The Bronze Bell Part 17

Mr. Labertouche was in the process of opening and reading a ten-days'

acc.u.mulation of correspondence, an occupation which he suspended temporarily to call his clerk in and receive his report. This proved to be a tolerably lengthy session, for the clerk, whose name appeared to be Frank, demonstrated his command of a surprising memory. Without notes he enumerated the callers at the office day by day from the time when Labertouche had left for the Mofussil with his specimen-box and the rest of his bug-hunting paraphernalia; naming those known to his employer, minutely describing all others, even repeating their words with almost phonographic fidelity.

Labertouche listened intently, without interrupting, abstractedly tapping his desk with a paper-cutter. At the end he said "Thank you,"

with a dry, preoccupied air; and resumed consideration of his letters.

These seemed to interest him little; one after the other he gave to his clerk, saying "File that," or "Answer that so-and-thusly." Two he set aside for his personal disposition, and these he took up again after the clerk had been dismissed. The first he read and reconsidered for a long time; then crumpled it up and, drawing to him a small tray of hammered bra.s.s, dropped the wadded paper upon it and touched a match to it, thoughtfully poking the blazing sheets with his paper-cutter until they were altogether reduced to ashes.

Quain's was the second letter. Having merely glanced at the heading and signature, Labertouche had reserved the rather formidable doc.u.ment--for Quain had written fully--as probably of scant importance, to be dealt with at his absolute leisure. But as he read his expression grew more and more serious and perturbed. Finishing the last page he turned back to the first and went over it a second time with much deliberation and frequent pauses, apparently memorising portions of its contents.

Finally he said, "Hum-m!" inscrutably and rang for Frank.

"He left New York by the _Lusitania_, eh?" said Mr. Labertouche aloud.

The clerk entering interrupted his soliloquy. "Bring me, please," he said, "Bradshaw, the _News_--and the latest P. & O. schedule." And when Frank had returned with these articles, he desired him to go at once and enquire at Government House the whereabouts of Colonel Dominick James Farrell, and further to search the hotels of Calcutta for a Miss Farrell, or for information concerning her. "Have this for me to-night--come to the bungalow at seven," he said. "And ... I shall probably not be at the office again for several days."

"Insects?" enquired the clerk.

"Insects," affirmed Mr. Labertouche gravely.

"In the Mofussil?"

"There or thereabouts, Frank."

"Yes, sir. I presume you don't feel the need of a capable a.s.sistant yet?"

"Not yet, Frank," said Labertouche kindly. "Be patient. Your time will come; you're doing famously now."

"Thank you."

"Good-afternoon. Lock the door as you leave."

Immediately that he found himself alone, Labertouche made of Quain's letter a second burnt offering to prejudice upon the tray of hammered bra.s.s. He was possessed of an incurable aversion to waste-paper baskets and other receptacles from which the curious might fish out torn bits of paper and, with patience, piece together and reconstruct doc.u.ments of whose import he preferred the world at large to remain unadvised.

Hence the tray of bra.s.s--a fixture among the furnishings of his desk.

This matter attended to, he lost himself in Bradshaw and the Peninsular & Oriental Steamship Company's list of sailings; from which he derived enlightenment. "He was to come direct," mused Labertouche. "In that case he'll have waited over in London for the _Poonah_." He turned to the copy of the _Indian Daily News_ which lay at his elbow, somewhat anxiously consulting its shipping news. Under the heading of "Due this Day" he discovered the words: "_Poonah_, London--Calcutta--Straits Settlements." And his face lengthened with concern.

"That's short notice," he said. "Lucky I got back to-day--uncommon lucky!... Still I may be mistaken." But the surmise failed to comfort him.

He drew a sheet of paper on which there was no letter-head to him and began to write, composing deliberately and with great care.

