“This device, which looks like an alabaster box, is a mold made of plaster for the purpose of counterfeiting one of the largest gold coins of the French currency. Dernburg came here, took this house, carried forward his undertaking until he had stored the squares under this drawing-room with false coins. Then when he had finished— when he had got the coins molded, gold-plated and hidden, ready for the business of their distribution, I called on him last night! It was my voice that was heard outside. I showed him that he was at the end of his tether—that the house was guarded; and I came away leaving open to him the only escape he had. He effected that escape with a razor drawn across his throat.”
Monsieur Jonquelle paused, his voice firm, even and unhurried.
“You appeared, Monsieur, a little later, and seeing an opportunity to obtain an indemnity from France for a murdered subject of your country, put the razor into your pocket and clumsily daubed the white squares of this drawing-room floor with the evidential signs of an assassination.”
IX.—The Problem of the Five Marks
I traveled up to Ostend with Monsieur Jonquelle, the Prefect of Police.
There was never one seeking the solution of a mystery who was left so wholly in the dark. My father had sent me over from America, but I came under sealed orders. I think his motive was more to test me a little in the world than to put me into a problem with the Service de la Sûreté—that detective department of the great police system of France.
I did not know there was a mystery in the affair until I came with my sealed orders to Monsieur Jonquelle.
I knew, of course, that my great-aunt was dead and that there were complications of some sort; but there were always complications, I imagined, in the settlement of estates in a foreign country. Still, if I had reflected, I might have seen something significant in the fact that I was sent to the Service de la Sûreté instead of a banking house or a solicitor. My father was at the head of a financial house of some importance in the world; he would make no mistake.
Monsieur Jonquelle smiled when he read my sealed orders:
“And so I am not to leave you to the depravity of Paris!”
He looked sharply at me. And then his expression changed. He seemed to fall into reflection, fingering the cord of his monocle, his eyes vaguely on me.
Had I perhaps seen the “Review of Toy Land” at the Folies Bergères?
I had not.
“I shall put you down, Sir Galahad,” he said, “in the city of Ostend, while I look about a bit in Belgium. You will require to be hardened by adventures.”
I slept that night at the Hotel Lotti and journeyed on the following day to Ostend. I learned little at the Service de la Sûreté, but I learned enough to know that my great-aunt’s death was involved in something puzzling. She was unmarried, rich, eccentric, and almost unknown to us. I asked Monsieur Jonquelle how she died.
He looked me over as one might look over an infant at a prize show and then he answered I would be too young to understand that!
Too young to understand what had killed my aunt! I, who had a degree from Harvard and was about to enter my father’s business!
I tried with a certain dignity to break through the man’s facetious manner. Would he kindly tell me how my aunt had died? Why, certainly he would tell me: she had been killed, and he was searching France for her assassin. But I must not get the conception of an Apache with a knife. She had suffered from no act of violence, no hand had touched her; there had not even been a will to death on the part of her assassins. And yet she had been killed. And he, and every intelligence of the Service de la Sûreté labored to find a solution of the problem.
In Ostend adventure awaited me!
It was there in the group of hurrying people, as I got down from the car a step behind Monsieur Jonquelle; a girl’s face caught for an instant and then lost in the crowd.
But her face and the manner in which she had regarded me remained.
It was a lovely oval face under a mass of abundant straw-colored hair, and with great blue eyes. But the lure was in something more than this exquisite face. It was in the expression that changed as by some enchantment in the moment that I had a vision of her; that expression, anxious and disturbed—startled—like a frightened wild thing when I caught it first in the swaying crowd, changed as it regarded me; an immense surprise, then a sort of wonder, and then some light as of a sudden daring purpose appeared, luminous as with a sort of deviltry.
I said nothing to Monsieur Jonquelle but I followed him to the Maison Blanc with a certain sense of interest.
I would find that face. Easily I shall find her, was the belief I held; and easily I found her, was the fact that followed.
Monsieur Jonquelle had departed on the Brussels road and I sat over my breakfast in the dining room that looks out on the long narrow street that runs landward through the city of Ostend from the Digue de Mer. It is a cobbled paved street of shops and little markets and there was a busy moving of peasant figures in it: baggytrousered fishermen shuffling in their wooden shoes and Flanders women in their native dress, picturesque and vivid.
I watched the mass movement in the long street for some time before I got down to the details in it. Then I noticed a big, sturdy dog harnessed to a little cart standing in the street below my window, beside a small grocer’s shop.
I got my hat and stick and sauntered out. It was a heavenly day, with a soft air from the Channel and a brilliant sun. As I came out, the door of the grocer’s shop opened and the girl I was setting out to seek was there, in the sun, before me. She looked like a heavenly doll in her peasant dress.
She smiled when she saw me, the corners of her mouth dimpling; and she spoke to me in a queer lisping sort of foreign English:
“Monsieur is an American?”
“Yes.”
“How nice!”
