The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu (7 page)

"You insist, Mr. Smith?"

"As your guest, I regret the necessity for reminding you that I
hold authority to enforce it."

Denby fidgeted uneasily. The tone of the conversation was
growing harsh and the atmosphere of the library portentous with
brewing storms.

There was a short, silent interval.

"This is what I had feared and expected," said the clergyman.
"This was my reason for not seeking official protection."

"The phantom Yellow Peril," said Nayland Smith, "to-day
materializes under the very eyes of the Western world."

"The 'Yellow Peril'!"

"You scoff, sir, and so do others. We take the proffered right
hand of friendship nor inquire if the hidden left holds a knife!
The peace of the world is at stake, Mr. Eltham. Unknowingly, you
tamper with tremendous issues."

Mr. Eltham drew a deep breath, thrusting both hands in his
pockets.

"You are painfully frank, Mr. Smith," he said; "but I like you
for it. I will reconsider my position and talk this matter over
again with you to-morrow."

Thus, then, the storm blew over. Yet I had never experienced
such an overwhelming sense of imminent peril-of a sinister
presence-as oppressed me at that moment. The very atmosphere of
Redmoat was impregnated with Eastern devilry; it loaded the air
like some evil perfume. And then, through the silence, cut a
throbbing scream-the scream of a woman in direst fear.

"My God, it's Greba!" whispered Mr. Eltham.

In what order we dashed down to the drawing-room I cannot
recall. But none was before me when I leaped over the threshold and
saw Miss Eltham prone by the French windows.

These were closed and bolted, and she lay with hands
outstretched in the alcove which they formed. I bent over her.
Nayland Smith was at my elbow.

"Get my bag" I said. "She has swooned. It is nothing
serious."

Her father, pale and wide-eyed, hovered about me, muttering
incoherently; but I managed to reassure him; and his gratitude
when, I having administered a simple restorative, the girl sighed
shudderingly and opened her eyes, was quite pathetic.

I would permit no questioning at that time, and on her father's
arm she retired to her own rooms.

It was some fifteen minutes later that her message was brought
to me. I followed the maid to a quaint little octagonal apartment,
and Greba Eltham stood before me, the candlelight caressing the
soft curves of her face and gleaming in the meshes of her rich
brown hair.

When she had answered my first question she hesitated in pretty
confusion.

"We are anxious to know what alarmed you, Miss Eltham."

She bit her lip and glanced with apprehension towards the
window.

"I am almost afraid to tell father," she began rapidly. "He will
think me imaginative, but you have been so kind. It was two green
eyes! Oh! Dr. Petrie, they looked up at me from the steps leading
to the lawn. And they shone like the eyes of a cat."

The words thrilled me strangely.

"Are you sure it was not a cat, Miss Eltham?"

"The eyes were too large, Dr. Petrie. There was something
dreadful, most dreadful, in their appearance. I feel foolish and
silly for having fainted, twice in two days! But the suspense is
telling upon me, I suppose. Father thinks"-she was becoming
charmingly confidential, as a woman often will with a tactful
physician-"that shut up here we are safe from-whatever threatens
us." I noted, with concern, a repetition of the nervous shudder.
"But since our return someone else has been in Redmoat!"

"Whatever do you mean, Miss Eltham?"

"Oh! I don't quite know what I do mean, Dr. Petrie. What does it
ALL mean? Vernon has been explaining to me that some awful Chinaman
is seeking the life of Mr. Nayland Smith. But if the same man wants
to kill my father, why has he not done so?"

"I am afraid you puzzle me."

"Of course, I must do so. But-the man in the train. He could
have killed us both quite easily! And-last night someone was in
father's room."

"In his room!"

"I could not sleep, and I heard something moving. My room is the
next one. I knocked on the wall and woke father. There was nothing;
so I said it was the howling of the dog that had frightened
me."

"How could anyone get into his room?"

"I cannot imagine. But I am not sure it was a man."

"Miss Eltham, you alarm me. What do you suspect?"

"You must think me hysterical and silly, but whilst father and I
have been away from Redmoat perhaps the usual precautions have been
neglected. Is there any creature, any large creature, which could
climb up the wall to the window? Do you know of anything with a
long, thin body?"

