gentlemen,” said the hospitable Smasher, “what do you say to a Welsh rarebit and a bottle of bitter at my place? We’re as full as we can hold down stairs, for the Finsbury Fizzer’s trainer has come up from Newmarket; and his backers is hearin’ anecdotes of his doings for the last interesting week. They talk of dropping down the river on Tuesday for the great event between him and the Atlantic Alligator, and the excitement’s tremenjous; our barmaid’s hands is blistered with working at the engines. So come round and see the game, gentlemen; and if you’ve any loose cash you’d like to put upon the Fizzer I can get you decent odds, considerin’ he’s the favourite.”
Richard shook his head. He would go home to his mother, he said; he wanted to talk to Peters about the day’s work. He shook hands heartily with his friends, and as they strolled off to the Smasher’s, walked with them as far as Charing Cross, and left them at the corner that led into quiet Spring Gardens.
In the club-room of the Cherokees that night the members renewed the oath they had taken on the night of Richard’s arrival, and formally inaugurated themselves as “Daredevil Dick’s secret police.”
Chapter IV
The Captain, the Chemist, and the Lascar
In the drawing-room of a house in a small street leading out of Regent Street are assembled, the morning after this opera-house recontre, three people. It is almost difficult to imagine three persons more dissimilar than those who compose this little group. On a sofa near the open window, at which the autumn breeze comes blowing in over boxes of dusty London flowers, reclines a gentleman, whose bronzed and bearded face, and the military style even of the loose morning undress which he wears, proclaim him to be a soldier. A very handsome face it is, this soldier’s, although darkened not a little by a tropical sun, and a good deal shrouded by the thick black moustache and beard which conceal the expression of the mouth, and detract from the individuality of the face. He is smoking a long cherry-stemmed pipe, the bowl of which rests on the floor. A short distance from the sofa on which he is lying, an Indian servant is seated on the carpet, who watches the bowl of the pipe, ready to replenish it the moment it fails, and every now and then glances upward to the grave face of the officer with a look of unmistakable affection in his soft black eyes.
The third occupant of the little drawing-room is a pale, thin, studious-looking man, who is seated at a cabinet in a corner away from the window, amongst papers and books, which are heaped in a chaotic pile on the floor about him. Strange books and papers these are. Mathematical charts, inscribed with figures such as perhaps neither Newton or Leplace ever dreamed of. Volumes in old worm-eaten bindings, and written in strange languages long since dead and forgotten upon this earth; but they all seem familiar to this pale student, whose blue spectacles bend over pages of crabbed Arabic as intently as the eyes of a boarding-school miss who devours the last volume of the last new novel. Now and then he scratches a few figures, or a sign in algebra, or a sentence in Arabic, on the paper before him, and then goes back to the book again, never looking up towards the smoker or his Hindoo attendant. Presently the soldier, as he relinquishes his pipe to the Indian to be replenished, breaks the silence.
“So the great people of London, as well as of Paris, are beginning to believe in you, Laurent?” he says.
The student lifts his head from his work, and turning the blue spectacles towards the smoker, says in his old unimpassioned manner—
“How can they do otherwise, when I tell them the truth? These,” he points to the pile of books and papers at his side, “do not err: they only want to be interpreted rightly. I may have been sometimes mistaken—I have never been deceived.”
“You draw nice distinctions, Blurosset.”
“Not at all. If I have made mistakes in the course of my career, it has been from my own ignorance, my own powerlessness to read these aright; not from any shortcoming in the things themselves. I tell you, they do not deceive.”
“But will you ever read them aright? Will you ever fathom to the very bottom this dark gulf of forgotten science?”
“Yes, I am on the right road. I only pray to live long enough to reach the end.”
“And then——?”
“Then it will be within the compass of my own will to live for ever.”
“Pshaw! The old story—the old delusion. How strange that the wisest on this earth should have been fooled by it!”
“Make sure that it is a delusion, before you say they were fooled by it, Captain.”
“Well, my dear Blurosset, Heaven forbid that I should dispute with one so learned as you upon so obscure a subject. I am more at home holding a fort against the Indians than holding an argument against Albertus Magnus. You still, however, persist that this faithful Mujeebez here is in some manner or other linked with my destiny?”
“I do.”
“And yet it is very singular! What can connect two men whose experiences in every way are so dissimilar?”
“I tell you again that he will be instrumental in confounding your enemies.”
“You know who they are—or rather, who he is. I have but one.”
“Not two, Captain?”
“Not two. No, Blurosset. There is but one on whom I would wreak a deep and deadly vengeance.”
“And for the other?”
“Pity and forgiveness. Do not speak of that. There are some things which even now I am not strong enough to hear spoken of. That is one of them.”
“The history of your faithful Mujeebez there is a singular one, is it not?” asks the student, rising from his books, and advancing to the window.
“A very singular one. His master, an Englishman, with whom he came from Calcutta, and to whom he was devotedly attached——”
“I was indeed, sahib,” said the Indian, in very good English, but with a strong foreign accent.
“This master, a rich nabob, was murdered, in the house of his sister, by his own nephew.”
“Very horrible, and very unnatural! Was the nephew hung?”
“No. The jury brought in a verdict of insanity: he was sent to a madhouse, where no doubt he still remains confined. Mujeebez was not present at the trial; he had escaped by a miracle with his own life; for the murderer, coming into the little room in which he slept, and finding him stirring, gave him a blow on the head, which placed him for some time in a very precarious state.”
“And did you see the murderer’s face, Mujeebez?” asks Monsieur Blurosset.
“No, sahib. It was dark, I could see nothing. The blow stunned me: when I recovered my senses, I was in the hospital, where I lay for months. The shock had brought on what the doctors called a nervous fever. For a long time I was utterly incapable of work; when I left the hospital I had not a friend in the world; but the good lady, the sister of my poor murdered master, gave me money to return to India, where I was kitmutghar for some time to an English colonel, in whose household I learned
