A BLIND LEAD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 14835, 11 November 1911, Page 3 (Supplement)

A BLIND LEAD.

BY LAURENCE L. LYNCH, Author of "A Slender Clue," "High Stakes," "The Unseen Hand.

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT.

COPYRIGHT

SYNOPSIS OF INTRODUCTION, The story opens at a fashionable club.for ladies in London. A tall, handsome m« n in came out and was accosted by am a motor-coat with the question Your • Miss Iris?" The girl jumped into the ' and was driven a considerable distance .oe fore she realised that she was being , nd by. an unfamiliar route x Then she founa a man, whom she had taken n to . flVO i vcr , mechanic, covering her with a rev She is threatened with rR . 8e( does not keep silence, and she is adar as Miss La Croix, but states she is not, Miss La Croix. The men used chloroform to keep her quiet. Just after that ear iei« the club another one of similar a-PP ance drew out from the kerb, and in it w - a young woman whom her companion, _ a man in evening dress, addressed as Miss Croix. On the following morning: beotlana Yard received a letter stating ttiat a miss Helmuth, of Edinburgh, was in London. She was a stranger, and had an ene y. Tho detectives were asked to see that, .sne was not suffering from any annoyance . quiry at the hotel, however, showed that Miss Helmuth had disappeared. Some time afterwards the papers announced the ai appearance of Miss Iris La Croix. y daughter of Jerome La Croix. miUionian, and also tho disappearance of Miss wei - muth. it being suggested that the* nag been kidnapped. A little more than a . after the disappearance of Miss Iris Li. wo« she was returned to her father s house quietiy and mysteriously as she was a . away. The ransom money was paid, ana the girl was returned, She was ill as result of the nervous strain. T ,«,„„i,v, Iris La Croix and Valentine Effingham, who has just come into a big f Ol tune, U© the Savoy together, and as they lea motor car a man, apparently rtrunk. stum bles against Iris and disappears. f In ;oug luncheon room Iris professes herself anxious not to miss any acquaintances she should recognise, but fears that the nervous strain she has gone through renders her foigetful. She is directed to two or three her escort and bows to them. She removes her glomes, Valentin© assisting her. and as he does so he notices something that sekts him, thim inc. Upon their return .to her home she she asks him to leave their engagement unannounced: fiho cannot bo his wifo till tne mystery of her kidnapping: is solved.

CHAPTER 11. THE Di'IXXON* OF THE SHOITERS. Mrs. Carringxox Leach gazed after the retiring figures of Iris La Croix and her escort, with elbows on table edge and finger tips daintily pressed together beneath the chin which they seemed to support. She held her pose until the eubjocts of her observation had passed from sight, and her companion, with a note of laughter in her voice, and a twinkle of malice in her eyes, said:

" Well, why don't you talk? I hate a dummy at tho table! " "Sodo I. Aren't these truffles delicious? I'm so fond of truffles."

Miss Smedley laughed tolerantly. "Tonic," she said, "you know you're dying to say something about Iris La Croix or her escort, or both; and you want me to open the ball. Well, I lack material, ho you'd best begin. Come, what's on your mind?" Oh, well Mrs. Carrington Leach put down her fork with a little clatter and leaned toward her friend. " Irene, what do you think of that affair?" You mean

"Oh, bother, I mean Iris La Croix's disappearanceand return?" About what you do, I fancy; what do you think?" "Well—l think now what I only wondered over before. I think 'there a more to this business 'than you or I or anybody knows,' or is going to find out— if the La Croixs can help it." Miss Irene Smedley sat suddenly erect, and looked interested.

