People may read about crimes in newspapers all their lives, and yet never properly realize that crime exists. To appreciate what crime is, one must be brought to close quarters with crime, as Carpentaria was. Twelve hours ago murder to him had been nothing but a name. Now he knew the horror that murder inspires. And with the corpse of the cat Beppo lying at his feet, he felt that horror far more keenly even than in the night as he unearthed the corpse of the mysterious drunken man. He had actually seen the cat done to death, and had it not been for the greediness of Beppo, he himself would have lain there, stretched out in eternal quiet.
He looked at the half-empty bowl of milk and at the splashes of milk on the round painted table, reflecting that each splash was no doubt sufficient to kill a man.
He wondered what he must do, how he must begin to disentangle himself from the coil of danger that was surrounding him. He was not afraid. He was probably much too excited to be afraid. He was angry, startled, grieved, and puzzled, and nothing more. His mind turned naturally to Juliette—Juliette, his comforter and companion. He did not like the idea of frightening her by a recital of what had occurred, but he knew that he would be compelled to do so. He must talk confidentially to some one who understood him and admired him. Now, at that hour in the morning the faithful Juliette, her dress ornamented by an extremely small and attractive French apron, was in the habit of personally dusting the writing-table in Carpentaria’s study adjoining the bedroom. No profane hand ever touched that table, and Juliette’s own hand never ventured to arrange its sublime disorder. There were three servants in the house—the parlourmaid, the cook, and a scullery-maid. There might have been a dozen had Juliette so wished. But Juliette was a simple person; her father, the second husband of Carpentaria’s mother, had belonged to the plain and excellent French bourgeoisie, who know so well how to cook and how to save money, and Juliette had inherited his tastes. Juliette was always curbing Carpentaria’s instinct towards magnificence. She did not want even three servants, and there were a number of delicate tasks, such as the dusting of Carpentaria’s table, that she would not permit them to do.
Carpentaria touched nothing on the balcony. He went into the bedroom, fastened the window, and then hesitated. He could hear Juliette’s soft movements in the study. Ought he, could he, go to her and say bluntly: “Juliette, some one is trying to murder me, and you must take more care than you took this morning—you allowed my milk to be poisoned”?
At last he opened the door of the study.
But it was not Juliette dusting the sacred table. It was Jenkins, the parlourmaid!
Such a thing had never before happened in the united domesticity of Carpentaria and Juliette! It was astounding. It unnerved Carpentaria.
He locked the door of the bedroom, and put the key in his pocket.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded gruffly of the parlourmaid.
“Dusting your table, sir,” replied Jenkins, in a tone that respectfully asked to be informed whether Carpentaria was blind.
“Who told you to dust my table?”
“Mistress, sir.”
“Where is your mistress?”
“I don’t know, sir. She told me to come up and dust the room.” A pause. “I—er—really don’t know.”
“Go and find her. Ask her to speak to me at once.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Half a minute, Jenkins. It was you who brought my milk up?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where did you take it from?”
“Mistress gave it me with her own hands, sir.”
“And you brought it direct to me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No one else touched it?”
“No, sir.”
“Anybody called here this morning?”
“Called, sir?” Jenkins seemed ruffled.
“Yes. Anybody been to the house?”
“No, sir,” said Jenkins, as though in asking if anybody had called Carpentaria was reflecting upon her moral character. And she blushed.
“Very well. Go and find your mistress.”
Jenkins departed, and came back in a surprisingly short space of time.
“Mistress doesn’t seem to be about, sir,” said Jenkins.
“What? She hasn’t gone out, has she?”
“Not that I know of, sir. But I can’t find her.”
“Have you looked in her bedroom?”
“I knocked at the door, sir.”
“And there was no answer?”
“No, sir.”
“When did you last see your mistress?”
“When she told me to dust this room, sir, after I had brought up your milk.”
“Where was she?”
“In the dining-room, sir.”
A fearful thought ran through the mind of Carpentaria, cutting it like a lancet. Suppose that Juliette had been poisoned! Suppose that an attempt had been made against her, as against him, but with more success! He hurried out of the room and knocked loudly at her bedroom-door.
“Juliette! Are you there?”
No answer.
“Juliette, I say!”
Again no answer. His heart almost stopped. He opened the door and entered the room. It was empty, but already the bed had been made and everything tidied. He penetrated to the dressing-room, which was equally neat and equally empty.
Then he searched the house and the premises; he searched everywhere except in the little outhouse wherein was hidden the corpse of the drunken man. At length, after a futile cross-examination of the cook in the kitchen, he perceived that the scullery-maid, in the scullery was surreptitiously beckoning to him.
