REQUIRES EXPLANATION
THE pretty Miss Bristowe was certainly an enigma.
In that dingy consulting-room in the Walworth Road I often sat during
the days that followed, musing over that curious and fruitless journey.
I felt rather piqued than disappointed, for to put it bluntly I had been
fooled, and left to pay nearly a sovereign to a cabman.
Her parting words to me: “Perhaps one day you will learn the real reason
of this decision,” seemed ominous ones, while her agitation was strange
in such circumstances. She parted from me so hastily that it seemed
almost as though she held me in fear. But why? I am sure I acted towards
her with all the gallantry in my rather rough nature. No; the more I
thought over it the more remarkable seemed the incident.
But a few days later I discovered yet a stranger circumstance. In order
to find out something regarding my pretty companion on that long cab
drive, I wrote to Dr. Whitworth at Bude, telling him that she had
called, and inquiring the nature of her brother’s complaint. To this I
received a brief note saying that he had never heard of “Miss Bristowe”
in his life.
Then the truth was rudely forced upon me that the woman who had held me
fascinated by her beauty was actually an impostor.
What, however, could have been her object in inducing me to accompany
her upon such a vain errand? Doctors see some queer things and meet with
strange adventures in the course of their practice, but surely her
motive in fooling me was utterly unintelligible.
Through the remaining fortnight I continued to treat the crowd of poor
suffering humanity that seemed to greet me ever in the waiting-room; for
Whitworth was a kindly man, hence all the poor came to him. Night after
night I sat listening to the ills of costermongers and their wives,
labourers, factory hands, cabmen, tram-men, and all that hard-working
class that makes up lower London “over the water.” Sometimes they told
me their symptoms with quaint directness, using scientific terms wrongly
or atrociously pronounced—the result of School Board education in
elementary physiology, I suppose. But, as in every neighbourhood of that
class, drink was accountable for, or aggravated, at least two-thirds of
the cases that I saw. Surely it would open the eyes of the social
reformer or the temperance advocate if he spent one evening in the
consulting-room of a dispensary in lower London.
At last Whitworth returned, fresh and bronzed, from the Cornish coast,
and as I sat handing back to him the keys of the place and receiving a
cheque for my services, I mentioned the subject of Miss Bristowe.
“Ah!” he laughed, “what did you mean by that letter? I don’t know any
such person, nor even anyone who lives at Blackheath.”
“And she said that you had attended her brother for nearly two years for
some internal ailment. She came here one night to fetch you. I told her
you were away, and after some persuasion she allowed me to accompany
her. Then, when we got to Blackheath, she suddenly changed her mind and
sent me back.”
“You never saw the brother?”
“Never went to the house. She wouldn’t let me.”
“But you yourself suggested going with her, you say?”
“Yes,” I replied, “I did.”
“Pretty?”
“Very much so.”
“And you were struck with her, eh?” he laughed, for he was a prosaic
married man with a couple of children.
“Just a trifle,” I admitted.
“Well,” he said, “the girl possibly saw that you were gone on her, so
she had a lark with you. You paid her cab home, and she had no
objection.”
“But her story was so plausible.”
“Every woman can be plausible when she pleases,” he said. “But are you
sure she asked for me?”
“Quite certain. She first inquired for you, telling me that you were an
old friend.”
He laughed heartily at what he termed the woman’s audacity; then, after
some further discussion of the subject, we dropped it as one of those
little mysteries of life that are beyond solution.
On relinquishing my position at the dispensary I wandered heedlessly
hither and thither in London. The weather was still hot, more oppressive
even than I had felt it at Naples or at Leghorn, and all seemed dull
because my friends were away in the country or at the seaside. Through
the _Lancet_ I was offered a three months’ engagement as assistant to a
doctor in Northumberland, but I declined it, as it was too far from
London. Somehow I felt it necessary, for the elucidation of the mystery
of the _Seahorse_, to remain in town—why I cannot tell.
One day in response to a note, I called upon Macfarlane, the specialist
in lunacy, and found him seated in his consulting-room, a fine apartment
furnished in old oak, of which he was an ardent collector, and
surrounded by a number of fine old clocks of various periods.
“Well, Pickering,” he exclaimed cheerily, rising to greet me, “I’ve got
some news for you about your—what shall we call him—foundling, eh?”
“That’s a good description,” I laughed. “Captain Seal used to call him
‘Old Mister Mystery.’ But what is the news?”
“Well, he’s taken a decided turn for the better. I see him every day,
and although at first he was bitterly hostile towards me because I
wouldn’t allow him to wear his sword, he has now become quite mild and
tractable. And what’s more, he’s taken to writing, which is one of the
best signs of impending recovery that we could have. Here are some of
his efforts,” he added, taking from a drawer a quantity of scraps of
paper, from half-sheets of foolscap to bits torn from newspapers, and
placing them before me. “I don’t suppose you can make anything more out
of them than I can. His brain is clearing, but is not yet rightly
balanced. Now and then his ideas run in the direction of a design made
up of creepy-looking demons and imps. There’s no doubt about it, that
whoever he is, he’s a man of some talent. Did you see what was in the
_Telegraph_ the other day?”
