Fire-Tongue, Sax Rohmer [trending books to read TXT] 📗

“Not at all anxious. This was all the more strange because Dad invited Mr. Brinn to his club.”

“He gave no reason for his refusal?”

“Oh, there was no refusal, Mr. Harley. He merely evaded the matter. I never knew why.”

“H’m,” muttered Harley. “And now, Miss Abingdon, can you enlighten me respecting the identity of the Oriental gentleman with whom he had latterly become acquainted?”

Phil Abingdon glanced rapidly at Doctor McMurdoch and then lowered her head. She did not answer at once. “I know to whom you refer, Mr. Harley,” she said, finally. “But it was I who had made this gentleman’s acquaintance. My father did not know him.”

“Then I wonder why he mentioned him?” murmured Harley.

“That I cannot imagine. I have been wondering ever since Doctor McMurdoch told me.”

“You recognize the person to whom Sir Charles referred?”

“Yes. He could only have meant Ormuz Khan.”

“Ormuz Khan—” echoed Harley. “Where have I heard that name?”

“He visits England periodically, I believe. In fact, he has a house somewhere near London. I met him at Lady Vail’s.”

“Lady Vail’s? His excellency moves, then, in diplomatic circles? Odd that I cannot place him.”

“I have a vague idea, Mr. Harley, that he is a financier. I seem to have heard that he had something to do with the Imperial Bank of Iran.” She glanced naively at Harley. “Is there such a bank?” she asked.

“There is,” he replied. “Am I to understand that Ormuz Khan is a Persian?”

“I believe he is a Persian,” said Phil Abingdon, rather confusedly. “To be quite frank, I know very little about him.”

Paul Harley gazed steadily at the speaker for a moment. “Can you think of any reason why Sir Charles should have worried about this gentleman?” he asked.

The girl lowered her head again. “He paid me a lot of attention,” she finally confessed.

“This meeting at Lady Vail’s, then, was the first of many?”

“Oh, no—not of many! I saw him two or three times. But he began to send me most extravagant presents. I suppose it was his Oriental way of paying a compliment, but Dad objected.”

“Of course he would. He knew his Orient and his Oriental. I assume, Miss Abingdon, that you were in England during the years that your father lived in the East?”

“Yes. I was at school. I have never been in the East.”

Paul Harley hesitated. He found himself upon dangerously delicate ground and was temporarily at a loss as to how to proceed. Unexpected aid came from the taciturn Doctor McMurdoch.

“He never breathed a word of this to me, Phil,” he said, gloomily. “The impudence of the man! Small wonder Abingdon objected.”

Phil Abingdon tilted her chin forward rebelliously.

“Ormuz Khan was merely unfamiliar with English customs,” she retorted. “There was nothing otherwise in his behaviour to which any one could have taken exception.”

“What’s that!” demanded the physician. “If a man of colour paid his heathen attentions to my daughter—”

“But you have no daughter, Doctor.”

“No. But if I had—”

“If you had,” echoed Phil Abingdon, and was about to carry on this wordy warfare which, Harley divined, was of old standing between the two, when sudden realization of the purpose of the visit came to her. She paused, and he saw her biting her lips desperately. Almost at random he began to speak again.

“So far as you are aware, then, Miss Abingdon, Sir Charles never met Ormuz Khan?”

“He never even saw him, Mr. Harley, that I know of.”

“It is most extraordinary that he should have given me the impression that this man—for I can only suppose that he referred to Ormuz Khan—was in some way associated with his fears.”

“I must remind you, Mr. Harley,” Doctor McMurdoch interrupted, “that poor Abingdon was a free talker. His pride, I take it, which was strong, had kept him silent on this matter with me, but he welcomed an opportunity of easing his mind to one discreet and outside the family circle. His words to you may have had no bearing upon the thing he wished to consult you about.”

“H’m,” mused Harley. “That’s possible. But such was not my impression.”

He turned again to Phil Abingdon. “This Ormuz Khan, I understood you to say, actually resides in or near London?”

“He is at present living at the Savoy, I believe. He also has a house somewhere outside London.”

There were a hundred other questions Paul Harley was anxious to ask: some that were professional but more that were personal. He found himself resenting the intrusion of this wealthy Oriental into the life of the girl who sat there before him. And because he could read a kindred resentment in the gloomy eye of Doctor McMurdoch, he was drawn spiritually closer to that dour character.

By virtue of his training he was a keen psychologist, and he perceived clearly enough that Phil Abingdon was one of those women in whom a certain latent perversity is fanned to life by opposition. Whether she was really attracted by Ormuz Khan or whether she suffered his attentions merely because she knew them to be distasteful to others, he could not yet decide.

Anger threatened him—as it had threatened him when he had realized that Nicol Brinn meant to remain silent. He combated it, for it had no place in the judicial mind of the investigator. But he recognized its presence with dismay. Where Phil Abingdon was concerned he could not trust himself. In her glance, too, and in the manner of her answers to questions concerning the Oriental, there was a provoking femininity—a deliberate and baffling intrusion of the eternal Eve.

He stared questioningly across at Doctor McMurdoch and perceived a sudden look of anxiety in the physician’s face. Quick as the thought which the look inspired, he turned to Phil Abingdon.

She was sitting quite motionless in the big armchair, and her face had grown very pale. Even as he sprang forward he saw her head droop.

“She has fainted,” said Doctor McMurdoch. “I’m not surprised.”

“Nor I,” replied Harley. “She should not have come.”

He opened the door communicating with his private apartments and ran out. But, quick as he was, Phil Abingdon had recovered before he returned with the water for which he had gone. Her reassuring smile was somewhat wan. “How perfectly silly of me!” she said. “I shall begin to despise myself.”

Presently he