AN EXPERT OPINION
ON the night following the regrettable disaster to the _Seahorse_ I was
back again in the cheap and rather comfortable rooms I had occupied for
a couple of years or so in Keppel Street, Chelsea. It is a thoroughfare
in which nearly every house exhibits the enticing legend, “Apartments to
Let,” mostly in permanent, neatly-framed signs of black and gold.
Mrs. Richardson, my landlady, was “full” and had been for a year past,
so No. 83, where I had diggings, was a quiet, eminently respectable
house, a fitting, residence for a man of my serious calling. When,
however, I returned with the Mysterious Man in a well-worn seaman’s
suit, unkempt head, and his sword in hand instead of a cane, Mrs.
Richardson looked askance at me.
I explained that my friend had come to live with me for a few weeks, and
that I should want an extra room; when she, good soul, looked him up and
down, noticed the big cracks in his sea-boots and the slit in the sleeve
of his pea-jacket, and rather reluctantly replied that she would turn
one of the servants out and prepare the room for my friend.
Presently, however, I took her aside and explained the curious facts,
whereupon she said:—
“Lor’, doctor! Only fancy! The old gentleman may be two hundred years
old!”
“Ah!” I remarked, “his age is only one of the minor mysteries connected
with the affair. It is in order to solve them that I’ve decided that he
shall remain under my care and treatment. He’s just a little wrong in
his head, you know. Nothing at all serious.”
“He didn’t answer me when I spoke to him.”
“No, for a very good reason. He’s dumb.”
“Two hundred years old, insane, and dumb! Lawk a mercy! He is a strange
old gentleman.”
“Well, Mrs. Richardson,” I said, “you’ve been very kind to me for the
past two years, and I hope that you will do me the favour of looking
after my friend.”
“Of course I will, doctor. But what’s his name?”
“He has no name. We call him the Mysterious Man.”
“Old Mister Mystery the girls will call him, I expect. But it don’t
matter what they nickname him if he’s wrong in his head.”
I laughed and, leaving her, returned to my sitting-room, where the old
castaway was engaged in examining all the objects in the room. He had
opened the back of my small American timepiece and was watching the
movement as though he had never hitherto seen any such mechanical
contrivance.
The day had been a busy one for me. I had arranged with Seal that the
old fellow should remain with me while the mystery of the _Seahorse_ was
solved, and as regards the gold we had placed the whole of it in a big
sea chest, sealed it, and that afternoon had deposited it in the care of
the manager of the Tottenham Court Road branch of the London and
South-Western Bank, where I had a small account.
The documents, manuscripts, armour, and silver tankard which I had
secured from the ancient vessel I had carried to Keppel Street. The
skipper was, of course, busy on the first day of landing, but his
chagrin was intense that he had lost the _Seahorse_. That we had really
discovered it could, of course, be proved by those vessels that had
spoken us in the Channel, but proof of that sort was not like towing the
remarkable relic up the Thames.
His owners, it appeared, were extremely angry at his being nearly a
fortnight overdue, and that he had wasted time and fuel upon what they
declared was a worthless derelict. According to what he afterwards told
me, he had a bad half-hour with the senior partner of his firm, and very
nearly got his notice of dismissal. He pointed out to the smug,
go-to-meeting old gentleman, who was a churchwarden down at Chislehurst,
that the boilers of the _Thrush_ were in such a state that he dare not
steam at any pressure, whereupon the senior partner replied:—
“That matters nothing whatever to us, Seal. The boat’s insured, and we
should lose nothing.”
“No; but myself and the crew may lose our lives,” observed the skipper.
“If your berth does not suit you, Seal, there are many other men quite
ready to sail in your place,” was the calm rejoinder.
And after that Seal left the office as quickly as he could, in order to
give vent outside to his private opinion of the firm and their line of
ships. This he did very forcibly, in language that only a Mediterranean
skipper is in the habit of using.
Now that I was back again, enjoying the comfort of my own shabby little
sitting-room after the small, stuffy cabin of the _Thrush_, one rather
curious incident caused me to reflect.
It occurred on the morning after the loss of the _Seahorse_. The squall
had gone down. We had passed the Nore and were steaming full ahead into
the mouth of the Thames. I had been seated on the bridge with Seal and
Thorpe for a couple of hours or so when I had occasion to descend to my
cabin.
