I took up the receiver. It was Eve's voice.

"Is that Mr. Walmsley?"

"It is," I admitted. "How are you, Eve?"

"Quite well, thank you."

"Still in London?"

"Certainly. Would you like to come and have tea with me?"

"Rather!" I replied enthusiastically. "Where are you?"

"Hiding!"

"That's all right," I replied. "I shan't give it away. Where shall I find
you?"

"Well," she said, "we talked it over and decided that the best hiding
place was one of the larger hotels. We are at the Ritz."

"I'll come right along if I may."

"Very well," she agreed. "Ask for Mr. Bundercombe."

I groaned under my breath, but I made no further comment; and in a very
few minutes I presented myself at the Ritz Hotel. I was escorted upstairs
and ushered into a very delightful suite on the second floor. Eve rose to
meet me from behind a little tea-table. She was charmingly dressed and
looking exceedingly well. Mr. Bundercombe, on the other hand, who was
walking up and down the apartment with his hands behind his back, was
distinctly nervous. He nodded at my entrance.

"How are you, Walmsley?" he said. "How are you?"

"I am quite well, sir, thank you," I replied, a little stupefied.

"Say, I'm afraid we are making a great mistake here," he went on
anxiously. "We've slipped a point too near to the wind this time."

"If you'll allow me to tell you exactly what I think," I ventured,
"frankly I think you have made a mistake. There's that matter of Reggie
Sidley. He was worrying me all yesterday morning to find out where you
were, and when I evaded the point he told me straight that he didn't
believe you were the Bundercombes at all. He is always in and out of this
place, and if he sees your name on the register--or his mother, Lady
Enterdean, sees it--it seems to me it's about all up!"

"A piece of bravado, I must admit," Mr. Parker muttered--"a piece of
absolute bravado! But there's the young woman who's responsible!" he
added, shaking his fist at Eve. "I may have suggested our coming to your
party as the Bundercombes, but it was Eve's idea that we put up this
little piece of bluff. Now I'm all for Paris!" he went on insinuatingly.

At that precise moment I felt that there was nothing I wanted so much as
to get Eve away from the Ritz, and I fell in with the scheme.

"We'll all go," I suggested. "I haven't had a week in Paris for a long
time."

Eve handed me my tea.

"Don't count me in!" she begged. "I never felt less inclined to move from
anywhere. If being Eve Bundercombe means living at the Ritz I think I'd
rather go on. The life of an adventuress is, after all, just a little
strenuous and I am tired of living on the thin edge of nothing."

"Perhaps, before you know where you are," Mr. Bundercombe remarked
gloomily, "you'll be living on the thin edge of a little less than
nothing!"

There was a knock at the door. We all looked at one another. A magnificent
person with powdered hair, breeches and silk stockings presented himself.

"Lord Reginald Sidley!" he announced.

In walked Reggie. He was correctly attired for calling and he carried a
most immaculate silk hat in his hand. I fully expected to see him drop it
on the floor, but he did nothing of the sort. He laid it upon a small
table, paused for one second to shake his fist at me, and advanced toward
Eve with both hands outstretched.

"At last I have found you, then!" he exclaimed. "Miss Bundercombe! Well, I
am glad to see you!"

"Hello, Reggie!" she answered sweetly. "What a time you've been looking us
up."

He was taken aback.

"Well, I like that!" he gasped. "And--how are you, Mr. Bundercombe?"

"Glad to see you!" Mr. Bundercombe replied cheerlessly.

The meeting had taken place and I seemed to be the only person in the room
who was suffering from any sort of shock. Reggie was still holding one of
Eve's hands and was almost incoherent.

"Come, I like that! I like that!" he exclaimed. "A long time looking you
up indeed! Why didn't you let me know you were here? There hasn't been a
line from you or from your father. We couldn't believe it when we heard
that you had been at the dinner the other evening. I was never so
disappointed in my life!"

I gripped Mr. Bundercombe by the arm and led him firmly to one side.

"Look here," I said, "is your name Bundercombe?"

"It is," he admitted gloomily.

"Are you a millionaire?" I persisted.

"Multi!" he groaned.

"Then what the blazes--what the----"

I stopped short. Once more the door was opened--this time without the
formality of a knock. If Mr. Bundercombe had seemed anxious and depressed
before it was obvious now that the worst had happened. All the cheerful
life seemed to have faded from his good-humored face. He had literally
collapsed in his clothes. Even Eve gave a little shriek.

Upon the threshold stood Mr. Cullen, and by his side a lady who might have
been anywhere between fifty and sixty years old. She was dressed in a
particularly unattractive checked traveling suit, with a little satchel
suspended from a shiny black leather band round her waist. She wore a
small hat that was much too juvenile for her; and from the back of it a
blue veil, which she had pushed on one side, hung nearly to the floor. Her
complexion was very yellow; she had a square jaw; and through her
spectacles her eyes glittered in a most unpleasant fashion. Her greeting
was scarcely conciliatory.

