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For this house in Cumberland Place which he had rented from Lord Easterton lent itself admirably to Hugesson Gastrell's distorted ideas as to plenishing, at which some people laughed, calling them almost Oriental in their splendour and their lavishness.
Osborne called in the middle of the night to ask if Hugesson had lost his purse: we both thought it so kind of you." I remembered a good deal more than that, but I did not tell her so.
It was Osborne, I now learned for the first time, who had effected the introduction between Hugesson Gastrell and "Lord Cranmere" the actual Lord Cranmere had been consulted by Jack on the subject of his being impersonated, and when Jack had outlined to him his plan and told him why the detective, Preston, wished to impersonate him, Lord Cranmere had entered into the spirit of the thing and given his consent.
I now began to see his object in cultivating the acquaintance of people of rank and wealth; for I had long ago noticed that Jasmine and Hugesson Gastrell never missed an opportunity of becoming acquainted with men and women of position. Also I began to grasp Preston's line of action.
"If we cross by the same boat as they do," I said suddenly, "we shall be recognized." He smiled grimly. "Not if you disguise yourself as you did at Hugesson Gastrell's the other night," he said. "Good heavens!" I exclaimed, "how do you know that?" He looked to right and left, then behind him. Nobody was near.
Nobody could have seemed more friendly or more thoroughly pleased to see me again than Hugesson Gastrell as he grasped me heartily by the hand, expressing surprise at our meeting so unexpectedly.
The death was, of course, attributed to syncope, but my friend who, by the way, had never heard of Hugesson before he received the foregoing account through the medium of planchette told me, and I agreed with him, that from similar cases that had come within his experience, it was most probable that Hugesson had in reality projected himself, and had perished in the manner described.
At that instant I remembered that the woman I had in my mind was the woman who on board the Masonic had, so Jack had told me, called herself Hugesson Gastrell's wife, and called herself his wife again at the house in Maresfield Gardens. But Gastrell had told Easterton, or at any rate led him to suppose, he was unmarried.
Only a day or two before we had discussed the advisability of informing Easterton of what was taking place nightly in the house in Cumberland Place which he had leased to Hugesson Gastrell, but we had come to the conclusion that no good end would be served by telling him, for were any complaint to be made to Gastrell he would of course declare that the people who gambled in the house were personal friends of his whom he had every right to invite there to play.
We waited several minutes. Then the door opened and Hugesson Gastrell entered. Like ourselves, he was in evening clothes. He advanced, shook hands cordially with "Lord Cranmere," saying that he had received his telephone message. "These are my friends of whom I spoke," Cranmere said, "Baron Poppenheimer and Sir Aubrey Belston." "Delighted to meet you," Gastrell exclaimed.
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