Buch lesen: «The Great God Gold»
Preface
An Explanation
The remarkable secret revealed in the following pages is not purely fiction.
The discovery, much in the form that I have here presented it, has actually been made, and its discoverer, a well-known professor at one of the Universities in the North of Europe, recently placed the extraordinary statement in my hands.
In consequence, I consulted a number of the first living authorities on the subject, who most courteously gave me their opinions and to whom I owe much assistance, while several other Hebrew scholars, less noted, evinced the greatest curiosity.
Therefore I trust that the reader himself may find this hitherto unheard-of statement of facts of equal importance and interest.
William Le Queux.Devonshire Club, London, 1910.
Chapter One
Introduces the Stranger
“My name? Why – what does that matter, Doctor? In an hour – perhaps before – I won’t trouble anybody further.”
“But surely it is your duty, my friend, to let me know your name?” argued the other. “Even if it be in confidence.”
The dying man slowly shook his head in the negative, moved uneasily, and stretching forth his thin trembling hand, answered in indifferent French.
“I regret that I cannot satisfy your curiosity. I have a reason – a – a strong private reason. Here is my key,” he went on, speaking very slowly and with great difficulty in a weak voice scarce above a whisper. “Open my bag, doctor, and; – and you’ll find there a – a big envelope. Will you give it to me?”
The Doctor, a queer, deformed little man shabbily dressed, with grey hair and short grey beard, rose from the bedside and with the key crossed to where a well-worn leather bag lay upon the floor.
As he turned his back upon his nameless patient and knelt beside the bag, a curious look of craft and cunning overspread his hard, furrowed countenance. But it was only for a second. Next instant it had vanished, and given place to that serious expression of sympathy which his face had previously worn.
He found a large blue, linen-lined envelope which he gave into the white trembling hands of the stranger.
The prostrate man looked about fifty, his unkempt hair and moustache just tinged with grey, unshaved, and with white drawn face betraying long and intense suffering.
Why was he so determined to conceal his name? What secret of his life had he to hide?
Upon his blanched features was written the history of a curious and adventurous past. Perhaps he held some strange and amazing secret. He was eccentric in only one particular – that though he knew himself to be dying, he would leave no message for any relative; refusing absolutely and stubbornly to give his name, even to the man who, now at his side, had befriended him.
The room was a small and not over cleanly one, high up in a fourth-rate hotel close to the Gare du Nord, in Paris, a room with a single bed, a threadbare carpet, and a cheap wooden washstand with the grey December light filtering through lace curtains that hung limp and yellow. The wallpaper was greasy and faded, and the bed itself the reverse of inviting.
To Doctor Raymond Diamond the dying man had been an entire stranger until three days before – a chance acquaintance which adversity had brought him. Both men were, as a matter of fact, stranded in Paris. They had, in ascending the narrow stairs of their little hotel, wished each other “Good-day.” Men who are hard up always form easy acquaintanceships. The stranger had told him that he was a Dane, from Copenhagen, but the name, Jules Blanc, which he had given to the proprietor was certainly not Danish. Indeed, he had admitted to Diamond that he had not given his real name. He had reasons for withholding it.
He was a mystery, and the Doctor strongly suspected him of having absconded from his native land, and coming to the end of his resources, was now in fear of the police.
That he was well educated had been quickly apparent. Though he spoke French badly it was evident that he had nevertheless travelled extensively, and had, in his better days, been possessed of considerable means. He had been in the Near East, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, and appeared to possess an intimate knowledge of those countries.
Yet his luggage had been reduced to that one small bag containing a big blue envelope and a chancre of linen.
For two days they had idled about Paris together, both practically without a sou.
The Doctor, when he had discovered the true state of his friend’s finances, had explained that he too was “temporarily embarrassed owing to his many recent investments;” whereat they had both laughed in chorus and with light hearts spent half the day lazily lolling upon the seats in the Tuileries Gardens watching the children at play.
It was during those idle hungry hours that the stranger’s remarks aroused within the Doctor the greatest curiosity. Diamond himself, an Englishman, had in his student days taken his M.D. at Edinburgh, and was also a scholar of no mean attainments, yet this Dane’s knowledge of many occult matters appeared amazingly profound.
Why did he so resolutely refuse to give his name?
On the day the Doctor had met the Dane, his financial resources consisted of one solitary franc and a twenty-five centime nickel piece. His newly found friend had less. Hence the food they had had was not very abundant. The two men, however, brothers in adversity, faced the hunger problem gaily. It was not the first time that either of them had been face to face with the streets and starvation, therefore it was no new experience.
