Has it never struck you that this twentieth century of ours is the
essential age of the very young girl?
Supreme to-day reigns the young woman between the age of--well say from
sixteen to twenty--who dresses her hair with a parting and a pigtail,
wears short skirts, displays a neat ankle, and persists in remaining in
her teens. Grumpy old fossils tell us that this species is a product of
an advanced state of civilisation which insists that everything must be
new, from a dish of _peches a la Melba_ to the tint of that eternal
hoarding in front of Buckingham Palace. One can only suppose that they
are correct. Ours is a go-ahead age which scoffs at the horse, and
pokes fun at the South-Eastern Railway, which forsakes Saturday concerts
for football, yet delights in talking-machines.
Is it any wonder therefore that the statuesque beauty and the skittish
matron of a year ago no longer finds herself in demand for
supper-parties, Sandown or Henley? No, she must nowadays stand aside,
and watch the reign of her little sister who dashes off from the theatre
to the Savoy in a motor-brougham still wearing her ribbon bow on her
pigtail, much as she did in the schoolroom.
The young of certain species of wild fowl are termed “flappers,” and
some irreverent and irascible old gentleman has applied that term to the
go-ahead young miss of to-day. Though most women over twenty-one may
attempt to disguise the fact, it is plain that the young girl just
escaped from the schoolroom now reigns supreme. Her dynasty is at its
zenith. She is the ruling factor of London life. Peers of the realm,
foreign potentates, hard-bitten soldiers from the East, magnates from
Park Lane all hurry to her beck and call. The girl in the pigtail and
short skirt rides over them all roughshod. And what is the result of
all this adulation upon the dimple-faced little girl herself? In the
majority of cases, I fear it results in making her a stuck-up, _blase_
and conceited little prig, for she nowadays takes upon herself a glory
and exalted position to which she is entirely unsuited, but which she
has been taught to consider hers by right.
Gwen Griffin was a perfect type of the very young girl, courted, petted
and flattered by all the men of her acquaintance. Having no mother to
forbid her, she was fond of going motor-rides and fond of flirtation,
but through it all she had, fortunately, never developed any of those
objectionable traits so common in girls of her age. She had managed to
remain quite simple, sweet and unaffected through it all, and six months
before, when she had found the man she could honestly love, she had cut
her male friends and entered upon life with all seriousness.
A week had gone by, and Frank had called every evening. Once he had
taken her to dine at the Carlton, and on to the theatre afterwards, for
now they had, by tacit though unspoken consent, agreed that all bygones
should be bygones.
Often he felt himself wondering what had been the real cause of her
mysterious absence from home, yet when such suspicions arose within him,
he quickly put them aside. How could he possibly doubt her love?
The Doctor was back again at Horsford, leading the same rural uneventful
life as before, but daily studying everything that had any possible
bearing upon the assertion of Professor Holmboe.
Frank came down to visit Lady Gavin one day, and as a matter of course
was very soon seated with the ugly little man in his cottage home.
Diamond, over a cigar, was relating the result of his most recent
studies, and lamenting that they were still as far from obtaining a
knowledge of the actual cipher as ever.
“Yes,” murmured the young man with a sigh, “I’m much afraid that old
Haupt will get ahead of us--even if he has not already done so. How is
it that you can’t get your friend Mullet to assist us further?”
“He has left London, I believe. He disappeared quite suddenly from his
rooms, and curiously enough, has sent me no word.”
“You hinted once that he’s a ‘crook.’ If so, he may have fled on
account of awkward police inquiries--eh?”
“Most likely. Yet it’s strange that he hasn’t sent me news of his
whereabouts.”
“Not at all, my dear Doctor,” responded the other. “If a man is in
hiding, it isn’t likely that he’s going to give away his place of
concealment, is it?”
“But he trusts me--trusts me implicitly,” declared Diamond.
“That may be so. But he doesn’t trust other persons into whose hands
his letter might possibly fall. The police have a nasty habit of
watching the correspondence of the friend of the man wanted, you know.”
“Perhaps you’re right, Mr Farquhar,” said the Doctor, with a heavy
expression upon his broad brow. “The more I study the problem of the
treasure of Israel, the more bewildered I become,” he went on. “Now as
regards the original of the Old Testament, it is not all written in
Hebrew, I find. Certain parts are in Aramaic, often erroneously called
Chaldee. [From Daniel, ii, 4, to vii, 28; Ezra iv, 8, to vi, 18; vii,
11 to 26; and Jeremiah x and xi.] Again, we have a difficulty to face
which even Professor Griffin had never yet mentioned to me. It is this.
