It was not a theme on which it was wise to permit one"s thoughts to linger,-and particularly was it clear that it was one from which Lessingham"s thoughts should have been kept as far as possible away.
"Come, Mr Lessingham, neither you nor I will do himself any good by permitting his reflections to flow in a morbid channel. Let us talk of something else. By the way, weren"t you due to speak in the House to-night?"
"Due!-Yes, I was due,-but what does it matter?"
"But have you acquainted no one with the cause of your non- attendance?"
"Acquaint!-whom should I acquaint?"
"My good sir! Listen to me, Mr Lessingham. Let me entreat you very earnestly, to follow my advice. Call another cab,-or take this! and go at once to the House. It is not too late. Play the man, deliver the speech you have undertaken to deliver, perform your political duties. By coming with me you will be a hindrance rather than a help, and you may do your reputation an injury from which it never may recover. Do as I counsel you, and I will undertake to do my very utmost to let you have good news by the time your speech is finished."
He turned on me with a bitterness for which I was unprepared.
"If I were to go down to the House, and try to speak in the state in which I am now, they would laugh at me, I should be ruined."
"Do you not run an equally great risk of being ruined by staying away?"
He gripped me by the arm.
"Mr Champnell, do you know that I am on the verge of madness? Do you know that as I am sitting here by your side I am living in a dual world? I am going on and on to catch that-that fiend, and I am back again in that Egyptian den, upon that couch of rugs, with the Woman of the Songs beside me, and Marjorie is being torn and tortured, and burnt before my eyes! G.o.d help me! Her shrieks are ringing in my ears!"
He did not speak loudly, but his voice was none the less impressive on that account. I endeavoured my hardest to be stern.
"I confess that you disappoint me, Mr Lessingham. I have always understood that you were a man of unusual strength; you appear instead, to be a man of extraordinary weakness; with an imagination so ill-governed that its ebullitions remind me of nothing so much as feminine hysterics, Your wild language is not warranted by circ.u.mstances. I repeat that I think it quite possible that by to-morrow morning she will be returned to you."
"Yes,-but how? as the Marjorie I have known, as I saw her last,- or how?"
That was the question which I had already asked myself, in what condition would she be when we had succeeded in s.n.a.t.c.hing her from her captor"s grip? It was a question to which I had refused to supply an answer. To him I lied by implication.
"Let us hope that, with the exception of being a trifle scared, she will be as sound and hale and hearty as even in her life."
"Do you yourself believe that she"ll be like that,-untouched, unchanged, unstained?"
Then I lied right out,-it seemed to me necessary to calm his growing excitement.
"I do."
"You don"t!"
"Mr Lessingham!"
"Do you think that I can"t see your face and read in it the same thoughts which trouble me? As a man of honour do you care to deny that when Marjorie Lindon is restored to me,-if she ever is!-you fear she will be but the mere soiled husk of the Marjorie whom I knew and loved?"
"Even supposing that there may be a modic.u.m of truth in what you say,-which I am far from being disposed to admit-what good purpose do you propose to serve by talking in such a strain?"
"None,-no good purpose,-unless it be the desire of looking the truth in the face. For, Mr Champnell, you must not seek to play with me the hypocrite, nor try to hide things from me as if I were a child. If my life is ruined-it is ruined,-let me know it, and look the knowledge in the face. That, to me, is to play the man."
I was silent.
The wild tale he had told me of that Cairene inferno, oddly enough-yet why oddly, for the world is all coincidence!-had thrown a flood of light on certain events which had happened some three years previously and which ever since had remained shrouded in mystery. The conduct of the business afterwards came into my hands,-and briefly, what had occurred was this:
Three persons,-two sisters and their brother, who was younger than themselves, members of a decent English family, were going on a trip round the world. They were young, adventurous, and-not to put too fine a point on it-foolhardy. The evening after their arrival in Cairo, by way of what is called "a lark," in spite of the protestations of people who were better informed than themselves, they insisted on going, alone, for a ramble through the native quarter.
They went,-but they never returned. Or, rather the two girls never returned. After an interval the young man was found again,- what was left of him. A fuss was made when there were no signs of their re-appearance, but as there were no relations, nor even friends of theirs, but only casual acquaintances on board the ship by which they had travelled, perhaps not so great a fuss as might have been was made. Anyhow, nothing was discovered. Their widowed mother, alone in England, wondering bow it was that beyond the receipt of a brief wire, acquainting her with their arrival at Cairo, she had heard nothing further of their wanderings, placed herself in communication with the diplomatic people over there,- to learn that, to all appearances, her three children had vanished from off the face of the earth.
Then a fuss was made,-with a vengeance. So far as one can judge the whole town and neighbourhood was turned pretty well upside down. But nothing came of it,-so far as any results were concerned, the authorities might just as well have left the mystery of their vanishment alone. It continued where it was in spite of them.
However, some three months afterwards a youth was brought to the British Emba.s.sy by a party of friendly Arabs who a.s.serted that they had found him naked and nearly dying in some remote spot in the Wady Haifa desert. It was the brother of the two lost girls. He was as nearly dying as he very well could be without being actually dead when they brought him to the Emba.s.sy,-and in a state of indescribable mutilation. He seemed to rally for a time under careful treatment, but he never again uttered a coherent word. It was only from his delirious ravings that any idea was formed of what had really occurred.
