Book: Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces

T >> Thomas W. Hanshew >> Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces




Almost simultaneously there was a sharp metallic "snick," an electric
bulb hanging from the ceiling flamed out luminously, a cupboard door
flashed open, a voice cried out in joyous, perfect English: "Thank God
for a man!" And, switching round with a cry of amazement, he found
himself looking into the face and eyes of a woman.

And of all women in the world--Ailsa Lorne!

He sucked in his breath and his heart began to hammer.

"Miss Lorne!" he exclaimed, so carried out of himself that he scarcely
knew what he did. "It was the French position that you chose, then? It
is you--_you_--that calls upon me?"

"No, it is not," she made reply, a rush of colour reddening her cheeks,
a feeling of embarrassment and of a natural restraint making her shake
visibly. "I am merely the envoy of another. I should not know you,
disguised as you are, but for that. Yes, I chose the French position, as
you see, Mr. Cleek. I am now the companion to Mademoiselle Athalie,
daughter of the Baron de Carjorac."

"Baron de Carjorac? Do you mean the French Minister of the Interior, the
President of the Board of National Defences, Miss Lorne--that
enthusiastic old patriot, that rabid old spitfire, whose one dream is
the wresting back of Alsace-Lorraine, the driving of the hated Germans
into the sea? Do you mean that ripping old firebrand?"

"Yes. But you'd not call him that if you were to see him now; if you
could see the wreck, the broken and despairing wreck, that six weeks of
the Chateau Larouge, six weeks of that horrible 'Red Crawl' have made of
him."

"'The Red Crawl'! Good heavens! then that letter, that appeal for
help--"

"Came from him!" she finished excitedly. "It was he who was to have met
you here to-night, Mr. Cleek. This house is one he owns; he thought he
might with safety risk coming here, but--he can't! he can't! He knows
now that there is danger for him everywhere; that his every step is
tracked; that the snare which is about him has been about him,
unsuspected, for almost a year; that he dare not, absolutely dare not,
appeal to the French police, and that if it were known he had appealed
to you, he would be a dead man inside of twenty-four hours, and not only
dead, but--disgraced. Oh, Mr. Cleek!"--she stretched out two shaking
hands and laid them on his arm, lifted a white, imploring face to
his--"save him! save that dear broken old man! Ah, think! think! They
are our friends, our dear country's friends, these French people. Their
welfare is our welfare, ours is theirs. Oh, help him, save him, Mr.
Cleek--for his own sake--for mine--for France. Save him, and win my
gratitude for ever!"

"That is a temptation that would carry me to the ends of the earth, Miss
Lorne. Tell me what the work is, and I will carry it through. What is
this incomprehensible thing of which both you and Baron de Carjorac have
spoken--this thing you allude to as 'The Red Crawl'?"

She gave a little shuddering cry and fell back a step, covering her face
with both hands.

"Oh!" she said, with a shiver of repulsion. "It is loathly--it is
horrible--it is necromancy--beyond belief! Why, oh, why were we ever
driven to that horrible Chateau Larouge! Why could not fate have spared
the Villa de Carjorac? It could not have happened then!"

"Villa de Carjorac? That was the name of the baron's residence, I
believe. I remember reading in the newspapers some five or six weeks ago
that it was destroyed by fire, which originated--nobody knew how--in the
apartments of the late baroness in the very dead of the night. I thought
at the time it read suspiciously like the work of an incendiary,
although nobody hinted at such a thing. The Chateau Larouge I also have
a distinct memory of, as an old historic property in the neighbourhood
of St. Cloud. Speaking from past experience, I know that, although it is
in such a state of decay, and supposed to be uninhabitable, it has, in
fact, often been occupied at a period when the police and the public
believed it to be quite empty. Gentlemen of the Apache persuasion have
frequently made it a place of retreat. There is also an underground
passage--executed by those same individuals--which connects with the
Paris sewers. That, too, the police are unaware of. What can the ruined
Chateau Larouge possibly have to do with the affairs of the Baron de
Carjorac, Miss Lorne, that you connect them like this?"

"They have everything to do with them--everything. The Chateau is no
longer a ruin, however. It was purchased, rebuilt, refitted by the
Comtesse Susanne de la Tour, Mr. Cleek, and she and her brother live
there. So do we--Athalie, Baron de Carjorac, and I. So, also, does the
creature--the thing--the abominable horror known as 'The Red Crawl.'"

"My dear Miss Lorne, what are you saying?"