Yet the stranger ever and anon seemed deeply depressed. He knit his brows, set his teeth hard, and drew deep sighs – sighs over the might-have-beens of his past. His business in Paris was an important, an entirely secret one, he had declared. In a few days – in a week at most – it must be completed.
“And then,” he added with a laugh of confidence, “I shall probably move on to the Grand.”
That same evening, however, as they were walking up the Rue Lafayette towards the obscure hotel, the stranger had been suddenly seized with sharp pains in the region of his heart. Neither man had tasted food for twenty-four hours, and both were cold and faint.
Diamond, however, took the man’s arm and managed to get him back to his room. There he examined him carefully, and having diagnosed the case, recognised the extreme danger, but told the patient nothing decisive.
He saw the proprietor, and from him borrowed three francs. Then he wrote a prescription which he took round to the big Pharmacie du Nord, at the corner.
The mixture revived the invalid, but in the night he collapsed again. At mid-day Diamond obtained a cup of bouillon from a cheap restaurant near, and brought it to the man who had refused his name. And he had now sat by the bedside with his fingers upon the patient’s pulse all through that short gloomy afternoon.
“I’m sorry things are so bad as they are,” the Doctor was saying, as he handed the invalid the big blue envelope, for he had, an hour before, told him the truth. “You ought to have had advice long ago.”
The dying man smiled faintly and shook his head.
“I was warned in Stockholm,” he answered in a low tone. “But I didn’t heed. I – I was a fool.”
The Doctor sighed. What could he say? He had recognised that the poor fellow was already beyond human aid. He had probably been suffering from the affection of the heart for the past six or seven years – perhaps more.
“And you are certain?” asked the ugly little man at last, again taking the thin, bony hand in his. “Are you quite certain that you wish to send no message to anybody?”
For a few seconds the prostrate man struggled hard to speak.
“No,” he succeeded in gasping at last. “No message – to – anybody.”
The Doctor pursed his lips at the rebuff. The eccentricity of the stranger had become more marked in those moments of finality.
His thin, nerveless fingers were fumbling with the bulky envelope, which seemed to contain a quantity of folded papers.
“Doctor,” he whispered at last, “I – I want to burn – all these – all – every one of them. Burn them entirely.”
“As you wish, my dear friend,” responded the hunchback, eyeing the envelope eagerly, and wondering what it might contain. “I’ll put a match to them in the stove yonder.”
The invalid, by dint of great effort, managed to move himself so that his eyes could fall upon the little door in the round iron stove, in which, however, no fire was burning, even though the day was bitterly cold.
Yet he hesitated, hesitated as though he dared not trust the hungry little man who had befriended him.
“Do you wish them destroyed?” the Doctor again inquired.
The dying man nodded, at the same moment raising his finger and motioning that he could not speak.
Diamond waited. He saw that the patient was vainly endeavouring to articulate some words.
For several moments there was a dead silence.
At last the nameless man spoke again, very softly and indistinctly. Indeed, the Doctor was compelled to bend low to catch the words:
“Take them,” he said. “Take them – and burn them in the stove. Mind – destroy every one.”
“Certainly I will,” answered the other. “Give them to me, and you shall see me burn them. I’ll do so there – before your eyes.”
The man held the envelope in his dying grip. He still hesitated. His eyes were fixed upon the papers wistfully, as though filled with poignant regret at a mission unaccomplished.
“Ah!” he gasped with difficulty. “To think that this is the end – the end of a lifetime’s study and struggle! Death defeats me, vanquishes me – as it has vanquished every other man who has striven to learn the secret.”
Diamond stood listening in wonder and curiosity. He noticed the dying man’s reluctance to destroy the papers.
Perhaps he would succumb, and leave them undestroyed! What secret could they contain?
There was a long silence. The grey light over the thousands of chimney-pots was fast fading into gloom. The room was darkening.
The patient lay motionless as one dead, yet his dull eyes were still open. In his hand he still held his treasured envelope.
Again Diamond spoke, but the man with a secret made no reply. He only raised his wan hand, and shook his head sadly, indicating inability to speak.
The queer little Doctor bent once more closer to the stranger and saw that the end was near. He was hoping against hope that the man would expire before he had strength to order the destruction of those documents, whatever they were. The mysterious statements of the dying man had indicated that the papers in question contained some remarkable secret, and naturally his curiosity had been aroused.
