A Fascinating Traitor: An Anglo-Indian StorySavage, Richard
General
A Fascinating Traitor: An Anglo-Indian Story
Savage, Richard
India -- Fiction
“I will go before you and await you!” eagerly said Hugh Johnstone,
rising. “I will ask another person to dine with us to-morrow, and this
evening I will prepare my daughter for the dinner, so that your coming
will be no surprise to her. Shall I bring my carriage here at four
to-day?”
“I will await you,” gravely said Alixe Delavigne, as she bowed in answer
to her guest’s formal signal of departure.
An hour later Jules Victor reported to his mistress: “We drove to the
telegraph office, where I awaited the gentleman for some time, and then
we repaired to his home.”
There was a disgruntled man whose curses upon his kinsman’s changing
moods were both loud and deep when Douglas Fraser received a telegram
that night at Allahabad. “Is the old man crazy?” he demanded, as he
read the words: “Wait at Allahabad for me. Keep shady. With you in three
days. Telegraph your address.” The canny young Scot thought of a coming
legacy and obeyed the head of his clan.
Madame Berthe Louison, as Delhi was destined to know her, lingered long
over her afternoon driving toilet. There was a recurring fear which made
her tremble. “Would Hugh Johnstone divulge the facts as to the jewels
to the Viceroy, and so gain his free rehabilitation-and then defy her?
No-no! He never would dare!” she answered. “My agents are even now
watching that bank. The bank would never give up the sealed packages
contents unknown, save on surrender of the carefully drawn receipts.”
And then Berthe remembered her own secret work at Calcutta. The
Grindlays knew of the surreptitious attempts made by the plausible Hugh
Fraser to withdraw the deposit long before the baronetcy episode. And
Berthe laughed, in memory of her capture of the receipts in the old days
at Brighton, while looking for the stolen letter.
Long before that rising star of fashion, Major Alan Hawke, returned from
General Willoughby’s delightful dinner upon the day of Hugh Johnstone’s
crafty surrender, he knew that Hugh Johnstone had astounded Delhi by a
personal exploitation of the Lady of the Silver Bungalow.
“By Gad! Hawke!” roared old Brigadier Willoughby, with his mouth full of
chutney, “Johnstone is going the pace! First he produces a daughter, a
hidden treasure, and now this wonderfully beautiful French countess.”
“I suppose, General,” lightly said the Major, “the old nabob will marry
and retire to Europe on his coming baronetcy.”
“Likely enough!” sputtered Willoughby. “You lucky young dog. I suppose
you are in the secret?”
But neither that night, nor two days later, at Major Hawke’s superb
dinner at the Delhi Club, did the jeunesse doree of the old capital
extract an admission from that mysterious “secret service” man, Major
Alan Hawke. “You cannot deny, Hawke, that you dined at the marble house
with the beauty whom we are all toasting,” said a rallying roisterer.
“And--with the Veiled Rose of Delhi!” said another, still more eagerly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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