The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other Stories (15 page)

* * *

I still held the unopened telegram, and I thought I detected a note of constraint or embarrassment in his manner as he referred me to the message.

“You haven’t looked at my telegram? Then you don’t know what brings me down here,” he said, with a seriousness which marked the end of the interlude of hilarious back-slapping.

“Anything grave and earnest?” I inquired. “My guess was that you were down here to set up your easel. I guessed wrong?”

He nodded. I was surprised to find him flushed and tongue-tied.

“If I had no better excuse for living than the bit of rotten painting I do from time to time, I might as well blow my brains out—if any,” he said, with a bad attempt at lightness. The concealed bitterness was something so novel in him that I probably looked up sharply. He became more embarrassed than ever, a fact which he betrayed by speaking with a sign of irritation.

“Why don’t you read the telegram?” he demanded, brusquely, and got up to pace the room while I obeyed the hint. I gave the reading due seriousness.

“Have you met the Drurocks?” read the extraordinary message. “What do you know about him? Is she seen about in public? Is there any gossip? Please learn what you can, but do not reply. Coming at once.—
WALES
.”

I put down the sheet and looked up at him.

“Sounds completely balmy, doesn’t it?” he challenged. “Well, I’m not off my nut. Never more earnest in my life.”

“In that case—” I began.

He leaped down my throat. “You
have
heard something!” he cried. “What? Is he mistreating her? What’s this about their being locked up in that house and all the servants leaving? What do you know? If he’s harmed her, Mac, I tell you I’ll finish him. I’ll cut his throat—with pleasure.”

The outburst subsided. I think I must have worn the expression of my utter amazement, for he was brought up short.

“You don’t know what I’m talking about!” It was an indictment. He was incredulous. “You mean you haven’t heard about it? I had all London pitying me—and grinning when I wasn’t looking.” He shrugged. “Oh well, I suppose a disappointed lover is a comical object. I didn’t feel comical, though, I can tell you. Of course, if you don’t know what I’m talking about—” He had another one of his sudden changes of mood and subject. “You know, you’re an irritating sort, Mac. You never know or hear anything. Where do you keep yourself? Don’t you even read the papers? The tabloids got hold of it and smeared me with ink. You know the sort of thing. My picture and hers and one of those blurbs hinting scandal: ‘Engagement Mysteriously Broken.’ That sort of thing! I could have wrung her neck at the time, but now, if she’s in trouble—” He trailed off into silence and sent up a thick screen of cigarette smoke.

I took my opportunity to be heard. “Who’s neck?” I demanded.

* * *

The answer was some more of his disconnected and excitable ramblings. But, out of his incoherence came eventually the coherent story, which I had complete before I got him off to bed far after midnight, bribed with a promise that we should look over the house at Low Fennel promptly after breakfast the following morning.

As a matter of fact, I did have some vague knowledge of his misadventure with a London girl who had gone off to marry some country squire, leaving Wales in the rather awkward predicament of being left waiting at the church. He did not gloss over his own humiliation in telling me of the circumstances. In view of his unheralded arrival in this blighted and inaccessible corner of Cornwall, all in a chivalric ferment and ready on any pretext to slaughter the husband, he did not need to add that he had recovered badly from the love affair and was ready to pick it up again at any sign from the lady.

She had been Margery Perth, daughter of Capt. Ronald Perth, VC, DSO, etc., etc.—more medals than shillings. Even before she got to be a newspaper darling by reason of her engagement to a London catch and the subsequent sudden marriage to an obscure Cornishman, one saw Margery’s face in the illustrateds. The press snap-shots hardly did her justice, I was soon to discover.

* * *

I offended Aubrey by failing to be properly impressed by the origins of his love affair with the girl. It seemed to be the usual sort of thing, a house-party, an afternoon on the river, a walk back to the hall by summer moonlight and there you have it, all tied and delivered, ready for the parson. At that, I suppose a love affair is as good as its best moment, and even Romeo and Juliet must have been a common pair of moonstruck nonentities before they rose to tragedy. Aubrey and Margery had their splendid interlude, as I am ready to testify, so let us gloss over the humdrum beginnings.