" Wait of one accord the two drew closer to tho small table. "How much . do you know about _ the affair, anyhow?" demanded the little matron. Of course you've Been away" "That's it. I've been away, and I did not read the papers—regularly. We were almost constantly out of doors. I read of the Toward offered by Jerome La Croix in a paper two days old ; and— well, let's cut it short, my evidence. The paper stated that Miss La Croix, at that time, had been absent from homo for six days. At first her people had folt sure she was safe and well somewhere among her friends. I suppose that was because she went and came so independently; but of course, when no letter or menage came, and an inquiry among her friends showed that she had not been seen by any of them, they reported the matter to the police, very quietly at first, and then Jerome La Croix announced in all the papers the fact of his daughter's disappearance, and that a large reward awaited the person who would give her friends reliable news of her. Within twenty-four hours another letter arrived. _It reiterated the demand for ransom, said that her captors had not ill-treated her, but that they were in ' deadly earnest, and demanded a etill larger reward. The characteristic feature of the letter was that Iris did not ask that the reward be sent, although, as everybody knows, she has all her mother's money, or mil have in a very short time, and might ransom her"Yes. It comes info her hands sometime next month, so Carr says— 1" <

"Well, of course, the thine: was soon j settled then. It told her father how he j must communicate with her gaolersby a series of code words, one meaning a whole sentence, and then— here I think comes the queerest detail of the entire business. They accepted £10,000 from a man who could have paid them a hunured thousand and hardly missed it." , "Yes." assented Mrs. Carrington Leach. "I said there was something behind. Did the newspaper you saw say if this letter with its list of symbolic words was typewritten, as were all the later instructions as to sending the ransom?" " Mercyno !" " And that she—lris says that she never dictated any letter." " ..ell, well." "And then her story, which, somehow, never pot into print! How very queer I The boldness of her abduction ! the room with only a skylight— clean and fairly decent —where she was kept! The gaolers whom she never saw, because the lights were controlled from without, and wero turned off. always before they appeared they only came at night, it seems. And [then she being taken away, and back, in an insensible condition • "-It's certainly a very strange affair," declared Miss Smedley, " ana it must have been a severe ordeal to break Iris down so utterly. How pale she is. except for a flash of colour now and then. And Iris La Croix is surely not a weak or nervous person, she is high-spirited, and one would fancy her the last person to break down utterly so long as there was a ray of hone. And yet they say she came home almost shattered, mentally, and that on some points her memory, even now that she is out again, is very unreliable. I heard that she stared at Percy Loundes, when ho called with, Valentine Effingham, and did not know him." "True. Yet she did not seem particularly weak just now. Irene, did you notice the little thing that happened at their table when she was removing her gloves ? . "There seemed to be something wrong with her lace, and glove buttons. What of it!" , "It was not the lace_, nor the glove, my girl. It —Valentine." " He was rather slow in getting tumgs straight. What else Mrs. Carrington Leach leaned yet closer to her friend, and her voice, low pitched from the first, sank still lower. " Perhaps if I had not seen them at the theatre last night, and taken .a note or two there, I might not have been so observing to-day. But I had them directly under my eye then, and several times after Iris had turned to speak to r him, and then looked again toward the stage. I saw

the strangest look, puzzled, troubled, anxi- j ous, come over his face, and he would eifc and seem to study her every movement and try to catch every word she uttered, and always when she turned back to him, he would seem to force himself to look careless and smiling and interested. And to-day, as he bent over that tangle of lace and glove, his face for a moment wore that same look—only more so! It was as if he v were saying to himself, 'Oh, this is worse than all the rest!' " „ "Perhaps he had torn the lace. "Gammon! Say perhaps he had seen a ghost, for just an instant he looked it. And he sat, for a, full minute, looking straight at her arm. from which he had just loosened the glove button, and, as she drew the lace away and he pulled the glove down upon her wrist no fairly, stared." "Tonie, your imagination is wonderful. To borrow one of your own phrases, 4 Give it a rest,' " laughed her friend. " Irene Smedley, you wait! And remember, we have not heard the _ last, nor the worst, nor the queerest side of this abduction case yet, mark me! My imagination's all right. Val Effingham was on nettles, from the minute he pulled off that glove, and he almost rushed her away from us, although she seemed to want to chat; —another —everybody thought their engagement would be announced at once, a month or more—befor she disappeared." "True." • "Well, you wait! I'll wager a box of gloves that engagement won't come out — until" V