The sympathy, the frank admiration in the words were adorable. I felt before her smile in that moment that no gift of God could equal being an American.
“You came last night from Paris … with the father?”
She held up the warning finger of a little, white, doubled hand. “I saw … does the father perhaps observe us?”
I laughed, and added the explanation. The man was not my father. He was Monsieur Jonquelle, the Prefect of Police of Paris. And he did not, perhaps, observe us! He had gone on to Brussels. She was glad he had gone on. Why did I, “so nice,” travel about with a Prefect of Police?
I explained that he was concerned with some affair of his trade in Paris that took him on to Brussels; I came to idle and amuse myself in Ostend.
She looked about her in the street with a troubled air. Leopold, her dog that drew the cart, was getting old, and like a man in years, would have his way. He was all right on the great road but he was quarrelsome in a crowded street. She had been waiting for the people to finish their morning affairs and leave her an empty way for him. But the street grew only the more densely crowded and she must go. Would I help her to the great road?
I would have helped her to the world’s end!
And on either side, at the dog’s muzzle, we threaded our way carefully through the long street across the environs of Ostend to the wide road that runs behind the sand dunes through the flat fields to the north.
She prattled like a child at every step with all the simplicity and curious interest of a child; a thousand questions that trod upon one another’s heels and hardly waited for an answer—like some friendly tot by a peasant’s fireside who asks about one’s intimate and reserved affairs and discloses in return the names and habits of the barn fowl.
When we reached the great road, she tucked herself into the tiny cart and bade me adieu. And before I could realize what had happened she was gone. She smiled back at me and called something which I did not hear. The dog hurried and the tiny cart drew away rapidly on the long road toward the north.
It was all so like a fairy story that I remained motionless in the road.
I returned t
o the Maison Blanc, but it was for luncheon only and a brief reflection; what I would do was already determined. I would search that road to the north. I set out on foot. One has more leisure to observe when one goes alone with a stick in one’s hand.
I found fields about me separated by wide ditches, then the thin line of a village extended along the road. And beyond that the road divided. The sun was half down the sky as I turned back. I was approaching the village when that fortune of events that seemed to attend me extended an unexpected favor, as I passed a little house surrounded by a wall with a white door opening on the road.
As I drew near, within a dozen paces of the door, some one flung this door violently open and rushed out, nearly falling in her haste. It was the girl I sought, and with two mighty strides I caught her. She turned like a wild thing in my arms and then, when she saw who it was, with a little gasp relaxed.
“Oh!” she murmured, “it is you; did the good God send you?”
For a moment she went all limp in my arms, trembling; then she sprang up, clutched my hand and took me with her through the door, and directly into the cottage.
The door from the path opened into a room that the girl evidently maintained for herself, and beyond it in the one adjoining, in a chair beside a window, sat a big old man, his hands supported by the wide arms of the chair and his great bald head fallen forward. I thought for a moment that he was dead. But when I put my hand on him the pulse beat in his temples and his hands were warm, and in a moment his eyelids slowly opened, and I saw that the man was alive and conscious.
The girl, who had followed at my elbow, drew me gently away through the door. She bade me wait until she should return; and went back into the room, closing the door behind her.
This was no peasant’s room. It was bright with chintz. The little women’s things about in it showed taste and delicacy. Even a certain luxury of life was indicated. And in the leisure I had time to observe the place. There was a prim little garden outside inclosed by the white wall, and in a corner of it stood the cart and the dog harness; the great dog slept on a bed of dried grass and leaves. It was a peasant cottage, but improved and livable, made charming in fact.
I was in this mood of wonder when the girl entered with a tray, a teakettle, and some dainty porcelain cups. She was composed now and smiling, but her face was white. She arranged the tea things on a little inlaid folding table and drew up a chair for me. Then, while the water boiled, she cleared the mystery with which we were environed.
Her father was a paralytic, growing with each day more helpless. His collapse this afternoon she had taken for the end, and in her terror she had rushed out to find some aid; by the favor of the good God I was passing at the moment. They were not, as I must have realized, native to Belgium, They were Russian. Her father was a savant, and a philologist, an antiquarian at the head of the Czar’s great museum in Petrograd. They had escaped here. And to go unnoticed she had assumed this peasant’s dress; also, there must be a way to carry their supplies here from the markets, and so came the dog and cart.
And now disaster enveloped her!
Her great blue eyes filled, and her soft adorable voice became unsteady. They had no longer any money, and this affliction that had fallen so swiftly on her father left her with no one to whom she could go for counsel.
Could she trust me; would I be a friend to her? She must have some one to advise with; would I maintain her confidence?
There could have been no doubt of me. I would have given her my inheritance. I had far more in my letter of credit than I could need. I would draw it out at the bank to-morrow.
She only shook her heavenly head at me and put out her hands with a little gesture.
No, no, she could not take anything from me. She did not mean that; what she meant was would I be a friend to her? Would I respect her confidence? Could she trust me?