"So I've got you at last, have I? Say, this is a pretty chase you've led
me! Do you know I've had to desert my post as president of the Great
Amalgamated Meeting of the Free Women of the West to come and look after
you two? Do you know that three thousand women had to listen to a
substitute last Thursday?--and after I'd spent two months getting my facts
for them! Do you know that you're the laughing-stock of Okata?"

"No one asked you to come, mother," Eve remarked with a sigh.

"Asked me to come, indeed!" the newcomer retorted. "Look at you both! I've
heard all about your doings. This gentleman by my side has told me a few
things. I'll talk to you presently, young woman. But say, is there
anywhere on the face of this earth such a miserable, addle-headed lunatic
as that man whom it's my misfortune to call my husband?"

She shook her fist at Mr. Bundercombe, who seemed to have become still
smaller. Then she looked at me, and at Reggie, who was standing with his
mouth wide open. She fixed upon us as her audience.

"Look at him!" she went on, stretching out her hands. "There's a
respectable American for you! For thirty years he works as a man should--
for it's what a man's made for--and thanks to his wife's help and advice
he prospers. Look at him, I ask you! A baby can see that he hasn't the
brains of a chicken. Yet there he stands--Joseph H. Bundercombe, of
Bundercombe's Reapers, with eight million dollars' worth of stock to his
name!"

I saw Reggie's eyes go up to the ceiling and I knew he was dividing eight
million dollars by five. An expression almost of reverence passed into his
face as he achieved the result. We none of us felt the slightest
inclination to interrupt. Mrs. Bundercombe's long, skinny forefinger drew
a little nearer to her victim. Then she coughed--the short, dry cough of
the professional speaker--and continued:

"Wouldn't you believe that was success enough for any reasonable mortal?
Wouldn't you say that, with a wife holding an honored and great position
in the State, and his daughter by his side, he'd settle down out there and
live a respectable, decent life? Not he! First of all he wants to travel.

"What does he do, then, but take up what he calls a hobby! He buys and
gloats over every silly detective story that was ever written; practises
disguises and making himself up, as he calls it; takes lessons in
conjuring; haunts the police courts; consorts with criminals--in short,
behaves like a great overgrown child in his own native city, where the
name of Bundercombe--from the feminine standpoint--realizes everything
that stands for freedom and greatness. The time came when it was necessary
for me to put down my foot once and for all. I called him to me.

"'Joseph Henry Bundercombe,' I said,'there must be an end to this!' 'There
shall be,' he promised. The next day he and Eve, my misguided
stepdaughter, were on their way to Europe; and I am credibly informed they
cheated a commercial traveler at cards on the way to New York. That I find
him at liberty now, it seems to me, is entirely owing to the clemency and
kindness of this gentleman, who recognized my description at Scotland Yard
and brought me here."

"Say, all I'm prepared to admit about that is that it was somehow
fortunate," Mr. Bundercombe remarked with a sudden revival of his old
self, "that it fell to my lot to have Mr. Cullen investigate some of my
small adventures!"

"Mr. Bundercombe," said Cullen severely, "I think you will do well to
listen to your wife and to take her advice. There are one or two of these
little affairs, you must remember, that are not entirely closed yet."

Mr. Bundercombe sighed. He adopted an attitude of resignation.

"Well, Cullen," he replied, "if my career of crime is really to come to an
end I don't want to bear you any ill will. We'll just take a stroll
downstairs and talk about it."

Mrs. Bundercombe, with a quick movement to the left, blocked the way.

"That means a visit to the bar!" she declared. "I know you, Mr.
Bundercombe. You'll stay right here and listen to a little more of what
I've got to say. Who this gentleman may be I don't at present know," she
went on, turning suddenly upon me; "but I am agreeable to listen to his
name if any one has the manners to mention it."

"Walmsley, madam," I told her quickly, "Paul Walmsley. I have the honor to
be engaged to marry your stepdaughter."

Mrs. Bundercombe looked at me in stony silence. Twice she opened her lips,
and I am quite sure that if words had come they would have been unkind
ones. Twice apparently, however, her command of language seemed
inadequate.

"So you're going to marry an Englishman," she said, glaring at Eve.

"I am going to marry Mr. Walmsley, mother," Eve agreed sweetly. "He has
been such a kind friend to us during the last few days--and I rather fancy
I shall like living on this side."

"Dear me! Dear me! I hadn't heard of this!" Mr. Bundercombe remarked with
interest. "You and I will go downstairs and have a little chat about it,
Mr. Walmsley."

He made another strategic movement toward the door, which was promptly and
effectually frustrated by his wife.