During those three brief days of their acquaintance he had, in vain, tried to form some conclusion as to who the stranger might be. At first he had believed him to be a broken-down medical man like himself. But that surmise had been quickly negatived. He was a professional man without a doubt, but he had carefully concealed even his profession as well as his name.
The doctor had re-seated himself in the rickety rush-bottomed chair at the bedside, and sat in patience for the end, as he had sat beside hundreds of other dying men and women in the course of his career.
The patient breathed heavily, and again stirring uneasily, cast a longing look at the glass of lemonade upon the little table near by. Diamond recognised his wish, and held the tumbler to the man’s parched lips.
The dying stranger motioned, and the Doctor bent his head until his ear was near the other’s mouth.
“Doctor,” he managed to whisper after great difficulty, “it’s no use. There’s no hope! Therefore will you take them to the stove – and – and burn them —burn them all!”
“Certainly I will,” was the Doctor’s reply, rising and slowly taking the envelope from the prostrate man’s reluctant fingers.
He felt crisp papers within as he turned his back upon the dying man and bent down to the stove, placing himself between the invalid’s line of vision and the stove itself.
A moment later, however, he opened the stove-door, placed the envelope within, and applied a match to it.
Next moment a blood-red light fell across the darkening room upon the pallid face lying on the pillow.
A pair of dull, anxious, deep-set eyes watched the flames leap up and quickly die down again, watched the crinkling tinder as the sparks died out one by one – watched until Diamond stirred up the charred folios in order that every one should be consumed.
Then he turned slightly in his bed and, stretching forth his hand as though wishing to speak, drew a long, hard breath.
“And – and so – vanishes all my hope – my life,” the stranger managed to sob bitterly in a voice almost inaudible.
Again he sighed – a long-drawn sigh. And then – in the room, now almost dark, reigned a complete silence.
Death had entered there. The man with the secret had passed to that land which lies beyond human ken.
Chapter Two
Describes the Doctor’s Doings
Raymond Diamond’s unfortunate deformity had always been against his advancement in his profession.
The only son of old Doctor Diamond, a country practitioner of the old school, in Norfolk, he had had a brilliant career at Edinburgh, and after some years of changeful life as a locum tenens had bought a partnership in a practice on the outskirts of Birmingham.
His partner turned out to be a rogue who had misrepresented facts, and six months afterwards absconded to America. Diamond, however, betrayed a sharp resourcefulness. He advertised the practice in the Lancet, and when a prospective purchaser came to view it, he hired fourteen or fifteen men to come into the surgery, one after the other, and pay fees. Such an impression did this ruse cause upon the newly married medico, who came from London to investigate, that he bought it at once, and Diamond netted nearly twice the sum he originally gave for his partnership.
Finding that his deformity precluded him from forming anything like a lucrative practice, he accepted a berth as ship’s doctor in the P&O service, and for some years sailed the Indian and China seas.
Back in London again, he drifted from one suburban practice to another, doing locum work, and at last built up a semblance of a practice in a cheap new suburban district down at Catford.
Even there, however, his ugliness proved much against him, and at last he was forced to retire into a Northamptonshire village, where he and his wife eked out a modest living by adopting children upon yearly payments.
It was not a very creditable means of livelihood, yet the several children beneath their cottage roof were all well treated and well cared for. And after all, Raymond Diamond, a brilliant man in many ways, was only a failure because of his physical shortcomings.
He knew his Paris well. In his younger days he had often been there. Indeed, he once resided at St. Cloud with an invalid gentleman for close upon two years. Long years of travel had rendered him a thorough-going cosmopolitan, even though his lot was now cast in a sleepy country village.
The reason of his present visit to Paris was in order to interview the father of one of his adopted daughters, but the man had not kept the appointment, and by waiting from day to day in hope of finding him, he had exhausted his slender finances, and he knew that his patient wife was in a similar condition of penury at home.
He was certainly a strikingly ugly man. His forehead was broad and bulgy, and his face narrowed to the point of the beard. His head seemed too large, his arms too long and ungainly, while his face was deeply furrowed by long years at sea. His mouth, too, was wide and ugly and when he laughed he displayed an uneven row of teeth much discoloured by tobacco.
With folded arms, he was standing by the dead stranger, silently contemplating the white upturned face which showed distinctly in the fading twilight.
