CHAPTER IV.
EAN FABOS BEGINS HIS STORY.
June 15th, 1904.
So to-night my task begins.
I am to prove that there is a conspiracy of crime so well organised, so widespread, so amazing in its daring, that the police of all the civilised countries are at present unable either to imagine or to defeat it—I am to do this or pay the supreme penalty of failure, ignominious and irrevocable.
I cannot tell you when first it was that some suspicion of the existence of this great republic of thieves and assassins first came to me. Years ago, I asked myself if it were not possible. There has been no great jewel robbery for a decade past which has not found me more zealous than the police themselves in study of its methods and judgment of its men. I can tell you the weight and size almost of every great jewel stolen, either in Europe or America, during the past five years. I know the life history of the men who are paying the penalty for some of those crimes. I can tell you whence they came and what was their intention should they have carried their booty away. I know the houses in London, in Paris, in Vienna, in Berlin where you may change a stolen diamond for money as readily as men cash a banknote across a counter. But there my knowledge has begun and ended. I feel like a child before a book whose print it cannot read. There is a great world of crime unexplored, and its very cities are unnamed. How, then, should a man begin his studies? I answer that he cannot begin them unless his destiny opens the book.
Let me set down my beliefs a little plainer. If ever the story be read, it will not be by those who have my grammar of crime at their call, or have studied, as I have studied, the gospel of robbery as long years expound it. It would be idle to maintain at great length my belief that the leading jewel robberies of the world are directed by one brain and organised by one supreme intelligence. If my own pursuit of this intelligence fail, the world will never read this narrative. If it succeed, the facts must be their own witnesses, speaking more eloquently than any thesis. Let me be content in this place to relate but a single circumstance. It is that of the discovery of a dead body just three years ago on the lonely seashore by the little fishing village of Palling, in Norfolk.
Now, witness this occurrence. The coastguard—for rarely does any but a coastguardsman tramp that lonely shore—a coastguard, patrolling his sandy beat at six o’clock of a spring morning, comes suddenly upon the body of a ship’s officer, lying stark upon the golden beach, cast there by the flood tide and left stranded by the ebb. No name upon the buttons of the pilot coat betrayed the vessel which this young man had served. His cap, needless to say, they did not find. He wore jack-boots such as an officer of a merchantman would wear; his clothes were of Navy serge; there was a briar pipe in his left-hand pocket, a silver tobacco box in his right; he carried a gold watch, and it had stopped at five minutes past five o’clock. The time, however, could not refer to the morning of this discovery. It was the coastguardsman’s opinion that the body had been at least three days in the water.
Such a fatality naturally deserved no more than a brief paragraph in any daily paper. I should have heard nothing of it but for my friend Murray, of Scotland Yard, who telegraphed for me upon the afternoon of the following day; and, upon my arrival at his office, astonished me very much by first showing me an account of the circumstance in theEastern Daily Press, and then passing for my examination a roll of cotton wool such as diamond brokers carry.
“I want your opinion,” he said without preface. “Do you know anything of the jewels in that parcel?”
There were four stones lying a-glitter upon the wool. One of them, a great gem of some hundred and twenty carats, rose-coloured, and altogether magnificent, I recognised at a single glance at the precious stones.
“That,” I said, “is the Red Diamond of Ford Valley. Ask Baron Louis de Rothschild, and he will tell you whose property it was.”
“Would you be very surprised to hear that it was found upon the body of the young sailor?”
“Murray,” I said, “you have known me too long to expect me to be surprised by anything.”
“But it is somewhat out of the way, isn’t it? That’s why I sent for you. The other stones don’t appear to be of the same class. But they’re valuable, I should think.”
I turned them over in my hand and examined them with little interest.
“This pure white is a Brazilian,” said I. “It may be worth a hundred and fifty pounds. The other two are jewellers’ common stuff. They would make a pretty pair of ear-rings for your daughter, Murray. You should make the Treasury an offer for them. Say fifty for the pair.”
“The police haven’t much money to waste on the ladies’ ears,” he said rather hardly; “we prefer ’em without ornament—they go closer to the doors. I thought you would like to hear about this. We can’t make much of it here, and I don’t suppose you’ll make more. A ship’s officer like that—you don’t expect him to be a fence in a common way, and he’s about the last you’d name for a professional hand in Paris—for if this is Baron Louis’s stone, as you say, it must have been stolen in Paris.”
“No reason at all, Murray. His wife wore it in her tiara. She was at the Prince’s, I believe, no more than a month ago. Does that occur to you?”
He shrugged his shoulders as though I had been judging his capacity, which, God knows, would have been an unprofitable employment enough.
“We haven’t begun to think about it,” he said. “How can we? No ship has reported his loss. He carried a pipe, a tobacco box, a gold watch, and this. Where does your clue start? Tell me that, and I’ll go on it.”
