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 _viâ_
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.