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 by force majeure of 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 yacht Connecticut, 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 Paris via Havre 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.