The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, Sax Rohmer [nonfiction book recommendations .txt] 📗

CHAPTER VIII

IN what order we dashed down to the drawing-room I cannot recall.

But none was before me when I leaped over the threshold and saw Miss

Eltham prone by the French windows.

 

These were closed and bolted, and she lay with hands

outstretched in the alcove which they formed. I bent over her.

Nayland Smith was at my elbow.

 

“Get my bag” I said. “She has swooned. It is nothing serious.”

 

Her father, pale and wide-eyed, hovered about me, muttering incoherently;

but I managed to reassure him; and his gratitude when, I having administered

a simple restorative, the girl sighed shudderingly and opened her eyes,

was quite pathetic.

 

I would permit no questioning at that time, and on her father’s

arm she retired to her own rooms.

 

It was some fifteen minutes later that her message was brought to me.

I followed the maid to a quaint little octagonal apartment, and Greba

Eltham stood before me, the candlelight caressing the soft curves

of her face and gleaming in the meshes of her rich brown hair.

 

When she had answered my first question she hesitated in pretty confusion.

 

“We are anxious to know what alarmed you, Miss Eltham.”

 

She bit her lip and glanced with apprehension towards the window.

 

“I am almost afraid to tell father,” she began rapidly.

“He will think me imaginative, but you have been so kind.

It was two green eyes! Oh! Dr. Petrie, they looked up at me

from the steps leading to the lawn. And they shone like the eyes

of a cat.”

 

The words thrilled me strangely.

 

“Are you sure it was not a cat, Miss Eltham?”

 

“The eyes were too large, Dr. Petrie. There was

something dreadful, most dreadful, in their appearance.

I feel foolish and silly for having fainted, twice in two days!

But the suspense is telling upon me, I suppose.

Father thinks”—she was becoming charmingly confidential,

as a woman often will with a tactful physician—“that

shut up here we are safe from—whatever threatens us.”

I noted, with concern, a repetition of the nervous shudder.

“But since our return someone else has been in Redmoat!”

 

“Whatever do you mean, Miss Eltham?”

 

“Oh! I don’t quite know what I do mean, Dr. Petrie.

What does it ALL mean? Vernon has been explaining to me

that some awful Chinaman is seeking the life of Mr. Nayland Smith.

But if the same man wants to kill my father, why has

he not done so?”

 

“I am afraid you puzzle me.”

 

“Of course, I must do so. But—the man in the train.

He could have killed us both quite easily! And—last night

someone was in father’s room.”

 

“In his room!”

 

“I could not sleep, and I heard something moving.

My room is the next one. I knocked on the wall and woke father.

There was nothing; so I said it was the howling of the dog

that had frightened me.”

 

“How, could anyone get into his room?”

 

“I cannot imagine. But I am not sure it was a man.”

 

“Miss Eltham, you alarm me. What do you suspect?”

 

“You must think me hysterical and silly, but whilst father and I have been

away from Redmoat perhaps the usual precautions have been neglected.

Is there any creature, any large creature, which could climb up the wall

to the window? Do you know of anything with a long, thin body?”

 

For a moment I offered no reply, studying the girl’s pretty face,

her eager, blue-gray eyes widely opened and fixed upon mine.

She was not of the neurotic type, with her clear complexion

and sun-kissed neck; her arms, healthily toned by exposure

to the country airs, were rounded and firm, and she had the agile

shape of a young Diana with none of the anaemic languor which breeds

morbid dreams. She was frightened; yes, who would not have been?

But the mere idea of this thing which she believed to be in Redmoat,

without the apparition of the green eyes, must have prostrated

a victim of “nerves.”

 

“Have you seen such a creature, Miss Eltham?”

 

She hesitated again, glancing down and pressing her finger-tips together.

 

“As father awoke and called out to know why I knocked,

I glanced from my window. The moonlight threw half the lawn

into shadow, and just disappearing in this shadow was something—

something of a brown color, marked with sections!”

 

“What size and shape?”

 

“It moved so quickly I could form no idea of its shape;

but I saw quite six feet of it flash across the grass!”

 

“Did you hear anything?”

 

“A swishing sound in the shrubbery, then nothing more.”

 

She met my eyes expectantly. Her confidence in my powers of understanding

and sympathy was gratifying, though I knew that I but occupied the position

of a father-confessor.

 

“Have you any idea,” I said, “how it came about that you awoke

in the train yesterday whilst your father did not?”

 

“We had coffee at a refreshment-room; it must have been drugged in some way.

I scarcely tasted mine, the flavor was so awful; but father is an old traveler

and drank the whole of his cupful!”

 

Mr. Eltham’s voice called from below.

 

“Dr. Petrie,” said the girl quickly, “what do you think they

want to do to him?”

 

“Ah!” I replied, “I wish I knew that.”

 

“Will you think over what I have told you? For I do assure you there

is something here in Redmoat—something that comes and goes in spite

of father’s `fortifications’? Caesar knows there is. Listen to him.

He drags at his chain so that I wonder he does not break it.”

 

As we passed downstairs the howling of the mastiff sounded eerily

through the house, as did the clank-clank of the tightening chain

as he threw the weight of his big body upon it.

 

I sat in Smith’s room that night for some time, he pacing the floor

smoking and talking.

 

“Eltham has influential Chinese friends,” he said;

“but they dare not have him in Nan-Yang at present.

He knows the country as he knows Norfolk; he would see things!

 

“His precautions here have baffled the enemy, I think.

The attempt in the train points to an anxiety to waste no opportunity.

But whilst Eltham was absent (he was getting his outfit in London,

by the way) they have been fixing some second string to their fiddle here.

In case no opportunity offered before he returned, they provided

for getting at him here!”

 

“But how, Smith?”

 

“That’s the mystery. But the dead dog in the shrubbery is significant.”

 

“Do you think some emissary of Fu-Manchu is actually inside the moat?”

 

“It’s impossible, Petrie. You are thinking of secret passages,

and so forth. There are none. Eltham has measured up every

foot of the place. There isn’t a rathole left unaccounted for;

and as for a tunnel under the moat, the house stands on a solid

mass of Roman masonry, a former camp of Hadrian’s time.

I have seen a very old plan of the Round Moat Priory as it

was called. There is no entrance and no exit save by the steps.

So how was the dog killed?”

 

I knocked out my pipe on a bar of the grate.

 

“We are in the thick of it here,” I said.

 

“We are always in the thick of it,” replied Smith. “Our danger is

no greater in Norfolk than in London. But what do they want to do?

That man in the train with the case of instruments—WHAT instruments?

Then the apparition of the green eyes tonight. Can they have been

the eyes of Fu-Manchu? Is some peculiarly unique outrage contemplated—

something calling for the presence of the master?”

 

“He may have to prevent Eltham’s leaving England without killing him.”

 

“Quite so. He probably has instructions to be merciful.

But God help the victim of Chinese mercy!”

 

I went to my own room then. But I did not even undress,

refilling my pipe and seating myself