This ungainly chit, Polly, whose person was only kept presentable by the ceaseless efforts of Juliette, had red hair, rather less red than Carpentaria’s, and she worshipped him afar off. She had that “cult” for him which very humble servants do sometimes entertain for masters who never even throw them a glance. And now she was beckoning to him and making eyes!
He followed her through the scullery into the yard.
“Do you want mistress, sir?” asked Polly in a whisper.
“Yes.”
“Well, she’s over the wye, sir.”
“Over the way?”
“Yes, sir, at Mr. Ilam’s. Mrs. Ilam’s been here this morning, sir. Don’t tell mistress as I told you, sir, for the love of heving!”
Juliette was at Ilam’s! And he had twice found Juliette in the avenue during the night! And she had been strangely excited when she came to kiss him before going to bed.
In something less than fifteen seconds he was rattling loudly at Ilam’s door. He received no answer. He heard no sound within the house. Wondering where the servants could be, he assaulted the door again, this time furiously. A man who was rolling a lawn in the Oriental Gardens glanced up at him. Still there was no reply. He was just deciding to break into the house by way of a window, when the door opened very suddenly, and as he was leaning upon it, he pitched forward into the hall and into the arms of old Mrs. Ilam, who, with her white cap, her black dress and her parchment face, seemed aggrieved by this entrance.
“Mr. Carpentaria!” she protested, raising her shaking hands.
But she was admirably and overpoweringly calm, and her extreme age prevented Carpentaria from taking the measures which he would have taken had she been younger, less imposing, less august, less like a dead woman who walked.
“My sister is here, and I must see her at once.”
“No, Mr. Carpentaria; your sister is not here.” Her tone startled him. It was so cold and positive. But after a few seconds he thought she was lying.
“She has been here, then?”
“No, Mr. Carpentaria. She has not been here.”
“Really! But you have seen her this morning. You came to my house.”
“No———”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Ilam, I saw you from my——”
“Ah!—from your balcony? You saw me cross the avenue, but you did not see me enter your house. You could not have seen that from your balcony, even if I had entered; and, as it happens, I didn’t enter.”
“My servants say you came.”
“Your servants probably say a good many things, Mr. Carpentaria,” she smiled humorously.
The musician felt himself against a stone wall. “Can I see your son?” he asked at length of the imperturbable old woman.
“My son is in bed and far from well,” said Mrs. Ilam.
“Then I should like to talk to you instead,” said Carpentaria.
She seemed to burst into welcome.
“Come in, then, my dear man, do! Come in!” And she preceded him into the drawing-room, an apartment furnished in the richest Tottenham Court Road splendour. They sat down on either side of the hearth, where a fire was burning. He did not know exactly how to begin.
“Now, Mr. Carpentaria,” she encouraged him.
“Some very strange things have been happening, Mrs. Ilam,” said he.
He deemed that he might as well go directly to the point. He would come to Juliette afterwards. So long as Juliette was not in Ilam’s house she was probably in no immediate danger.
“To you?” asked the dame.
“To me. I saw some very strange things with my own eyes last night, and within the last twelve Lours there have been two attempts to murder me.”
A slight flush reddened the wrinkled yellow cheek of Mrs. Ilam. It seemed as though she tried to speak and could not. Her fingers worked convulsively.
“You, too?” he murmured, with apparent difficulty.
“Why do you say ‘you, too’?” Carpentaria demanded.
She paused again.
“It was the milk?” she seemed to stammer.
“Yes, the second attempt; it was the milk,” admitted Carpentaria.
She hid her face.
“The same attempt has been made against Josephus,” she said. “And he was so frightened it has made him ill. That is why he is not feeling very well this morning.”
“But does Mr. Ilam take milk for breakfast? I thought he always had ham and eggs?”
“Never!” said Mrs. Ilam. “Hot bread-and-milk. Nothing else.”
“And how did he find out that the milk was poisoned?” Carpentaria pursued.
“I—I don’t know,” said Mrs. Ilam. “But he did. He’s very particular about his food, is Jos. And he suspected something. So he tried it on Neptune, the Newfoundland. And Neptune is dead. He says he thinks it must be prussic acid. Oh, Mr. Carpentaria, what is this plot against us all? What are we to do?”
Carpentaria was reduced to muteness. The old lady had changed the trend of his thoughts. He had been secretly accusing Ilam, but if Ilam’s life also had been attempted, the case was very much altered. It was perhaps even more perilous. Still, Mrs. Ilam had done nothing to explain the extraordinary events of the night. He decided to be cautious.
