I took a glass in which the doctor had placed some drug, giving me
instructions to administer it to him, and I forced a few drops of it
between his teeth.
The evening was warm and oppressive. Twilight was just falling, and
through the open window came the low hum of the motor traffic a few
hundred yards away in the Strand. The hotel in which we were was a
quiet, unostentatious little place in Surrey Street, to which, on
leaving the ship two days before, he had persuaded me to accompany him.
Some one had recommended him to go there, he said, in preference to the
Savoy or Carlton.
On board the _Miltiades_, which he had joined at Naples, he had
displayed no outward sign of wealth--or that he possessed money to burn.
Indeed, his dress was mean and shabby, and by the wardrobe contained in
his two ragged bags, one would certainly never put him down as a man of
means. It is generally dangerous, however, to judge a man by his
clothes.
The old clock of St Clement Danes struck eight, and a few moments later
there came a low tap at the door, and the doctor again reappeared, and
bent over his patient anxiously.
He gave him a few more drops of the medicine, but the old man made an
impatient gesture, and refused to swallow more.
What request, I wondered, was contained in that crumpled and rather
bulky letter which I held in my breast-pocket?
Outside, in the corridor, the doctor told me that the end was quite
near, and suggested that I should obtain something from him concerning
his friends.
"Mr Arnold has already told me," I replied. "He possesses no friends."
And at that the doctor shrugged his shoulders and descended the stairs.
Back at the bedside in the fast-fading light of the hot day of early
June, I took the old man's bony hand in silent farewell.
He turned his eyes upon me, gazing at me with a strange intense look, as
though trying to read my very soul.
He endeavoured to speak, but though I bent my ear to his mouth, I could
catch no words. His thin nervous hands clenched themselves, his grey
beard moved, and he struggled violently to communicate with me, but
without avail. Then with his right hand, he made a sign that he wished
to write.
Instantly I obtained a pen and scrap of paper which I placed before him.
For a long time his hand trembled, so that he could make no intelligible
writing. At last, however, he managed slowly, and with infinite
difficulty, to trace very unevenly the words--
"_Remember the name Harford--be friendly, but beware of him and the
Hand_."
He watched my face eagerly as I read.
Of a sudden, the light went out of his grey countenance, the pen dropped
from his thin, nerveless fingers, a scarlet spot fell upon the paper,
and a deep, long-drawn sigh escaped his ashen lips.
Then a great stillness fell--a great silence broken only by the low roar
of the London traffic.
And I knew that Melvill Arnold, the man of mystery, was dead.