For once Casteno was full of sympathy with me.
No sooner did I explain to him the extraordinary development of that
mystery at Whitehall Court than he was all eagerness, all attention, all
resource to prove to me that I must think the best and not the worst of
Colonel Napier's disappearance.
At first, I own, I was not at all inclined to take help from such a
quarter; I had not forgotten those suspicious circumstances in which he
left my office at the time the murder was committed. Nevertheless,
before we had finished our dinner in that quaint old Shrewsbury hotel he
had practically won me over to his way of looking at the occurrence.
"After all," said he, as he drained his last glass of wine, "you can
certainly rely on the impression that Colonel Napier has come to no
harm. If he had, Miss Doris would not be here at all as she is, as
bright and gay as a lark, and as keen as a hawk on getting the benefit
of those manuscripts for Lord Cuthbertson. Neither he nor Lord
Fotheringay would dare to keep bad news from her. They are, after all,
both of them gentlemen, whatever may happen to be the Chauvinistic
tactics they adopt to push themselves forward in their own particular
little intrigues in politics. Silence in such a crisis would be
monstrous--utterly monstrous."
"But where can he be?" I cried helplessly. "What is he doing? Why
doesn't he come forward and tell the police as much as he knows of the
affair?"
"Perhaps he has," said Casteno significantly, dealing with my last
question first. "Who knows? Naylor has dropped his part in the search,
you see, and if that means anything at all it means that the murder has
precious little to do with this wild chase after the old parchment
records. My own impression is that the daughter is not the only member
of the Napier family who has taken sides against us in this hunt for the
submerged treasure. When the truth is told I think you will find both
father and daughter have determined, in a perfectly friendly way, to
work against me, just to prove to you how foolish and futile you have
been not to take their advice. Hence Colonel Napier may have been
despatched in one direction to circumvent us and Miss Doris in another.
That disposition of their forces would be quite fair, you know, and
might have most important results."
"And the man found dead in the colonel's bed?"
"Any theory could account for his presence," said the Spaniard,
shrugging his shoulders and walking towards the window as though
heartily tired of my objections. "One is that he was some burglar who
had got the office that the colonel had left the flat, and had disguised
himself to resemble the master, had walked in at the front door and
personated him over-night, and had been assassinated in error. Such
cases of impersonation are much more common than people imagine, but
they have such ludicrous, as well as tragic, results that they seldom,
if ever, get into the police courts. Another theory--and to me not at
all a bad one--is that the whole business has been engineered by some
secret society for a purpose that will eventually become apparent. As
you know, there are plenty of secret organisations in London that do not
content themselves with mystic signs and passwords and occasional
extravagances in the shape of nitro-glycerine and dynamite. I know
there is a branch of the Spanish `Friends of Liberty' in England, for
instance; and I am sure if they have got some hint from Mexico about the
discovery of those manuscripts they will stop at nothing--not even a
crime like this--to frighten off Colonel Napier."
"Well, I had better leave it," I said at last, with a sigh, throwing the
paper on to the floor and joining my companion at the casement. "After
all, you are really the leader of this expedition, and you have a right
to require of me that I shall pay some attention to your conclusions."
"Yes; leave it," repeated Casteno. "Remember, you are only one man with
one brain and one pair of hands. You can't do everything in a maze that
has such extraordinary ramifications as this. I tried alone, remember,
and failed; and, first, I had to get your help, and then Mr
Cooper-Nassington's, and heaven alone knows where we shall end. But
this brings me to another point, Glynn," he went on, with increasing
earnestness. "I want you not to approach Miss Doris until this flying
machine experiment is over. It is quite natural of you to wish to do
so, I admit, but I want you to consider my interests a little for a day
or two, and to refrain."
"I see," I said meditatively. "You are afraid something might happen,
some injudicious word of hers, some careless act, which might scare off
some of the people we want to keep blind to our movements, eh?"
"Yes," answered Casteno; "but that's not all. You must recollect, too,
that the people who are not for us are against us. It is not really to
the Napier interest that your side should win. They are fighting, in my
opinion, on the side of the authorities as represented by the Foreign
Secretary and the earl. Well, let them, that's all, and only when we've
won let us put our heads above the hedge."
Some other conversation followed, but in the end I agreed to do as Jose
Casteno wished. As a consequence, we kept quite quiet in our rooms
until we had got word from a friendly waiter that the hunchback, Miss
Doris, and Captain Sparhawk had returned to the hotel, apparently on
good terms again, and then in the darkness of night we slipped off and
had a good tramp about the ancient streets and by-ways of Shrewsbury,
rising next morning as fresh and as sturdy as ever. For a time, it is
true, we feared that after his compact to help Lord Cyril Cuthbertson
the hunchback might deem it prudent to avoid the excursion. As a matter
of fact, I was the one who thought so. Casteno didn't, because, in the
first place, he was sure that his father would never in any
circumstances help England against Spain; and in the second, the dwarf
was too keen on flying machines and their commercial and military
possibilities to let Sparhawk slip through his fingers when he had got
hold of a really serviceable invention that would take seven or eight
people careering through the air at will. And, as it turned out,
Casteno was correct, and I wasn't. The hunchback did turn up in the
flying machine enclosure at the great floral fete, all prepared for the
expedition, and, oddly enough, he brought with him as companion--he
seemed to have quite forgiven all her previous day's tricks--my own
Doris, who looked as bright and gay as though a trip in a flying machine
were one of the most enjoyable things in existence.