“I happened to see lights in your house very late last night, or rather, early this morning,” he said. “I was afraid that either you or Mr. Ilam might be ill.”
His eyes sought hers and met them fully and squarely.
“Oh!” she exclaimed sadly. “Jos had a dreadful night. He does have them sometimes, you know. Bad dreams. In many ways he is just like a child. There are nights when I think his dreams are more real to him than his real life. Now, last night he dreamed there was a corpse lying on a bier in the avenue, and nothing would satisfy him but that I should come out with him to see. Fancy it! at my age! However, there was nothing—of course.”
Carpentaria said to himself that the old lady evidently was unaware of her son’s midnight escapade, and that he could get no further with her. The hope sprang up within him that Polly had been after all mistaken. Juliette might have gone out merely for a stroll and have returned ere then. He rose to take leave of Mrs. Ilam.
“What are you going to do?” she asked him.
“What about?”
“Well, my dear man, about this attempted poisoning.”
“I suppose we must inform the police,” he replied.
“Yes, I suppose so,” she agreed. “But perhaps it would be well to wait until you had had a talk with Jos. He’ll be getting up during the day.”
“We’ll see,” said Carpentaria.
“It’s a good thing it’s Sunday and we’re free, isn’t it?” she remarked.
He had got precisely as far as the drawing-room door, when a voice reached his ears from the upper story. “Mrs. Ilam! Mrs. Ilam! He’s eaten his ham and eggs. What about the marmalade?”
Carpentaria dashed into the hall and looked up the stairs, and he saw the head of Juliette over the banisters.
Behind him he heard a suppressed sigh from Mrs. Ilam.
Carpentaria ran up the stairs. If he had not had flame-coloured hair, and the fiery temper that goes with it, he would probably have pursued the more dignified course of calling Juliette down and interrogating her in privacy. But he was Carpentaria. She knew his moods, and she fled before him into a sitting-room, where Ilam, a dressing-gown covering his suit of Sunday black, reclined in an easy-chair by the side of a small table bearing an empty plate and a knife and fork.
She cowered down on the floor.
“Oh, Carlos!” she exclaimed under her breath.
Carpentaria made the obvious demand:
“What are you doing in this house, Juliette?”
There was a silence.
“Look here, Carpentaria,” Ilam began, rising a little in a chair.
“Silence!” cried Carpentaria angrily and threateningly.
And at the noise the great dog Neptune, pride of the Ilams, emerged from behind the chair and growled.
Juliette said at last:
“Mrs. Ilam told me that Jos—that Mr. Ilam was unwell, and so I—I came to see how he was. That’s all.”
“Really!” said Carpentaria. “Is that all? Your philanthropic interest in the sick and suffering, my girl, does you great credit. But as the invalid seems to be doing fairly well you’d better come home with me. I want to talk to you.”
Juliette gave a look of appeal to Ilam.
“I must tell him,” she whispered. “I must tell Carlos. Why did you want me to keep it a secret? Carlos, Mr. Ilam and I are engaged to be married. We love each other. We only want your consent, and Jos was afraid you mightn’t give it. He was afraid. We’ve been engaged three days now, haven’t we, Jos?”
“My consent!” Carpentaria shouted bitterly. “My consent!” His wrath was dreadful, and yet to a certain extent he was controlling himself. “I suppose,” he addressed Juliette, “it’s your love for this estimable gentleman that leads you out into the gardens of a night, and I suppose you take beautiful romantic moonlight strolls together. My consent! Ye gods!”
The dog continued to growl.
Juliette gathered herself together, and moved to Ilam’s chair, and Ilam took her hand protectively.
“My poor dear! Never mind!” murmured Ilam soothingly.
Genuine affection spoke in those tones uttered by the stout and otherwise grotesque Mr. Ilam. Love itself unmistakably appeared in the attitude of the pair as they clasped hands in front of Carpentaria’s fury. And Carpentaria could not but be struck by what he saw. It sobered him, puzzled him, diverted his thoughts.
“Come, Juliette,” he said in a quieter, more persuasive tone.
He turned to leave the room, and Juliette obediently followed. Allowing her to pass before him, he stopped an instant and threw a glance at Ilam.
“So they’ve been trying to poison you, Ilam.”
“Poison me!” repeated Ilam, plainly at a loss.
“Yes,” said Carpentaria with a sneer. “And you never have ham and eggs for breakfast. That’s the reason why that plate is streaked with yellow. You always have milk. Naturally, you eat it with a knife and fork. And you suspected the milk and gave some of it to Neptune, and he fell down dead. He looks dead, doesn’t he?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Ilam said.