"No, you don't!" Mrs. Bundercombe prohibited. "I've a good deal more to
say yet. I haven't been dragged over the ocean three thousand miles to
have you all slip away directly I arrive. A nice state of things indeed!
My husband, Joseph H. Bundercombe, a suspect at Scotland Yard, followed
everywhere by detectives; and my daughter----"

"Stepdaughter, please," Eve interrupted.

"Stepdaughter then!--talking about marrying a man she's probably known
about twenty-four hours and met at a bar or in a thieves' kitchen, or
something of the sort! If you must marry an Englishman," she continued
with rising voice, "why don't you marry Lord Reginald Sidley there? His
father is an earl, anyway."

"His uncle's one," Reggie put in gloomily, jerking his head toward me.
"Old Walmsley's all right."

Eve patted his hand.

"Good boy!" she said. "You know I never encouraged you--did I, Reggie?'"

"Encouraged me!" he protested. "I think, on the whole, you said the rudest
things to me I ever heard in my life--from a girl, anyway. I imagine," he
added, taking up his hat, "that it's up to me to leave this little
domestic gathering."

"I'll see you out," Mr. Bundercombe declared with alacrity.

Mrs. Bundercombe, with her eyes steadily fixed upon her husband, stepped
back until she blocked the doorway.

"My dear Hannah!"

"Your dear nothing!" she interrupted ruthlessly.

"You just sit down by the side of your daughter there and let me tell you
both what I think of you and what I'm going to do about it."

"I think," I suggested, "a little taxi drive----Your mother and father no
doubt have a great deal to say to one another, and you can receive your
little lecture later."

Eve assented at once; and Mrs. Bundercombe, for some reason or other, only
entered a faint protest against our departure. It was about five o'clock
in the afternoon and the streets were crowded with every description of
vehicle. The sun was still warm; there was a faint pink light in the sky--
a perfume of lilac in the air from the window-boxes and flower-barrows. I
took Eve's fingers in mine and held them. I think she knew that something
in the nature of an inquisition was coming, for she sat very demure, her
eyes fixed on the road ahead.

"Eve," I asked, "how about Mrs. Samuelson's jewels?"

"They were returned to her from 'a repentant criminal,'" Eve murmured.

"And the forged banknotes made by the young man in the Adelphi?"

"They were all destroyed as fast as father could buy them," she explained.
"He has found the boy a post now with some printer in America."

"And the two thousand pounds at the gaming club--that first night?"

"Daddy made it three and sent it to a hospital. He thought it would do
them more good."

"You know, you're a shocking pair!" I said severely.

"Paul," she sighed, "you never can know how dull it was at Okata."

"I'm jolly glad it was!" I told her. "It gives me a better chance--doesn't
it?"

"And we'll give daddy a good time whenever we can?" she pleaded.

"Always," I promised. "He's one of the best!"

"He's so clever, too!"

"Clever, without a doubt," I admitted, "only I think perhaps we might get
him to use his talents in a more orthodox way. By the by," I added,
putting my head out of the window, "I think it's getting a little chilly."

I ordered the taxi closed and we returned to the hotel. The hall porter
drew me on one side confidentially.

"Mr. Bundercombe and the other gentleman, sir," he announced, "are waiting
for you in the bar."

CHAPTER X--A BROKEN PARTNERSHIP

By what certainly seemed to be, at the time, a stroke of evil fortune, I
invited Mrs. Bundercombe and Eve to lunch with me at Prince's restaurant a
few days after our return from the country. Mrs. Bundercombe was
graciously pleased to accept my invitation; but she did not think it
necessary to alter in any way her usual style of dress for the occasion.

We sailed into Prince's, therefore--Eve charming in a lemon-colored
foulard dress and a black toque; Mrs. Bundercombe in an Okata dressmaker's
conception of a tailor-made gown in some hard, steel-ray material, and a
hat whose imperfections were perhaps mercifully hidden by a veil, which,
instead of providing a really reasonable excuse for its existence by
concealing some portion of Mrs. Bundercombe's features, streamed down
behind her nearly to her feet.

The _maitre d'hotel_ who welcomed me and showed to our table found his
little flow of small talk arrested by that first glimpse of our companion.
He accepted my orders in a chastened manner, and I noticed his eyes
straying every now and then, as though in fearsome fascination, to Mrs.
Bundercombe, who was sitting very upright at the table, with her bony
fingers stretched out and a good deal of gold showing in her teeth as she
talked with Eve in a high nasal voice concerning the absurd food
invariably offered in English restaurants.

Then suddenly her flow of language ceased--the bomb-shell fell! Mrs.
Bundercombe's face became unlike anything I have ever seen or dreamed of.
Even Eve's eyes were round and her expression dubious. I turned my head.

Some three tables away Mr. Bundercombe was lunching with a young lady--a
stranger to us all She was not only a stranger to us all but, though she
was remarkably good looking, there were indications that she scarcely
belonged to our world.

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