The building in which his offices were located stood upon a corner; at either end of the long corridor on the upper floor, upon which the various offices opened, were stairways, one descending to Dhurrumtollah Street, the other to a side street little better than an alley. It may be considered significant that, whereas Labertouche himself was not seen either to enter or to leave the building at any time that day, an Att.i.t mendicant did enter from Dhurrumtollah Street shortly after Frank had gone to lunch--and disappeared forthwith; while, in the dusk of evening, a slim Eurasian boy with a clerkly air left by the stairs to the alley. I say a boy, but he may have been thirty; he was carefully attired in clothing of the mode affected by the Anglo-Indian, but wore shoes that were almost heelless. His height may have been five-feet seven inches, but he carried himself with a slight, studious rounding of the shoulders that a.s.sorted well with the effect of his large gold-rimmed spectacles.

He stumbled out of the alley into Free School Street and set his face to the Maidan, shuffling along slowly with a peering air, his spectacles catching the light from the shop-windows and glaring gla.s.sily through the shadows.

CHAPTER VIII

FIRST STEPS

Forward on the promenade deck of the _Poonah,_ in the shadow of the bridge, Amber stood with both elbows on the rail, dividing his somewhat perturbed attention between a noisy lot of lascar stewards, deckhands, and native third-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers in the bows below, and the long lines of Saugor Island, just then slipping past on the starboard beam.

On either hand, ahead, the low, livid green banks of the Hooghly were closing in, imperceptibly constricting the narrow channel through which the tawny tide swirled down to the sea at the full force of its ebb.

Struggling under this handicap, the _Poonah_ trembled from stem to stern with the heavy labouring of the screw, straining forward like a thoroughbred, its strength almost spent, with the end of the race in sight. Across the white gleaming decks, as the bows swung from port to starboard and back again, following the channel, purple-black shadows slipped like oil. A languid land-wind blew fitfully down the estuary, in warm puffs dense with sickly-sweet jungle reek. The day was hot and sticky with humidity; a haze like a wall of dust coloured the skies almost to the zenith.

It was ten o'clock in the morning; Calcutta lay a hundred miles up the river, approximately. By evenfall Amber expected to be in the city, whether he stuck by the steamer until she docked in the port, or left her at Diamond Harbour, sixty miles upstream, and finished his journey by rail. At the present moment he hardly knew which to do; in the ordinary course of events he would have gone ash.o.r.e at Diamond Harbour, thereby gaining an hour or two in the city. But within the last eighteen hours events had been diverted from their normal course; and Amber was deeply troubled with misgivings.

Up to the day that the Poonah had sailed from Tilbury Dock, London, from the time he had left Quain among the sand-dunes of Long Island, he had not been conscious of any sort of espionage upon his movements.

That gaunt and threatening figure which he had seen silhouetted against the angry dawn had not again appeared to disturb or trouble him. His journey across the Atlantic had been uneventful; he had personally investigated the saloon pa.s.senger lists, the second and third cabins and the steerage of the _Lusitania,_ not forgetting the crew, only to be rea.s.sured by the absence of anybody aboard who even remotely suggested an Indian spy. But from the hour that the _Poonah_ with its miscellaneous ship's company, white, yellow, brown, and black, had warped out into the Thames, he had felt he was being watched--had realised it instinctively, having nothing definite whereon to base his feeling. He was neither timorous nor given to conjuring up shapes of terror from the depths of a nervous imagination; the sensation of being under the surveillance of unseen, prying eyes is unmistakable. Yet he had tried to reason himself out of the belief--after taking all sensible precautions, such as never letting the photograph of Sophia Farrell out of his possession and keeping the Token next his skin, in a chamois bag that nestled beneath his arm, swinging from a leather cord round his neck. And as day blended into eventless day, he had lulled himself into an uneasy indifference. What if he were watched? What could it profit any one to know what he did or how he did it, day by day? And with increasing infrequency he had come to question himself as to the reason for the spying on his movements.