“You must ask mamma,” replied Carpentaria, departing.
He saw now with the utmost clearness that the aged Mrs. Ilam had been indulging him with some impromptu lying, invented, and clumsily invented, to put him off the scent, were it only for a few hours.
“She may be clumsy in her lying,” he thought as he descended the stairs in Juliette’s wake, “but she can act, the old woman can!”
He remembered that her acting had been perfect, and if Juliette had not happened to disclose the fact of her presence, the lying of Mrs. Ilam, clumsy as it was, might have succeeded. It is so easy to poison a dog, and to arrange the remains of poisoned milk.
He was capable of congratulating her on her acting, but she had utterly vanished from the ground-floor.
When he had deposited Juliette safely in his study, she began to cry softly. It was impossible for him to maintain his anger against her.
“Juliette,” he said, “why do you have secrets from me?”
“Oh, Carlos, he wished it to be kept secret. He said he had reasons; and I love him. No one has ever loved me before, and I’m thirty.”
“What about my affection?” asked Carpentaria.
“Oh, that’s different!” she cried.
Then he questioned her about Mrs. Ilam.
“I was at the kitchen window, preparing your milk, and the window was open, and Mrs. Ilam came up outside, and told me that Jos was unwell, and wanted to see me.”
“Did she touch the milk?”
“Touch the milk? No; why should she touch the milk?”
“Could she reach to touch the milk, supposing she had wished to?”
“I dare say she could. Yes, she could. But why?”
“Could you swear absolutely she didn’t?”
“I couldn’t swear; but I’m nearly sure. Carlos, what do you mean?”
“I’ll show you what I mean!” said Carpentaria.
He unlocked the bedroom door and led her to the balcony.
Three hours later Carpentaria, whose thoughts had been bent upon some solution of the problem set by Juliette’s strange and incomprehensible love affair with Josephus Ilam, was obliged to devote his brains to other and not less disturbing matters. He received in his study, for the second time that day, young Rivers, the newly-admitted doctor who had been officially attached to the City of Pleasure. A medical cabinet and a pharmacy had been judged quite indispensable to the smooth running of the City, and the foresight which had provided them was entirely justified by the numerous small accidents, faintings, and indispositions that marked the opening day, when more than three hundred persons had patronized the pharmacy, and more than twenty had received the attentions of the ardent young doctor.
Carpentaria had first met young Rivers when this youth was walking Bart’s, and the accession of Rivers to the brilliant and brilliantly remunerated position of physician and surgeon-in-ordinary to the City of Pleasure was due to Carpentaria’s influence. Rivers was grateful, very grateful. Moreover, he liked Carpentaria, thought him, in fact, the most wonderful man, except Lord Lister, that he had ever met.
“Well,” said the fair youth of twenty-five, when Carpentaria had shut the study-door, “I’ve made the analysis. It comes out to just about what I expected.”
“Prussic acid?”
“Not exactly prussic acid. A soluble cyanide—cyanide of potassium. Have you by any chance got a photographic bureau concealed somewhere in the show?”
“Why, of course,” said Carpentaria. “Didn’t you know? It’s next door to the lecture-hall.”
“Then the cyanide of potassium was probably got from there. It’s used by photographers. Better make inquiries.”
“We will,” Carpentaria agreed. “And do you mean to say cyanide of potassium will kill like that? How much prussic acid does it contain?”
“Scarcely any. Not two per cent.—not one per cent.”
“And poor Beppo was dead in a minute.”
“My dear Mr. Carpentaria,” said Rivers excitedly. “The strongest solution of prussic acid known to commerce only contains four per cent, of pure acid. And in the anhydrous state——”
“Anhydrous?”
“That means without water. In the anhydrous state,” Rivers proceeded enthusiastically, “two grains will kill a man in a second of time. Like that! It’s an amazing poison!”
Carpentaria shuddered.
“By the way,” he said, as if casually, “I’ve got a corpse I want you to look at.”
“A corpse?”
“Keep calm, my young friend,” Carpentaria enjoined him. And he told him the history of the drunken man. “Naturally all this is strictly confidential,” he concluded.
“I should think so,” said Rivers, aghast. “Can you not see that you have got yourself into a dreadful mess? You are an accessory after the fact. You have been guilty of a gross illegality. I don’t know what the penalty is; I’m not very well up in medical jurisprudence; but I know it’s something pretty stiff. Why, you might be accused of the murder.”
