is to leave her. You two fellows were so very good to her back in the old days, you won’t abandon her now, will you?” he implored, speaking slowly and with very great difficulty, tears standing in his eyes.
“Certainly not, old chap,” was my answer. “If left alone she’ll want some one to advise her and to look after her interests.”
“The scoundrelly lawyer chaps will do that,” he snapped, with a strange hardness in his voice, as though he entertained no love for his solicitors. “No, I want you to see that no man marries her for her money – you understand? Dozens of fellows are after her at this moment, I know, but I’d rather see her dead than she should marry one of them. She must marry for love – love, you hear? Promise me, Gilbert, that that you’ll look after her, won’t you?”
Still holding his hand, I promised.
That was the last word he uttered. His pale lips twitched again, but no sound came from them. His glassy eyes were fixed upon me with a stony, terrible stare, as though he were endeavouring to tell me something.
Perhaps he was revealing to me the great secret – the secret of how he had solved the mystery of fortune and become worth over a million sterling – perhaps he was speaking of Mab. Which we knew not. His tongue refused to articulate, the silence of death was upon him.
Thus he passed away; and thus did I find myself bound to a promise which I intended to fulfil, even though he had not revealed to us his secret, as we confidently expected. We believed that, knowing himself to be dying, he had summoned us there to impart that knowledge which would render us both rich beyond the dreams of avarice. But in this we had been most bitterly disappointed. For five years, I confess, we had waited, expecting that he would some day share some of his wealth with us in return for those services we had rendered him in the past. Yet now it seemed he had coolly disregarded his indebtedness to us, and at the same time imposed upon me a duty by no means easy – the guardianship of his only daughter Mabel.
Chapter Two
Contains Certain Mysterious Facts
I ought here to declare that, having regard to all the curious and mysterious circumstances of the past, the situation was, to me, far from satisfactory. As we strolled together along Market Street that cold night discussing the affair, rather than remain in the public room of the hotel, Reggie suggested that the secret might be written somewhere and sealed up among the dead man’s effects. But in that case, unless it were addressed to us, it would be opened by the persons the dying man had designated as “those scoundrelly lawyer chaps,” and in all probability be turned by them to profitable account.
His solicitors were, we knew, Messrs Leighton, Brown and Leighton, an eminently respectable firm in Bedford Row; therefore we sent a telegram from the Central Office informing them of their client’s sudden death, and requesting that one of the firm should at once come to Manchester to attend the inquest which Doctor Glenn had declared would be necessary. As the deceased man had expressed a wish that Mabel should, for the present, remain in ignorance, we did not inform her of the tragic occurrence.
Curiosity prompted us to ascend again to the dead man’s chamber and examine the contents of his kit-bag and suit-case, but, beyond his clothes, a cheque-book and about ten pounds in gold, we found nothing. I think that we both half-expected to discover the key to that remarkable secret which he had somehow obtained, yet it was hardly to be imagined that he would carry such a valuable asset about with him in his luggage.
In the pocket of a small writing-book which formed part of the fittings of the suit-case I discovered several letters, all of which I examined and found them to be of no importance – save one, a dirty, ill-written note in uneducated Italian, which contained some passages which struck me as curious.
Indeed, so strange was the tenor of the whole communication that, with Reggie’s connivance, I resolved to take possession of it and make further inquiry.
There were many things about Burton Blair that had puzzled us for years, therefore we were both determined, if possible, to elucidate the curious mystery that had surrounded him, even if he had carried to his grave the secret of his enormous fortune.
We alone in all the world knew the existence of the secret, only we were in ignorance of the necessary key by which the source of riches could be opened. The manner in which he had gained his great wealth was a mystery to every one, even to his daughter Mabel. In the City and in Society he was vaguely believed by some to possess large interests in mines, and to be a successful speculator in stocks, while others declared that he was the ground-landlord of at least two large cities in America, and yet others were positive that certain concessions from the Ottoman Government had brought him his gold.
All were, however, mistaken in their surmises. Burton Blair possessed not an acre of land; he had not a shilling in any public company; he was not interested in either Government concessions or industrial enterprises. No. The source of the great wealth by which he had, in five years, been able to purchase, decorate and furnish in princely manner one of the finest houses in Grosvenor Square, keep three of the most expensive Panhards, motoring being his hobby, and rent that fine old Jacobean mansion Mayvill Court, in Herefordshire, came from a source which nobody knew or even suspected. His were mysterious millions.
“I wonder if anything will come out at the inquest?” queried Reggie, later that evening. “His lawyers undoubtedly know nothing.”
“He may have left some paper which reveals the truth,” I answered. “Men who are silent in life often commit their secrets to paper.”
“I don’t think Burton ever did.”
“He may have done so for Mabel’s benefit, remember.”
“Ah! by Jove!” gasped my friend, “I never thought of that. If he wished to provide for her, he would leave his secret with some one whom he could implicitly trust. Yet he trusted us – up to a certain point. We are the only ones who have any real knowledge of the state of affairs,” and my tall, long-legged, fair-haired friend, who stood six feet in his stockings, the picture of the easy-going muscular Englishman, although engaged in the commerce of feminine frippery, stopped with a low grunt of dissatisfaction, and carefully lit a fresh cigar.
We passed a dismal evening strolling about the main streets of Manchester, feeling that in Burton Blair we had lost a friend, but when on the following morning we met Herbert Leighton, the solicitor, in the hall of the Queen’s, and had a long consultation with him, the mystery surrounding the dead man became considerably heightened.
“You both knew my late client very well, indeed,” the solicitor remarked, after some preliminaries. “Now, are you aware of the existence of any one who would profit by his sudden decease?”
“That’s a curious question,” I remarked. “Why?”
“Well, the fact is this,” explained the dark, sharp-featured man, with some hesitation. “I have every reason to believe that he has been the victim of foul play.”
“Foul play!” I gasped. “You surely don’t think that he was murdered? Why, my dear fellow, that couldn’t be. He was taken ill in the train, and died in bed in our presence.”
The solicitor, whose face had now become graver, merely shrugged his narrow shoulders, and said – “We must, of course, await the result of the inquest, but from information in my possession I feel confident that Burton Blair did not die a natural death.”
That same evening the Coroner held his inquiry in a private room in the hotel, and, according to the two doctors who had made the post-mortem earlier in the day, death was due entirely to natural causes.
