“Well, if you are satisfied, so am I,” I returned. “We need not spy about this creepy old mansion any longer. We have discovered all we have set out to find, and now I propose we get back to the Green Dragon Hotel, whither, doubtless, he and Captain Sparhawk will return.”
“And how about Miss Napier?” queried Casteno slyly.
“Oh! Miss Napier will probably come back with her uncle to the same place. He, doubtless, to keep up the deception that he is going straight now for England and English interests, will forgive her that piece of trickery which landed him right into Cuthbertson’s net; and she, to see that he does keep straight, will let herself be deceived by him, and will watch him as far as she dare without exciting his suspicions. At all events, it is useless for me to think of making any move with regard to her just at this moment. In the first place, she has her hands full watching her prisoner, Sparhawk, and if I showed up now in this disguise she might put a bullet through the pair of us. Certainly she would raise an alarm, and there would be endless trouble and difficulties before we managed to explain, at all satisfactorily, what we were doing here without an invitation when so many vital national issues were being settled. In the second place, I can’t make out her ignorance of the death of her father. Is it real, or assumed? Something very odd must have happened to make her behave like this at this mournful crisis in the family fortunes. Now, what can that be? So far as I can see there is only one source here in Shrewsbury which can possibly supply any sort of key to the mystery without asking the girl herself. That is, a Sunday special edition of one of the Sunday papers – the People, Lloyd’s, or some journal like that. The only place where we can find that with any degree of certainty is the Green Dragon, so, naturally, I am all eagerness to hasten back there and to look over its columns!”
“I see you’re right,” replied Casteno, as, springing to his feet, he snatched up his boots and hastened as rapidly as he could down the stairs, with the result that in a few seconds we had crossed the lawn and reached the shelter of the belt of trees near the boundary wall by which we had effected our entrance. Here we set to work, and quickly removed all traces of our adventures; then, hoisting ourselves over the wall that divided us from the side lane, we raced back as hard as we could in the direction of the town.
“We must eat,” he argued; “eat to live. Everything just now depends on us keeping in the pink of condition. To do that we must never neglect our food.”
Happily, after moments that seemed as long as hours, the paper I sought did materialise at last. It was a newly-arrived copy of the Weekly Dispatch, I remember, and no sooner did I glance at the first page than I saw from the headlines that some startling developments in the case had occurred since I turned my face from London towards the west. As a matter of fact, quite a new complexion had been put on the tragedy, and the latest report now ran as follows: —
THE MYSTERY OF WHITEHALL COURT
WHO IS THE DEAD MAN?
STRANGE STORY OF A VALET
“Quite a new turn has been given to the tragedy in Embankment Mansions, full particulars of the discovery of which appear on an inside page. Firstly, the valet Richardson has now had time to examine the body which was found in Colonel Napier’s bedroom, and he says unhesitatingly that it is not that of his master at all but of a stranger who at first sight resembles him strongly. This view is borne out by two old friends of Colonel Napier who have also seen the corpse – the Rev. Richard Jennings, the vicar of St. Helen’s, Palace Street, Westminster, and Colonel Goring-Richmond, who some years ago was on the most intimate terms with the deceased and spent the summer with him in the Austrian Tyrol. Secondly, if this be true, there is no doubt that not only Colonel Napier, but also his daughter Doris, have suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. All their affairs, it seems, have been left in the uttermost confusion, and it looks as though, if there has not been foul play in their lives in one direction, there has been in another. Close inquiries amongst their friends reveal no intention on their part to be absent from home. Their servants also are astounded at their disappearance, and all the machinery of their social life has been brought suddenly to a standstill; while letters and telegrams of inquiry and visits from friends, who have read accounts which purport to explain Colonel’s Napier’s sudden demise, plunge their departure into a mingled atmosphere of tragedy and mystery, which it seems impossible to-night to break through. Meanwhile, everybody is asking: Who is the man who has been found stabbed to death in Colonel Napier’s bed? The police are certainly powerless to explain; while common people dare not suggest a most terrible answer which will occur to everybody who reads these lines for fear of the law of libel.”
Chapter Fifteen.
In Search of the Secret
For once Casteno was full of sympathy with me.
No sooner did I explain to him the extraordinary development of that mystery at Whitehall Court than he was all eagerness, all attention, all resource to prove to me that I must think the best and not the worst of Colonel Napier’s disappearance.