“There are no papers, then?”
“None—that is, this paper. And if you can make head or tail of it, I’ll give a hundred pounds to a hospital.”
He passed across the table a worn and tattered letter case. It contained a dirty calendar of the year, a lock of dark-chestnut hair, a plain gold wedding ring, and a slip of paper with these words upon it:
“Captain Three Fingers—Tuesday.”
“Is that all, Murray?” I asked when I had put the paper down.
“Absolutely all,” he replied.
“You have searched him for secret pockets?”
“As a woman’s bag at a remnant sale.”
“Where did he carry the diamonds?”
“Inside his waistcoat—a double pocket lined with wool.”
“No arms upon him?”
“Not a toothpick.”
“And you have no trace of any vessel?”
“Lloyd’s can tell us nothing. There has been no report made. It is evident that the man fell off a ship, though what ship, and where, heaven alone knows.”
This, I am afraid, was obvious. The police had asked me to identify the jewels and now that it was done I could be of no more service to them. It remained to see what Baron Louis de Rothschild would have to say, and when I had reminded Murray of that, I took my leave. It would be idle to pretend that I had come to any opinion which might help him. To me, as to others, the case seemed one of profound mystery. A dead seaman carried jewels of great price hidden in his clothes, and he had fallen overboard from a ship. If some first tremor of an idea came to me, I found it in the word “ship.” A seaman and a ship—yes, I must remember that.
And this will bring me to the last and most astonishing feature of this perplexing mystery. Baron Louis expressed the greatest incredulity when he heard of the loss of his famous jewel. It was at his banker’s in Paris, he declared. A telegram to the French house brought the reply that they had the stone sure enough, and that it was in safe keeping, both literally and in metaphor. To this I answered by the pen of my friend at Scotland Yard that if the bankers would cause the stone to be examined for the second time, they would find it either to be false or of a quality so poor that it could never be mistaken by any expert for the Red Diamond of Ford Valley. Once more fact confirmed my suppositions. The jewel in Paris was a coarse stone, of little value, and as unlike the real gem as any stone could be. Plainly the Baron had been robbed, though when and by whom he had not the remotest idea.
You will admit that this twentieth century conception of theft is not without its ingenuity. The difference in value between a diamond of the first water and the third is as the difference between a sovereign and a shilling. Your latter day thief, desiring some weeks of leisure in which to dispose of a well-known jewel, will sometimes be content with less than the full value of his enterprise. He substitutes a stone of dubious quality for one of undoubted purity. Madam, it may be, thinks her diamonds want cleaning, and determines to send them to the jeweller’s when she can spare them. That may be in six months’ time, when her beautiful gems are already sparkling upon the breast of a Rajah or his latest favourite. And she never can be certain that her diamonds were as fine as she believed them to be.
This I had long known. It is not a fact, however, which helps the police, nor have I myself at any time made much of it. Indeed, all that remained to me of the discovery upon Palling beach was the suggestion of a ship, and the possession of a slip of paper with its almost childish memorandum: “Captain Three Fingers—Tuesday.”
CHAPTER V.
THE MAN WITH THE THREE FINGERS.
Dr. Fabos continues his Story.
I waited three years to meet a man with three fingers, and met him at last in a ball-room at Kensington. Such is the plain account of an event which must divert for the moment the whole current of my life, and, it may be, involve me in consequences so far-reaching and so perilous that I do well to ignore them. Let them be what they may, I am resolved to go on.
Horace has told us that it is good to play the fool in season. My own idea of folly is a revolt against the conventional, a retrogression from the servitude of parochial civilisation to the booths of unwashed Bohemia. In London, I am a member of the Goldsmith Club. Its wits borrow money of me and repay me by condescending to eat my dinners. Their talk is windy but refreshing. I find it a welcome contrast to that jargon of the incomprehensible which serves men of science over the walnuts. And there is a great deal of human nature to be studied in a borrower. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself could not be more dignified than some of those whose lives are to be saved by a trifling advance until Saturday.
Seven such Bohemians went at my charge to the Fancy Fair and Fête at Kensington. I had meant to stop there half an hour; I remained three hours. If you say that a woman solved the riddle, I will answer, “In a measure, yes.” Joan Fordibras introduced herself to me by thrusting a bunch of roses into my face. I changed two words with her, and desired to change twenty. Some story in the girl’s expression, some power of soul shining in her eyes, enchanted me and held me fast. Nor was I deceived at all. The story, I said, had no moral to it. They were not the eyes of an innocent child of nineteen as they should have been. They were the eyes of one who had seen and known the dark side of the lantern of life, who had suffered in her knowledge; who carried a great secret, and had met a man who was prepared to fathom it.