“Yes, I am aware of all that,” answered Carpentaria. “But I was very curious; and I didn’t want any police meddling here.”
“You are going just the way to bring them here.”
“Not at all. When you have made your examination I shall simply put the body where I found it. No one will be the wiser.”
“And theft?”
“Then—we shall see. It will depend on your examination.”
“But, really, Mr. Carpentaria, I cannot lend myself——-”
“Not to oblige me?”
Carpentaria smiled an engaging smile, and they descended together to the outhouse.
The outhouse was not more than eleven feet square, and the barrow with its burden was stretched across it diagonally, so that when the two men were inside, the place was full and the door would scarcely close. A small window gave light.
Rivers gently pulled the black cloth aside.
“This is just such black cloth as photographers use,” he remarked.
“So it is,” said Carpentaria.
The eyes of the corpse were closed; he might have been a man asleep, this strange relic from which a soul had flown and which would soon resolve itself into its original dust.
“Poor fellow,” thought Carpentaria. “Once he lived, and had interests, and probably passions, and thought himself of some importance in the universe.”
The spectacle saddened Carpentaria, whereas the young doctor was not at all saddened, he was merely intensely interested.
“A blow on the head among other things,” he observed, indicating to Carpentaria the top of the skull which showed an abrasion together with an extravasation of blood, now clotted.
“Would that do it?” queried Carpentaria.
“Don’t know. Might. By Jove, the rigor is extraordinarily acute.”
“Rigor?”
“The stiffness that follows death. Great Scott!”
The doctor assumed an upright position, and stared, first at the corpse and then at Carpentaria.
“Great Scott!” he repeated.
“What’s up?”
The doctor made no reply, but tried to lift the left arm of the body. He could not, without raising the entire body.
“This is most interesting,” he said.
“What is?”
Again Rivers did not answer. Instead, he took his watch from his pocket, and put it suddenly against the ear of the corpse.
The corpse twitched; its head moved slightly; the eyelid lifted the eighth of an inch.
“See that? You’re lucky! And so’s he!” said the doctor. “It’s catalepsy! that’s all—A sudden slight noise at the ear itself will often produce a change of position in catalepsy.”
“Then he’s not dead!” exclaimed Carpentaria.
“Dead? He’s no more dead than you are! It’s just catalepsy, induced probably by that blow. But he must have been very excited previously, and, no doubt, suffering from melancholia too. My dear Mr. Carpentaria, there is only one absolutely reliable symptom of death, and that is—putrefaction. Death is imitated by various diseases. But there are not many that will imitate the coldness of death as catalepsy will. Feel that hand; it’s like ice.”
“And how long will he remain in this condition?” asked Carpentaria, full of joy and relief.
“Till you go and bring me some snuff. Snuff is the best thing in these cases.”
“And he’ll be perfectly well again?”
“Yes, in a day or two.”
“He’ll remember—things?”
“Of course he will! Shall I go for that snuff, or will you?”
“I will run,” said Carpentaria, and he ran.
It was half-past seven o’clock on Monday evening. More than thirty hours had elapsed since young Rivers first began his operations to restore life to the cataleptic patient, and he was only just succeeding in an affair which had proved extremely difficult and protracted. Young Rivers, in fact, had found out during the watches of Sunday night and the sunny morning of Monday that the disease (if catalepsy may be called a disease) has a habit of flatly defying the rules of medical text-books and the experience of even the youngest doctors. But ultimately he had triumphed, though not by means of the famous snuff, which Carpentaria had obtained, after exhaustive research, from a bass-fiddle player in his band.
The patient reclined, alive, conscious, capable of movement and speech, but otherwise a prodigious enigma, in an arm-chair in Carpentaria’s bedroom. His existence was a profound secret from all except the doctor and the musician.
And now these two, who had brought him back to earthly life, wanted him to talk, to explain himself, to unravel the mysteries of Saturday afternoon and Saturday night. And Carpentaria, dressed in his uniform, waited, watch in hand; for in half an hour the daily concert must commence in the Oriental Gardens. Nothing could interfere with Carpentaria’s presence in the gorgeous illuminated bandstand. He had sacrificed his interest in his half-sister, his curiosity about the doings of the Ilams, his inspection of the affairs of the City, and even a rehearsal, to the care of the recovering cataleptic, but the concert itself, with its audience of a hundred thousand or so, could not be sacrificed.
“So you are Carpentaria?” murmured the patient, sipping at a glass of hot milk.
His age now appeared to be fifty. He had grey hair and a short grey beard, rather whiter than the hair, and his eyes bore the expression of a man who has found that life bears no striking resemblance to a good joke. His hands moved nervously over the surfaces of the chair.