"The truth, nothing but the truth!" she answered hysterically. "Oh, let
me begin at the beginning--you'll never understand unless I do. I'll
tell you in as few words as possible--as quickly as I can. It all began
last winter, when Athalie and her father were at Monte Carlo. There they
met Madame la Comtesse de la Tour and her brother, Monsieur Gaston
Merode. The baron has position but he has not wealth, Mr. Cleek. Athalie
is ambitious. She loves luxury, riches, a life of fashion--all the
things that boundless money can give; and when Monsieur Merode--who is
young, handsome, and said to be fabulously wealthy--showed a distinct
preference for her over all the other marriageable girls he met, she was
flattered out of her silly wits. Before they left Monte Carlo for Paris
everybody could see that he had only to ask her hand, to have it
bestowed upon him. For although the baron never has cared for the man,
Athalie rules him, and her every caprice is humoured.

"But for all he was so ardent a lover, Monsieur Merode was slow in
coming to the important point. Perhaps his plans were not matured. At
any rate, he did not propose to Athalie at Monte Carlo; and, although he
and his sister returned to Paris at the same time as the baron and his
daughter, he still deferred the proposal."

"Has he not made it yet?"

"Yes, Mr. Cleek. He made it six weeks ago--to be exact, two nights
before the Villa de Carjorac was fired."

"You think it was fired, then?"

"I do now, although I had no suspicion of it at the time. Athalie
received her proposal on the Saturday, the baron gave his consent on the
Sunday, and on Monday night the villa was mysteriously burnt, leaving
all three of us without an immediate refuge. In the meantime, Madame la
Comtesse had purchased the ruin of the Chateau Larouge, and during the
period of her brother's deferred proposal was engaged in fitting it up
as an abode for herself and him. On the very day it was finished,
Monsieur Merode asked for Athalie's hand."

"Oho!" said Cleek, with a strong rising inflection. "I think I begin to
smell the toasting of the cheese. Of course, when the villa was burnt
out, Madame la Comtesse insisted that, as the _fiancee_ of her brother,
Mlle. de Carjorac must make her home at the Chateau until the necessary
repairs could be completed; and, of course, the baron had to go with
her?"

"Yes," admitted Ailsa. "The baron accepted--Athalie would not have
allowed him to decline had he wished to--so we all three went there and
have been residing there ever since. On the night after our arrival an
alarming, a horrifying thing occurred. It was while we were at dinner
that the conversation turned upon the supernatural--upon houses and
places that were reputed to be haunted--and then Madame la Comtesse made
a remarkable statement. She laughingly asserted that she had just
learned that, in purchasing the Chateau Larouge, she had also become the
possessor of a sort of family ghost. She said that she had only just
heard--from an outside source--that there was a horrible legend
connected with the place; in short, that for centuries it had been
reputed to be under a sort of spell of evil and to be cursed by a
dreadful visitant known as 'The Red Crawl'--a hideous and loathsome
creature, neither spider nor octopus, but horribly resembling
both--which was supposed to 'appear' at intervals in the middle of the
night, and, like the fabled giants of fairy tales, carry off 'lovely
maidens and devour them.'"

"Who is responsible for that ridiculous assertion, I wonder? I think I
may say that I know as much about the Chateau Larouge and its history as
anybody, Miss Lorne, but I never heard of this supposed 'legend' before
in all my life."

"So the baron, too, declared, laughing as derisively as any of us over
the story, although it is well known that he has a natural antipathy to
all crawling things--an abhorrence inherited from his mother--and has
been known to run like a frightened child from the appearance of a mere
garden spider."

"Oho!" said Cleek again. "I see! I see! The toasted cheese smells
stronger, and there's a distinct suggestion of the Rhine about it this
time. There's something decidedly German about that fabulous 'monster'
and that haunted chateau, Miss Lorne. They are clever and careful
schemers, those German Johnnies. Of course, this amazing 'Red Crawl' was
proved to have an absolute foundation in fact, and equally, of course,
it 'appeared' to the Baron de Carjorac?"

"Yes--that very night. After we had all gone to bed, the house was
roused by his screams. Everybody rushed to his chamber, only to find him
lying on the floor in a state of collapse. The thing had been in his
room, he said. He had seen it--it had even touched him--a horrible,
hideous red reptile, with squirming tentacles, a huge, glowing body, and
eyes like flame. It had crept upon him out of the darkness--he knew not
from where. It had seized him, resisted all his wild efforts to tear
loose from it, and when he finally sank, overcome and fainting, upon the
floor, his last conscious recollection was of the loathsome thing
settling down upon his breast and running its squirming 'feelers' up and
down his body."

