The Pit Prop Syndicate - Freeman Wills Crofts (best books to read in your 20s txt) 📗
- Author: Freeman Wills Crofts
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His tone jarred on Merriman, but he answered courteously: “I left him in London. I had business bringing me to this neighborhood, and when I reached Bordeaux I took the opportunity to run out to see you and Miss Coburn.”
The manager replied suitably, and the conversation became general. As soon as he could with civility, Merriman rose to go. Mr. Coburn cried out in protest, but the other insisted.
Mr. Coburn had become more cordial, and the two men strolled together across the clearing. Merriman had had no opportunity of further private conversation with Madeleine, but he pressed her hand and smiled at her encouragingly on saying good-bye.
As the taxi bore him swiftly back towards Bordeaux, his mind was occupied with the girl to the exclusion of all else. It was not so much that he thought definitely about her, as that she seemed to fill all his consciousness. He felt numb, and his whole being ached for her as with a dull physical pain. But it was a pain that was mingled with exultation, for if she had refused him, she had at least admitted that she loved him. Incredible thought! He smiled ecstatically, then, the sense of loss returning, once more gazed gloomily ahead into vacancy. As the evening wore on his thoughts turned towards what she had said about the syndicate. Her forged note theory had come to him as a complete surprise, and he wondered whether she really had hit on the true solution of the mystery. The conversation she had overheard undoubtedly pointed in that direction. “Planting stuff” was, he believed, the technical phrase for passing forged notes, and the reference to “tens,” “twenties,” and “fifties,” tended in the same direction. Also “forming connections to get rid of it” seemed to suggest the finding of agents who would take a number of notes at a time, to be passed on by ones and twos, no doubt for a consideration.
But there was the obvious difficulty that the theory did not account for the operations as a whole. The elaborate mechanism of the pit-prop industry was not needed to provide a means of carrying forged notes from France to England. They could be secreted about the person of a traveller crossing by any of the ordinary routes. Hundreds of notes could be sewn into the lining of an overcoat, thousands carried in the double bottom of a suitcase. Of course, so frequent a traveller would require a plausible reason for his journeys, but that would present no difficulty to men like those composing the syndicate. In any case, by crossing in rotation by the dozen or so well-patronized routes between England and the Continent, the continuity of the travelling could be largely hidden. Moreover, thought Merriman, why print the notes in France at all? Why not produce them in England and so save the need for importation?
On the whole there seemed but slight support for the theory and several strong arguments against it, and he felt that Madeleine must be mistaken, just as he and Hilliard had been mistaken.
Oh! how sick of the whole business he was! He no longer cared what the syndicate was doing. He never wanted to hear of it again. He wanted Madeleine, and he wanted nothing else. His thoughts swung back to her as he had seen her that afternoon; her trim figure, her daintiness, her brown eyes clouded with trouble, her little shell-like ears escaping from the tendrils of her hair, her tears.... He broke out once more into a cold sweat as he thought of those tears.
Presently he began wondering what his own next step should be, and he soon decided he must see her again, and with as little delay as possible.
The next afternoon, therefore, he once more presented himself at the house in the clearing. This time the door was opened by an elderly servant, who handed him a note and informed him that Mr. and Miss Coburn had left home for some days.
Bitterly disappointed he turned away, and in the solitude of the lane he opened the note. It read:
“Friday.
“Dear Mr. Merriman,—I feel it is quite impossible that we should part without a word more than could be said at our interrupted interview this afternoon, so with deep sorrow I am writing to you to say to you, dear Mr. Merriman, 'Good-bye.' I have enjoyed our short friendship, and all my life I shall be proud that you spoke as you did, but, my dear, it is just because I think so much of you that I could not bring your life under the terrible cloud that hangs over mine. Though it hurts me to say it, I have no option but to ask you to accept the answer I gave you as final, and to forget that we met.
“I am leaving home for some time, and I beg of you not to give both of us more pain by trying to follow me. Oh, my dear, I cannot say how grieved I am.
“Your sincere friend,
“Madeleine Coburn.”
Merriman was overwhelmed utterly by the blow. Mechanically he regained the taxi, where he lay limply back, gripping the note and unconscious of his position, while his bloodless lips repeated over and over again the phrase, “I'll find her. I'll find her. If it takes me all my life I'll find her and I'll marry her.”
Like a man in a state of coma he returned to his hotel in Bordeaux, and there, for the first time in his life, he drank himself into forgetfulness.