“Yes,” Carpentaria admitted; “and you?”
It was the first direct question that he had ventured to put to the enigma, and the enigma ignored it.
“You say I was buried and you unburied me?” he pursued.
“Yes,” said Carpentaria enthusiastically, and he described the journeys, the disappearances and the reappearances, of the body of the enigma on the opening night.
“I suppose I should have died really, if I’d been left alone?” the enigma demanded of Rivers.
“Undoubtedly,” said Rivers. “Undoubtedly,” he repeated.
The enigma turned almost fiercely on Carpentaria.
“Then why, in the name of common sense, couldn’t you have left me alone?” he cried.
It was as though he owed Carpentaria a grudge which the most cruel ingenuity could not satisfy.
“I—I thought——” Carpentaria stammered, too surprised to be able to argue well.
“You thought you were doing a mighty clever thing,” snapped the enigma.
“I merely——”
“Or, rather,” the enigma proceeded, “you didn’t think at all.”
Rivers and Carpentaria exchanged a glance, indicating to each other that the man was an invalid and must therefore be humoured.
“Really, Mr.——-” Carpentaria began.
“Call me Jetsam,” the invalid interrupted. “It isn’t my name, but it’s near enough.”
“Well, Mr. Jetsam——”
“Not at all,” said Mr. Jetsam, sitting up in the chair. “There I was, comfortably dead, blind and deaf for evermore to the stupidities, the shams, the crimes, and the tedium of this world, and you go and deliberately recreate me! Is your opinion of the earth, and particularly of England, so high that you imagine a man is better on it than off it? Have you reached your present position and your present age, without coming to the conclusion that a person once comfortably dead would never want to be alive again? It seems to me, that you took upon yourselves the responsibility, the terrible responsibility of putting me back into life without giving the matter a moment’s serious thought. And I do verily believe that you expected me to be grateful! Grateful!”
“It was a question of duty——” Carpentaria ventured.
“Yes, of course. It only remained for you to drag in that word; I anticipated it. And why was it your duty? Who told you it was your duty? What authority have you for saying it was your duty? None—absolutely none! The sole explanation of your conduct is that, like most human beings, you are an interfering busybody; you can’t leave a thing alone.”
At length Carpentaria laughed. He was conscious of a certain liking for Mr. Jetsam.
“I can but offer you my humble apologies,” he said. “They are of no avail; they will not undo what is done. But none the less I offer them to you. You see, when I last saw you alive, you were so drunk, so very drunk——”
“I was not drunk at all,” said Mr. Jetsam. “And your inability to perceive the fact proves that, though you may be able to wear a very stylish uniform and to make a great deal of noise with a band, you are an infant as a detective. No, sir, I had certain plans to execute, and you, with that meddlesomeness that appears to characterize you, came along and interfered. In order that I might be left alone I pretended to be drunk. I have never been drunk in my life, which is conceivably more than you can say for yourself, or you, sir”—and he pointed to the young doctor, who had only recently finished being a medical student.
“And those plans—may one inquire?” Carpentaria murmured.
Mr. Jetsam covered his face with his hands.
“Ah!” he sighed, evidently speaking to himself. “I had done with all that, and now I must begin again. My instincts will inevitably drive me to begin again. My dear people”—he surveyed his two companions with an acid and distant stare—“instead of saving life, you have only set in motion a chain of circumstances that will lead to the loss of it. Murder and the scaffold will probably be the net result of your officious zeal.”
There was a rap on the bedroom door.
“Five minutes to eight, sir,” called a voice.
“Right,” said Carpentaria, getting up; and to Mr. Jetsam, “I will see you after the concert.”
“I doubt it,” said Mr. Jetsam.
“Why not?”
“Because I shall be gone. I am feeling quite strong.”
“I should like to talk to you about certain people,” pursued Carpentaria.
“Who?”
“Well, Josephus Ilam.”
“I know all about Josephus Ilam.”
“And his mother. Perhaps you don’t know all about his mother.”
Mr. Jetsam jumped to his feet with singular agility.
“Mrs. Ilam! She’s been dead for years,” he said gravely.
“She was very much alive this morning,” replied Carpentaria.
“He told me she was dead,” Jetsam muttered.
“He lied. She is in the bungalow opposite.”
“Oh!” Jetsam breathed, and he seemed to breathe the breath out of his body. He swayed and fell back into the chair.
“By Jove! He’s fainted!” exclaimed Rivers.
“Look after him,” said Carpentaria, and flew downstairs and towards his bandstand.
