The Beetle: A Mystery, Richard Marsh [chromebook ebook reader .TXT] 📗

seemed the only light about the place. By its glimmer I perceived Lessingham standing half-way up the stairs. He was in full war paint,—as he is not the sort of man who dresses for the House, I took it that he had been mixing pleasure with business.

‘It’s I, Lessingham,—Atherton. Do you know that a fellow has jumped out of your drawing-room window?’

It was a second or two before he answered. When he did, his voice had lost its petulance.

‘Has he escaped?’

‘Clean,—he’s a mile away by now.’

It seemed to me that in his tone, when he spoke again, there was a note of relief.

‘I wondered if he had. Poor fellow! more sinned against than sinning! Take my advice, Atherton, and keep out of politics. They bring you into contact with all the lunatics at large. Good night! I am much obliged to you for knocking us up. Matthews, shut the door.’

Tolerably cool, on my honour,—a man who brings news big with the fate of Rome does not expect to receive such treatment. He expects to be listened to with deference, and to hear all that there is to hear, and not to be sent to the right-about before he has had a chance of really opening his lips. Before I knew it—almost!—the door was shut, and I was on the doorstep. Confound the Apostle’s impudence! next time he might have his house burnt down—and him in it!—before I took the trouble to touch his dirty knocker.

What did he mean by his allusion to lunatics in politics,—did he think to fool me? There was more in the business than met the eye,—and a good deal more than he wished to meet mine,—hence his insolence. The creature.

What Marjorie Lindon could see in such an opusculum surpassed my comprehension; especially when there was a man of my sort walking about, who adored the very ground she trod upon.

CHAPTER XII.
A MORNING VISITOR

All through the night, waking and sleeping, and in my dreams, I wondered what Marjorie could see in him! In those same dreams I satisfied myself that she could, and did, see nothing in him, but everything in me,—oh the comfort! The misfortune was that when I awoke I knew it was the other way round,—so that it was a sad awakening. An awakening to thoughts of murder.

So, swallowing a mouthful and a peg, I went into my laboratory to plan murder—legalised murder—on the biggest scale it ever has been planned. I was on the track of a weapon which would make war not only an affair of a single campaign, but of a single half-hour. It would not want an army to work it either. Once let an individual, or two or three at most, in possession of my weapon-that-was-to-be, get within a mile or so of even the largest body of disciplined troops that ever yet a nation put into the field, and—pouf!—in about the time it takes you to say that they would be all dead men. If weapons of precision, which may be relied upon to slay, are preservers of the peace—and the man is a fool who says that they are not!—then I was within reach of the finest preserver of the peace imagination ever yet conceived.

What a sublime thought to think that in the hollow of your own hand lies the life and death of nations,—and it was almost in mine.

I had in front of me some of the finest destructive agents you could wish to light upon—carbon-monoxide, chlorine-trioxide, mercuric-oxide, conine, potassamide, potassium-carboxide, cyanogen—when Edwards entered. I was wearing a mask of my own invention, a thing that covered ears and head and everything, something like a diver’s helmet—I was dealing with gases a sniff of which meant death; only a few days before, unmasked, I had been doing some fool’s trick with a couple of acids—sulphuric and cyanide of potassium—when, somehow, my hand slipped, and, before I knew it, minute portions of them combined. By the mercy of Providence I fell backwards instead of forwards;—sequel, about an hour afterwards Edwards found me on the floor, and it took the remainder of that day, and most of the doctors in town, to bring me back to life again.

Edwards announced his presence by touching me on the shoulder,—when I am wearing that mask it isn’t always easy to make me hear.

‘Someone wishes to see you, sir.’

‘Then tell someone that I don’t wish to see him.’

Well-trained servant, Edwards,—he walked off with the message as decorously as you please. And then I thought there was an end,—but there wasn’t.

I was regulating the valve of a cylinder in which I was fusing some oxides when, once more, someone touched me on the shoulder. Without turning I took it for granted it was Edwards back again.

‘I have only to give a tiny twist to this tap, my good fellow, and you will be in the land where the bogies bloom. Why will you come where you’re not wanted?’ Then I looked round. ‘Who the devil are you?’

For it was not Edwards at all, but quite a different class of character.

I found myself confronting an individual who might almost have sat for one of the bogies I had just alluded to. His costume was reminiscent of the ‘Algerians’ whom one finds all over France, and who are the most persistent, insolent and amusing of pedlars. I remember one who used to haunt the répétitions at the Alcazar at Tours,—but there! This individual was like the originals, yet unlike,—he was less gaudy, and a good deal dingier, than his Gallic prototypes are apt to be. Then he wore a burnoose,—the yellow, grimy-looking article of the Arab of the Soudan, not the spick and span Arab of the boulevard. Chief difference of all, his face was clean shaven,—and whoever saw an Algerian of Paris whose chiefest glory was not his well-trimmed moustache and beard?

I expected that he would address me in the lingo which these gentlemen call French,—but he didn’t.

‘You are Mr Atherton?’

‘And you are Mr—Who?—how did you come here? Where’s my servant?’

The fellow held up his hand. As he did so, as if in accordance with a pre-arranged signal, Edwards came into the room looking excessively startled. I turned to him.

‘Is this the person who wished to see me?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Didn’t I tell you to say that I didn’t wish to see him?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then why didn’t you do as I told you?’

‘I did, sir.’

‘Then how comes he here?’

