The Sins of Severac Bablon Part 43

It is improbable that in the history of the newspaper business, even during war-time, there has ever been such a rush made for the papers as that which worked the trade to the point of general exhaustion on the following morning.

Without pausing here to consider the morning's news, let us return to the Chancery Legal Incorporated Credit Society Bank.

"Move along here, please. Move on. Move on."

Again the street is packed with emotional humanity. But what a different scene is this, although in its essentials so similar. For every face is flushed with excitement--joyful excitement. As once before, they press eagerly on toward the bank entrance; but this morning the doors are _open_. Almost every member of that crushed and crushing a.s.sembly holds a copy of the morning paper. Every man and every woman in the crowd knows that the missing financiers have declined, firmly, to afford any information whatever respecting their strange adventure--that they have refused, all four of them, point blank either to substantiate or to deny the sensational story of Messrs. Macready and Murray. "The incident is closed," Baron Hague is reported as declaring. But what care the depositors of the Chancery Legal Incorporated? For is it not announced, also, that this quartet of public benefactors, with a fifth philanthropist (who modestly remains anonymous) have put up between them no less a sum than three and a half million pounds to salve the wrecked bank?

"By your leave. Make way here. Stand back, _if_ you please."

Someone starts a cheer, and it is feverishly taken up by the highly wrought throng, as an escorted van pulls slowly through the crowd. It is bullion from the Bank of England. Good red gold and crisp notes. It is dead hopes raised from the dust; happiness reborn, like a ph[oe]nix from the ashes of misery.

"Hip, hip, hip, hooray!"

Again and again, and yet again that joyous cheer awakes the echoes of the ancient Inns.

It was as a final cheer died away that Haredale, on the rim of the throng, felt himself tapped upon the shoulder.

He turned a flushed face and saw a tall man, irreproachably attired, standing smiling at his elbow. The large eyes, with their compelling light of command, held nothing now but a command to friendship.

"Severac Bablon!"

"Well, Haredale!" The musical voice made itself audible above all the din. "These good people would rejoice to know the name of that anonymous friend who, with four other disinterested philanthropists, has sought to bring a little gladness into a grey world. Here am I. And there, on the bank steps, are police. Make your decision. Either give me in charge or give me your hand."

Haredale could not speak; but he took the outstretched hand of the most surprising bandit the world ever has known, and wrung it hard.

CHAPTER XXII

THE TURKISH YATAGHAN

It was about a fortnight later that a City medical man, Dr. Simons, in the dusk of a spring evening, might have been seen pressing his way through the crowd of excited people who thronged the hall of Moorgate Place, Moorgate Street.

Addressing himself to a portly, florid gentleman who exhibited signs of having suffered a recent nervous shock, he said crisply.

"My name, sir, is Simons. You 'phoned me?"

The florid gentleman, mopping his forehead with a Cambridge-blue silk handkerchief, replied rather pompously, if thickly:

"I'm Julius Rohscheimer. You'll have heard of me."

Everyone had heard of that financial magnate, and Dr. Simons bowed slightly.

The two, followed by a murmuring chorus, ascended the stairs.

"Stand back, please," rapped the physician tartly, turning upon their following. "Will someone send for the police and ring up Scotland Yard?

This is not a peep-show."

Abashed, the curious ones fell back, and Simons and Rohscheimer went upstairs alone. Most of the people employed in those offices left sharp at six, but a little group of belated workers from an upper floor were nervously peeping in at an open door bearing the words:

DOUGLAS GRAHAM

They stood aside for the doctor, who entered briskly, Rohscheimer at his heels, and closed the door behind him. A chilly and indefinable something pervaded the atmosphere of Moorgate Place a something that floats, like a marsh mist, about the scene of a foul deed.

The outer office was in darkness, as was that opening off it on the left; but out from the inner sanctum poured a flood of light.

Douglas Graham's private office was similar to the private offices of a million other business men, but on this occasion it differed in one dread particular.

Stretched upon the fur rug before the American desk lay a heavily built figure, face downward. It was that of a fashionably dressed man, one who had been portly, no longer young, but who had received a murderous thrust behind the left shoulder-blade, and whose life had ebbed in the grim red stream that stained the fur beneath him.

With a sharp glance about him, the doctor bent, turned the body and made a rapid examination. He stood up almost immediately, shrugging slightly.

"Dead!"

Julius Rohscheimer wiped his forehead with the Cambridge silk.

"Poor Graham! How long?" he said huskily.

"Roughly, half an hour."

"Look! look! On the desk!"

The doctor turned sharply from the body and looked as directed.

Stuck upright amid the litter of papers was a long, curved dagger, with a richly ornamented hilt. Several doc.u.ments were impaled by its crimson point, and upon the topmost the following had roughly and shakily been printed:

"VENGENCE IS MINE!

"SeVERAC BABLON."

Dr. Simons started perceptibly, and looked about the place with a sudden apprehension. It seemed to Julius Rohscheimer that his face grew pale.

In the eerie silence of the dead man's room they faced one another.

The doctor, his straight brows drawn together, looked, again and again, from the ominous writing to the poor, lifeless thing on the rug.

"Then, indeed, his sins were great," he whispered.

Rohscheimer, with his eyes fixed on the dagger, shuddered violently.

"Let's get out, doctor," he quavered thickly. "My--my nerve's goin'."

Dr. Simons, though visibly shaken by this later discovery, raised his hand in protest. He was looking, for the twentieth time, at the words printed upon the bloodstained paper.

"One moment," he said, and opened his bag. "Here"--pouring out a draught into a little gla.s.s--"drink this. And favour me with two minutes'

conversation before the police arrive."

Rohscheimer drank it off and followed the movements of the doctor, who stepped to the telephone and called up a Gerrard number.