"Well, until?" ' ' " Until Val Eff ceases _ his trick of going about with anxiety in his eyes and doubt or some other trouble in his mind! It won't come out this week, or next, or the week after that!" Irene Smedley laughed, and pushed back her chair. " I hear," she said, " and I'll heed the outcome. Meantime, I wear sixes, and mode is my colour. Come, Tonie, let's get along; I thought you wanted to shop to-day." Mrs. Carrington Leach was the wife of a millionaire sporting man, club man, yachtsman, and" all round good fellow. They belonged to the younger smart set of fashionable London, arid, because each was tolerant of the other, each had a few fads, but never the same ones, and each took care never to bore the other by being too much in evidence, they lived in harmony ; and while people sometimes said that Tonio was too fond of gossip, and rather given to general frivolity, it was understood that her bark was always worse than her bito, and that, once she had squeezed the orange of her neighbour's affairs dry to the utmost, she would champion them at need and to the bitter end. People who wero not well informed sometimes wondered ,at the intimacy between Miss Smedley and the little matron who was so volatile and so fond of truffles and trifling. For Irene Smedley was the direct opposite of her friend. She was, tall, and had " a fine figure." She was slow of movement, and of speech; good humoured and sensible. - While she seldom jested, and was not quick at repartee, she possessed a keen sense of the ridiculous; and, certainly, no one could appreciate more fully or smile more kindly at the fads and incongruous .fancies of her little opposite. They were cousins, one© removed, and had grown up side by side and in twin houses that were almost one big dwelling. They had studied under the same masters, and been graduated from the same schools, I and a strong and most tolerant and frank friendship was the present result. Miss Smedley way almost a spinster, and a rich and independent one. She cared little for society, but did not shun it. She kept a house in town, and a cottage in Surrey; and an elderly aunt, almost a nonentity, but " good," and a born housekeeper of the old school, played propriety at her table. The two were seated in this Miss Smed-

ley's brougham—she detested motor-cars — about an' hour after Iris La Croix and her companion had left them at the Savoy, and had just been held up in a jam of vehicles and surface cars, before a large building, when Mrs. Leach cried : " Irene, look!" "Where, child? At what?" " Tho kerb there, and the entrance! It's Val Effingham, and his motor is just driving away. —he's going in, and— there's Bruce Abinger coming out. • He's offices there."

"Who, Bruce?" Yes, goose! And see! Val has stopped him! See how in earnest he soems? See ! Bruce shakes his head, and looks at his watch." = "Careful, Tonie, they'll see us peeping. " I guess, it's the open street. Look now, Bruce looks as if Val had shocked or startled him; and, ves—they're going toward the lift, and Val had urgent business, he told us ; and Bruce is his second self! His confidant, if he has one. If the business is with Bruce Abinger, I'll wager it's something private, confidential, and that it concerns Iris La Croix !" " H'm!" murmured . Miss Smedley. "Bruce Abinger is a lawyer, and very clever—in many ways." " Irene Smcdlsy, what do you mean by that?" "Just what I say." CHAPTER 111. EFFINGHAM SPEAKS. % Bruce Abinger closed his office door and turned the key, ran up the twin blinds of his broad front window, admitting a flood of sunlight, and placed a chair opposite his own, at his desk. Motioning his friend to occupy the one seat, he dropped into the other. "Now, old fellow," he said, "my time is yours. What do you mean by saying that you are in trouble'! What has happened since we dined together last night? When I left you at the club you seemed very well content with the world and all ia it." ' ' " " That, Bruce, was last night. This morning I could mark by my stop watch the very moment when a thing, an imp of doubt—which, now and then, for the past few days has peered at me, aroused by a word, a glance, or a suggestion—at last has seized upon me and forced me to believe!" he paused. Bruce Abinger's eyes were fixed upon him keenly, kindly, with the look of one who understands. And as he caught and read this glance Effingham added— As I live, Bruce, you are the only man in London to-day, who, hearing what I am about to say, will not declare at once that I've gone stark mad."