Captain Sparhawk himself, now that the critical day of trial had dawned,
looked, I must confess, very nervous and overwrought. Attired in a
costume that proved to be a compromise between what is usually adopted
by the driver of a fast motor car and the captain of a penny steamboat,
he flitted about from point to point in the enclosure, the
personification of anxiety and restlessness.
"First we must think of the weather, Miss Doris," we caught him saying
as, disguised in the uniform of sergeants in the Royal Engineers, we
showed our tickets which entitled us to the trip in his company and
joined the mob of experts and committeemen who buzzed about him like so
many noisy and curious bees. As for our features, they were works of
art--the art of the painter and the art of the wig-maker--while our
voices had developed a military bluffness and roughness, which left our
throats lined with something like sandpaper every time we opened our
mouths.
"It all depends on the wind," he repeated, and he directed her gaze
anxiously to the sky, as though she could see at a glance whether the
wind were likely at the time of the ascent to blow forty miles an hour,
or four. "You see, I have got the inflation well advanced," he went on,
pointing to the huge, slowly-swelling monster, which lay like a gigantic
but quarter-filled balloon of fishlike shape on the greensward as men in
mechanics' clothes hastened here and there pulling a hose straight,
slackening a rope, or dragging out the folds of the silk as if they were
so many sheets of lead. "This particular machine is Number 9 of my
series, two ahead of Santos-Dumont. As you are going with us to-day,"
at which news both Casteno and I started, for we had not bargained for
that, "I crave your permission to name it the `Doris.'"
"By all means," said the girl, beaming with pleasure; "and I trust it
will have the best of good luck, and bring all connected with it fame
and fortune!" Whereat the little mob I have mentioned broke into a loud
cheer, which was taken up by the thousands who lined the ropes that
marked off the enclosures, and amongst whom the news of the machine's
informal christening passed like so much wildfire.
At this point somebody--I think it was the chairman of the fete--
appeared bearing three or four magnums of champagne, which were opened,
and the contents passed amongst the select coterie gathered around the
inventor. Thus encouraged, the gallant captain went further.
"You need not really fear the trip, Miss Napier," he said, raising the
glass with a proud gesture to his lips. "Nor you two gentlemen," he
added, nodding in the direction of Casteno and myself, who had
been pointed out to him by the gatekeeper as his two paying
fellow-passengers. "As for Mr Zouche here," now he included the
hunchback, "he is a practical aeronaut like myself. I always say, where
he would lead I would follow; but, for to-day, we have reversed things a
bit, although my opinion of his skill and knowledge remains just the
same."
"Then you think the machine is perfectly safe?" said a voice in the
crowd.
"It's as safe as going to heaven in a rocking-chair," promptly answered
the captain, like an oracle. "The fact is," he proceeded in a lower
tone, "I have had the thing well tested. In the first place, I had it
filled with air and coal gas, for the purpose of arranging the rigging,
and then I took a little trip with it myself with proper hydrogen, and
the petroleum motor hard at work, and it sailed aloft like a bird. In
form, of course, it is similar to the balloon, `La France,' experimented
with as long ago as 1834 by some French officers at Meudon--that is, it
is shaped like a plaice--the front end being larger than the rear; while
it is provided with a compensating ballonet, which is inflated with air
by means of a fan controlled from the motor. The two cars, to hold
three passengers each, like the motor, are supported by a pine
framework, and are suspended at a distance of fifteen feet under the
balloon. The propeller is an exceptionally large and strong one, and
resembles a fish's tail, a mackerel's, for I contend we find all our
true air affinities in the sea. It turns at the rate of two hundred and
fifty revolutions a minute, and the whole apparatus is strong enough to
let us take a fair amount of ballast; for the secret of my success in my
invention does not turn on lightness, where so many flying-machine
inventors have gone wrong of late, but on weight--weight to subdue the
pressure of the wind, to conquer the dead force of the air, and to
answer the power of the motor to get up anything approaching a decent
speed."
The enthusiast stopped. Some detail in the rigging as the great aerial
monster rose higher and higher suddenly required his attention; and for
the next few minutes none of us spoke at all, as the captain moved
hither and thither, directing his subordinates, and getting everything
into working order. Curiously enough, all his feverishness left him
like magic directly there was any serious work to do. For that time he
might have been quite alone in his workshop. He moved and spoke and
acted as one who had perfect confidence in himself and in the issue of
the daring experiment which he was about to undertake.