Joan Fordibras—that was her name. Judged by her impulsive manner, the brightness of her talk and the sweetness of her laugh, there was no more light-hearted girl in England that night. I alone, perhaps, in all that room, could tell myself that she carried a heavy burden, and would escape from it byforce majeureof an indomitable will. Her talk I found vapid to the point of hysteria. She told me that she was half French and half American—“just which you like to call me.” When I had danced twice with her she presented me to her father, General Fordibras—a fine military figure of a man, erect and manly, and gifted with eyes which many a woman must have remembered. These things I observed at a glance, but that which I was presently to see escaped my notice for some minutes. General Fordibras, it appears, had but three fingers to his left hand.
I say that I observed the fact negligently, and did not for the moment take full cognizance of its singularity. Alone in my chambers at the Albany, later on, I lighted my pipe and asked myself some sane questions. A man who had lost a finger of his left hand was not such a wonder, surely, that I could make much of it. And yet that sure instinct, which has never failed me in ten years of strenuous investigation, refused stubbornly to pass the judgment by. Again in imagination I stood upon Palling beach and looked upon the figure of the dead sailor. The great sea had cast him out—for what? The black paper, did not an avenging destiny write the words upon it? “Captain Three Fingers!” Was I a madman, then, to construct a story for myself and to say, “To-night I have seen the man whom the dead served. I have shaken him by the hand. I have asked him to my house”? Time will answer that question for good or ill. I know but this—that, sitting there alone at the dead of night, I seemed to be groping, not in a house, or a room, or a street, but over the whole world itself for the momentous truth. None could share that secret with me. The danger and the ecstasy of it alike were my own.
Who was this General Fordibras, and what did the daughter know of his life? I have written that I invited them both to my house in Suffolk, and thither they came in the spring of the year. Okyada, the shrewdest servant that ever earned the love and gratitude of an affectionate master, could not help me to identify the General. We had never met him in our travels, never heard of him, could not locate him. I concluded that he was just what he pretended to be so far as his birth and parentage were concerned—a Frenchman naturalised in America; a rich man to boot, and the owner of the steam yachtConnecticut, as he himself had told me. The daughter Joan astonished me by her grace and dignity, and the extent of her attainments. One less persistent would have put suspicion by and admitted that circumstances justified no doubt about these people; that they were truly father and daughter travelling for pleasure in Europe, and that any other supposition must be an outrage. Indeed, I came near to believing so myself. The pearls which had been stolen from me in Paris, was it not possible that the General had bought them in market overt? To say that his agents had stolen them, and that his daughter wore them under my very nose, would be to write him down a maniac. I knew not what to think; the situation baffled me entirely. In moments of sentiment I could recall the womanly tenderness and distress of little Joan Fordibras, and wonder that I had made so slight a response. There were other hours when I said, “Beware—there is danger; these people know you—they are setting a trap for you.” Let us blame human nature alone if this latter view came to be established at no distant date. Three men burgled my house in Suffolk in the month of June. Two of them escaped; the third put his hands upon the brass knob of my safe, and the electric wires I had trained there held him as by a vice of fire. He fell shrieking at my feet, and in less than an hour I had his story.
Of course I had been waiting for these men. An instinct such as mine can be diverted by no suggestions either romantic or platonic. From the first, my reason had said that General Fordibras might have come to Deepdene for no other reason than to prepare the way for the humbler instruments who should follow after. Okyada, my little Jap, he of the panther’s tread and the eagle eye—he stood sentinel during these weeks, and no blade of grass in all my park could have been trodden but that he would have known it. We were twice ready for all that might occur. We knew that strangers had come down from London to Six Mile Bottom station one hour after they arrived there. When they entered the house, we determined to take but one of them. The others, racing frantically for liberty, believed that they had outwitted us. Poor fools, they were racing to the gates of a prison.
I dragged the thief to his feet and began to threaten and to question him. He was a lad of twenty, I should say, hatchet-faced and with tousled yellow hair. When he spoke to me I discovered that he had the public school voice and manner, never to be mistaken under any circumstances.
“Now come,” I said; “here is seven years’ penal servitude waiting for you on the doorstep. Let me see that there is some spark of manhood left in you yet. Otherwise——” But here I pointed again to the electric wires, which had burned his hands, and he shuddered at my gesture.
“Oh, I’ll play the game,” he said. “You won’t get anything out of me. Do what you like—I’m not afraid of you.”
It was a lie, for he was very much afraid of me. One glance told me that the boy was a coward.
“Okyada,” I said, calling my servant, “here is someone who is not afraid of you. Tell him what they do to such people in Japan.”
The little fellow played his part to perfection. He took the craven lad by both his hands and began to drag him back toward the wires. A resounding shriek made me tremble for the nerves of my dear sister, Harriet. I went to the door to reassure her, and when I returned the lad was on his knees, sobbing like a woman.