Abinger's face, already serious, was taking on a look of concern. "No, Val," he assured his friend, " I shall not say that. If you were Bane yesterday, and the day before, and last week, and last year, you're .sane still," . . "Oh, yes, I'm sane, heaven knows! I could almost wish I were not."

Again for a moment Ab'nger focussed upon his friend's face his keen, clear, concentrated gaze. Then he bent toward him. " Val," he began gently, "I see that it is something serious—this trouble that has so suddenly arrived. If I can help you — let mo hear it."

" Bruce, you know what Iris La Croix has been, and is to mo?" " Certainly!" " And how her disappearance upset mo?" " Yes." " " You know how I rejoiced at the first news of her, and how at her coming back, I thought I had nothing more to ask of Fortune or Fate." "Yes," quietly. "I know." " Bruce, remember, you say I am quite sane—she has not come back!"

Abingor's face never changed; and the young man' sitting opposite him, and holding himself down with all his will and strength began to feel his quiet firmness like the touch of a steadying hand. " Explain," urged Abinger. "There is no explanation! But Mia fact, Bruce Abinger, is ae I ftata it. The girl who was left at the corner nearest the La Croix home at midnight two weeks ago, the girl wth Iris La Croix's eyes and hair, her face, voice, and figure, and who calls herself Iris la Croix, is not my Iris the girl I knew so well—too well to be deceived by mere resemblance!" "Go please." Val Effingham, sitting opposite thi» quiet, grave, attentive friend, opened his lips to let loose some of the shocked, grieved, naesionate thoughts, and growing beliefs that were seething and clamour ing for utterance within him, and then !e caught his breath, gaspingly almost, and drew slowly back. For hours he had been holding himself in check, with a force and at a cost that was terrible. Before this friend in whose brain and strength he

trusted, he felt the cruel, tense locked, condition of muscles and nerve relax. - . Letting himself sink back in a pose which was almost restful, Effingham met the gaze of hie friend, and - realised that his con centrated quiet was silently beating down the tumult within himself, and that emotion was giving way to strength of will; and the shock and revolt of his most recent discovery and experience, was coming under the control of reason once more. Slowly the hands that had gripped the arms of the big chair relaxed and elid to his knees. He sighed heavily, like one relieved, after exhaustion, and presently he said:, , . , , , "Bruce, that calm, clear, trained mind of yours was never more needed, never more gratefully felt! Give me a moment —to settle my thoughts; for Ino longer feel like beating the air, and screaming because lam hurt. Hurt! Ay soul. 1 can't realise how —yet! For, Bruce, I have only to repeat what I have just declared. Iris La Croix was never so horribly lost, to meto all her friende as at this moment when she seems to be -up there in Jerome La Croix's big mansion —returned, unharmed and happy, to ner home and friends ! Do you want mo to tell— he stopped short at a gesture from Abinger. "If you're quite sure of yourself now, old man—l can see that you've ( bad a •shock, and have been 'holding on' a bit too long for physical comfort. If you v ® settled down, tell me . how did this belief first come to you?"' <, Effingham hesitated. "To be quite frank," he confessed, " I don't just know how to put it. As you know, I was thereat her home—when she came. La Croix sent for me as soon as he had the word. We didn't know the exact hour, for the message merely said that she would be at the door that night Tuesday night —' some time between sundown and sunrise.' That note in itself was a bit of gross cruelty ! The brutes knew, of course, that such a message would mean long hours of suspense, for that 6he would not arrive by daylight, or twilight, we knew very well."