The concert was over. If it had been as great a triumph as usual—and it had—the reasons were perhaps that nothing succeeds like success, and that the Carpentaria band was so imbued with the spirit of Carpentaria that it would have played in the Carpentaria manner even had the shade of Beethoven come down to conduct it. Certainly Carpentaria’s performances with the baton, though wild and bizarre, lacked that sincerity and that amazing invention which usually distinguished them. He had too much to think about. There was the possibility of getting shot as he stood there. There was the possibility of being poisoned at his next meal. There was the possibility of some fearful complication with Juliette and Ilam. There was the positive mystery of Ilam himself. There was the comparative mystery of Ilam’s mother. And there was the superlative mystery of Mr. Jetsam. Under these circumstances, with all these pre-occupations, the plaudits of a hundred thousand people did not particularly interest Carpentaria that night. His chief desire was to get back to Mr. Jetsam, and to extract Mr. Jetsam’s secrets out of Mr. Jetsam either by force, by fraud, or by persuasion. As he was bowing languidly for the nineteenth time, and the entire orchestra was bowing behind him, amid a hurricane of clapping, he thought to himself:
“It’s a good thing I’m not in love! It would only need that, in addition to what I already have on my hands, to drive me crazy!”
As a fact, he had never been in love. Art, particularly as expressed by brass instruments, was his mistress.
He turned to descend the steps from the bandstand, when he perceived a tall African standing at attention at the bottom of the steps.
“What do you want?” he asked the African.
The man smiled the placid and infantile smile of his race, and handed a note to Carpentaria.
“You from the Soudanese village?”
“Yes, sah.”
The inhabitant of the Soudanese village, which was one of the attractions of the hippodrome, stood about six feet four inches high, and he was in native costume, which consisted largely, but not exclusively, of beads and polish. To gaze, dazzled, at the polish on that man’s face, shoulders, chest, and calves, one would guess that the whole tribe must sit up at nights bringing his polish to such a unique pitch of perfection. In his cheek you could see yourself as in a mirror, and he had the air of being personally well satisfied with the splendour of his mahogany skin.
Carpentaria opened the note. It read:
“Please come to me at once.—Ilam.”
Should he go? Or should he refuse this strange invitation, and hasten at once to Mr. Jetsam and the doctor?
“Where is Mr. Ilam?” he demanded of the Soudanese.
The Soudanese merely increased his smile, and pointed vaguely in the direction of the Amusement Park.
“Over there?”
“Yes, sah.”
“But where, man?”
“Yes, sah!” He lifted an arm and pointed.
The upper part of the illuminated rim of the giant wheel, a hundred feet higher than any other wheel in the world, could be seen over the roofs of the lofty white buildings in the Central Way. At this moment a rushing, roaring noise was heard to the east, and simultaneously the lights of the giant wheel were extinguished. Carpentaria glanced round. A rocket burst with a faint reverberation in the sky, a little colony of crimson stars floated for a few seconds amid the clouds—some stars had the shape of the letter I and others of the letter C—and then they expired, and the sky was black again. Cheers greeted the ingenious signal for the commencement of the first pyrotechnic display of the City of Pleasure, and a small crowd, which was beginning to form in the neighbourhood of the Soudanese, frittered itself suddenly away in a rush towards the Embankment. The fireworks were discharged from a plot of ground on the other side of the river—a plot specially leased for that sole purpose.
“I’ll come with you,” said Carpentaria to the Soudanese. He had decided that an interview with Ilam could not do any harm, and there was always the chance that it might in some way prove decisive. As for Mr. Jetsam, he would deal with Mr. Jetsam later. Possibly Ilam might have determined to make a general confession to him.
And he had his revolver.
The Soudanese walked quickly, and he was several inches taller than Carpentaria. In something less than five minutes they had arrived at the entrance to the Amusements Park, which was closing for the night.
“Where is Mr. Ilam?” Carpentaria asked again.
The Soudanese smiled.
They stood at the foot of the giant wheel, all of whose sixty cars were in darkness save one, and this car was at the bottom, and its door was open. Near the door stood a single official in the uniform of the City.
Carpentaria began to be puzzled.
“Mr. Ilam at the top?” he asked the official.
“I think so, sir,” said the official, after hesitating.