“I can’t stand pain—I never could,” he said. “If you’re a gentleman, you won’t ask me to give away my pals.”
“Your pals,” I said quietly, “being the refuse of Europe—rogues and bullies and blackmailers. A nice gang for a man who played cricket for his house at Harrow.”
He looked at me amazed.
“How the devil do you know that?”
“You have the colours in your tie. Now stand up and answer my questions. Your silence cannot save those who sent you here to-night. They knew perfectly well that you would fail; they wished you to fail, and to lie to me when they caught you. I am not the man to be lied to. Understand that; I have certain little secrets of my own. You have investigated one of them. Do not compel me to demonstrate the others to you.”
I could see that he was thinking deeply. Presently he asked:
“What are you going to do with me? What’s the game if I split?”
“Answer me truly,” I said, “and I will keep you out of prison.”
“That’s all very fine——”
“I will keep you out of prison and try to save you from yourself.”
“You can’t do that, sir.”
“We will see. There is at the heart of every man a seed of God’s sowing, which neither time nor men may kill. I shall find it in yours, my lad. Oh, think of it! When you stood at the wicket in the playing fields of Harrow, your beloved school, your friends about you when you had a home, a mother, sisters, gentle hands to welcome you; was it to bring you to such a night as this? No, indeed. There is something which is sleeping, but may wake again—a voice to call you; a hand upon your shoulder compelling you to look back. Let it be my hand, lad. Let mine be the voice which you hear. It will be kinder than others which may speak afterwards.”
His face blanched oddly at my words. An hour ago he would have heard them with oaths and curses. Now, however, his bravado had gone with his courage. Perhaps I had made no real appeal to the old instincts of his boyhood. But his fear and his hope of some advantage of confession brought him to his knees.
“I can’t tell you much,” he stammered.
“You can tell me what you know.”
“Well—what about it then?”
“Ah! that is reason speaking. First, the name of the man.”
“What man do you speak of?”
“The man who sent you to this house. Was it from Paris, from Rome, from Vienna? You are wearing French boots, I see. Then it was Paris, was it not?”
“Oh, call it Paris, if you like.”
“And the man—a Frenchman?”
“I can’t tell you. He spoke English. I met him at Quaz-Arts, and he introduced me to the others—a big man with a slash across his jaw and pock-marked. He kept me at a great hotel six weeks. I was dead out of luck—went over there to get work in a motor-works and got chucked—well, I don’t say for what. Then Val came along——”
“Val—a Christian name?”
“I heard the rest of it was Imroth. Some said he was a German Jew who had been in Buenos Ayres. I don’t know. We were to get the stuff easy and all cross back by different routes. Mine was Southampton—Havre. I’d have been back in Paris to-morrow night but for you. Good God, what luck!”
“The best, perhaps, you ever had in your wretched life. Please to go on. You were to return to Paris—with the diamonds?”
“Oh, no; Rouge la Gloire carried those—on the ship, of course. I was to cross the scent. You don’t know Val Imroth. There isn’t another man like him in Paris. If he thought I’d told you this, he’d murder the pair of us, though he crossed two continents to do it. I’ve seen him at it. My God, if you’d seen all I’ve seen, Dr. Fabos!”
“You have my name, it appears. I am not so fortunate.”
He hung down his head, and I saw with no little satisfaction that he blushed like a girl.
“I was Harry Avenhill once,” he said.
“The son of Dr. Avenhill, of Cambridge?”
“It’s as true as night.”
“Thank God that your father is dead. We will speak of him again—when the seed has begun to grow a little warm. I want now to go back a step. This ship in which my diamonds were to go——”
He started, and looked at me with wild eyes.
“I never said anything about any ship!”
“No? Then I was dreaming it. You yourself were to return to ParisviâHavre and Southampton, I think; while this fellow Rouge la Gloire, he went from Newhaven.”
“How did you know that?”
“Oh, I know many things. The ship, then, is waiting for him—shall we say in Shoreham harbour?”
It was a pure guess upon my part, but I have never seen a man so struck by astonishment and wonder. For some minutes he could not say a single word. When he replied, it was in the tone of one who could contest with me no longer.
“If you know, you know,” he said. “But look here, Dr. Fabos; you have spoken well to me, and I’ll speak well to you. Leave Val Imroth alone. You haven’t a month to live if you don’t.”
I put my hand upon his shoulder, and turned him round to look me full in the face.
“Harry Avenhill,” said I, “did they tell you, then, that Dr. Fabos was a woman? Listen to me, now. I start to-morrow to hunt these people down. You shall go with me; I will find a place for you upon my yacht. We will seek this Polish Jew together—him and others, and by the help of God above me, we will never rest until we have found them.”