"Of course! Of course! That was part of the game. It was after
something. Something of the utmost importance to German interests.
That's why the Chateau Larouge was refitted, why the Villa de Carjorac
was burnt down, and why this Monsieur Gaston Merode became engaged to
Mademoiselle Athalie."

"Oh, how could you know that, Mr. Cleek? Nobody ever suspected. The
baron never confessed to any living soul until he did so to me,
to-day--and then only because he had to tell somebody, in order that the
appointment with you might be kept. How, then, could you guess?"

"By putting two and two together, Miss Lorne, and discovering that they
do not make five. The inference is very clear: Baron de Carjorac is
President of the Board of National Defences; Germany, in spite of its
public assurances to the contrary, is known by those who are 'on the
inside' to harbour a very determined intention of making a secret
attack, an unwarned invasion, upon England. France is the key to the
situation. If, without the warning that must come through the delay of
picking a quarrel and entering into an open war with the Republic, the
German army can swoop down in the night, cross the frontier, and gain
immediate possession of the ports of France, in five hours' time it can
be across the English Channel, and its hordes pouring down upon a
sleeping people. To carry out this programme, the first step would, of
course, be to secure knowledge of the number, location, manner of the
secret defences of France--the plans of fortification, the maps of the
'danger zone,' the documentary evidence of her strongest and weakest
points--and who so likely to be the guardian of these as the Baron de
Carjorac? That is how I know that 'The Red Crawl' was after something of
vital importance to German interests, Miss Lorne. That he got it, I know
from the fact that the baron, while hinting at disgrace and speaking of
peril to his own life, dared not confide in the French authorities and
ask the assistance of the French police. Moreover, if 'The Red Crawl'
had failed to secure anything, the baron, with his congenital loathing
of all crawling things, would have left the Chateau Larouge
immediately."

"Oh, to think that you guessed it so easily--and it was all such a
puzzle to me. I could not think, Mr. Cleek, why he did remain--why he
would not be persuaded to go, although every night was adding to the
horror of the thing and it seemed clear to me that he was going mad. Of
course, Madame la Comtesse and her brother tried to reason him out of
what he declared, tried to make him believe that it was all fancy--that
he did not really see the fearful thing; it was equally in vain that I
myself tried to persuade him to leave the place before his reason became
unsettled. Last night"--she paused, shuddered, put both hands over her
face, and drew in a deep breath--"last night, I, too, saw 'The Red
Crawl,' Mr. Cleek--I, too!"

"You, Miss Lorne?"

"Yes. I made up my mind that I would--that, if it existed, I would have
absolute proof of it. The countess and her brother had scoffed so
frequently, had promised the baron so often that they would set a
servant on guard in the corridor to watch, and then had said so often to
poor, foolish, easily persuaded Athalie that it was useless doing
anything so silly, as it was absolutely certain that her father only
imagined the thing, that I--I determined to take the step myself,
unknown to any of them. After everybody had gone to bed, I threw on a
loose, dark gown, crept into the corridor, and hid in a niche from which
I could see the door of the baron's room. I waited until after
midnight--long after--and then--and then--"

"Calm yourself, Miss Lorne. Then the thing appeared, I suppose?"

"Yes; but not before something equally terrible had happened. I saw the
door of the countess's room open; I saw the countess herself come out,
accompanied by the man who up till then I had believed, like everybody
else, was her brother."

"And who is not her brother, after all?"

"No, he is not. Theirs is a closer tie. I saw her kiss him. I saw her go
with him to an angle of the corridor, lift a rug, and raise a trap in
the floor."

"Hullo! Hullo!" ejaculated Cleek. "Then she, too; knows of the passage
which leads to the sewers. Clearly, then, this Countess de la Tour is
not what she seems, when she knows secrets that are known only to the
followers of--well, never mind. Go on, Miss Lorne, go on. You saw her
lift that trap; and--what then?"

"Then there came up out of it--oh, the most loathsome-looking creature I
ever saw; a huge, crawling, red shape that was like a blood-red spider,
with the eyes, the hooked beak, and the writhing tentacles of an
octopus. It made no sound, but it seemed to know her, to understand her,
for when she waved her hand toward the open door of her own room it
crawled away and, obeying that gesture, dragged its huge bulk over the
threshold, and passed from sight. Then the man she called her brother
kissed her again, and as he descended into the darkness below the trap I
heard her say quite distinctly: 'Tell Marise that I will come as soon as
I can; but not to delay the revel. If I am compelled to forego it
to-night, there shall be a wilder one to-morrow, when Clodoche
arrives.'"