At first, I own, I was not at all inclined to take help from such a quarter; I had not forgotten those suspicious circumstances in which he left my office at the time the murder was committed. Nevertheless, before we had finished our dinner in that quaint old Shrewsbury hotel he had practically won me over to his way of looking at the occurrence.
“After all,” said he, as he drained his last glass of wine, “you can certainly rely on the impression that Colonel Napier has come to no harm. If he had, Miss Doris would not be here at all as she is, as bright and gay as a lark, and as keen as a hawk on getting the benefit of those manuscripts for Lord Cuthbertson. Neither he nor Lord Fotheringay would dare to keep bad news from her. They are, after all, both of them gentlemen, whatever may happen to be the Chauvinistic tactics they adopt to push themselves forward in their own particular little intrigues in politics. Silence in such a crisis would be monstrous – utterly monstrous.”
“But where can he be?” I cried helplessly. “What is he doing? Why doesn’t he come forward and tell the police as much as he knows of the affair?”
“Perhaps he has,” said Casteno significantly, dealing with my last question first. “Who knows? Naylor has dropped his part in the search, you see, and if that means anything at all it means that the murder has precious little to do with this wild chase after the old parchment records. My own impression is that the daughter is not the only member of the Napier family who has taken sides against us in this hunt for the submerged treasure. When the truth is told I think you will find both father and daughter have determined, in a perfectly friendly way, to work against me, just to prove to you how foolish and futile you have been not to take their advice. Hence Colonel Napier may have been despatched in one direction to circumvent us and Miss Doris in another. That disposition of their forces would be quite fair, you know, and might have most important results.”
“And the man found dead in the colonel’s bed?”
“Any theory could account for his presence,” said the Spaniard, shrugging his shoulders and walking towards the window as though heartily tired of my objections. “One is that he was some burglar who had got the office that the colonel had left the flat, and had disguised himself to resemble the master, had walked in at the front door and personated him over-night, and had been assassinated in error. Such cases of impersonation are much more common than people imagine, but they have such ludicrous, as well as tragic, results that they seldom, if ever, get into the police courts. Another theory – and to me not at all a bad one – is that the whole business has been engineered by some secret society for a purpose that will eventually become apparent. As you know, there are plenty of secret organisations in London that do not content themselves with mystic signs and passwords and occasional extravagances in the shape of nitro-glycerine and dynamite. I know there is a branch of the Spanish ‘Friends of Liberty’ in England, for instance; and I am sure if they have got some hint from Mexico about the discovery of those manuscripts they will stop at nothing – not even a crime like this – to frighten off Colonel Napier.”
“Well, I had better leave it,” I said at last, with a sigh, throwing the paper on to the floor and joining my companion at the casement. “After all, you are really the leader of this expedition, and you have a right to require of me that I shall pay some attention to your conclusions.”
“Yes; leave it,” repeated Casteno. “Remember, you are only one man with one brain and one pair of hands. You can’t do everything in a maze that has such extraordinary ramifications as this. I tried alone, remember, and failed; and, first, I had to get your help, and then Mr Cooper-Nassington’s, and heaven alone knows where we shall end. But this brings me to another point, Glynn,” he went on, with increasing earnestness. “I want you not to approach Miss Doris until this flying machine experiment is over. It is quite natural of you to wish to do so, I admit, but I want you to consider my interests a little for a day or two, and to refrain.”
“I see,” I said meditatively. “You are afraid something might happen, some injudicious word of hers, some careless act, which might scare off some of the people we want to keep blind to our movements, eh?”
“Yes,” answered Casteno; “but that’s not all. You must recollect, too, that the people who are not for us are against us. It is not really to the Napier interest that your side should win. They are fighting, in my opinion, on the side of the authorities as represented by the Foreign Secretary and the earl. Well, let them, that’s all, and only when we’ve won let us put our heads above the hedge.”
Some other conversation followed, but in the end I agreed to do as José Casteno wished. As a consequence, we kept quite quiet in our rooms until we had got word from a friendly waiter that the hunchback, Miss Doris, and Captain Sparhawk had returned to the hotel, apparently on good terms again, and then in the darkness of night we slipped off and had a good tramp about the ancient streets and by-ways of Shrewsbury, rising next morning as fresh and as sturdy as ever. For a time, it is true, we feared that after his compact to help Lord Cyril Cuthbertson the hunchback might deem it prudent to avoid the excursion. As a matter of fact, I was the one who thought so. Casteno didn’t, because, in the first place, he was sure that his father would never in any circumstances help England against Spain; and in the second, the dwarf was too keen on flying machines and their commercial and military possibilities to let Sparhawk slip through his fingers when he had got hold of a really serviceable invention that would take seven or eight people careering through the air at will. And, as it turned out, Casteno was correct, and I wasn’t. The hunchback did turn up in the flying machine enclosure at the great floral fête, all prepared for the expedition, and, oddly enough, he brought with him as companion – he seemed to have quite forgiven all her previous day’s tricks – my own Doris, who looked as bright and gay as though a trip in a flying machine were one of the most enjoyable things in existence.