On the very lowest estimate, the Old Testament must represent a
literary activity of fully a thousand years, and therefore it is but
reasonable to suppose that the language of the earlier works would be
considerably different from that of the later; while, on other grounds,
the possible existence of local dialects might be expected to show
itself in diversity of diction among the various books. But, curiously
enough--though I am handicapped by not being acquainted with the Hebrew
tongue--all the authorities I have consulted agree that neither of those
surmises find much verification in our extant Hebrew text.”
“I’ve always understood that,” Frank remarked. “Yes. I’ve been reading
deeply, Mr Farquhar. Curiously enough the most ancient documents and
the youngest are remarkably similar in the general cast of their
language, and certainly show nothing corresponding in the difference
between Homer and Plato, or Chaucer and Shakespeare. Though we know
that the Ephraimites could not give the proper (Gileadite) sound of the
letter _shin_ in _Shibboleth_, [Judges, xii 8] yet all attempts to
distinguish dialects in our extant books have failed.”
“I think,” said Farquhar, “that such remarkable uniformity, while
testifying to the comparative stability of the language, is in part to
be explained by the hypothesis of a continuous process of revision and
perhaps modernising of the documents, which may have gone on until well
into our era.”
“Exactly,” remarked the Doctor, “yet in spite of this levelling tendency
there appear to remain certain diversities, particularly in the
vocabulary, which have not been eliminated, and these serve to
distinguish two great periods in the history of the language, sometimes
called the gold and silver ages, respectively, roughly separated by the
return from the exile. To the former belong, without doubt, the older
strata in the Hexateuch, and the greater prophets; to the latter, almost
as indubitably, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Ecclesiastes and Daniel, all
of which use a considerable mixture of Aramaic of Persian words. Then,
the great question for us is whether the ancient text of Ezekiel
preserved in St. Petersburg is an original, or a modernised version. If
the latter, much of the cipher, perhaps all, must have been destroyed!”
“I quite follow your argument, my dear Diamond,” Farquhar replied, “but
has not Holmboe established to his own satisfaction that the cipher
still exists in the manuscript in question? He has, therefore, proved
it to be an exact copy of the original--if not the original itself.”
“Experts all agree that it cannot be the original,” declared the Doctor.
“It is quite true that Holmboe alleges that the cipher exists, and
gives quotations from it. Yet now that I have been reading deeply I
have become a trifle sceptical. I’m anxious for Griffin to discover the
key number, and prove it for himself. Personally, I entertain some
doubt about the present text of Ezekiel being the actual text of the
prophet.”
“That can only be proved by the test of the cipher,” was Farquhar’s
reply. “If you accept any part of the dead man’s declaration, you must
surely accept the whole.”
“I have all along accepted the whole--just as Griffin accepts it.”
“Then why entertain any doubt in this direction? The Professor has
never mentioned it, which shows us that there is no need why we should
query it.”
“Yes, but may not the fact of the text having been modernised be the
reason of Griffin’s non-success in discovering the key number?”
“Holmboe discovered it,” remarked the other, “therefore, I see no reason
why Griffin--with Holmboe’s statement before him and in addition that
scrap of manuscript which evidently relates to the key--should not be
equally successful.”
“Ah!” sighed the ugly little man whose fidgety movements showed his
increasing anxiety, “if we could but know what the old German was
doing--or in what direction he is working.”
“He’s not back at his own home. I received a telegram from our Leipzig
correspondent only yesterday. His whereabouts is just as mysterious as
that of your friend Mullet. By the way--would he never tell you who
were the principals in this opposition to us?”
“No, he has always steadily refused.”
“Some shady characters, perhaps--men whom he is compelled to shield,
eh?”
“I think so,” answered the Doctor. “I wanted him to stand in with us,
but he’s a strange fellow, for though he promised to help me, he refused
to participate in any part of the profit.”
“Has some compunction in betraying his friends, evidently,” laughed
Frank. “I’m very anxious to meet him. He promised to call on Griffin,
but has never done so.”
“He’s been put on his guard, and cleared out, that’s my candid opinion.
‘Red Mullet’ is a splendid fellow, but a very slippery customer, as the
police know too well. He’s probably half-way across the world by this
time. He’s a very rapid traveller. I’ve sometimes had letters from him
from a dozen different cities in as many days.”
“To move rapidly is always incumbent upon the adventurer, if he is to be
successful in eluding awkward inquiry. He never writes to the child, I
suppose?” Frank asked, as Aggie at that moment passed the window.