On entering I found an intruder in the person of Harding, the seaman who
had been told off as the keeper of the Mysterious Man. He did not notice
my approach, for I had on a pair of tennis shoes with rubber soles,
therefore I stood in the doorway for a few moments watching him.
He had spread open that document with the seven signatures that had so
puzzled me, and with paper and pencil seemed to be scribbling some notes
as to its purport. Strange, I thought, that a common seaman could
decipher those ill-written lines of Latin where I had so entirely
failed. So I watched and saw how, with his head bent to the open
port-hole in order to obtain a good light, he was carefully deciphering
the words contained there, and I detected by the expression on his
countenance that what he found entirely satisfied him. Upon the small
piece of paper in his palm he scribbled something now and then, and was
just slipping it into his pocket, when I asked in a hard voice:—
“Well, what are you doing here?”
He turned with a start, his face flushed in confusion, and stammered:—
“Nothing, doctor. I—I was only looking at this old parchment you got
out of Noah’s Ark.”
“You’ve been reading it,” I said. “I’ve watched you making some extracts
from it. Give me that paper.”
He made a movement to place it in his pocket, but at the same moment I
snatched the old document from his other hand and arrested his effort to
conceal the scrap of paper.
“You have no right here,” I said angrily, “and I demand that paper
whereon you have made notes of an affair that does not concern you.”
“I shall not give it you,” he responded defiantly.
“Then I shall call the captain.”
“You can do so if you wish. I shall be paid off to-day, so it doesn’t
matter.”
“Give it to me,” I cried, incensed at the fellow’s insolence, and made a
swift movement to seize his wrist. He was, however, too quick for me,
for, grasping my arm with his left hand, he screwed up the paper with
his right and dropped it through the porthole into the sea.
I saw it flutter for a moment in the air and drop into the surging water
ten yards away.
“Leave this place at once,” I commanded. “You have no right here, and
have evidently entered for some dishonest purpose. I shall inform
Captain Seal at once.”
“All right,” he answered, shrugging his shoulders as he went through the
doorway, “you needn’t get your wool off, doctor. I was doing no harm,
surely, having a look at that old scribble.”
But the truth was patent. That man, an ordinary seaman, had read and
understood what was written there. That look of supreme satisfaction on
his face was sufficient to tell me that he had gained knowledge of some
secret hidden from me.
Benjamin Harding was a seaman of exemplary conduct, it was true. He
drank little, seldom swore, and was much more careful of his personal
appearance than the rest of the grimy crew. His speech betokened a
somewhat better education than the others, and I had more than once
detected beneath his rough exterior traces of refinement. More than
once, too, I had overheard him repress a too expressive imprecation from
the mouth of one or other of his shipmates. Tall, lean, and muscular,
his age I judged to be about forty, his beard and hair sandy, and his
eyes a washed-out grey. His cheeks showed marks of smallpox, and under
his left eye was a long white scar. I returned to the bridge and told
Seal of the incident, but the pilot not yet being aboard he was too much
occupied with the navigation of the ship to be able to reprimand the man
there and then.
So I went again to my cabin and counted over my treasures, finding to my
satisfaction that none were missing.
I saw but little more of the man Harding. The skipper later on told me
that he had given the fellow a good talking too, and that he had
expressed his regret at his insolence. He had, however, only shipped for
the voyage, and would be paid off that day, therefore it was useless to
do more than remonstrate.
Nevertheless, the incident disturbed me. I had a strange, indescribable
intuition that the man Harding had obtained possession of some secret
hidden from me; that the apparently ignorant seaman was acquainted with
the Latin script and with those puzzling abbreviations which had so
utterly floored me. Before my eyes he had deciphered line after line,
reading it off almost as easily as the copies of _Lloyd’s_ and the
_Dispatch_, that found so much favour in the forecastle. Yet why had he
taken such precaution to destroy the memoranda he had written if the
facts did not relate to some secret from which he expected to receive
benefit?
Thus, while the Mysterious Man slept soundly in the room prepared for
him, I sat for a long time over my pipe trying to decipher the uneven
scribble and pondering over what might be written on that time-stained
parchment.
Next day Seal came to see me, dressed in his shore-going toggery—a neat
navy blue suit and a peaked cap a size too small for his ponderous head.
The Mysterious Man so far demonstrated that his senses were returning
that he expressed pleasure at meeting the skipper by holding out his
hand to him, a fact which gave both of us satisfaction.
