THEREBY HANGS A TALE.
"You believe now, I hope," said Mr. Fortescue, as we walked homeward.
"Believe what, sir?"
"That I have relentless enemies who seek my life. When I first told you of
this you did not believe me. You thought I was the victim of an
hallucination, else had I been more frank with you."
"I am really very sorry."
"Don't protest! I cannot blame you. It is hard for people who have led
uneventful lives and seen little of the seamy side of human nature to
believe that under the veneer of civilization and the mask of convention,
hatreds are still as fierce, men still as revengeful as ever they were in
olden times.... I hope I did not make a mistake in sparing young
Griscelli's life."
"Sparing his life! How?"
"He sought my life, and I had a perfect right to take his."
"That is not a very Christian sentiment, Mr. Fortescue."
"I did not say it was. Do you always repay good for evil and turn your
check to the smiter, Mr. Bacon?"
"If you put it in that way, I fear I don't."
"Do you know anybody who does?"
After a moment's reflection I was again compelled to answer in the
negative. I could not call to mind a single individual of my acquaintance
who acted on the principle of returning good for evil.
"Well, then, if I am no better than other people, I am no worse. Yet,
after all, I think I did well to let him go. Had I killed the brigand,
there would have been a coroner's inquest, and questions asked which might
have been troublesome to answer, and he has brothers and cousins. If I
could destroy the entire brood! Did you see the look he gave me as he went
away? It meant murder. We have not seen the last of Giuseppe Griscelli,
Mr. Bacon."
"I am afraid we have not. I never saw such an expression of intense hatred
in my life! Has he cause for it?"
"I dare say he thinks so. I killed his father and his grand-father."
This, uttered as indifferently as if it were a question of killing hares
and foxes, was more than I could stand. I am not strait-laced, but I draw
the line at murder.
"You did what?" I exclaimed, as, horror-struck and indignant, I stopped in
the path and looked him full in the face.
I thought I had never seen him so Mephistopheles-like. A sinister smile
parted his lips, showing his small white teeth gleaming under his gray
mustache, and he regarded me with a look of cynical amusement, in which
there was perhaps a slight touch of contempt.
"You are a young man, Mr. Bacon," he observed, gently, "and, like most
young men, and a great many old men, you make false deductions. Killing is
not always murder. If it were, we should consign our conquerors to
everlasting infamy, instead of crowning them with laurels and erecting
statues to their memory. I am no murderer, Mr. Bacon. At the same time I
do not cherish illusions. Unpremeditated murder is by no means the worst
of crimes. Taking a life is only anticipating the inevitable; and of all
murderers, Nature is the greatest and the cruellest. I have--if I could
only tell you--make you see what I have seen--Even now, O God! though half
a century has run its course--"
Here Mr. Fortescue's voice failed him; he turned deadly pale, and his
countenance took an expression of the keenest anguish. But the signs of
emotion passed away as quickly as they had appeared. Another moment and he
had fully regained his composure, and he added, in his usual
self-possessed manner:
"All this must seem very strange to you, Mr. Bacon. I suppose you consider
me somewhat of a mystery."
"Not somewhat, but very much."
Mr. Fortescue smiled (he never laughed) and reflected a moment.
"I am thinking," he said, "how strangely things come about, and, so to
speak, hang together. The greatest of all mysteries is fate. If that horse
had not run away with you, these rascals would almost certainly have made
away with me; and the incident of to-day is one of the consequences of
that which I mentioned at our first interview."
"When we had that good run from Latton. I remember it very well. You said
you had been hunted yourself."
"Yes."
"How was it, Mr. Fortescue?"
"Ah! Thereby hangs a tale."
"Tell it me, Mr. Fortescue," I said, eagerly.
"And a very long tale."
"So much the better; it is sure to be interesting."
"Ah, yes, I dare say you would find it interesting. My life has been
stirring and stormy enough, in all conscience--except for the ten years I
spent in heaven," said Mr. Fortescue, in a voice and with a look of
intense sadness.
"Ten years in heaven!" I exclaimed, as much astonished as I had just been
horrified. Was the man mad, after all, or did he speak in paradoxes? "Ten
years in heaven!"
Mr. Fortescue smiled again, and then it occurred to me that his ten years
of heaven might have some connection with the veiled portrait and the
shrine in his room up-stairs.
"You take me too literally," he said. "I spoke metaphorically. I did not
mean that, like Swedenborg and Mohammed, I have made excursions to
Paradise. I merely meant that I once spent ten years of such serene
happiness as it seldom falls to the lot of man to enjoy. But to return to
our subject. You would like to know more of my past; but as it would not
be satisfactory to tell you an incomplete history, and to tell you
all--Yet why not? I have done nothing that I am ashamed of; and it is well
you should know something of the man whose life you have saved once, and
may possibly save again. You are trustworthy, straightforward, and
vigilant, and albeit you are not overburdened with intelligence--"
Here Mr. Fortescue paused, as if to reflect; and, though the observation
was not very flattering--hardly civil, indeed--I was so anxious to hear
this story that I took it in good part, and waited patiently for his
decision.