He could not reply to me. I summoned Okyada, and bade him find a bedroom for Mr. Harry Avenhill.
“We leave by the early train for Newcastle,” I said. “See that Mr. Avenhill is called in time. And please to tell my sister that I am coming to have a long talk with her.”
My poor sister! However will she live if there are no slippers to be aired or man’s untidiness to be corrected! Her love for me is very sweet and true. I could wish almost that my duty would leave me here in England to enjoy it.
CHAPTER VI.
A CHALLENGE FROM A WOMAN.
Dr. Fabos joins his Yacht “White Wings.”
I had given the name ofWhite Wingsto my new turbine yacht, and this, I confess, provokes the merriment of mariners both ancient and youthful. We are painted a dirty grey, and have the true torpedo bows—to say nothing of our low-lying stern rounded like a shark’s back and just as formidable to look upon when we begin to make our twenty-five knots. The ship is entirely one after my own heart. I will not deny that an ambition of mastery has affected me from my earliest days. My castles must be impregnable, be they upon the sea or ashore. And the yacht which Yarrow built for me has no superior upon any ocean.
The boat, I say, was built upon the Thames and engined upon the Tyne. I remember that I ordered it three days after I wrote the word “ship” in my diary; upon a morning when the notion first came to me that the sea and not the land harboured the world’s great criminals, and that upon the sea alone would they be taken. To none other than the pages of my diary may I reveal this premonition yet awhile. The police would mock it; the public remain incredulous. And so I keep my secret, and I carry it with me. God knows to what haven.
We left Newcastle, bravely enough, upon the second day of September in the year 1904. A member of the Royal Yacht Squadron by favour and friendship of the late Prince Valikoff, of Moscow, whose daughter’s life he declared that I saved, we flew the White Ensign, and were named, I do not doubt, for a Government ship. Few would have guessed that this was the private yacht of an eccentric Englishman; that he had embarked upon one of the wildest quests ever undertaken by an amateur, and that none watched him go with greater interest than his friend Murray, of Scotland Yard. But such was the naked truth. And even Murray had but a tithe of the secret.
A long, wicked-looking yacht! I liked to hear my friends say that. When I took them aboard and showed them the monster turbines, the spacious quarters for my men beneath the cupola of the bows, and aft, my own cabins, furnished with some luxury and no little taste, I hope—then it was of the Hotel Ritz they talked, and not of any wickedness at all. My own private room was just such a cabin as I have always desired to find upon a yacht. Deep sloping windows of heavy glass permitted me to see the white foaming wake astern and the blue horizon above it. I had to my hand the books that I love; there were pictures of my own choosing cunningly let into the panels of rich Spanish mahogany. Ornaments of silver added dignity but no display. Not a spacious room, I found that its situation abaft gave me that privacy I sought, and made of it as it were a house apart. Here none entered who had not satisfied my little Jap that his business was urgent. I could write for hours with no more harassing interruption than that of a gull upon the wing or the echo of the ship’s bells heard afar. The world of men and cities lay down yonder below the ether. The great sea shut its voices out, and who would regret them or turn back to hear their message?
Let pride in my ship, then, be the first emotion I shall record in this account of her voyages. Certainly the summer smiled upon us when we started down the turbid, evil-smelling river Tyne, and began to dip our whale-nosed bows to the North Sea. The men I had shipped for the service, attracted by the terms of my offer, and drawn from the cream of the yachting ports of England, were as fine a lot as ever trod a spotless deck. Benson, my chief engineer, used to be one of Yarrow’s most trusted experts. Captain Larry had been almost everything nautical, both afloat and ashore. A clean-shaven, blue-eyed, hard-faced man, I have staked my fortune upon his courage. And how shall I forget Cain and Abel, the breezy twin quartermasters from County Cork—to say nothing of Balaam, the Scotch boatswain, or Merry, the little cockney cook! These fellows had been taken aside and told one by one frankly that the voyage spelled danger, and after danger, reward. They accepted my conditions with a frankness which declared their relish for them. I had but three refusals, and one of these, Harry Avenhill, had no title to be a chooser.
Such was the crew which steamed with me, away from gloomy Newcastle, southward, I knew not to what seas or harbourage. To be just, certain ideas and conjectures of my own dictated a vague course, and were never absent from my reckoning. I believed that the ocean had living men’s secrets in her possession, and that she would yield them up to me. Let Fate, I said, stand at the tiller, and Prudence be her handmaiden. But one man in all Europe knew that I intended to call at the port of Havre, and afterwards to steam for Cape Town. To others I told a simpler tale. The yacht was my hobby, the voyage a welcome term of idleness. They rarely pursued the subject further.
