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I was debating whether or not to refer to our previous meeting, at Maresfield Gardens, when Mrs. Gastrell herself solved the difficulty. "I wonder," she said, her great eyes very wide open, her gaze resting full on mine, "if you remember that we have met before. It was just before Christmas. You and Mr.
"The whole idea regarding to-night, and our plan of action, originates with Preston," Jack said to me. "He believes in fact, he is almost sure that Gastrell and his associates know nothing of him by repute as a detective, also that they don't know him by sight, or by name either.
Was she what she appeared to be, or was this amazing beauty of hers a cloak, a weapon if you will, perhaps the most dangerous weapon of a clever, scheming woman? Easterton had told us that Gastrell was a bachelor. Gastrell had declared that he had never before met either Jack Osborne or myself.
John Mapletoft, with whom he maintained a close correspondence for no less than forty years: a man who had travelled much and learnt many languages, a celebrated physician, and afterwards, when he took orders, an accomplished London preacher; Francis Gastrell, Bishop of Chester, Mapletoft's son-in-law; Sir Richard Blackmore, another physician of note, and, like Mapletoft, most zealous in all plans for doing good, but whose unlucky taste for writing dull verses brought down upon him the unmerciful castigation of the wits; John Johnson of Cranbrook, with whose writings on the Eucharistic Sacrifice Nelson most warmly sympathised; Edmund Halley, the mathematician, his school playmate and life-long friend; Ralph Thoresby, an antiquarian of high repute, a moderate Dissenter in earlier life, a thoughtful and earnest Churchman in later years, but who throughout life maintained warm and intimate relations with many leading members of either communion; Dr.
Unable to decide, I had put the case to Osborne, and eventually we had decided to say nothing, at any rate for the moment, to anybody at all. "What would be the good?" Jack had argued. "You have the word of a dying man, and that's all; and what is there that you can prove against this man Gastrell at present?
"Don't you agree, Mr. Berrington?" Mrs. Gastrell exclaimed, laughing as she turned from Cranmere to me. "I didn't catch the question," I said with a start, again brought suddenly to earth. "Lord Cranmere is of opinion that the man you found in hiding at Holt must, from the descriptions which have been given of him, at some time or other have been a gentleman.
"Very," I answered absently, "of music that is music." For my attention had become suddenly distracted. How came this woman to be here, this woman who called herself Gastrell's wife? Lord Easterton was somewhere about, for I had seen him in the crowd. Such a striking woman would be sure to attract his attention, he would inquire who she was, he might even ask Gastrell, and then what would happen?
This time she showed us into a room a good deal larger than the one in which I had been interviewed by Gastrell in the morning.
Not for a moment had Preston, or Jack Osborne, believed the long story that Jasmine Gastrell had related to them while Dulcie and I had been engrossed in conversation, a story it is unnecessary to repeat, though it had been told apparently with a view to leading them to think that Mrs. Gastrell was shortly to make a tour round the world.
"But it will take you a good time to get in, you know," he added as an afterthought, hopeful that the prospect of delay might cause Gastrell to change his mind. "Two, even three years, some men have to wait." "That won't matter," Gastrell said carelessly, as the hall porter helped him on with his coat. "I can join some other club meanwhile, though I draw the line at pot-houses.
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