For a moment I offered no reply, studying the girl's pretty
face, her eager, blue-gray eyes widely opened and fixed upon mine.
She was not of the neurotic type, with her clear complexion and
sun-kissed neck; her arms, healthily toned by exposure to the
country airs, were rounded and firm, and she had the agile shape of
a young Diana with none of the anaemic languor which breeds morbid
dreams. She was frightened; yes, who would not have been? But the
mere idea of this thing which she believed to be in Redmoat,
without the apparition of the green eyes, must have prostrated a
victim of "nerves."

"Have you seen such a creature, Miss Eltham?"

She hesitated again, glancing down and pressing her finger-tips
together.

"As father awoke and called out to know why I knocked, I glanced
from my window. The moonlight threw half the lawn into shadow, and
just disappearing in this shadow was something-something of a brown
color, marked with sections!"

"What size and shape?"

"It moved so quickly I could form no idea of its shape; but I
saw quite six feet of it flash across the grass!"

"Did you hear anything?"

"A swishing sound in the shrubbery, then nothing more."

She met my eyes expectantly. Her confidence in my powers of
understanding and sympathy was gratifying, though I knew that I but
occupied the position of a father-confessor.

"Have you any idea," I said, "how it came about that you awoke
in the train yesterday whilst your father did not?"

"We had coffee at a refreshment-room; it must have been drugged
in some way. I scarcely tasted mine, the flavor was so awful; but
father is an old traveler and drank the whole of his cupful!"

Mr. Eltham's voice called from below.

"Dr. Petrie," said the girl quickly, "what do you think they
want to do to him?"

"Ah!" I replied, "I wish I knew that."

"Will you think over what I have told you? For I do assure you
there is something here in Redmoat-something that comes and goes in
spite of father's 'fortifications'? Caesar knows there is. Listen
to him. He drags at his chain so that I wonder he does not break
it."

As we passed downstairs the howling of the mastiff sounded
eerily through the house, as did the clank-clank of the tightening
chain as he threw the weight of his big body upon it.

I sat in Smith's room that night for some time, he pacing the
floor smoking and talking.

"Eltham has influential Chinese friends," he said; "but they
dare not have him in Nan-Yang at present. He knows the country as
he knows Norfolk; he would see things!

"His precautions here have baffled the enemy, I think. The
attempt in the train points to an anxiety to waste no opportunity.
But whilst Eltham was absent (he was getting his outfit in London,
by the way) they have been fixing some second string to their
fiddle here. In case no opportunity offered before he returned,
they provided for getting at him here!"

"But how, Smith?"

"That's the mystery. But the dead dog in the shrubbery is
significant."

"Do you think some emissary of Fu-Manchu is actually inside the
moat?"

"It's impossible, Petrie. You are thinking of secret passages,
and so forth. There are none. Eltham has measured up every foot of
the place. There isn't a rathole left unaccounted for; and as for a
tunnel under the moat, the house stands on a solid mass of Roman
masonry, a former camp of Hadrian's time. I have seen a very old
plan of the Round Moat Priory as it was called. There is no
entrance and no exit save by the steps. So how was the dog
killed?"

I knocked out my pipe on a bar of the grate.

"We are in the thick of it here," I said.

"We are always in the thick of it," replied Smith. "Our danger
is no greater in Norfolk than in London. But what do they want to
do? That man in the train with the case of instruments-WHAT
instruments? Then the apparition of the green eyes to-night. Can
they have been the eyes of Fu-Manchu? Is some peculiarly unique
outrage contemplated-something calling for the presence of the
master?"

"He may have to prevent Eltham's leaving England without killing
him."

"Quite so. He probably has instructions to be merciful. But God
help the victim of Chinese mercy!"

I went to my own room then. But I did not even undress,
refilling my pipe and seating myself at the open window. Having
looked upon the awful Chinese doctor, the memory of his face, with
its filmed green eyes, could never leave me. The idea that he might
be near at that moment was a poor narcotic.

The howling and baying of the mastiff was almost continuous.

When all else in Redmoat was still the dog's mournful note yet
rose on the night with something menacing in it. I sat looking out
across the sloping turf to where the shrubbery showed as a black
island in a green sea. The moon swam in a cloudless sky, and the
air was warm and fragrant with country scents.