“Oh, yes, very often. But he always encloses her letter to me. He
never gives his address to her, for fear, I suppose, that it should fall
into other hands. I wired to his rooms in Paris a week ago, but, as
yet, have received no response. His rooms in London are closed. I was
up there on Thursday. Why he keeps them on when he’s away for years at
a time, I can never understand.”
“Probably sub-lets them, as so many fellows do,” Farquhar suggested,
“yet it’s unfortunate we can’t get into touch with him.”
“Miss Griffin is acquainted with him--I wonder if she knows his
whereabouts?” remarked Diamond quite innocently.
“She knows him!” Frank echoed in surprise. “Are you quite sure of
that?”
“Quite. She told me so.”
“How could she know a man who is admittedly an outsider?” asked Frank.
“My dear Mr Farquhar,” he laughed, “your modern girl makes many
undesirable acquaintances, especially a pretty go-ahead girl of Miss
Griffin’s type.”
Frank bit his lip. This friendship of Gwen’s with the man Mullet
annoyed him. What could she possibly know of such a man? He resolved
to speak to her about it, and make inquiry into the circumstances of
their acquaintance.
He must warn her to have nothing to do with a man of such evil
reputation, he thought. Little did he dream that this very man whom the
world denounced as an outsider had stood the girl’s best and most
devoted friend.
He walked back along the village street to the Manor, and dressed for
dinner, his mind full of dark forebodings.
What would be the end? What could it be, except triumph for those
enemies, the very names of whom were, with such tantalising persistency,
withheld.
Half an hour after he had left the Doctor’s cottage the village
telegraph-boy handed Aggie a message which she at once carried to her
foster-father.
He tore it open, started, read it through several times, and then placed
it carefully in the flames.
Then he hurriedly put on his boots, overcoat and hat, and went forth,
explaining to his wife that he was suddenly called on urgent business to
London.
That evening, just before ten o’clock, a short dark figure could have
been seen slinking along by the railings of Berkeley Square, indistinct
in the night mist, which, with the dusk, had settled over London.
The man, though he moved constantly up and down to keep himself warm,
kept an alert and watchful eye upon the big sombre-looking mansion
opposite--the residence, as almost any passer-by would have told the
stranger, of Sir Felix Challas, the anti-Semitic philanthropist.
Over the semicircular fanlight a light burned brightly, but the inner
shutters of the ground floor rooms were closed, while the drawing-room
above was lighted.
Time after time the silent watcher passed and repassed the house, taking
in every detail with apparent curiosity, yet ever anxious and ever
expectant.
The constable standing at the corner of Hill Street eyed the dwarfed man
with some suspicion, but on winter nights the London streets, even in
the West End, abound with homeless loafers.
The Doctor, wearing a shabby overcoat several sizes too large for him
and a felt hat much battered and the worse for wear, watched vigilantly
and with much patience.
He saw a taxi-cab drive up before Sir Felix’s and a rather tall,
good-looking man in opera hat and fur-lined coat descend and enter the
house. The cab waited and ten minutes later the visitor--Jim Jannaway
it was--was bowed out by the grave-faced old butler, and giving the man
directions, was whirled away into Mount Street, out of sight.
“I suppose that’s the fellow!” murmured the ugly little man beneath his
breath, as he stood back in the darkness against the railings opposite.
Hardly had the words escaped his lips when a hansom came from the
direction of Berkeley Street, and pulling up, an old, rather feeble
white-bearded man got out, paid the driver, and ascending the steps rang
the bell.
He was admitted without question, and the door was closed behind him.
“Erich Haupt, without a doubt,” remarked the Doctor aloud. “Why has he
returned to London? Has he made a further discovery, I wonder. The
description of him is exact.”
For half an hour he waited, wondering what was happening within that
great mansion.
Then Jim Jannaway suddenly returned, dismissed his “taxi,” and was
admitted. All that coming and going showed that something was in the
wind.
“Red Mullet” had given him due warning from his hiding-place. His
telegram had been despatched from Meopham, which he had discovered was a
pleasant Kentish village, not far from Gravesend. He was evidently in
concealment there.
Just before eleven o’clock another hansom turning out of Hill Street in
the mist, pulled up before the house, and he watched a dark figure
alight from it.
Notwithstanding the dim light he recognised the visitor in an instant.
The figure was that of a tall, dark-eyed girl.
“Good Heavens!” he gasped, staring across the road, rigid. “Mullet was
right! He was not mistaken after all! By Jove--then I know the truth!
We are betrayed into the hands of our enemy!”
And as the Doctor stood there he was entirely unaware that he, in turn,
was being watched from the opposite pavement--and by a woman!