She stood up, released her hand that I had imprisoned in the fervor of my assurance, and removed the tea things from the table. She took them out and returned with some sheets of paper.
There must have been a dozen sheets, all blank except for some scrawling marks in pencil that looked like the pothooks made by school children in their first copy-books.
Her father had brought with him out of Russia a little packet containing a present from the Czar, she said. It was of great value and meant their fortune when their store of money was exhausted. He was fearful for the safety of the thing and had hidden it in Paris, somewhere in the house of the Prince Kitzenzof, their friend, with whom they had stopped after their escape from Russia. She had not thought much about it until this sudden paralysis had seized her father. Then he could not tell her where it was hidden. He was able to speak when she first asked him, but she could not understand. He spoke either some ancient language or his words were babble. But he seemed to understand what she was saying, and to endeavor to reply.
Then, because he could still move his hands, it had occurred to her to have him write the secret, and she had put a pencil in his fingers and a pad of paper on his chair arm, and he had made these pothooks. Over and over again and always in the same strange fashion he had made the same strange marks.
As I have written, they looked to me like the first efforts of a child to form the curves and angles of letters in a copy-book. But the girl, beside me, pointed out some peculiar details.
The paralytic had made always precisely the same number of these marks on every sheet that had been put before him; there were always five of these marks; they were always precisely the same with no variation, and they were always in precisely the same relative position to one another. There was always a line drawn under them across the page, and below this line at about the middle of it there was an “x.”
The girl had thought the thing all out and her comments were intelligent; in her simple way she had followed the very methods of learned men who undertake to decipher an inscription. She gave her conclusion:
The marks were not unmeaning scrawls, because they never varied in form; the mere incoherent efforts of a paralytic to form letters would not have this exactness. Therefore she concluded that each of these marks meant something definite.
Then these characters were always placed in the same order and on a line; therefore they were related in that order in their meaning—if they had a meaning. Her father had always apparently understood her question to him, and seemed concerned to give her a direction. The “x” under the line, the point of his pencil always dwelt on, and returned to, as though he wished her particularly to mark it; as though it, in the whole writing, was the important sign.
Her deep interest might, indeed, influence her conclusions, but she thought that these characters contained a definite direction about the packet, and that the “x” indicated the point at which it was concealed, in some relation to the message above the line in this mysterious cipher. She thought that if she could understand these strange marks she would be told where the thing was that she sought, and how to find it.
But she could not understand them.
They did not resemble any letters of any alphabet with which she was familiar. True, she knew only such modern languages as a girl was taught in Petrograd—French, Italian, English, and her native one. But her father was a great philologist. He would know innumerable languages. Could it be that he had written here in some one of the old dead languages to which his life had been given up? He was always deciphering inscriptions in these dead dialects at the Czar’s museum.
She had thought about it.
Might it happen that this paralysis had left some portion of his mind uninjured—some portion dealing with old things—and benumbed the rest?
I caught at the suggestion: why, yes, that was a thing we had been taught in lectures. It was called aphasia, and there were many cases; men stricken with it forgot their names and history and their language, and had to learn to write again like a child; there was a case of one who could write only in the Greek script after he was so stricken, and anot
her who knew only Latin.
“The thing is simple,” I said. “We require only a direction to some archeologist. I will ask Monsieur Jonquelle.”
“Oh, no, no!” she cried, “not Monsieur Jonquelle, not the police!”
That would ruin everything. The police would find the thing and keep it. It would be seized and confiscated. It had been carried into France concealed. There had been no declaration at the customs. Monsieur Jonquelle was the very last person who should know.
Let her think a moment! And she walked about in her perturbation, her face tense, her fingers moving.
“I know,” she said, “the very thing to do … the very thing!”
There was a book shop on the street where I had found her with the dog, a dingy place with a clutter of old books. And now that she remembered there was a big English book with a leather back; a sort of lexicon, she thought, that had a lot of ancient alphabets grouped in columns on one page. I might go in there and see if these strange marks resembled the letters of any alphabet.
I would know the very page. One day, when her father was poring over it, she had put her thumb on the margin; it was soiled with the dust of the shop and left a print. I would be able to see that very mark there.
She was now alive and vital with an eager interest. And she literally put me out of the cottage into the road. I must go now at once.
I set out for Ostend as upon some high adventure.
As I approached the village a tall man seated on a stone by the roadside got up and went on before me. I thought for a moment it was Monsieur Jonquelle; then I saw the peasant dress he wore. I tried to overtake him, but his stride was as long and as vigorous as my own and he kept his distance. He was still before me when I went into the book shop on the street in Ostend.
I found the book at once.
It was a copy of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary in some old edition. And a moment later I had the very page, headed: Ancient Alphabets: Comparative Table of Hieroglyphic and Alphabetic Characters. And on the margin was the little thumb print! These ancient alphabets were arranged in columns, as the girl had said, with the equivalent English letter in the last narrow column on the right.
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