‘Really, sir,’—Edwards put his hand up to his head as if he was half asleep—‘I don’t quite know.’

‘What do you mean by you don’t know? Why didn’t you stop him?’

‘I think, sir, that I must have had a touch of sudden faintness, because I tried to put out my hand to stop him, and—I couldn’t.’

‘You’re an idiot.—Go!’ And he went. I turned to the stranger. ‘Pray, sir, are you a magician?’

He replied to my question with another.

‘You, Mr Atherton,—are you also a magician?’

He was staring at my mask with an evident lack of comprehension.

‘I wear this because, in this place, death lurks in so many subtle forms, that, without it, I dare not breathe.’ He inclined his head,—though I doubt if he understood. ‘Be so good as to tell me, briefly, what it is you wish with me.’

He slipped his hand into the folds of his burnoose, and, taking out a slip of paper, laid it on the shelf by which we were standing. I glanced at it, expecting to find on it a petition, or a testimonial, or a true statement of his sad case; instead it contained two words only,—‘Marjorie Lindon.’ The unlooked-for sight of that well-loved name brought the blood into my cheeks.

‘You come from Miss Lindon?’

He narrowed his shoulders, brought his finger-tips together, inclined his head, in a fashion which was peculiarly Oriental, but not particularly explanatory,—so I repeated my question.

‘Do you wish me to understand that you do come from Miss Lindon?’

Again he slipped his hand into his burnoose, again he produced a slip of paper, again he laid it on the shelf, again I glanced at it, again nothing was written on it but a name,—‘Paul Lessingham.’

‘Well?—I see,—Paul Lessingham.—What then?’

‘She is good,—he is bad,—is it not so?’

He touched first one scrap of paper, then the other. I stared.

‘Pray how do you happen to know?’

‘He shall never have her,—eh?’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Ah!—what do I mean!’

‘Precisely, what do you mean? And also, and at the same time, who the devil are you?’

‘It is as a friend I come to you.’

‘Then in that case you may go; I happen to be overstocked in that line just now.’

‘Not with the kind of friend I am!’

‘The saints forefend!’

‘You love her,—you love Miss Lindon! Can you bear to think of him in her arms?’

I took off my mask,—feeling that the occasion required it. As I did so he brushed aside the hanging folds of the hood of his burnoose, so that I saw more of his face. I was immediately conscious that in his eyes there was, in an especial degree, what, for want of a better term, one may call the mesmeric quality. That his was one of those morbid organisations which are oftener found, thank goodness, in the east than in the west, and which are apt to exercise an uncanny influence over the weak and the foolish folk with whom they come in contact,—the kind of creature for whom it is always just as well to keep a seasoned rope close handy. I was, also, conscious that he was taking advantage of the removal of my mask to try his strength on me,—than which he could not have found a tougher job. The sensitive something which is found in the hypnotic subject happens, in me, to be wholly absent.

‘I see you are a mesmerist.’

He started.

‘I am nothing,—a shadow!’

‘And I’m a scientist. I should like, with your permission—or without it!—to try an experiment or two on you.’

He moved further back. There came a gleam into his eyes which suggested that he possessed his hideous power to an unusual degree,—that, in the estimation of his own people, he was qualified to take his standing as a regular devil-doctor.

‘We will try experiments together, you and I,—on Paul Lessingham.’

‘Why on him?’

‘You do not know?’

‘I do not.’

‘Why do you lie to me?’

‘I don’t lie to you,—I haven’t the faintest notion what is the nature of your interest in Mr Lessingham.’

‘My interest?—that is another thing; it is your interest of which we are speaking.’

‘Pardon me,—it is yours.’

‘Listen! you love her,—and he! But at a word from you he shall not have her,—never! It is I who say it,—I!’

‘And, once more, sir, who are you?’

‘I am of the children of Isis!’

‘Is that so?—It occurs to me that you have made a slight mistake,—this is London, not a dog-hole in the desert.’

‘Do I not know?—what does it matter?—you shall see! There will come a time when you will want me,—you will find that you cannot bear to think of him in her arms,—her whom you love! You will call to me, and I shall come, and of Paul Lessingham there shall be an end.’

While I was wondering whether he was really as mad as he sounded, or whether he was some impudent charlatan who had an axe of his own to grind, and thought that he had found in me a grindstone, he had vanished from the room. I moved after him.

‘Hang it all!—stop!’ I cried.

He must have made pretty good travelling, because, before I had a foot in the hall, I heard the front door slam, and, when I reached the street, intent on calling him back, neither to the right nor to the left was there a sign of him to be seen.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE PICTURE

‘I wonder what that nice-looking beggar really means, and who he happens to be?’ That was what I said to myself when I returned to the laboratory. ‘If it is true that, now and again, Providence does write a man’s character on his face, then there can’t be the slightest shred of a doubt that a curious one’s been written on his. I wonder what his connection has been with the Apostle,—or if it’s only part of his game of bluff.’

I strode up and down,—for the moment my interest in the experiments I was conducting had waned.

‘If it was all bluff I never saw a better piece of acting,—and yet what sort of finger can such a precisian as St Paul have in such a pie? The fellow seemed to squirm at the mere mention of the rising-hope-of-the-Radicals’ name. Can the objection be political? Let me consider,—what has Lessingham done which could offend the religious or patriotic susceptibilities of the most fanatical of Orientals? Politically, I can recall