"Clodoche! By Jupiter!" Cleek almost jumped as he spoke. "Now I know the
'lay'! No; don't ask me anything yet. Go on with the story, please.
What then, Miss Lorne, what then?"

"Then the man below said something which I could not hear--something to
which she answered in these words: 'No, no; there is no danger. I will
guard it safely, and it shall go into no hands but Clodoche's. He and
Count von Hetzler will be there about midnight to-morrow to complete the
deal and pay over the money. Clodoche will want the fragment, of course,
to show to the count as a proof that it is the right one, as "an
earnest" of what the remainder is worth. And you must bring me that
"remainder" without fail, Gaston--you hear me?--without fail! I shall be
there, at the rendezvous, awaiting you, and the thing must be in our
hands when von Hetzler comes. The thing must be finished to-morrow
night, even if you and Serpice have to throw all caution to the winds
and throttle the old fool.' Then, as if answering a further question,
she laughingly added: 'Oh, get that fear out of your head. I'm not a
bat, to be caught napping. I'll give it to no one but Clodoche--and not
even to him until he gives the secret sign.' And then, Mr. Cleek, as she
closed the trap I heard the man call back to her 'Good night' and give
her a name I had not heard before. We had always supposed that she had
been christened 'Suzanne,' but as that man left he called her--"

"I know before you tell me--'Margot'!" interjected Cleek. "I guessed the
identity of this 'Countess de la Tour' from the moment you spoke of
Clodoche and that secret trap. Her knowledge of those two betrayed her
to me. Clodoche is a renegade Alsatian, a spy in the pay of the German
Government, and an old _habitue_ of 'The Inn of the Twisted Arm,' where
the Queen of the Apaches and her pals hold their frequent revels. I can
guess the remainder of your story now. You carried this news to the
Baron de Carjorac, and he, breaking down, confessed to you that he had
lost something."

"Yes, yes--a dreadful 'something,' Mr. Cleek: the horrible thing that
has been making life an agony to him ever since. On the night when that
abominable 'Red Crawl' first overcame him, there was upon his person a
most important document--a rough draft of the maps of fortification and
the plan of the secret defences of France, the identical document from
which was afterwards transcribed the parchment now deposited in the
secret archives of the Republic. When Baron de Carjorac recovered his
senses after his horrifying experience--"

"That document was gone?"

"Part of it, Mr. Cleek--thank God, only a part! If it had been the
parchment itself, no such merciful thing could possibly have happened.
But the paper was old, much folding and handling had worn the creases
through, and when, in his haste, the secret robber grabbed it, whilst
that loathsome creature held the old man down, it parted directly down
the middle, and he got only a vertical section of each of its many
pages."

"Victoria! 'And the fool hath said in his heart, There is no God,'"
quoted Cleek. "So, then, the hirelings of the enemy have only got half
what they are after; and, as no single sentence can be complete upon a
paper torn like that, nothing can be made of it until the other half is
secured, and--our German friends are still 'up a gum-tree.' I know now
why the baron stayed on at the Chateau Larouge, and why 'The Red Crawl'
is preparing to pay him another visit to-night: he hoped, poor chap, to
find a clue to the whereabouts of the fragment he had lost; and that
thing is after the fragment he still retains. Well, it will be a long,
long day before either of those two fragments fall into German hands."

"Oh, Mr. Cleek, you think you can get the stolen paper back? You believe
you can outwit those dreadful people and save the Baron de Carjorac's
honour and his life?"

"Miss Lorne"--he took her hand in his and lifted it to his lips--"Miss
Lorne, I thank you for giving me the chance! If you will do what I ask
you, be where I ask you in two hours' time, so surely as we two stand
here this minute, I will put back the German calendar by ten years at
least. They drink 'To the day,' those German Johnnies, but by to-morrow
morning the English hand you are holding will have given them reason to
groan over the night!"




CHAPTER VIII


It was half-past eleven o'clock. Madame la Comtesse, answering a reputed
call to the bedside of a dying friend, had departed early, and was not
to be expected back, she said, until to-morrow noon. The servants--given
permission by the gentleman known in the house as Monsieur Gaston
Merode, and who had graciously provided a huge char-a-banc for the
purpose--had gone in a body to a fair over in the neighbourhood of
Sevres, and darkness and stillness filled the long, broad corridor of
the Chateau Larouge. Of a sudden, however, a mere thread of sound
wavered through the silence, and from the direction of Miss Lorne's room
a figure in black, with feet muffled in thick, woollen stockings, padded
to an angle of the passage, lifted a trap carefully hidden beneath a
huge tiger-skin rug, and almost immediately Cleek's head rose up out of
the gap.