It was in the shrubbery that Denby's collie had met his
mysterious death-that the thing seen by Miss Eltham had
disappeared. What uncanny secret did it hold?

Caesar became silent.

As the stopping of a clock will sometimes awaken a sleeper, the
abrupt cessation of that distant howling, to which I had grown
accustomed, now recalled me from a world of gloomy imaginings.

I glanced at my watch in the moonlight. It was twelve minutes
past midnight.

As I replaced it the dog suddenly burst out afresh, but now in a
tone of sheer anger. He was alternately howling and snarling in a
way that sounded new to me. The crashes, as he leapt to the end of
his chain, shook the building in which he was confined. It was as I
stood up to lean from the window and commanded a view of the corner
of the house that he broke loose.

With a hoarse bay he took that decisive leap, and I heard his
heavy body fall against the wooden wall. There followed a strange,
guttural cry… and the growling of the dog died away at the rear of
the house. He was out! But that guttural note had not come from the
throat of a dog. Of what was he in pursuit?

At which point his mysterious quarry entered the shrubbery I do
not know. I only know that I saw absolutely nothing, until Caesar's
lithe shape was streaked across the lawn, and the great creature
went crashing into the undergrowth.

Then a faint sound above and to my right told me that I was not
the only spectator of the scene. I leaned farther from the
window.

"Is that you, Miss Eltham?" I asked.

"Oh, Dr. Petrie!" she said. "I am so glad you are awake. Can we
do nothing to help? Caesar will be killed."

"Did you see what he went after?"

"No," she called back, and drew her breath sharply.

For a strange figure went racing across the grass. It was that
of a man in a blue dressing-gown, who held a lantern high before
him, and a revolver in his right hand. Coincident with my
recognition of Mr. Eltham he leaped, plunging into the shrubbery in
the wake of the dog.

But the night held yet another surprise; for Nayland Smith's
voice came:

"Come back! Come back, Eltham!"

I ran out into the passage and downstairs. The front door was
open. A terrible conflict waged in the shrubbery, between the
mastiff and something else. Passing round to the lawn, I met Smith
fully dressed. He just had dropped from a first-floor window.

"The man is mad!" he snapped. "Heaven knows what lurks there! He
should not have gone alone!"

Together we ran towards the dancing light of Eltham's lantern.
The sounds of conflict ceased suddenly. Stumbling over stumps and
lashed by low-sweeping branches, we struggled forward to where the
clergyman knelt amongst the bushes. He glanced up with tears in his
eyes, as was revealed by the dim light.

"Look!" he cried.

The body of the dog lay at his feet.

It was pitiable to think that the fearless brute should have met
his death in such a fashion, and when I bent and examined him I was
glad to find traces of life.

"Drag him out. He is not dead," I said.

"And hurry," rapped Smith, peering about him right and left.

So we three hurried from that haunted place, dragging the dog
with us. We were not molested. No sound disturbed the now perfect
stillness.

By the lawn edge we came upon Denby, half dressed; and almost
immediately Edwards the gardener also appeared. The white faces of
the house servants showed at one window, and Miss Eltham called to
me from her room:

"Is he dead?"

"No," I replied; "only stunned."

We carried the dog round to the yard, and I examined his head.
It had been struck by some heavy blunt instrument, but the skull
was not broken. It is hard to kill a mastiff.

"Will you attend to him, Doctor?" asked Eltham. "We must see
that the villain does not escape."

His face was grim and set. This was a different man from the
diffident clergyman we knew: this was "Parson Dan" again.

I accepted the care of the canine patient, and Eltham with the
others went off for more lights to search the shrubbery. As I was
washing a bad wound between the mastiff's ears, Miss Eltham joined
me. It was the sound of her voice, I think, rather than my more
scientific ministration, which recalled Caesar to life. For, as she
entered, his tail wagged feebly, and a moment later he struggled to
his feet-one of which was injured.

Having provided for his immediate needs, I left him in charge of
his young mistress and joined the search party. They had entered
the shrubbery from four points and drawn blank.

"There is absolutely nothing there, and no one can possibly have
left the grounds," said Eltham amazedly.

We stood on the lawn looking at one another, Nayland Smith,
angry but thoughtful, tugging at the lobe of his left ear, as was
his habit in moments of perplexity.