They led up to an engagement in due form, with a public announcement. Then her father took her to the continent. A tour of the casinos was his regular annual custom and he saw no reason why his daughter’s engagement should interfere with his habits. He was that kind of selfish pensioned Britisher, a fellow with his half-pay and a few extra pounds from somewhere and a liking for his ease.

“They left last June,” Aubrey told me. “I saw Margery down to the boat-train. I’ll swear she had no thought then, but to have the separation over with. It was to be an Autumn wedding. I never heard another word from her until early September, and then it was the news I read in my morning paper: ‘Married: Margery Perth, daughter of Capt. Ronald. Perth—and all the letters—to Maj. Henry Drurock. Maj. and Mrs Drurock will return to England within the month, and to Cornwall to open Low Fennel, where Maj. Drurock has mining interests.”

He quoted every line of the announcement. You could tell the bit of print had burned into his memory.

“She wasn’t that sort,” he protested, earnestly. “There must have been something wrong.” He went on in a more subdued manner, as if a bit ashamed of what he was saying. “There were lots of rumours. I don’t say they were anything but rumours, mind. But people came back from Biarritz with stories of cheating in the casino. Her father was an unconscionable gambler, you know, and on his half-pay. Anyway, they talked about his being headed for a French jail and this Drurock fellow buying off the authorities. Melodrama, isn’t it? I daresay untrue, every bit of it. It was just the sort of thing my fool friends might concoct to salve my wounded pride.” He questioned me. “What do you think?”

“How can I think anything?” I retorted. “I only know what you’re telling me. Pretty daughters do marry bounders to keep their daddies in funds. It’s been done. I’ve heard of cases. Perhaps only in books, but it’s been heard of. What then? You say you never heard from her again and here you are in her village. This is Drurock’s land, you know—the village, and everything you see for miles around. Though I wouldn’t give a week’s pay for the whole of it. It’s hopeless terrain. It has no crop but leeches and toads, no climate but a poisonous fog.”

“Poisonous?” His utterance of the word was a shout. “Did you say ‘poisonous fog’?”

“Merely a figure of speech,” I hastened to assure him; betraying, I hoped, no sign of my startled recognition of this reiteration, by an apparently sane Londoner, of the notion which obsessed old Ord. “What’s the matter, Aubrey? What about a ‘poisonous fog’?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged, hopelessly. “It’s something hellish, but I can’t say what it is.” On the last of his breath, he mumbled: “Poor Margery,” and then leapt to his feet. “We’ve got to do something, Mac. We’ve got to get her out of it. I didn’t know what her letter meant-—poor child. I thought the poison fumes were something she had imagined, some obsession of her unhappiness.”

“Oh, then you
have
heard from the lady?” I put in.

“Indirectly, yes.” He brought out his bill-fold and extracted a written sheet from it. “It’s a letter to her father. The old scoundrel popped off last week. They found him in his room at the club. He had been reading this. Maybe he had enough decency left in him to die of the shock of what’s in the letter, but I doubt it. It was the drinking finished him off. The club people turned over his few effects to his solicitor, who happens to be mine, too. The lawyer had enough sense to be a bit alarmed about Margery’s letter and he thought I might be the proper person to come to in the absence of any relative who would take the trouble to attend the funeral. In short, he turned the letter over to me and I’m asking you now. What do you think?”

I studied the pathetic scrawl, apparently dashed off in haste and under considerable emotional stress, for the taller letters all leaned like trees in a hurricane and half the lines ran off the page.

“Please, papa,” the girl had written, “you
must
come now—at once—and take me away from him. He won’t let me go alone. I know you don’t believe about the poison fumes, but it’s literally, awfully, devilishly true, papa, and I swear that I am not sick or anything and I haven’t got hallucinations and this is
not a
trick to get away. If it happens
once more
, it will kill me. Get me out of this now, papa! Haven’t I done enough? Margery.”

“Well?” he demanded as I finished the reading.

“It’s a perfect riddle,” I ventured. “I should say, though, that the writer thinks she is in some kind of danger.”

“Thinks
she is!” he cried. “You don’t know her. She isn’t the kind that’s afraid of a twig scratching against a pane. No—there’s something wrong.” He got up and stormed about the room. “Come on, Mac. We’ve got to act at once.”

