by Sax Rohmer
“We are anxious to know what alarmed you, Miss Eltham.”
She bit her lip and glanced with apprehension toward 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 some one 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 any one 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-grey eyes widely opened and fixed upon mine. She was not of the neurotic type, with her clear complexion and sunkissed 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 anæmic 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 colour, marked with sections!”
“What size and shape?”
“It moved so quickly I could form no idea of its shape; 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 flavour was so awful; but father is an old traveller 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 Redmoat?”
“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 rat-hole 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 are 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 tonight. 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 command 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 st
range, 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 leant further 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 leapt, 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 around to the lawn, I met Smith fully dressed. He had just 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 around 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.
CHAPTER NINE
THE THIRD VICTIM
With the first coming of light, Eltham, Smith and I tested the electrical contrivances from every point. They were in perfect order. It became more and more incomprehensible how any one could have entered and quitted Redmoat during the night. The barbed-wire fencing was intact, and bore no signs of having been tampered with.
Smith and I undertook an exhaustive examination of the shrubbery.
At the spot where we had found the dog, some five paces to the west of the copper beech, the grass and weeds were trampled and the surrounding laurels and rhododendrons bore evidence of a struggle, but no human footprint could be found.
“The ground is dry,” said Smith. “We cannot expect much.”
“In my opinion,” I said, “someone tried to get at Caesar; his presence is dangerous. And in his rage he broke loose.”
“I think so too,” agreed Smith. “But why did this person make for here? And how, having mastered the dog, get out of Redmoat? I am open to admit the possibility of some one’s getting in during the day whilst the gates are open, and hiding until dusk. But how in the name of all that’s wonderful does he get out? He must possess the attributes of a bird.”
I thought of Greba Eltham’s statements, reminding my friend of her description of the thing which she had seen passing into this strangely haunted shrubbery.
“That line of speculation soon takes us out of our depth, Petrie,” he said. “Let us stick to what we can understand, and that may help us to a clearer idea of what, at present, is incomprehensible. My view of the case to date stands thus:
“(1) Eltham, having rashly decided to return to the interior of China, is warned by an official whose friendship he has won in some way to stay in England.
“(2) I know this official for one of the Yellow group represented in England by Dr. Fu-Manchu.
“(3) Several attempts, of which we know but little, to get at Eltham are frustrated, presumably by his curious ‘defences’. An attempt in a train fails owing to Miss Eltham’s distaste for refreshment-room coffee. An attempt here fails owing to her insomnia.
“(4) During Eltham’s absence from Redmoat certain preparations are made for his return. These lead to:
“(a) The death of Denby’s collie;
“(b) The things heard and seen by Miss Eltham;
“(c) The things heard and seen by us all last night.
“So that the clearing up of my fourth point—id est, the discovery of the nature of these preparations—becomes our immediate concern. The prime object of these preparations, Petrie, was to enable someone to gain access to Eltham’s room. The other events are incidental. The dogs had to be got rid of, for instance; and there is no doubt that Miss Eltham’s wakefulness saved her father a second time.”
“But from what? For heaven’s sake, from what?”
Smith glanced about into the light-patched shadows.
“From a visit by someone—perhaps by Fu-Manchu himself,” he said, in a hushed voice. “The object of that visit I hope we may never learn; for that would mean that it had been achieved.”
“Smith,” I said, “I do not altogether understand you; but do you think he has some incredible creature hidden here somewhere? It would be like him.”
“I begin to suspect the most formidable creature in the known world to be hidden here. I believe Fu-Manchu is somewhere inside Redmoat!”
Our conversation was interrupted at this point by Denby, who came to report that he had examined the moat, the roadside, and the bank of the stream, but found no footprints or clue of any kind.
“No one left the grounds of Redmoat last night, I think,” he said. And his voice had awe in it.
That day dragged slowly on. A party of us scoured the neighbourhood for t races of strangers, examining every foo t of the Roman ruin hard by; but vainly.
“May not your presence here induce Fu-Manchu to abandon his plans?” I asked Smith.
“I think not,” he replied. “You see, unless we can prevail upon him, Eltham sails in a fortnight. So the Doctor has no time to w
aste. Furthermore, I have an idea that his arrangements are of such a character that they must go forward. He might turn aside, of course, to assassinate me, if opportunity arose! But we know, from experience, that he permits nothing to interfere with his schemes.”
There are few states, I suppose, which exact so severe a toll from one’s nervous system as the anticipation of calamity.
All anticipation is keener, be it of joy or pain, than the reality whereof it is a mental forecast; but that inactive waiting at Redmoat, for the blow which we knew full well to be pending, exceeded, in its nerve taxation, anything of the kind I hitherto had experienced.
I felt as one bound upon an Aztec altar, with the priest’s obsidian knife raised above my breast!
Secret and malign forces throbbed about us; forces against which we had no armour. Dreadful as it was, I count it a mercy that the climax was reached so quickly. And it came suddenly enough; for there in that quiet Norfolk home we found ourselves at handgrips with one of the mysterious horrors which characterized the operations of Dr. Fu-Manchu. It was upon us before we realized it. There is no incidental music to the dramas of real life. As we sat on the little terrace in the creeping twilight, I remember thinking how the peace of the scene gave the lie to my fears that we bordered upon tragic things. Then Caesar, who had been a docile patient all day, began howling again; and I saw Greba Eltham’s shudder.
I caught Smith’s eye, and was about to propose our retirement indoors, when the party was broken up in more turbulent fashion. I suppose it was the presence of the girl which prompted Denby to the rash act, a desire personally to distinguish himself; but, as I recalled afterwards, his gaze had rarely left the shrubbery since dusk, save to seek her face, and now he leapt wildly to his feet, overturning his chair, and dashed across the grass to the trees.
“Did you see it?” he yelled. “Did you see it?”
He evidently carried a revolver, for from the edge of the shrubbery a shot sounded, and in the flash we saw Denby with the weapon raised.
“Greba, go in and fasten the windows,” cried Eltham. “Mr. Smith, will you enter the bushes from the west. Dr. Petrie, east. Edwards, Edwards—” And he was off across the lawn with the nervous activity of a cat.