Carpentaria went into the car. The Soudanese shut the sliding door, remaining himself outside. The official blew a whistle, and the giant wheel began slowly to revolve with a terrific vibration and straining of chains and rods. The car was designed to hold sixty people—when the giant wheel was in full work it earned a hundred and eighty pounds per revolution—and Carpentaria felt lonely in it. “Is this some trap?” his thoughts ran; and he said to himself that he didn’t care whether it was a trap or not. As the car rose in the sky he had a superb view of the fireworks, which were now in full career—an immense and glittering tapestry of changing coloured flame, reflected hue for hue and tint for tint on the calm surface of the Thames beneath. And high above the pyrotechnics lightning was beginning to play. The day had been hot, even close, and it had been a pleasing surprise to the money-takers of the City that rain had not fallen.
At last the wheel shuddered, shook, and stopped. The car was at the summit, three hundred and forty feet above the level of the earth. A figure appeared on the flying platform outside the car. The door was opened, and Ilam entered.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Carpentaria demanded of him, standing up suddenly, and instinctively feeling the handle of his revolver with his right hand.
“It means that I wish to talk to you in private,” answered Ham, emphasizing the last two words; “and there seems to me to be no place particularly private down below now,” he added.
“What do you infer?”
“Perhaps I don’t quite know what I infer,” said Ilam. “All I can tell you is that this City has been getting rather peculiar this last day or two.”
“It has,” Carpentaria agreed pointedly.
“And as you went to the trouble of taking me up in that thing”—he indicated overhead, where the captive balloon was darting a searchlight to and fro across the expanse of the grounds—“I thought I’d go to the trouble of bringing you up here. It’s safer.”
Carpentaria noticed how pale the man was, how changed his visage, and how nervous his demeanour.
“I hope it is,” said Carpentaria. “What do you want?”
“Let’s sit down,” replied Ilam, clearing his throat, and they sat down on opposite sides of the car. “I’ll explain what I want in three words. How much will you take to clear out? I’m a plain man—how much will you take to clear out?”
“Clear out of the City? I won’t take anything,” said Carpentaria. “All the gold of all the Rockefellers won’t clear me out. I’ve got the largest audience for my band that any bandmaster ever had, and I like it. It’s worth more than money to——”
“Is it worth more than life to you?” asked the heavy President, gloomily.
“No; but I reckon I can keep my life and my audience, too,” said Carpentaria. “At any rate, you’ve tried to have my life twice and failed, and that hasn’t frightened me. I’m less frightened than you are, even.”
“I’ve not tried to kill you,” said Ilam.
“You’ve tried to shoot me and to poison me. Why, I cannot imagine.”
“I’ve not,” repeated Ilam.’
And, in spite of himself, Carpentaria was impressed by the apparent truthfulness of Ilam’s tone.
“Then who has?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Ilam lamely. “I don’t know what you mean, what you are referring to. But I’ll give you fifty thousand a year for ten years to go—to go.”
“No,” said Carpentaria. “I’m here. I stay.”
“Then, you’ll take the consequences.”
“I always take the consequences. But what consequences, my friend?”
“Well,” Ilam coughed, “you say there have been attempts on your life. Suppose they are continued? What then? I should like to save you. And perhaps I can only save you by persuading you to vanish.”
“Awfully good of you,” Carpentaria sneered. “But I assure you that these attempts on my life interest me enormously. I wouldn’t miss them for a fortune. I’m beginning rather to like them. One gets used to an atmosphere of mystery. No, Mr. President, I shall not go; but Juliette will go. I shall send Juliette away to-morrow.”
Ilam bit his lip.
“That remains to be seen,” said he. “She likes me. I should make her a good husband. Why do you object to me?”
“Why do you court her in the dark? Why do you force her to have secrets from me?”
“That’s neither here nor there,” said Ilam. “I should make her a good husband.”
“But what sort of a mother-in-law would she have if she married you?” demanded Carpentaria.
Ilam made no reply.
“And,” continued Carpentaria, “I don’t think it’s a good thing for a woman to have a husband who is always seeing ghosts.”
“Seeing ghosts?”
“Don’t you see ghosts?” sneered Carpentaria. “N—no.”
“Come down with me, and I’ll show you one, then,” said the bandmaster.
He had conceived the idea of confronting Ilam with Mr. Jetsam.
The shifting searchlight from the balloon fell dazzlingly across the car, and through the window Carpentaria saw plainly for the fraction of a second the polished face of the Soudanese. Then it disappeared.
He rushed to the door, flung it open, and gazed downwards into the weblike tracery of the steel-work which shone dully in the white glare of the searchlight. A zigzag stairway, incomparably slender, stretched away towards earth along the face of the colossal wheel, and a dark figure slipped rapidly from rung to rung of the dizzy ladder. Then the light moved capriciously away, and all was indistinguishable blackness.