“Do what?” I reasoned with him. “Go up to the chateau at this hour, drag this Drurock, whom we do not know, out of his bed and tell him we are taking his wife away because she doesn’t like the weather? Be reasonable. Sleep on it.”

“And do nothing?”

“We’ll do something, but we’ll do it tomorrow. My suggestion would be to have breakfast, hire a car, and go over to call like civilised people. Drurock can hardly pull up a portcullis and drop hot lead on us. The chances are we’ll get a fair sort of reception and you’ll get a chance to talk to the lady in private for a moment and clear up the whole thing.”

He calmed sufficiently to consider the programme.

“I mustn’t go as myself,” he said. “If there’s anything really wrong, my turning up would give the show away. Drurock must know me by name. He must have seen those London papers.” He warmed to my proposal and his own somewhat melodramatic revision of it. “I’ll be an artist, sketching around, loafing in the. neighbourhood with you. As for you, you’re quite unimpeachably explained. A frog-catcher come to where frogs are caught. That’s it. Peter McAllister, RA, FRGS, subcurator of his Majesty’s pollywogs and his artist friend, dropping in for some scientific chit-chat and a cup of tea. If that’s a bargain, I’ll get to bed.”

“It’s a bargain.”

Old Ord’s mumblings about Drurock came to my mind as I tucked myself in and bade my room-mate goodnight. I was on the point of telling Aubrey the tale, but soon thought better of it. The excitable fellow’s suspicions and dreads already were feeding on too much food. I slept.

* * *

The day was steaming hot. Aubrey complained that his paints ran on the palette. However, he was obviously complaining for the sake of talking, for he was no more interested in the daub he was perpetrating than I, and that was not at all. We were established on a little hump of ground overlooking Low Fennel and Aubrey’s composition on canvas took in the old tower which I had previously seen and the modern section which I now saw for the first time. This brick wing of the venerable pile of buildings had been carefully designed not to clash with the rest but it was plainly of recent date, and a materialistic eye, such as my own, could pick out the exterior indications of modern fittings within. A pair of telephone wires, branching off from the overland line up to the village, ended near what I took to be library windows in this modern wing. The grounds, to this side of the house, had been made as attractive as gardening skill could accomplish.

We had come on our expedition loaded like pack mules. Our equipment was principally painter’s gear and included a ridiculous garden parasol which was set up on the knoll to give the artist shade.

“Certainly, it’s ridiculous,” agreed Aubrey when I complained. “But it’s excellent advertising. I want to be noticed. Do you think we can be seen from the windows of Low Fennel?”

The question was redundant. The extravagant parasol would be seen and talked about for miles around. I pulled on my gloves. I was interested in a brambly gully which sloped down from this highland toward the bog behind the chateau.

“I’ll do a bit of self-advertising, too,” I informed him. “We meet at lunch hour and beg bread at Low Fennel; is that the programme?”

He nodded and I went about my affairs. I carried net and pail, but these tools of my much ridiculed profession remained idle. An interest other than scientific urged me on. I rebelled against it, but the sum of the extravagant talk I had heard in the last twenty-four hours was beginning to have its effect on the more unreliable and romantic sections of my brain. What was at the bottom of all this fantastic nonsense about an air-poisoned castle, prison for a London girl who cried desperately for rescue from something which, if it happened
once again
, would kill her? Scientific dispassionateness deserted me. I confess I stumbled down the gully, prey to an excitement which had nothing to do with the peculiar professional interests of Peter McAllister, zoologist.

The sides of the gully became steeper. It was turning in fact into a ravine. I had not judged the depression on this side of Low Fennel to be so deep. I approached a turn in the gorge and found myself face to face with—the master of Low Fennel!

I knew it was he the moment I saw him. For one thing, the man was London tailored and I knew that there was no other man of wealth living in the neighbourhood. For another, a portrait photograph of the landlord of the countryside hung in the parlour of the inn up in the village and I recognised the striking features at once. For a rough picture of the man as a whole, he was a fairly average sample of the genus, country gentleman. The tweeds were the suitable costume of the heavy-set man, strong-jawed and choleric, who first looked up in surprise and then advanced cordially toward me.