Possibly the fruitlessness of any such speculation had much to do with his gradual cessation of interest in the enigma. He was not credulous of the power of divination popularly ascribed to the Oriental; he was little inclined to believe that the nature of his errand to India had been guessed, or that any native intelligence in India knew or suspected the secret of Sophia Farrell's parentage--Rutton's solicitude to the contrary notwithstanding. The theory that he most favoured in explanation of the interest in him was that it had somehow become known that he bore with him the emerald. It was quite conceivable that that jewel, intrinsically invaluable, was badly wanted by its former possessors, whether for the simple worth of it or because it played an important part in the intrigue, or whatever it was, that had resulted in Rutton's suicide. For his own part, Amber cared nothing for it; he had christened it, mentally, the Evil Eye--with a smile to himself; nonetheless he half-seriously suspected it of malign properties. He was imaginative enough for that--or superst.i.tious, if you prefer.

He would, however, gladly have surrendered the jewel to those who coveted it, in exchange for a promise of immunity from a.s.sa.s.sination, had he known whom to approach with the offer and been free to make it.

But he must first show it to Dhola Baksh of the Machua Bazaar. After that, when its usefulness had been discharged, he would be glad of the chance to strike such a bargain....

Such, in short, had been his frame of mind up to eight o'clock of the previous evening. At that hour he had made a discovery which had diverted the entire trend of his thoughts.

Doggott, ever a poor sailor, had been feeling ill and Amber had excused him early in the afternoon. About six o'clock he had gone to his stateroom and dressed for dinner, unattended. Absorbed in antic.i.p.ations of the morrow, when first he should set foot in Calcutta and take the first step in pursuit of Sophia Farrell, he had absent-mindedly neglected to empty the pockets of his discarded clothing. At seven he had gone to dinner, leaving his stateroom door open, as was his habit--a not unusual one with first-cabin pa.s.sengers on long voyages--and his flannels swinging from hooks in the wall. About eight, discovering his oversight through the absence of his cigarette-case, he had hurried back to the stateroom to discover that he had been curiously robbed.

His watch, his keys, his small change and his sovereign purse, his silver cigarette-case--all the articles, in fact, that he was accustomed to stuff into his pockets--with one exception, were where he had left them. But the leather envelope containing the portrait of Sophia Farrell was missing from the breast-pocket of his coat.

From the hour in which he had obtained it he had never but this once let it out of his personal possession. The envelope he had caused to be constructed for its safe-keeping during his enforced inaction in London. He had never once looked at it save in strict privacy, secure even from the eyes of Doggott; and the latter did not know what the leather case contained.

Thus his preconceived and self-constructed theory as to the extent of The Enemy's knowledge, was in an instant overthrown. "They" had seized the very first relaxation of his vigilance to rob him of that which he valued most. And in his heart he feared and believed that the incident indicated "their" intimacy not alone with his secret but with that which he shared with Colonel Farrell.

Since then his every move toward regaining the photograph had been fruitless. His stateroom steward, a sleek, soft Bengali boy who had attended him all through the voyage with every indication of eagerness to oblige him, professed entire ignorance of the theft. That was only to be expected. But when Amber went to the purser and the latter cross-examined the steward in his presence, the Bengali stuck to his protestations of innocence without the tremor of an eyelash. In fact, he established an alibi by the testimony of his fellow-stewards.

Further, when Amber publicly offered a reward of five guineas "and no questions asked" and in private tempted the Bengali with much larger amounts, he accomplished nothing.

In the end, and in despair, Amber posted a notice on the ship's bulletin-board, offering fifty guineas reward for the return of the photograph to him either before landing or at the Great Eastern Hotel, Calcutta, and having thereby established his reputation as a mild lunatic, sat down to twirl his thumbs and await the outcome, confidently antic.i.p.ating there would be none. "They" had outwitted him and not five hundred guineas would tempt "them," he believed. It remained only to contrive a triumph in despite of this setback.

But how to set about it? How might he plan against forces of whose very nature he was ignorant--save that he guessed them to be evil? How could he look ahead and scheme to circ.u.mvent the unguessable machinations of the unknown?... His wits, like wild things in a cage, battered themselves to exhaustion against the implacable bars of his understanding.