Now, I had determined to call at the port of Havre, not because I had any business to do there, but because intelligence had come to me that Joan Fordibras was spending some weeks at Dieppe, and that I should find her at the Hôtel de Palais. We made a good passage down the North Sea, and on the morning following our arrival I stood among a group of lazy onlookers, who watched the bathers go down to the sea at Dieppe and found their homely entertainment therein. Joan Fordibras was one of the last to bathe, but many eyes followed her with interest, and I perceived that she was an expert swimmer, possessed of a graceful figure, and of a daring in the water which had few imitators among her sex. Greatly admired and evidently very well known, many flatterers surrounded her when she had dressed, and I must have passed her by at least a dozen times before she suddenly recognised me, and came running up to greet me.
“Why, it’s Dr. Fabos, of London! Isn’t it, now?” she exclaimed. “I thought I could not be mistaken. Whoever would have believed that so grave a person would spend his holiday at Dieppe?”
“Two days,” said I, answering her to the point. “I am yachting round the coast, and some good instinct compelled me to come here.”
She looked at me, I thought, a little searchingly. A woman’s curiosity was awake, in spite of her nineteen years. None the less she made a pretty picture enough; and the scene about stood for a worthy frame. Who does not know the summer aspect of a French watering-place—the fresh blue sea, the yellow beach, the white houses with the green jalousies, the old Gothic churches with their crazy towers—laughter and jest and motor-cars everywhere—Mademoiselle La France tripping over the shingle with well-poised ankle—her bathing dress a very miracle of ribbons and diminuendos—the life, the vivacity, the joy of it, and a thousand parasols to roof the whispers in. So I saw Mistress Joan amid such a scene. She, this shrewd little schemer of nineteen, began to suspect me.
“Who told you that I was at Dieppe?” she asked quickly.
“Instinct, the best of guides. Where else could you have been?”
“Why not at Trouville?”
“Because I am not there.”
“My, what a reason! Did you expect to find my father here?”
“Certainly not. He sailed in his yacht for Cherbourg three days ago.”
“Then I shall call you a wizard. Please tell me why you wanted to see me.”
“You interested me. Besides, did not I say that I would come? Would you have me at Eastbourne or Cromer, cooped up with women who talk in stares and men whose ambitions rot in bunkers? I came to see you. That is a compliment. I wished to say good-bye to you before you return to America.”
“But we are not going to Amer——that is, of course, my home is there. Did not father tell you that?”
“Possibly. I have a poor head for places. There are so many in America.”
“But I just love them,” she said quickly; and then, with mischief in her eyes, she added, “No one minds other people trying to find out all about them in America.”
It was a sly thrust and told me much. This child did not carry a secret, I said; she carried the fear that there might be a secret. I had need of all my tact. How fate would laugh at me if I fell in love with her! But that was a fool’s surmise, and not to be considered.
“Curiosity,” I said, “may have one of two purposes. It may desire to befriend or to injure. Please consider that when you have the time to consider anything. I perceive that there are at least a dozen young men waiting to tell you that you are very beautiful. Do not let me forbid them. As we are staying at the same hotel——”
“What? You have gone to the Palais?”
“Is there any other house while you are in Dieppe?”
She flushed a little and turned away her head. I saw that I had frightened her; and reflecting upon the many mistakes that so-called tact may make sometimes, I invented a poor excuse and left her to her friends.
Plainly, her eyes had challenged me. And the Man, I said, must not hesitate to pick up the glove which my Lady of Nineteen had thrown down so bravely.
CHAPTER VII.
MY FRIEND McSHANUS.
Dr. Fabos at Dieppe.
I thought that I knew no one in Dieppe, but I was wrong, as you shall see; and I had scarcely set foot in the hotel when I ran against no other than Timothy McShanus, the journalist of Fleet Street, and found myself in an instant listening to his odd medley of fact and fancy. For the first time for many years he was in no immediate need of a little loan.
“Faith,” says he, “’tis the best thing that ever ye heard. The Lord Mayor of this very place is dancing and feasting the County Councillors—and me, Timothy McShanus, is amongst ’em. Don’t ask how it came about. I’ll grant ye there is another McShanus in the Parlyment—a rare consated divil of a man that they may have meant to ask to the rejoicin’. Well, the letter came to worthier hands—and by the honour of ould Ireland, says I, ’tis this McShanus that will eat their victuals. So here I am, me bhoy, and ye’ll order what ye like, and my beautiful La France shall pay for it. Shovels of fire upon me head, if I shame their liquor——”
I managed to arrest his ardour, and, discovering that he had enjoyed the hospitality of Dieppe for three days upon another man’s invitation, and that the end of the pleasant tether had been reached, I asked him to dine with me, and he accepted like a shot.