"Thank God you managed to do it. I was horribly afraid you would not,"
said Ailsa in a palpitating whisper.

"You need not have been," he answered. "I know a dozen places beside
'The Inn of the Twisted Arm' from which one can get into the sewers.
I've screwed a bolt and socket on the inner side of this trap in case of
an emergency, and I've carried a few things into the passage for
'afterwards.' I suppose that fellow Merode, as he calls himself, is in
his room, waiting?"

"Yes; and, although he pretends to be alone to-night, he--he has other
men with him, hideous, ruffianly looking creatures, whom I saw him admit
after the servants had gone. The countess has left the house and gone I
don't know where."

"I do, then. Make certain she's at 'The Twisted Arm,' waiting, first,
for the coming of Clodoche, and, second, for the arrival of this
precious 'Merode' with the remaining half of the document. I've sent
Dollops there to carry out his part of the programme, and when once I
get the password Margot requires before she will hand over the paper,
the game will be in my hands entirely. They are desperate to-night,
Miss Lorne, and will stop at nothing--not even murder. There! the rug's
replaced. Quick! lead me to the baron's room--there's not a minute to
waste."

She took his hand and led him tiptoe through the darkness, and in
another moment he was in the Baron de Carjorac's presence.

"Oh, monsieur, God for ever bless you!" exclaimed the broken old man,
throwing himself on his knees before Cleek.

"Out with the light--out with the light!" exclaimed he, ducking
down suddenly. "Were you mad to keep it burning till I came,
with that"--pointing to a huge bay window opening upon a
balcony--"uncurtained and the grounds, no doubt, alive with spies?"

Miss Lorne sprang to the table where the baron's reading-lamp stood,
jerked the cord of the extinguisher, and darkness enveloped the room,
darkness tempered only by the faint gleams of the moon streaming over
the balcony, and through the panes of the uncurtained window.

Cleek, on his knees beside the kneeling baron, whipped a tiny electric
torch from his pocket, and, shielding its flare with his scooped hands,
flashed it upon the old man's face.

"Simple as rolling off a log--exactly like your pictures," he commented.
"I'll 'do' you as easily as I 'do' Clodoche--and I could 'do' him in the
dark from memory. Quick"--snicking off the light of the electric torch
and rising to his feet--"into your dressing-room, baron. I want that
suit of clothes; I want that ribbon, that cross--and I want them at
once. You're a bit thicker-set than me, but I've got my Clodoche rig on
underneath this, and it will fill out your coat admirably and make us as
like as two peas. Give me five minutes, Miss Lorne, and I promise you a
surprise."

He flashed out of sight with the baron as he ceased speaking; and Ailsa,
creeping to the window and peering cautiously out, was startled
presently by a voice at her elbow saying, in a tone of extreme
agitation: "Oh, mademoiselle, I fear, even yet I fear, that this Anglais
monsieur attempts too much, and that the papier he is gone for ever."

"Oh, no, baron, no!" she soothed, as she laid a solicitous hand upon
his arm. "Do believe in him; do have faith in him. Ah, if you only
knew--"

"Thanks. I reckon I shall pass muster!" interposed Cleek's voice; and it
was only then she realised. "You'll find the baron in the other room,
Miss Lorne, looking a little grotesque in that grey suit of mine. In
with you, quickly; go with him through the other door, and get below
before those fellows begin to stir. Get out of the house as quietly and
as expeditiously as you can. With God's help, I'll meet you at the Hotel
du Louvre in the morning, and put the missing fragment in the baron's
hands."

"And may God give you that help!" she answered fervently as she moved
towards the dressing-room door. "Ah, what a man! what a man!"

Then, in a twinkling she was gone, and Cleek stood alone in the silent
room. Giving her and the baron time to get clear of the other one, he
went in on tiptoe, locked the door through which they had passed, put
the key in his pocket, and returned. Going to the door which led from
the main room into the corridor, he took the key from the lock of that,
too, replacing it upon the outer side, and leaving the door itself
slightly ajar.

"Now then for you, Mr. 'The Red Crawl,'" he said, as he walked to the
baron's table, and, sinking down into a deep chair beside it, leaned
back with his eyes closed as if in sleep, and the faint light of the
moon half-revealing his face. "I want that password, and I'll get it, if
I have to choke it out of your devil's throat! And she said that she
would be grateful to me all the rest of her life! Only 'grateful,' I
wonder? Is nothing else possible? What a good, good thing a real woman
is!"

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