“And gives, also, her friends the means of tracing her. No woman could wear such a brooch as that without attracting attention, let alone attempt to raise money on it. Take my advice, Clive: get Lord Culvers’s permission, and run out advertisements and handbills for that brooch without a moment’s delay; of course offering a suitable reward for it. Where that brooch is, there is Ida. If we get news of the one we get news of the other.”
V
Lord Culvers did not offer any opposition to Mr. Redway’s suggestion. Off and on the girls lost a good many articles of jewellery in the course of a year, and an advertisement more or less, for one of their brooches, would not be likely to attract much attention among their friends. So, on the day after Clive’s consultation with his father, the following advertisement appeared in the leading London and provincial journals:
“Five hundred pounds reward will be paid for information that will lead to the recovery of a diamond brooch, missing from a lady’s jewel-case. It is formed as a hawk with outstretched wings, holding in its beak a spray of emeralds. The eyes are composed of two large rubies.
“Information to be given to Messrs. Hunt and Locke, Chancery Lane, London.”
The Messrs. Hunt and Locke thus mentioned were not Lord Culvers’s family lawyers, but a firm of solicitors noted for their successful conduct of complicated criminal cases.
Simultaneously with its publication in the London newspapers, the advertisement appeared in the principal Continental journals.
Captain Culvers, lounging over his breakfast and matutinal cigar, in his rooms in a quiet street in an unfashionable quarter of Paris, had his eye caught by it.
This visit of his to the gay capital did not promise to be either a pleasant or a profitable one to him. It was beyond measure irksome to him to shun all possible rendezvous of his countrymen of his own social standing; to remain within doors the greater part of the day, and to issue forth only when the fashionable world, to which, of right, he held entrée, were safely shut in at their dinners, their opera, or their balls. Yet this was what circumstances compelled him to, unless he was prepared to run the gauntlet of all sorts of questions and conjectures respecting his private affairs and sudden change of plans.
Society, to a man of his temperament, is as absolute a necessity as his cigar and his game of baccarat. He was consequently driven to seek it in haunts and among associates of a lower grade. He thus became once more the habitué of a sporting, drinking, card-playing set, that, in view of his approaching marriage, he had vowed should know him no more.
He read the advertisement offering the large reward for Ida’s brooch with an anxious, startled look on his face.
“The fools!” he muttered. “Who has set going this piece of folly? It must be put a stop to without a moment’s delay.” He went at once to his writing-table; but the letter which he there set himself to write was not finished without many a pause to his pen and much careful thought.
Eventually it ran thus:
“Rue Vervien, 15.
“My Dear Uncle—I have this moment read your advertisement offering a reward for Ida’s brooch. At least, I judge it to be yours from the description of the brooch, which I recognise as one that Ida was very fond of wearing. Will you mind my asking you if you are quite sure she had it on when she left home with me? I saw nothing of it.” This was underlined. “Are you acting upon information given you by Juliet? If so, may I ask whether her statement is confirmed by Ida’s maid? If this is not the case, pardon me if I say that I think you are being misled to follow a wrong scent. Take my word for it, Juliet knows more than any of us”—this was also underlined—“and my belief is that if you concentrate attention on her you’ll come upon traces of Ida far sooner than by offering rewards for a brooch which may possibly be all the time safely hidden in a young lady’s jewel-case. I beg of you at once to withdraw the advertisement, whose only result may be to lead us a long way out of our road and land us in the mire at last.
This letter, as ill-luck would have it, fell into Juliet’s hands before it reached her father’s. Recognising the handwriting, she at once ran with it to her father’s study.
“From Sefton, father; he may have something to tell us,” she exclaimed, as she entered the room.
Lord Culvers, in spite of his repeated hourly assurances to his wife and daughter that “things” were bound to come right if they were only let alone, was far from feeling confident that his words would be verified, and would occasionally give way to those little outbursts of irritability to which placidly-disposed people are prone when the tranquil surface of their existence is broken.
“From Sefton—why wasn’t it given me before?” he said, irritably. “I’ve waited in the whole morning for the post—now where are my glasses?”
Juliet picked up the glasses, and perched them on her own little, straight nose. “Now, if you don’t worry, I’ll read it to you,” she said, patronisingly. Then above the rims of the glasses, without pause or exclamation, she read aloud the letter from beginning to end.
Before Lord Culvers had time to pass comment upon it, she had torn it in two, and tossed it into the wastepaper basket.
“That’s the only place for such a letter as that,” she said, taking off