Shorthand notes were taken of some of the utterances of his delirium. Afterwards they were submitted to me. I remembered the substance of them quite well, and when Mr Lessingham began to tell me of his own hideous experiences they came back to me more clearly still. Had I laid those notes before him I have little doubt but that he would have immediately perceived that seventeen years after the adventure which had left such an indelible scar upon his own life, this youth-he was little more than a boy-had seen the things which he had seen, and suffered the nameless agonies and degradations which he had suffered. The young man was perpetually raving about some indescribable den of horror which was own brother to Lessingham"s temple and about some female monster, whom he regarded with such fear and horror that every allusion he made to her was followed by a convulsive paroxysm which taxed all the ingenuity of his medical attendants to bring him out of. He frequently called upon his sisters by name, speaking of them in a manner which inevitably suggested that he had been an unwilling and helpless witness of hideous tortures which they had undergone; and then he would rise in bed, screaming, "They"re burning them! they"re burning them! Devils! devils!" And at those times it required all the strength of those who were in attendance to restrain his maddened frenzy.
The youth died in one of these fits of great preternatural excitement, without, as I have previously written, having given utterance to one single coherent word, and by some of those who were best able to judge it was held to have been a mercy that he did die without having been restored to consciousness. And, presently, tales began to be whispered, about some idolatrous sect, which was stated to have its headquarters somewhere in the interior of the country-some located it in this neighbourhood, and some in that-which was stated to still practise, and to always have practised, in unbroken historical continuity, the debased, unclean, mystic, and b.l.o.o.d.y rites, of a form of idolatry which had had its birth in a period of the world"s story which was so remote, that to all intents and purposes it might be described as pre-historic.
While the ferment was still at its height, a man came to the British Emba.s.sy who said that he was a member of a tribe which had its habitat on the banks of the White Nile. He a.s.serted that he was in a.s.sociation with this very idolatrous sect,-though he denied that he was one of the actual sectaries. He did admit, however, that he had a.s.sisted more than once at their orgies, and declared that it was their constant practice to offer young women as sacrifices-preferably white Christian women, with a special preference, if they could get them, to young English women. He vowed that he himself had seen with his own eyes, English girls burnt alive. The description which he gave of what preceded and followed these foul murders appalled those who listened. He finally wound up by offering, on payment of a stipulated sum of money, to guide a troop of soldiers to this den of demons, so that they should arrive there at a moment when it was filled with worshippers, who were preparing to partic.i.p.ate in an orgie which was to take place during the next few days.
His offer was conditionally accepted. He was confined in an apartment with one man on guard inside and another on guard outside the room. That night the sentinel without was startled by hearing a great noise and frightful screams issuing from the chamber in which the native was interned. He summoned a.s.sistance. The door was opened. The soldier on guard within was stark, staring mad,-he died within a few months, a gibbering maniac to the end. The native was dead. The window, which was a very small one, was securely fastened inside and strongly barred without. There was nothing to show by what means entry had been gained. Yet it was the general opinion of those who saw the corpse that the man had been destroyed by some wild beast. A photograph was taken of the body after death, a copy of which is still in my possession. In it are distinctly shown lacerations about the neck and the lower portion of the abdomen, as if they had been produced by the claws of some huge and ferocious animal. The skull is splintered in half-a-dozen places, and the face is torn to rags.
That was more than three years ago. The whole business has remained as great a mystery as ever. But my attention has once or twice been caught by trifling incidents, which have caused me to more than suspect that the wild tale told by that murdered native had in it at least the elements of truth; and which have even led me to wonder if the trade in kidnapping was not being carried on to this very hour, and if women of my own flesh and blood were not still being offered up on that infernal altar. And now, here was Paul Lessingham, a man of world-wide reputation, of great intellect, of undoubted honour, who had come to me with a wholly unconscious verification of all my worst suspicions!
That the creature spoken of as an Arab,-and who was probably no more an Arab than I was, and whose name was certainly not Mohamed el Kheir!-was an emissary from that den of demons, I had no doubt. What was the exact purport of the creature"s presence in England was another question, Possibly part of the intention was the destruction of Paul Lessingham, body, soul and spirit; possibly another part was the procuration of fresh victims for that long-drawn-out holocaust. That this latter object explained the disappearance of Miss Lindon I felt persuaded. That she was designed by the personification of evil who was her captor, to suffer all the horrors at which the stories pointed, and then to be burned alive, amidst the triumphant yells of the attendant demons, I was certain. That the wretch, aware that the pursuit was in full cry, was tearing, twisting, doubling, and would stick at nothing which would facilitate the smuggling of the victim out of England, was clear.
My interest in the quest was already far other than a merely professional one. The blood in my veins tingled at the thought of such a woman as Miss Lindon being in the power of such a monster. I may a.s.suredly claim that throughout the whole business I was urged forward by no thought of fee or of reward. To have had a share in rescuing that unfortunate girl, and in the destruction of her noxious persecutor, would have been reward enough for me.
One is not always, even in strictly professional matters, influenced by strictly professional instincts.
The cab slowed. A voice descended through the trap door.
"This is Commercial Road, sir,-what part of it do you want?"
"Drive me to Limehouse Police Station."
We were driven there. I made my way to the usual inspector behind the usual pigeon-hole.
"My name is Champnell. Have you received any communication from Scotland Yard to-night having reference to a matter in which I am interested?"
"Do you mean about the Arab? We received a telephonic message about half an hour ago."
"Since communicating with Scotland Yard this has come to hand from the authorities at Vauxhall Station. Can you tell me if anything has been seen of the person in question by the men of your division?"
I handed the Inspector the "report." His reply was laconic.
"I will inquire."
He pa.s.sed through a door into an inner room and the "report" went with him.
"Beg pardon, sir, but was that a Harab you was a-talking about to the Hinspector?"
The speaker was a gentleman unmistakably of the gutter-snipe cla.s.s. He was seated on a form. Close at hand hovered a policeman whose special duty it seemed to be to keep an eye upon his movements.