CHAPTER 11. AN UNEXPECTED ALLY
For several days Merriman, sick at heart and shaken in body, remained on at Bordeaux, too numbed by the blow which had fallen on him to take any decisive action. He now understood that Madeleine Coburn had refused him because she loved him, and he vowed he would rest neither day nor night till he had seen her and obtained a reversal of her decision. But for the moment his energy had departed, and he spent his time smoking in the Jardin and brooding over his troubles.
It was true that on three separate occasions he had called at the manager's house, only to be told that Mr. and Miss Coburn were still from home, and neither there nor from the foreman at the works could he learn their addresses or the date of their return. He had also written a couple of scrappy notes to Hilliard, merely saying he was on a fresh scent, and to make no move in the matter until he heard further. Of the Pit-Prop Syndicate as apart from Madeleine he was now profoundly wearied, and he wished for nothing more than never again to hear its name mentioned.
But after a week of depression and self-pity his natural good sense reasserted itself, and he began seriously to consider his position. He honestly believed that Madeleine's happiness could best be brought about by the fulfilment of his own, in other words by their marriage. He appreciated the motives which had caused her to refuse him, but he hoped that by his continued persuasion he might be able, as he put it to himself, to talk her round. Her very flight from him, for such he believed her absence to be, seemed to indicate that she herself was doubtful of her power to hold out against him, and to this extent he drew comfort from his immediate difficulty.
He concluded before trying any new plan to call once again at the clearing, in the hope that Mr. Coburn at least might have returned. The next afternoon, therefore, saw him driving out along the now familiar road. It was still hot, with the heavy enervating heat of air held stagnant by the trees. The freshness of early summer had gone, and there was a hint of approaching autumn in the darker greenery of the firs, and the overmaturity of such shrubs and wild flowers as could find along the edge of the road a precarious roothold on the patches of ground not covered by pine needles. Merriman gazed unceasingly ahead at the straight white ribbon of the road, as he pondered the problem of what he should do if once again he should be disappointed in his quest. Madeleine could not, he thought, remain indefinitely away. Mr. Coburn at all events would have to return to his work, and it would be a strange thing if he could not obtain from the father some indication of his daughter's whereabouts.
But his call at the manager's house was as fruitless on this occasion as on those preceding. The woman from whom he had received the note opened the door and repeated her former statement. Mr. and Miss Coburn were still from home.
Merriman turned away disconsolately, and walked slowly back across the clearing and down the lane. Though he told himself he had expected nothing from the visit, he was nevertheless bitterly disappointed with its result. And worse than his disappointment was his inability to see his next step, or even to think of any scheme which might lead him to the object of his hopes.
He trudged on down the lane, his head sunk and his brows knitted, only half conscious of his surroundings. Looking up listlessly as he rounded a bend, he stopped suddenly as if turned to stone, while his heart first stood still, then began thumping wildly as if to choke him. A few yards away and coming to meet him was Madeleine!
She caught sight of him at the same instant and stopped with a low cry, while an expression of dread came over her face. So for an appreciable time they stood looking at one another, then Merriman, regaining the power of motion, sprang forward and seized her hands.
“Madeleine! Madeleine!” he cried brokenly. “My own one! My beloved!” He almost sobbed as he attempted to strain her to his heart.
But she wrenched herself from him.
“No, no!” she gasped. “You must not! I told you. It cannot be.”
He pleaded with her, fiercely, passionately, and at last despairingly. But he could not move her. Always she repeated that it could not be.
“At least tell me this,” he begged at last. “Would you marry me if this syndicate did not exist; I mean if Mr. Coburn was not mixed up with it?”
At first she would not answer, but presently, overcome by his persistence, she burst once again into tears and admitted that her fear of disgrace arising through discovery of the syndicate's activities was her only reason for refusal.
“Then,” said Merriman resolutely, “I will go back with you now and see Mr. Coburn, and we will talk over what is to be done.”
At this her eyes dilated with terror.
“No, no!” she cried again. “He would be in danger. He would try something that might offend the others, and his life might not be safe. I tell you I don't trust Captain Beamish and Mr. Bulla. I don't think they would stop at anything to keep their secret. He is trying to get out of it, and he must not be hurried. He will do what he can.”
“But, my dearest,” Merriman remonstrated, “it could do no harm, to talk the matter over with him. That would commit him to nothing.”
But she would not hear of it.
“If he thought my happiness depended on it,” she declared, “he would break with them at all costs. I could not risk it. You must go away. Oh, my dear, you must go. Go, go!” she entreated almost hysterically, “it will be best for us both.”
Merriman, though beside himself with suffering, felt he could no longer disregard her.
“I shall go,” he answered sadly, “since you require it, but I will never give you up. Not until one of us is dead or you marry someone else—I will never give you up. Oh, Madeleine, have pity and give me some hope; something to keep me alive
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