“I wonder who he was?” he exclaimed aloud. “Why did he refuse his name, and why was he so particular to burn those papers? He was a queer stick – poor fellow! I suppose they have inquests in France, and I’ll get something as a witness.”
And he pulled the sheet tenderly across to hide the lifeless visage.
“But,” he added, “perhaps I’ve rendered myself liable because I didn’t call in a French doctor!”
Then, suddenly arousing himself, he walked softly across to the stove and, spreading his handkerchief on the floor, raked out all the tinder into it. To his satisfaction he saw, as he had anticipated, that some of the papers, closely folded as they were, had only been burned at the edges.
One of them he opened, and found it covered with typewriting.
“These will, no doubt, prove interesting,” he remarked to himself as he gathered every particle up into the handkerchief, and very carefully folded it over to protect it.
The lid of an old cardboard box which he found under the bed he broke up, and placing one piece above the handkerchief and the other below, he put the whole into the breast-pocket of his shabby frock-coat.
The stranger’s bag he next examined. It was old, and covered with labels of first-class hotels – many of them in cities in the Near East and the Levant. The contents were disappointing, only a couple of shirts marked with the initials “P.H.”, several dirty collars, a cravat or two, and a safety razor, together with a few unimportant odds and ends.
“The proprietor must have these, in lieu of his bill, I suppose,” Diamond said. “I wonder what ‘P.H.’ stands for? He was a well-read man without a doubt. By Jove! he took his blow as bravely as any fellow I’ve seen go under. With a heart like that, it’s a marvel that he lived so long. If I knew who his relatives were, I’d ‘wire’ to them – providing I had the money,” he added with a bitter smile.
Then he shrugged his shoulders, and after striking a match to reassure himself that nothing had been left inside the stove to betray the fact that papers had been burned there, he turned upon his heel and left the room.
Below, in his dingy little back room on the first floor, he saw the proprietor, and told him what had occurred.
The old man grunted in his armchair and ordered the greasy-looking valet-de-chambre to inform the police, but to first go and search the dead man’s effects and ascertain if he had left any money.
“Monsieur Blanc was penniless, like myself,” Diamond said. “Neither of us had eaten all day yesterday.”
“No money to pay his bill!” croaked the old Frenchman, who looked more like a concierge than a hotel proprietor. “And you are also without money?” he asked glaring.
“I regret that such is the truth,” was Diamond’s answer with much politeness. “Has not m’sieur noticed in life that honest men are mostly poor? Thieves and rogues are usually in funds.”
“Then I must ask you to leave my hotel at once,” said the old man testily.
The Doctor grinned, and bowed.
“If that is m’sieur’s decision, I can do nothing else but obey,” was his polite answer.
“You will leave your luggage, of course.”
“M’sieur is quite welcome to all he finds,” was the Doctor’s response, and with another bow he turned and strode out.
His plan had worked admirably. He had no desire to remain there in the present circumstances. To be ordered out was certainly better than to flee.
So he walked gaily down the stairs, and a few minutes later was strolling airily down the Rue Lafayette, in the direction of the Opera.
The hotel proprietor and the valet-de-chambre quickly searched the dead man’s room, but beyond the bag and its contents found nothing. Afterwards they informed the police.
Meanwhile Raymond Diamond walked on, undecided how to act. He had already reached the Place de l’Opera, now bright beneath its many electric lamps, before he had made up his mind. He would go once again in search of little Aggie’s father, the man who owed him money.
Therefore he turned into the narrow Rue des Petit-Champs, and half-way down entered a house, passed the concierge, and ascended to a flat on the second floor.
Fully twenty times he had called there before, but the place was shut, as its owner, an Englishman, was absent somewhere in the Midi. When, however, he rang, he heard movement within.
His heart leapt for joy, for when the door opened there stood Mr Mullet, a tall, thin, red-haired man with a long pale face and a reddish, bristly moustache, who, the moment he recognised his visitor, stretched forth his hand in welcome.
“Come in, Doctor,” he cried cheerily. “I got back only this morning, and the concierge gave me your card. I expected, however, you’d grown tired of waiting, and returned to England. How’s my little Aggie?”
“She grows a bonnie girl, Mr Mullet – quite a bonnie girl,” answered the ugly little man. “Gets on wonderfully well at school. And Lady Gavin, at the Manor, takes quite an interest in her.”
“That’s right. I’m glad to hear it – very glad. Though I’m a bit of a rover, Doctor, I’m always thinking of the child you know. Why – she must be nearly thirteen now.”
“Nearly. It’s fully six years since I took her off your hands.”
