The boy leading the donkey kept his eye upon the valley below, and from time to time caught a glimpse of the old man who had now left the bridle path, and was picking his way up the rough hill-side. He was making for a dilapidated house which stood at one of the hairpin bends of the road, and the donkey-boy, shading his eyes from the glare of the rising sun, saw him disappear into what must have been the cellar of the house, since the door through which he went was a good twenty feet beneath the level of the road. The donkey-boy continued his climb, tugging at his burdened beast, and presently he came up to the house. Smoke was rising from one of the chimneys, and he halted at the door, tied the rope he held to a rickety gate post, and knocked gently.
A bright-faced peasant woman came to the open door and shook her head at the sight of the wares with which the donkey was laden.
"We want none of your truck, my boy," she said. "I have my own garden. You are not a Monogasque."
"No, signora," replied the boy, flashing his teeth with a smile. "I am from San Remo, but I have come to live in Monte Carlo to sell vegetables for my uncle, and he told me I should find a lodging here."
She looked at him dubiously.
"I have one room which you could have, boy," she said, "though I do not like Italians. You must pay me a franc a night, and your donkey can go into the shed of my brother-in-law up the hill."
She led the way down a flight of ancient stairs and showed him a tiny room overlooking the valley.
"I have one other man who lives here," she said. "An old one, who sleeps all day and goes out all night. But he is a very respectable man," she added in defence of her client.
"Where does he sleep?" asked the boy.
"There!" The woman pointed to a room on the opposite side of the narrow landing. "He has just come in, I can hear him." She listened.
"Will madame get me change for this?" The boy produced a fifty-franc note, and the woman's eyebrows rose.
"Such wealth!" she said good-naturedly. "I did not think that a little boy like you could have such money."
She bustled upstairs to her own room, leaving the boy alone. He waited until her heavy footsteps sounded overhead, and then gently he tried the door of the other lodger. Mr. Jaggs had not yet bolted the door, and the spy pushed it open and looked. What he saw satisfied him, for he pulled the door tight again, and as the footfall of old Jaggs came nearer the door, the donkey-boy flew upstairs with extraordinary rapidity.
"I will come later, madame," he said, when he had received the change. "I must take my donkey into Monte Carlo."
She watched the boy and his beast go down the road, and went back to the task of preparing her lodger's breakfast.
To Monte Carlo the cabbage seller did not go. Instead, he turned back the way he had come, and a hundred yards from the gate of Villa Casa, Mordon, the chauffeur, appeared, and took the rope from his hand.
"Did you find what you wanted, mademoiselle?" he asked.
Jean nodded. She got into the house through the servants' entrance and up to her room without observation. She pulled off the black wig and applied herself to removing the stains from her face. It had been a good morning's work.
"You must keep Mrs. Meredith fully occupied to-day." She waylaid her father on the stairs to give him these instructions.
For her it was a busy morning. First she went to the Hôtel de Paris, and on the pretext of writing a letter in the lounge, secured two or three sheets of the hotel paper and an envelope. Next she hired a typewriter and carried it with her back to the house. She was working for an hour before she had the letter finished. The signature took her some time. She had to ransack Lydia's writing case before she found a letter from Jack Glover—Lydia's signature was easy in comparison.
This, and a cheque drawn from the back of Lydia Meredith's cheque-book, completed her equipment.
That afternoon Mordon, the chauffeur, motored into Nice, and by nine o'clock that night an aeroplane deposited him in Paris. He was in London the following morning, a bearer of an urgent letter to Mr. Rennett, the lawyer, which, however, he did not present in person.
Mordon knew a French girl in London, and she it was who carried the letter to Charles Rennett—a letter that made him scratch his head many times before he took a sheet of paper, and addressing the manager of Lydia's bank, wrote:
"This cheque is in order. Please honour."
Chapter XXX
"Desperate diseases," said Jean Briggerland, "call for desperate remedies."
Mr. Briggerland looked up from his book.
"What was that tale you were telling Lydia this morning," he asked, "about Glover's gambling? He was only here a day, wasn't he?"
"He was here long enough to lose a lot of money," said Jean. "Of course he didn't gamble, so he did not lose. It was just a little seed-sowing on my part—one never knows how useful the right word may be in the right season."
"Did you tell Lydia that he was losing heavily?" he asked quickly.
"Am I a fool? Of course not! I merely said that youth would be served, and if you have the gambling instinct in you, why, it didn't matter what position you held in society or what your responsibilities were, you must indulge your passion."
Mr. Briggerland stroked his chin. There were times when Jean's schemes got very far beyond him, and he hated the mental exercise of catching up. The only thing he knew was that every post from London bore urgent demands for money, and that the future held possibilities which he did not care to contemplate. He was in the unfortunate position of having numerous pensioners to support, men and women who had served him in various ways and whose approval, but what was more important, whose loyalty, depended largely upon the regularity of their payments.
"I shall gamble or do something desperate," he said with a frown. "Unless you can bring off a coup that will produce twenty thousand pounds of ready money we are going to get into all kinds of trouble, Jean."
"Do you think I don't know that?" she asked contemptuously. "It is because of this urgent need of money that I have taken a step which I hate."
He listened in amazement whilst she told him what she had done to relieve her pressing needs.
"We are getting deeper and deeper into Mordon's hands," he said, shaking his head. "That is what scares me at times."
"You needn't worry about Mordon," she smiled. Her smile was a little hard. "Mordon and I are going to be married."
She was examining the toe of her shoe attentively as she spoke, and Mr. Briggerland leapt to his feet.
"What!" he squeaked. "Marry a chauffeur? A fellow I picked out of the gutter? You're mad! The fellow is a rascal who has earned the guillotine time and time again."
"Who hasn't?" she asked, looking up.
"It is incredible! It's madness!" he said. "I had no idea——" he stopped for want of breath.
Mordon was becoming troublesome. She had known that better than her father.
"It was after the 'accident' that didn't happen that he began to get a little tiresome," she said. "You say we are getting deeper and deeper into his hands? Well, he hinted as much, and I did not like it. When he began to get a little loving I accepted that way out as an easy alternative to a very unpleasant exposure. Whether he would have betrayed us I don't know; probably he would."
Mr. Briggerland's face was dark.
"When is this interesting event to take place?"
"My marriage? In two months, I think. When is Easter? That class of person always wants to be married at Easter. I asked him to keep our secret and not to mention it to you, and I should not have spoken now if you had not referred to the obligation we were under."
"In two months?" Mr. Briggerland nodded. "Let me know when you want this to end, Jean," he said.