Captain Sparhawk himself, now that the critical day of trial had dawned, looked, I must confess, very nervous and overwrought. Attired in a costume that proved to be a compromise between what is usually adopted by the driver of a fast motor car and the captain of a penny steamboat, he flitted about from point to point in the enclosure, the personification of anxiety and restlessness.
“First we must think of the weather, Miss Doris,” we caught him saying as, disguised in the uniform of sergeants in the Royal Engineers, we showed our tickets which entitled us to the trip in his company and joined the mob of experts and committeemen who buzzed about him like so many noisy and curious bees. As for our features, they were works of art – the art of the painter and the art of the wig-maker – while our voices had developed a military bluffness and roughness, which left our throats lined with something like sandpaper every time we opened our mouths.
“It all depends on the wind,” he repeated, and he directed her gaze anxiously to the sky, as though she could see at a glance whether the wind were likely at the time of the ascent to blow forty miles an hour, or four. “You see, I have got the inflation well advanced,” he went on, pointing to the huge, slowly-swelling monster, which lay like a gigantic but quarter-filled balloon of fishlike shape on the greensward as men in mechanics’ clothes hastened here and there pulling a hose straight, slackening a rope, or dragging out the folds of the silk as if they were so many sheets of lead. “This particular machine is Number 9 of my series, two ahead of Santos-Dumont. As you are going with us to-day,” at which news both Casteno and I started, for we had not bargained for that, “I crave your permission to name it the ‘Doris.’”
“By all means,” said the girl, beaming with pleasure; “and I trust it will have the best of good luck, and bring all connected with it fame and fortune!” Whereat the little mob I have mentioned broke into a loud cheer, which was taken up by the thousands who lined the ropes that marked off the enclosures, and amongst whom the news of the machine’s informal christening passed like so much wildfire.
At this point somebody – I think it was the chairman of the fête – appeared bearing three or four magnums of champagne, which were opened, and the contents passed amongst the select coterie gathered around the inventor. Thus encouraged, the gallant captain went further.
“You need not really fear the trip, Miss Napier,” he said, raising the glass with a proud gesture to his lips. “Nor you two gentlemen,” he added, nodding in the direction of Casteno and myself, who had been pointed out to him by the gatekeeper as his two paying fellow-passengers. “As for Mr Zouche here,” now he included the hunchback, “he is a practical aeronaut like myself. I always say, where he would lead I would follow; but, for to-day, we have reversed things a bit, although my opinion of his skill and knowledge remains just the same.”
“Then you think the machine is perfectly safe?” said a voice in the crowd.
“It’s as safe as going to heaven in a rocking-chair,” promptly answered the captain, like an oracle. “The fact is,” he proceeded in a lower tone, “I have had the thing well tested. In the first place, I had it filled with air and coal gas, for the purpose of arranging the rigging, and then I took a little trip with it myself with proper hydrogen, and the petroleum motor hard at work, and it sailed aloft like a bird. In form, of course, it is similar to the balloon, ‘La France,’ experimented with as long ago as 1834 by some French officers at Meudon – that is, it is shaped like a plaice – the front end being larger than the rear; while it is provided with a compensating ballonet, which is inflated with air by means of a fan controlled from the motor. The two cars, to hold three passengers each, like the motor, are supported by a pine framework, and are suspended at a distance of fifteen feet under the balloon. The propeller is an exceptionally large and strong one, and resembles a fish’s tail, a mackerel’s, for I contend we find all our true air affinities in the sea. It turns at the rate of two hundred and fifty revolutions a minute, and the whole apparatus is strong enough to let us take a fair amount of ballast; for the secret of my success in my invention does not turn on lightness, where so many flying-machine inventors have gone wrong of late, but on weight – weight to subdue the pressure of the wind, to conquer the dead force of the air, and to answer the power of the motor to get up anything approaching a decent speed.”