For the thousand-and-first time he reviewed the maddeningly scanty store of facts at his command, turning them over and over in his mind, vainly hopeful of inferring a clue. But, as always, he found his thoughts circling a beaten track of conjecture.... What dread power had hounded Rutton, forth from the haunts of his kind, from pillar to post of the world (as he had said) to his death among the desolate dunes of Long Island? What "staggering blow against the peace and security of the world" could that or any power possibly strike, with Rutton for its tool, once it had caught and bent him to its will? What fear had set upon his lips a seal so awful that even in the shadow of death he had not dared speak, though to speak were to save the one being to whom his heart turned in the end? To save his daughter from what, had he voluntarily renounced her, giving her into another's care, forswearing his paternal t.i.tle to her love, refusing himself even the cold comfort of seeing her attain to the flower of her womanly beauty as another's child? What--finally--was the ordeal of the Gateway of Swords, and what could it be that made the Gateway of Death seem preferable to it?

For the thousand-and-first time Amber abandoned his efforts to divine the inscrutable, to overcome the insurmountable, to attain to the inaccessible, but abandoned them grudgingly, grimly denying the possibility of ultimate failure. Though he were never to know the dark heart of the mystery, yet would he s.n.a.t.c.h from its pythonic coils the woman he had sworn to save, the woman he loved!

And while the black steamer with the buff super-structure toiled on, cleaving its arduous way through the turbulent yellow flood between the contracting sh.o.r.es of the Sunderbunds, while the offsh.o.r.e wind buffeted Amber's cheeks with the hot panting breath of Bengal, his eyes, dimmed with dreaming, saw only Her face.

So often of late had he in solitude pondered her photograph, striving to solve the puzzle of her heart that was to him a mystery as unfathomable as that which threatened her, that he had merely to think of her to bring her picture vividly before him. He could close his eyes (he closed them now, shutting out the moving panorama of the river) and see the girl that he had known in those few dear hours: the girl with eyes as brown as sepia but illumined by traces of gold in the irides--eyes that could smile and frown and be sweetly grave, all in the time that a man needs to catch his breath; the girl with the immaculate, silken skin, milk-white, with the rose-blush of young blood beneath; with lips softly crimson as satin petals of a flower, that could smile a man into slavery; the girl to contemplate whose adorably modelled chin and firm, round, young neck would soften the austerity of an anchorite; in whose hair was blended every deep shade of bronze and gold....

Something clutched at his heart as with a hand of ice. He could never forget, dared not remember what he could not believe yet dared not deny. To him, reared as he had been, the barrier of mixed blood rose between them, a thing surmountable only at the cost of caste; the shadow of that horror lay upon his soul like ink--as black as the silhouetted rails and masts and rigging of the _Poonah_ on her dead white decks. He could win her heart only to lose his world. And still he loved, still pursued his steadfast way toward her, knowing that, were he to find her and his pa.s.sion to be returned, death alone could avert their union in marriage. He might not forget but ... he loved.

With him the high wind of Romance was a living gale, levelling every obstacle between him and the desire of his heart.

This is to be borne in mind: it was the man's first love. Theretofore the habits of a thinker had set his feet in paths apart from those of other men. Pretty women he had always admired--from a discreet distance; that distance abridged, he had always found himself a little afraid of and dismayed by them. They were the world's disturbing element; they took men's lives in the rosy hollows of their palms and moulded them as they would. While Amber had desired to mould his own life. The theme of love that runs a golden thread through the drab fabric of existence had to him been an illusion--a hallucination to which others were subject, from which he was happily, if unaccountably, exempt. But that had been yesterday; to-day....

In the afternoon the _Poonah_ touched at Diamond Harbour, landing the majority of her pa.s.sengers. Amber was among those few who remained aboard.

When the steamer swung off from the jetty and, now aided by a favourable tide, resumed her progress up the river, he replaced his notice on the bulletin-board with one offering a hundred guineas for the return of the photograph before they docked in the port of Calcutta; the offer of fifty guineas for its return to the Great Eastern Hotel remained unaltered.

His antic.i.p.ations were not disappointed; positively nothing came of it.