“I’m busy unloading now, you know, doctor,” the captain said, in his
deep, cheery voice, “so I must leave it all to you. Act just as you
think fit. For my own part I think we ought to get them parchments
deciphered. They might tell us something interesting.”
“And the gold?”
“For the present we’ll stick to that,” was his prompt reply. “If anybody
claims it we’ll investigate their claim, as the insurance people say,
but as far as I can see the only person entitled to it is that lunatic
over there,” and he jerked his thumb in the direction of the Mysterious
Man.
He drank deeply of my whisky, and pronounced it good. We chatted for an
hour or more, and when I asked about Harding he merely answered:—
“Oh, the fellow was paid off last night. I’m quite your way of
thinking—there was some mystery about that chap. I’ve made inquiries
and find that he hadn’t been many voyages before, because he betrayed
ignorance of many common terms at sea, and gave himself away in lots of
details.”
“He was an educated man,” I remarked.
“Yes, I believe he was. He’s left one or two books about the forecastle
which are not the sort that sailors read.”
“What class of books?” I inquired.
“Oh, one was a Latin dictionary, another an odd volume of _Chambers’
Encyclopædia_, and a third book called _Old English Chronicles_,
whatever they are.”
The latter was certainly not a work in which a sailor would be
interested. I had known it at college, the mediaeval chronicles of
Geoffrey of Monmouth and other monks, a volume of the driest and most
uninteresting kind, save to an antiquarian student. Yes, I felt more
convinced than ever that Benjamin Harding was not what he had pretended
to be.
The Mysterious Man had taken to smoking. I had purchased for him a
shilling briar at a tobacconist’s in King’s Road, and while we talked he
sat puffing at it and looking aimlessly down on the street. The pity of
it all was that the poor old fellow was dumb. Even though a lunatic he
might, if he could have spoken, have given us some clue to his past. But
up to the present we were just as ignorant as to who or what he was as
in that first moment when we had discovered him in the dark cabin of
that death-ship.
To his old rusty sword he clung, as though it were a mascot. Even now he
wore it suspended from his waist by a piece of cord that had come from
off my trunk, and at night it reposed with him in his room. Once it had
no doubt been the sharp, ready weapon of some swaggering elegant, but it
was now blunt, rusted, and scabbardless, only its maker’s name and the
remarkable temper of its blade showed what it once had been.
A week later I set about to discover some one who could decipher the
parchments and the book containing the hidden secret of Bartholomew da
Schorno, for therein I anticipated I should discover some clue to the
mystery of the _Seahorse_. In the Manuscript Department of the British
Museum I obtained the address of a certain Charles Staffurth, who, I was
told, was an expert upon the court and commercial hands of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
So to his address in the Clapham Park Road, I carried my precious book
and documents, and sought an interview. A prim old gentleman in
steel-rimmed spectacles received me in a back room fitted as a study,
and after the first half dozen words I recognized that he was a scholar.
I told the story of my discovery, to which he listened with breathless
interest, and when I undid the brown paper parcel and revealed the
parchments his eyes fairly danced with expectation and delight. He was
an enthusiast.
He bent over them, handling them with a reverence and fondness which
showed him to be a true palaeographist. He ran quickly through the pages
of the vellum book and remarked:—
“Ah! they are not numbered, I see. Sixteenth century hand of Central
Italy!”
He recognized it at once, without looking for dates.
“Really doctor—Doctor Pickering,” he exclaimed, glancing at my card,
“this is a most remarkable story. I’m sure it will give me the greatest
pleasure to look through these papers, and I will do so if you will
leave them with me for a day or two. The book, you see, is voluminous,
and will require a good deal of deciphering. They have many such at the
Museum, so I have experience of the difficulties in reading them. Let’s
see, to-day is Tuesday. Will you call on Thursday afternoon? By that
time I hope to have read the greater portion of what is contained here.
If, however, I discover anything of very great importance I will
telegraph to you.”
And so it was arranged. I remained chatting with him for nearly half an
hour, and then returned to my strangely silent companion, the Mysterious
Man.
The old expert had evidently been much impressed by my story, and had
commenced to decipher the documents as soon as I took leave of him, for
at eleven o’clock next morning I received a telegram from him, worded as
follows:—
“Please call here at once. Most important discovery.—Staffurth.”