“Fully.”
And the two men sat down in the rather comfortable room of the tall, cadaverous-looking man, a mining engineer, whose adventures would have filled a volume.
David Mullet, or “Red Mullet” as his friends called him on account of the colour of his hair, offered the Doctor a good cigar from his case, poured out two glasses of brandy and soda, and after a chat took out two notes of a thousand francs from the pocket-book he carried and handed them to his visitor, receiving a receipt in return.
“I’ve been a long time paying, I’m afraid, Doctor,” laughed the man airily. “But you know what kind of fellow I am! Sometimes I’m flush of money, and at others devilish hard up.”
“I’m hard up, or I wouldn’t press for this.”
“My dear Doctor, it’s been owing for two years. And I’m very glad to get out of your debt.”
“Well, Mr Mullet,” Diamond said, “eighty pounds is a lot to me just now. I haven’t had a square meal for days, and to tell the truth I’ve just been ordered out of my hotel.”
“My dear fellow, that’s happened to me dozens of times,” laughed the other. “I never feel sorry for the proprietor. I only regret that I can’t give tips to the servants. I suppose you’ll go back home – eh?”
“To-night, or by the first service in the morning.”
“By Jove, I’d like to see my little Aggie. I wonder,” exclaimed the man, “I wonder if I could manage to get across?”
“It isn’t far,” urged the Doctor.
But “Red Mullet” hesitated. He had a cause to hesitate. There was a hidden reason why for the past three years he had not put foot on English soil.
He shook his head sadly as he recognised that discretion was the better part of valour. He was too wary a man to run his neck into a noose.
“No,” he said, “I think that in a few weeks I’ll ask you to bring little Aggie over here to see me. You won’t mind the trip – eh?”
“Not at all,” was the reply. “Aggie will hardly know her father, I expect. She looks upon me as her parent.”
“That was what we arranged, Doctor. She was to take your name, and you were to bring her up as your own daughter. I have a reason for that.”
“So you told me six years ago.”
“Red Mullet” nodded, and stretched out his long legs lazily as he contemplated the smoke of his cigar ascending to the ceiling. Recollections of his child had struck a sympathetic chord in his memory. There were incidents in his life that he would fain have forgotten. One of them was now recalled.
Quickly, however, the shadow passed, and his brow cleared. He became the same easy-going, humorous man he always had been, possessing a merry bonhomie and a fund of stories regarding his own amusing experiences in various out-of-the-way corners of the world.
At last the Doctor, with eighty pounds in his pocket, rose and wished his friend adieu.
Then he walked to a brasserie in the Avenue de l’Opera, where he dined well, concluding his meal with coffee and a liqueur, and at nine o’clock he left the Gare du Nord for Calais and London.
The reason of his sudden flight from Paris was the fear of having contravened the law by not calling in a French medical man when he knew that the case of the mysterious Blanc was hopeless. Detention would mean trouble and much expense. Therefore he deemed it best to get across to England at the earliest possible moment.
At six o’clock next morning he found himself in a small hotel called the Norfolk in Surrey Street, Strand, where he had on one or two occasions stayed. The waiter having brought up his breakfast, he locked the door and, going to the table, he took from his pocket the packet of charred paper and broken tinder which he had abstracted from the stove in Paris.
With infinite care he opened the handkerchief and spread it out. The tinder had broken into tiny fragments and some had been reduced to black powder, while the half-charred paper split as he attempted to open it.
He had switched on the light, for the London dawn had not yet spread. Then, seating himself at the table, he proceeded to examine and decipher the remains of the papers which the dying man believed he had entirely destroyed.
For some time he could make nothing of the lines of written words, which had neither beginning nor end.
Suddenly, however, he held his breath. He sat erect, statuesque, his dark eyes staring at the paper.
Then he re-read the written lines eagerly.
“Great Heavens! How strange!” he cried. “How utterly astounding! That man who refused his name had learned the greatest and most important secret this modern world of ours contains! And it is in my hands —mine! My God! Is it true – is it really true what this man alleges?”
He paused and again re-read the smoke-blackened, half-burned pages. For some moments he sat with his mouth open in utter astonishment. He could scarcely believe his own eyes.
“His secret – his amazing secret, one unheard of – is mine!” he gasped, glancing around the room, as though half-fearful lest he had been overheard. “I shall be a rich man – one of the richest in all Europe! Before six months is out the whole world will be at the feet of Raymond Diamond!”