"To relate it _viva voce_" he went on, thoughtfully, "would be troublesome
to both of us."
"I am sure I should find it anything but troublesome."
"Well, I should. It would take too much time, and I hate travelling over
old ground. But that is a difficulty which I think we can get over. For
many years I have made a record of the principal events of my life, in the
form of a personal narrative; and though I have sometimes let it run
behind for a while, I have always written it up."
"That is exactly the thing. As you say, telling a long story is
troublesome. I can read it."
"I am afraid not. It is written in a sort of stenographic cipher of my own
invention."
"That is very awkward," I said, despondently. "I know no more of shorthand
than of Sanskrit, and though I once tried to make out a cipher, the only
tangible result was a splitting headache."
"With the key, which I will give you, a little instruction and practice,
you should have no difficulty in making out my cipher. It will be an
exercise for your intelligence"--smiling. "Will you try?"
"My very best."
"And now for the conditions. In the first place, you must, in stenographic
phrase, 'extend' my notes, write out the narrative in a legible hand and
good English. If there be any blanks, I will fill them up; if you require
explanations, I will give them. Do you agree?"
"I agree."
"The second condition is that you neither make use of the narrative for
any purpose of your own, nor disclose the whole or any part of it to
anybody until and unless I give you leave. What say you?"
"I say yes."
"The third and last condition is, that you engage to stay with me in your
present capacity until it pleases me to give you your _congé_. Again what
say you?"
This was rather a "big order," and very one-sided. It bound me to remain
with Mr. Fortescue for an indefinite period, yet left him at liberty to
dismiss me at a moment's notice; and if he went on living, I might have to
stay at Kingscote till I was old and gray. All the same, the position was
a good one. I had four hundred a year (the price at which I had modestly
appraised my services), free quarters, a pleasant life, and lots of
hunting--all I could wish for, in fact; and what can a man have more? So
again I said, "Yes."
"We are agreed in all points, then. If you will come into my room "--we
were by this time arrived at the house--"you shall have your first lesson
in cryptography."
I assented with eagerness, for I was burning to begin, and, from what Mr.
Fortescue had said, I did not anticipate any great difficulty in making
out the cipher.
But when he produced a specimen page of his manuscript, my confidence,
like Bob Acre's courage, oozed out at my finger-ends, or rather, all over
me, for I broke out into a cold sweat.
The first few lines resembled a confused array of algebraic formula. (I
detest algebra.) Then came several lines that seemed to have been made by
the crawlings of tipsy flies with inky legs, followed by half a dozen or
so that looked like the ravings of a lunatic done into Welsh, while the
remainder consisted of Roman numerals and ordinary figures mixed up,
higgledy-piggledy.
"This is nothing less than appalling," I almost groaned. "It will take me
longer to learn than two or three languages."
"Oh, no! When you have got the clew, and learned the signs, you will read
the cipher with ease."
"Very likely; but when will that be?"
"Soon. The system is not nearly so complicated as it looks, and the
language being English--"
"English! It looks like a mixture of ancient Mexican and modern Chinese."
"The language being English, nothing could be easier for a man of ordinary
intelligence. If I had expected that my manuscript would fall into the
hands of a cryptographist, I should have contrived something much more
complicated and written it in several languages; and you have the key
ready to your hand. Come, let us begin."
After half an hour's instruction I began to see daylight, and to feel that
with patience and practice I should be able to write out the story in
legible English. The little I had read with Mr. Fortescue made me keen to
know more; but as the cryptographic narrative did not begin at the
beginning, he proposed that I should write this, as also any other missing
parts, to his dictation.
"Who knows that you may not make a book of it?" he said.
"Do you think I am intelligent enough?" I asked, resentfully; for his
uncomplimentary references to my mental capacity were still rankling in my
mind.
"I should hope so. Everybody writes in these days. Don't worry yourself on
that score, my dear Mr. Bacon. Even though you may write a book, nobody
will accuse you of being exceptionally intelligent."
"But I cannot make a book of your narrative without your leave," I
observed, with a painful sense of having gained nothing by my motion.
"And that leave may be sooner or later forthcoming, on conditions."
As the reader will find in the sequel, the leave has been given and the
conditions have been fulfilled, and Mr. Fortescue's personal
narrative--partly taken down from his own dictation, but for the most part
extended from his manuscript--begins with the following chapter.