" Naturally." "At ten o'clock La. Croix sent all the servants to bed, all except one— butler. And when the bell rang—Bruce, that hard old man was as weak as water. 'Go and bring her in, Effingham,' he said to me. And I was quick to go. I met them at the first or vestibule landing, and when he saw me coming toward them Harris, the butler ,ducked down the corridor, and she stood there alone waiting for me. It seemed an hour , before I reached her side —and when I spoke her name, and took her hand in mine, I felt her whole body quiver—she was, closely veiled; and Bruce—she almost struggled away from me. But I saw that she was very nervous, and she only said, 4 Val, I'm horribly weak,, and so confused ! It's all been so terrible . I shall not feel myself again until I have forgotten it; if I ever can forget it.' She met her father in much the same way. But I did not wonder at that. They have been so much apart all their lives, and La Croix, is such a hard old duffer." "He is that. At least on the surface.'" "Yes. Well, her aunt soon took her away, of course, almost at once it seemed, and I left the house after a few words with . the old, man..... It , was a rare night, and once outside. I crossed the street and walked slowly down to the club. I had been very happy, thinking and planning for her return wo wero just about to announce our engagement when she was spirited away—"; \ , " I know!" " I told you? Yes! I remember. Well —when I got outside and was able to think. I didn't know myself. Bruce, I could not find a shadow of the thrill, the gladness I should have felt at her return. I felt cold, and dazed, and—miserable. But I did not understand the cause—then, and I was frightened; fearing that the ordeal the poor girl had undergone had been too much, had broken her high and fine spirit—" " It should take much to do that."

"So. I told myself. Wall, I saw her again next morning, but only for a few moments, and—mostly in her aunt's presence. She—lriswas very quiet, very pale, and excessively nervous." "That is unlike Iris La Croix!" " True. Her two weeks' illness followed. But I saw her daily, after the second day, and with the nurse close at hand in the dressing-room just beyond us. I had thought of the commition, the nine days' wonder, that her sudden return —the whole affair—would provoke in her own circle, and all about town; and, having first consulted her father, I asked her to let me make our engagement known at onoe. She tried to jest, but it was plain to me tnat she was horribly nervous, and almost hysterical, at the mere suggestion. ; She parr ried, and then she just begged me to let her have time to rest and feel more like herself. And then she told me how great the shock had really been to her. How real—for. a time—was her danger. » She said that she seemed, at times to have an impaired memory for facts, and folks, and declared that an announcement then in her weak condition, would bring down upon her a host of friends and congratulations, and that she could not bear ityet. 'She wanted, first of all, to rest and grow stronger. Of course I yielded." "Of course!" • " For the past few days I have seen Iris daily. She has driven out with me twice, and' last night, as you know, sue went to a place of amusement for the first time. Several times she has had those strange. lapses of memory. She savs they come when she begins to feel exhausted, and are accompanied with a slight dizziness, and a sense of pain just above the eyes." "Urn! Severe mental strain, 1 should say." " And so should I, if this were all. But you must remember— you know—how much, for the past two years, Iris La Croix and I have been together, how much I have seen her, in her home, informally, and with the restraints of the social world laid aside. Oh, I can't describe them, in detail, but there were various little mannerisms of speech, and gesture, that I miss. But, most of all, until to-day, has been the feeling! I have played, at least have tried to play, my part, as if indeed she were the girl I have known and loved. But—there it is Coming in the moment, even when she is most like the old Iris; when I have not been startled—as I am, sooner or later, every time we meet! In her most quiet, natural moments there is the feeling that it is not my Iris, but a stranger with her face, but not her soul, who is sitting beside me . Iris was quick to respond, frank, spontaneous, affectionate. This girl just tries to be. And "Just a moment, Val,' interposed Abinger. " You saida moment ago—you said, ' until to-day— of all until to-day — as if to-day had witnessed some change." ..."And it lias! It lias! Until to-day I have wondered, doubted, feared. ' And God, how I have suffered! But to-day— I knew! Less than two hours ago I had the proof" " The proof, man ? Think what you are saying!' , Valentine Effingham brought himself suddenly erect in his chair. The quiet with which, under the strong calm of his friend's influence, he had forced himself to speak and listen, fell from him, as if by the suppressed fire of his thought and purpose; hi? cheeks flushed, his dark eyes flamed, and he brought hi?-right hand down upon the broad arm of his chair with force and firmness.

"Think!" he cried, "I tell you I am done with thinking! Ido not know where Iri , La Croix may be at this moment. I pray God she is alive and safe. But— know where she is not! The girl who masquerades in her name and place is not Iris ! I know it! " "Can you make others know it?" " Listen," Effingham said, "and judge." (To be continued on Wednesday next.)