Max Pemberton - Murder Mysteries Boxed-Set - 40+ Books in One Edition

Our talk at the table was altogether of frivolous things. Not by so much as a look did Mistress Joan recall to me the conversation, intimate and outspoken, which had passed between us at Dieppe. I might have been the veriest dreamer to remember it all—the half-expressed plea for pity on her part, the doubt upon mine. How could one believe it of this little coquette, prattling of the theatres of Paris, the shops of Vienna, or the famous Sherry’s of New York. Had we been a supper party at the Savoy, the occasion could not have been celebrated with greater levity. Of the people’s history, I learned absolutely nothing at all that I did not know already. They had a house on the banks of the Hudson River, an apartment in Paris; in London they always stayed at hotels. General Fordibras was devoted to his yacht. Miss Aston adored Jane Austen, and considered the Imperial Theatre to be the Mecca of all good American ladies. Nonsense, I say, and chiefly immaterial nonsense. But two facts came to me which I cared to make a note of. The first of them dealt with Joan Fordibras’s departure from Dieppe and her arrival at Santa Maria.

“My, I was cross,” she exclaimed à propos, “just to think that one might have gone on to Aix!”

“Then you left Dieppe in a hurry?” I commented.

She replied quite unsuspectingly:

“They shot us into the yacht like an expressed trunk. I was in such a temper that I tore my lace dress all to pieces on the something or other. Miss Aston, she looked daggers. I don’t know just how daggers look, but she looked them. The Captain said he wouldn’t have to blow the siren if she would only speak up.”

“My dear Joan, whatever are you saying? Captain Doubleday would never so forget himself. He sent roses to my cabin directly I went on board.”

“Because he wanted you to help navigate the ship, cousin. He said you were a born seaman. Now, when I go back to London⁠——”

“Are you returning this winter?” I asked with as much indifference as I could command. She shook her head sadly.

“We never know where my father is going. It’s always rush and hurry except when we are here at Santa Maria. And there’s no one but the parish priest to flirt with. I tried so hard when we first came here—such a funny little yellow man, just like a monkey. My heart was half broken when Cousin Emma cut me out.”

“Cousin Emma”—by whom she indicated the masculine Miss Aston—protested loudly for the second time, and again the talk reverted to Europe. I, however, had two facts which I entered in my notebook directly I went upstairs. And this is the entry that I made:

“(1) Joan Fordibras left Dieppe at a moment’s notice. Ergo, her departure was the direct issue of my own.

“(2) The General’s yacht put out to sea, but returned when I had left. Ergo, his was not the yacht which I had followed to South Africa.”

These facts, I say, were entered in my book when I had said good-night to Joan, and left her at the stair’s foot—a merry, childish figure, with mischief in her eyes and goodwill toward me in her words. Whatever purpose had been in the General’s mind when he brought her to Santa Maria, she, I was convinced, knew nothing of it. To me, however, the story was as clear as though it had been written in a master book.

“They hope that I will fall in love with her and become one of them,” I said. Such an idea was worthy of the men and their undertaking. I foresaw ripe fruit of it, and chiefly my own salvation and safety for some days at least.

Willingly would I play a lover’s part if need be. “It should not be difficult,” I said, “to call Joan Fordibras my own, or to tell her those eternal stories of love and homage of which no woman has yet grown weary!”

Table of Contents

Dr. Fabos Makes Himself Acquainted with the Villa San Jorge.

Joan had spoken of a Bluebeard’s cupboard in my bedroom. This I opened the moment I went up to bed. It stood against the outer wall of the room, and plainly led to some apartment or gallery above. The lock of the inner door, I perceived, had a rude contrivance of wires attached to it. A child would have read it for an ancient alarm set there to ring a bell if the door were opened. I laughed at his simplicity, and said that, after all, General Fordibras could not be a very formidable antagonist. He wished to see how far my curiosity would carry me in his house, and here was an infantile device to discover me. I took a second glance at it, and dismissed it from my mind.

I had gone up to bed at twelve o’clock, I suppose, and it was now nearly half an hour after midnight. A good fire of logs still burned in the grate, a hand lamp with a crimson shade stood near by my bed. Setting this so that I could cast a shadow out upon the verandah, I made those brisk movements which a person watching without might have interpreted as the act of undressing, and then, extinguishing the light and screening the fire, I listened for the footsteps of my servant, Okyada. No cat could tread as softly as he; no Indian upon a trail could step with more cunning than this soft-eyed, devoted, priceless fellow. I had told him to come to me at a quarter to one, and the hands of the watch were still upon the figures when the door opened inch by inch, and he appeared, a spectre almost invisible, a pair of glistening eyes, of white laughing teeth—Okyada, the invincible, the uncorruptible.

“What news, Okyada?”

He whispered his answer, every word sounding as clearly in my ears as the notes of a bell across a drowsy river.

“There is that which you should know, master. He is here, in this house. I have seen him sleeping. Let us go together—the white foot upon the wool. It would be dangerous to sleep, master.”

I thought that his manner was curiously anxious, for here was a servant who feared nothing under heaven. To question him further, when I could ascertain the facts for myself, would have been ridiculous; and merely looking to my pistols and drawing a heavy pair of felt slippers over my boots, I followed him from the room.

“Straight down the stairs, master,” he said; “they are watching the corridors. One will not watch again to-night—I have killed him. Let us pass where he should have been.”

I understood that he had dealt with one of the sentries as only a son of Hiroshima could, and, nodding in answer, I followed him down the stairs and so to the dining-room I had so recently quitted. The apartment was almost as I had left it an hour ago. Plates and glasses were still upon the table; the embers of a fire reddened upon the open hearth. I observed, however, that a shutter of a window giving upon the verandah had been opened to the extent of a hand’s-breadth, and by this window it was plain that my servant meant to pass out. No sooner had we done so than he dexterously closed the shutter behind him by the aid of a cord and a little beeswax; and having left all to his satisfaction, he beckoned me onward and began to tread a wide lawn of grass, and after that, a pine-wood, so thickly planted that an artificial maze could not have been more perplexing.

Now it came to me that the house itself did not contain the man I was seeking nor the sights which Okyada had to show me. This woodland path led to the wall of the mountain, to the foot of that high peak visible to every ship that sails by Santa Maria. Here, apparently, the track terminated. Okyada, crouching like a panther, bade me imitate him as we drew near to the rock; and approaching it with infinite caution, he raised his hand again and showed me, at the cliff’s foot, the dead body of the sentinel who had watched the place, I made sure, not a full hour ago.

“We met upon the ladder, master,” said my servant, unmoved. “I could not go by. He fell, master—he fell from up yonder where you see the fires. His friends are there; we are going to them.”