“’Tis for the pleasure of me friend’s company. To-morrow ye shall dine with me and the Mayor—me old friend the Mayor—that I have known since Tuesday morning. We’ll have fine carriages afterwards, and do the woods and the forests. Ye came here, I’ll be saying, because ye heard that the star of Timothy McShanus was on high? ’Twould be that, no doubt. What the divil else should bring such an astronomer man to Dieppe?”
I kept it from him a little while; but when he rejoined me at the dinner table later on, the first person he clapped his eyes upon was little Joan Fordibras, sitting with a very formidable-looking chaperone three tables from our own. The expression upon his face at this passed all simile. I feared that every waiter in the room would overhear his truly Celtic outburst.
“Mother of me ancestors!” he cried; “but ’tis the little shepherdess herself. Ean Fabos, have shame to admit it. ’Twas neither the stars of the celestial heavens nor the beauty of the firmament that carried ye to this shore. And me that was naming it the wit and the beauty of me native counthry. Oh, Timothy McShanus, how are the mighty fallen! No longer——”
I hustled him to his seat and showed my displeasure very plainly. As for little Joan Fordibras, while she did not hear his words, his manner set her laughing, and in this she was imitated by French and English women round about. Indeed, I defy the greatest of professors to withstand this volatile Irishman, or to be other than amused by his amazing eccentricities.
“We’ll drink champagne to her, Fabos, me bhoy,” he whispered as the soup was served. “Sure, matrimony is very like that same wine—a good thing at the beginning, but not so good when you take overmuch of it. ’Twould be married I had been meself to the Lady Clara Lovenlow of Kildare, but for the blood of Saxons in her veins. Ay, and a poor divil of a man I would be this same time, if I had done it. Sure, think of Timothy McShanus with his feet in the family slippers and his daughters singing ‘The Lost Chord’ to him. Him that is the light of the Goldsmith Club. Who goeth home even with the milk! Contemplate it, me bhoy, and say what a narrow escape from that designing wench he has had.”
He rattled on, and I did not interrupt him. To be plain, I was glad of his company. Had it appeared to Joan Fordibras that I was quite alone in the hotel, that I knew no friends in Dieppe, and had no possible object in visiting the town but to renew acquaintance with her during her father’s absence—had this been so, then the difficulties of our intercourse were manifest. Now, however, I might shelter my intentions behind this burly Irishman. Indeed, I was delighted at the encounter.
“McShanus,” I said, “don’t be a fool. Or if you must be one, don’t include me in the family relationship. Do I look like a man whose daughters will be permitted to sing the ‘Lost Chord’ to him?”
“Ye can never judge by looks, Docthor. Me friend Luke O’Brien, him that wrote ‘The Philosophy of Loneliness’ in the newspapers, he’s seven children in County Cork and runs a gramophone store. ‘Luke,’ says I, ‘’tis a fine solitude ye have entirely.’ ‘Be d——d to that,’ says he—and we haven’t spoken since.”
“Scarcely delicate to mention it, McShanus. Let me relieve your feelings by telling you that my yacht,White Wings, will be here to-morrow night to fetch me.”
“Glory be to God, ye’ll be safe on the sea. I mistrust the colleen entirely. Look at the eyes of it. D’ye see the little foot peepin’ in and out—‘like mice beneath the petticoat,’ says the poet. She’s anxious to show ye she’s a small foot and won’t cost ye much in shoe leather. Turn your head away when she laughs, Ean, me bhoy. ’Tis a wicked bit of a laugh, and to a man’s destruction.”
“I must remember this, McShanus. Do you think you could entertain the old lady while I talk to her?”
“What, the she-cat with the man’s hair and the telescope? The Lord be good to me. I’d sooner do penal servitude.”
“Now, come, you can see by her glance that she is an authority upon some of the ’isms, McShanus. I know that she plays golf. I saw her carrying sticks this very afternoon.”
“To break heads at a fair. Is Timothy McShanus fallen to this? To tread at the heels of a she-man with sticks in her hands. Faith, ’twould be a fancy fair and fête entirely.”
“Drink some more champagne, and brace yourself up to it, Timothy.”
He shook his head and lapsed into a melancholy silence. Certainly his nerves required bracing up for the ordeal, and many glasses of ’89 Pommery went to that process. When dinner was done, we strolled out upon the verandah and found Miss Fordibras and her chaperone, Miss Aston, drinking coffee at one of the little tables in the vestibule. They made way for us at once, as though we had been expected, and I presented McShanus to them immediately.
“Mr. Timothy McShanus—the author of ‘Ireland and Her Kings.’ He’s descended from the last of them, I believe. Is it not so, McShanus?”
“From all of them, Dr. Fabos. Me father ruled Ireland in the past, and me sons will rule it in the future. Ladies, your servant. Be not after calling me an historian. ’Tis a poet I am when not in the police courts.”