“I saw a distorted story about the _Seahorse_,” I answered.
“But on the following day there was a short statement regarding this
nameless patient of ours. They sent a reporter to me to obtain further
details, but I did not consider myself justified in giving them. The
less the public knows about the affair the better—that’s my opinion.”
“Certainly,” I said. “I’m very glad you did not allow yourself to be
interviewed.”
Then I turned myself to the uneven scribble, mostly in pencil, which had
been executed by the lunatic. My hopes were quickly dashed, for I found
it poor stuff. Sometimes it appeared as though he wished to write a
letter, for there were the preliminary words, “Dear sister,” “Dear
Harry,” and “My dear sir.” Once he started to write a nautical song,
whether of his own composition or not I am unaware. The lines, written
quite distinctly, although in a shaky old-fashioned hand, were:—
There’s nothing like rum on a windy night,
Sing hey, my lads, sing hey!
When the rigging howls and you’re battened tight,
Yo ho! my lads, Yo ho!
On a dirty piece of newspaper was written: “Jimmy Jobson, 1st mate, went
to Davy Jones’s locker May 16.” Another bore the statement: “Pugfaced
Willie ought to have been a tub-thumper instead of sailing under the
black flag. That is Andy Anderson’s opinion.”
The last piece I examined was half a sheet of note-paper bearing the
heading, “High Elms,” the paper given to patients for their
correspondence. It was covered with scribble, just as a child scribbles
before it can write, but in a small blank space near the bottom were the
strange words: “Beware of Black Bennett! He means mischief!”
The latter had been written as a warning, but to whom addressed it was
impossible to tell.
“All are, of course, the wanderings of the patient’s mind,” remarked
Macfarlane. “Those names may possibly help us to establish his
identity.”
“Have you determined his age?”
“Not more than seventy, if as much,” was the reply. “But I feel certain
that he’ll recover, if not at once, within, say, a year. This writing is
a very hopeful sign. Of course, I can’t say that he’ll recover his
speech too—probably he won’t. But he can write, and by that means tell
us something of how he came on board the ancient ship.”
I remained with the great specialist for half an hour longer, then
taking possession of the curious evidence of the old fellow’s returning
sanity I went back to Chelsea.
Time after time I examined that strange warning regarding “Black
Bennett.” Who could he be?
There was one remark about the black flag, which meant piracy. Possibly,
then, this man Bennett had been a pirate at some time or other.
Anyhow, I was greatly gratified to think that ere long the Mysterious
Man might be able to give us an intelligible account of himself, and
although the meaning of the warning regarding “Black Bennett” was an
enigma, I quickly forgot all about it.
The one point upon which all my energies were concentrated was the
recovery of that cryptic document which the drunken old labourer at
Rockingham had disposed of. I called at all the chief dealers in
manuscripts in London and made inquiry if anything like the parchment I
described had been offered for sale, but was informed that
sixteenth-century parchments of that character were too common to be of
sufficient value for them to consider. Codexes or charters of any
century down to the fifteenth would always be looked at, but a notarial
deed of so late a date as the end of the sixteenth century was beneath
the notice of any of the dealers.
Early one morning I received a telegram from Mr. Staffurth, and, in
response, went to Clapham Park Road in hot haste.
I found, to my surprise, a strange, black-bearded man in his study, and
the old gentleman was greatly excited and alarmed. A pane of glass in
the window was, I noticed, missing, and it was accounted for by his
breathless statement that during the night his house had been broken
into by burglars.
The black-bearded man, who was a detective, chimed in, saying:—
“It seems, sir, as though they were after some of the valuable books the
gentleman has. They didn’t go further into the house than this room,
although the door was unlocked.”
“You see what they’ve done, doctor—cut out a pane of glass, opened the
window, forced the shutters, and got in. Look at the place! They’ve
turned everything topsy-turvy!”
They certainly had, for papers and books were strewn all over the floor.
“Have you missed anything?” I asked quickly.
“One thing only. It is, I regret to say, that parchment deed of yours
with the seven signatures. They’ve taken nothing else but that, although
here, as you see, is an illuminated _Horæ_ worth at least £300, and the
twelfth-century St. Bernardus that Quaritch bid £200 for at Sotheby’s
last week.”
“They were expert thieves,” the detective remarked, “and were evidently
in search of something which they knew the gentleman had in his
possession.”
“But the book—the book containing the cipher!” I cried, dismayed, the
truth dawning upon me that the burglars had been in search of those
documents of mine.
“Fortunately, they were unable to secure it,” was old Mr. Staffurth’s
reply. “I had locked it in the safe here as a precaution against its
destruction by fire.” And he indicated the good-sized safe that stood in
the opposite corner of the room. “You see upon it marks of their
desperate efforts to open it, but with all their drills, chisels,
wedges, and such-like things they were not successful. The secret of the
cipher is still ours.”
“Then they were hired burglars?” I said.
“That seems most probable, sir,” replied the detective. “Such a thing is
not by any means unusual. They were professionals at the game, whoever
they were.”