“Was he, poor chap! Well, we all have our troubles, don’t we! Who is this young thug! Not a friend of yours, I hope?”
“That is Ogden, Mrs. Ford’s son. It’s a tragedy—”
“Perhaps it doesn’t do him justice. Does he really squint like that, or is it just the artist’s imagination?”
“Don’t make fun of it. It’s the loss of that boy that is breaking Nesta’s heart.”
I was shocked.
“Is he dead? I’m awfully sorry. I wouldn’t for the world—”
“No, no. He is alive and well. But he is dead to her. The court gave him into the custody of his father.”
“The court?”
“Mrs. Ford was the wife of Elmer Ford, the American millionaire. They were divorced a year ago.”
“I see.”
Cynthia was gazing at the portrait.
“This boy is quite a celebrity in his way,” she said. “They call him ‘The Little Nugget’ in America.”
“Oh! Why is that?”
“It’s a nickname the kidnappers have for him. Ever so many attempts have been made to steal him.”
She stopped and looked at me oddly.
“I made one today, Peter,” she said. “I went down to the country, where the boy was, and kidnapped him.”
“Cynthia! What on earth do you mean?”
“Don’t you understand? I did it for Nesta’s sake. She was breaking her heart about not being able to see him, so I slipped down and stole him away, and brought him back here.”
I do not know if I was looking as amazed as I felt. I hope not, for I felt as if my brain were giving way. The perfect calmness with which she spoke of this extraordinary freak added to my confusion.
“You’re joking!”
“No; I stole him.”
“But, good heavens! The law! It’s a penal offence, you know!”
“Well, I did it. Men like Elmer Ford aren’t fit to have charge of a child. You don’t know him, but he’s just an unscrupulous financier, without a thought above money. To think of a boy growing up in that tainted atmosphere—at his most impressionable age. It means death to any good there is in him.”
My mind was still grappling feebly with the legal aspect of the affair.
“But, Cynthia, kidnapping’s kidnapping, you know! The law doesn’t take any notice of motives. If you’re caught—”
She cut through my babble.
“Would you have been afraid to do it, Peter?”
“Well—” I began. I had not considered the point before.
“I don’t believe you would. If I asked you to do it for my sake—”
“But, Cynthia, kidnapping, you know! It’s such an infernally low-down game.”
“I played it. Do you despise me?”
I perspired. I could think of no other reply.
“Peter,” she said, “I understand your scruples. I know exactly how you feel. But can’t you see that this is quite different from the sort of kidnapping you naturally look on as horrible? It’s just taking a boy away from surroundings that must harm him, back to his mother, who worships him. It’s not wrong. It’s splendid.”
She paused.
“You will do it for me, Peter?” she said.
“I don’t understand,” I said feebly. “It’s done. You’ve kidnapped him yourself.”
“They tracked him and took him back. And now I want you to try.” She came closer to me. “Peter, don’t you see what it will mean to me if you agree to try? I’m only human, I can’t help, at the bottom of my heart, still being a little jealous of this Audrey Blake. No, don’t say anything. Words can’t cure me; but if you do this thing for me, I shall be satisfied. I shall know.”
She was close beside me, holding my arm and looking into my face. That sense of the unreality of things which had haunted me since that moment at the dance came over me with renewed intensity. Life had ceased to be a rather grey, orderly business in which day succeeded day calmly and without event. Its steady stream had broken up into rapids, and I was being whirled away on them.
“Will you do it, Peter? Say you will.”
A voice, presumably mine, answered “Yes.”
“My dear old boy!”
She pushed me into a chair, and, sitting on the arm of it, laid her hand on mine and became of a sudden wondrously businesslike.
“Listen,” she said, “I’ll tell you what we have arranged.”
It was borne in upon me, as she began to do so, that she appeared from the very beginning to have been extremely confident that that essential part of her plans, my consent to the scheme, could be relied upon as something of a certainty. Women have these intuitions.
III
Looking back, I think I can fix the point at which this insane venture I had undertaken ceased to be a distorted dream, from which I vaguely hoped that I might shortly waken, and took shape as a reality of the immediate future. That moment came when I met Mr. Arnold Abney by appointment at his club.
Till then the whole enterprise had been visionary. I gathered from Cynthia that the boy Ogden was shortly to be sent to a preparatory school, and that I was to insinuate myself into this school and, watching my opportunity, to remove him; but it seemed to me that the obstacles to this comparatively lucid scheme were insuperable. In the first place, how were we to discover which of England’s million preparatory schools Mr. Ford, or Mr. Mennick for him, would choose? Secondly, the plot which was to carry me triumphantly into this school when—or if—found, struck me as extremely thin. I was to pose, Cynthia told me, as a young man of private means, anxious to learn the business, with a view to setting up a school of his own. The objection to that was, I held, that I obviously did not want to do anything of the sort. I had not the appearance of a man with such an ambition. I had none of the