Miss Aston, the elderly lady with the short hair and the glasses, took McShanus seriously, I am afraid. She began to speak to him of Browning and Walt Whitman and Omar Khayyam. I drew my chair near to Miss Fordibras and took my text from the common talk.
“No one reads poetry nowadays,” I said. “We have all grown too cynical. Even McShanus does not consider his immortal odes worth publishing.”
“They will perish with me in an abbey tomb,” said he; “a thousand years from now, ’tis the professors from New Zealand who will tell the world what McShanus wrote.”
Miss Aston suggested a little tritely that much modern poetry should be so treated.
“Time is the true critic,” she exclaimed majestically, and McShanus looked at me as who should say, “She has some experience of that same Time.”
I turned to Joan Fordibras and asked her to defend the poets.
“The twentieth century gives us no solitudes,” I said; “you cannot have poets without solitudes. We live in crowds nowadays. Even yachting is a little old-fashioned. Men go where other men can see them show off. Vanity takes them there—even Bridge is vanity, the desire to do better than the other man.”
Miss Aston demurred.
“There are some women who know nothing of vanity,” she said stonily. “We live within ourselves, and our lives are our own. Our whole existence is a solitude. We are most truly alone when many surround us.”
“’Tis a compliment to my friend Fabos,” cried McShanus triumphantly. “Let me have the honour to escort ye to the Casino, lady, for such a man is no company for us. No doubt he’ll bring Miss Fordibras over when they’ve done with the poets. Will ye not, doctor?”
I said that I should be delighted, and when the cloaks had been found we all set out for the Casino. Timothy was playing his part well, it appeared. I found myself alone with Joan Fordibras presently—and neither of us had the desire to hurry on to the Casino. In truth, the season at Dieppe had already begun to wane, and there were comparatively few people abroad on the parade by the sea-shore. We walked apart, a great moon making golden islands of light upon the sleeping sea, and the distant music of the Casino band in our ears.
“This time to-morrow,” I said, “my yacht will be nearer Ushant than Dieppe.”
She looked up at me a little timidly. I thought that I had rarely seen a face at once so pathetic and so beautiful.
“Away to the solitudes?” she asked quickly.
“Possibly,” I said; “but that is the point about yachting. You set out for nowhere, and if you don’t like it, you come back again.”
“And you positively don’t know where you are going?”
“I positively don’t know where I am going.”
“But I do,” she said. “You are going to follow my father.”
I had never been so amazed in my life. To say that I was astonished would be to misrepresent the truth. I knew already that she suspected me; but this challenge—from a mere child—this outspoken defiance, it passed all comprehension.
“Why should I follow your father?” I asked her as quickly.
“I do not know, Dr. Fabos. But you are following him. You suspect him, and you wish to do us an injury.”
“My dear child,” I said, “God forbid that I should do any man an injury. You do not mean what you say. The same cleverness which prompts this tells you also that anything I may be doing is right and proper to do—and should be done. May we not start from that?”
I turned about and faced her. We had come almost to the water’s edge by this time. The lazy waves were rolling at our feet—the waves of that sea I purposed to cross in quest of a truth which should astonish the world. The hour was momentous to both our lives. We knew it so to be and did not flinch from it.
“Oh,” she said, with tears in her eyes, “if I could only believe you to be my friend.”
“Miss Fordibras,” I said, “believe it now because I tell you so. Your friend whatever may befall. Please to call me that.”
I think that she was about to confess to me the whole story of her life. I have always thought that it might have been so at that moment. But the words remained unspoken—for a shadow fell upon us as we talked, and, looking up, I perceived the figure of a man so near to us that his outstretched hand could have touched my own. And instantly perceiving it also, she broke away from me and begged me to take her to the Casino.
“Miss Aston will be anxious,” she cried, excited upon compulsion. “Please let us go. It must be nine o’clock.”
I rejoined that I was quite in ignorance of the fact; but, taking her cue, I led the way from the place and turned toward the Casino. The light of an arc lamp as we went showed me her young face as pale as the moonbeams upon the still sea before us. I understood that the man had been watching her, and that she was afraid of him. Indeed, no artifice could conceal so plain a fact.
Of this, however, she would not speak at all. In the Casino, she went straight to the side of the formidable Miss Aston, and began to babble some idle excuse for our delay. McShanus himself was playing at Petits Chevaux and making the room ring with his exclamations. I understood that the hour for confidence had passed, and that the words she had meant to speak to me might go for ever unspoken.
Was it well that this should be? God knows. The path of my duty lay clearly marked before me. Not even the hand of Joan Fordibras must turn me aside therefrom. I could but hope that time would lift the shadows and let me see the sun beyond them.