The enthusiast stopped. Some detail in the rigging as the great aerial monster rose higher and higher suddenly required his attention; and for the next few minutes none of us spoke at all, as the captain moved hither and thither, directing his subordinates, and getting everything into working order. Curiously enough, all his feverishness left him like magic directly there was any serious work to do. For that time he might have been quite alone in his workshop. He moved and spoke and acted as one who had perfect confidence in himself and in the issue of the daring experiment which he was about to undertake.
Chapter Sixteen.
Above the Clouds
At last everything seemed in readiness.
The beautiful grounds of the Quarry were black with thousands upon thousands of anxious spectators, and at a signal from the aeronaut Casteno and I, amidst loud cheers from the mob in the enclosure, took our places first in the car. There was room for a third passenger, and for a few seconds the Spaniard and I debated eagerly whether we should have Doris or the hunchback as the last party in the trio, and, if so, what line we ought to take with them lest they should suspect we were not those harmless members of a curious section of the public which we had given ourselves out to be. Unfortunately, as it happened, we were destined to have as travelling companion a total stranger to both of us. All at once we saw Doris beckon to the captain, and when he approached she introduced him to a tall venerable-looking figure with a long white beard.
“This is the Professor Stephen Leopardi of the Meteorological Office, whom I mentioned to you,” she said in her clear, ringing tones. “He is an old friend of my father and myself from London, but just now he happens to be staying near the Wrekin, and he is very anxious, if you will take him, to make the ascent with you. He is a man of science too, of considerable reputation, and any testimony he can bear to the uses of your invention must, in the natural course of things, be very valuable to you.”
“Quite so! Quite so!” rejoined both Captain Sparhawk and the hunchback, whose eyes gleamed with avarice at the prospect of getting so famous an expert to go with them and to speak up for them without a fee. “We shall really be only too delighted if the professor will make the sixth in our party – if he will consent to do so. There is a very nice seat vacant in the car we have reserved for independent passengers. Will he honour us by occupying that?” And with a good many flourishes and bows on both sides the scientist, to our profound disgust, was hoisted on to a seat next to Casteno and myself, thus cutting off for good all chance of our carrying on any private conversation or of giving each other any confidential hints.
A few minutes later Doris and the hunchback entered the adjacent car. Captain Sparhawk shook hands warmly with some of his more prominent supporters and friends on the committee and followed them, and the next moment he blew a shrill call on a small whistle attached to the motor, close to which he had taken up his position, ready to set all the machinery at work.
There was a loud crash of cannon, an ear-splitting salvo of cheers as one by one the guide-ropes slipped out of their blocks, and finally the air-ship “Doris” rose free from her moorings and went sailing like a bird across the river Severn in the direction of Welshpool.
At first the sensation was delightful. The earth and its people and features dropped away from us, until we seemed to have risen out of the hollow of a basin. There was no sense of ascent at all. The world slipped away from us, and not we away from the world. One by one the sounds died out, until at last we could only catch the hoarse barking of some sheep-dogs which must have seen us with those keen eyes of theirs and thought mischief was astir. Clouds, too, began to rush swiftly towards us, and soon we found ourselves enveloped in a soft, clinging, whitish mist, which blotted out all sight of the earth we had left behind us.
We were now being carried upward with a terrific force, and insensibly all of us turned our eyes towards Captain Sparhawk to see how he was going to acquit himself and his machine now the time of real trial had come. After all, any balloon could rise like this had done. Indeed, all balloons had been able to accomplish as much since the days of the Brothers Montgolfier. It was on the steering – directing – descent that the fame of the “Doris” and all modern flying machines had to rest. How would the vessel behave in a wild upward dash like ours?
Alas! we had not long to wait for an answer.
All at once we saw Captain Sparhawk stagger and throw up his arms. The wind had blown his coat, which he had carelessly left unfastened, against the motor, and the petroleum ignition had set the dry woollen material on fire. In vain he tried to extinguish the flames. They spread with hideous rapidity, and at last, frantic with pain, he scrambled on to the framework, and dashed headlong to the earth, a seething mass of fire.
For a moment, I believe, all our hearts stood still with terror.
Freed, too, from the burden of Captain Sparhawk’s weight, the air-ship shot upward at a most amazing rate of speed. At first it gave two great violent lurches, as though the loss of that twelve or fourteen stone of ballast would send it heeling over, with its cars at a crazy angle ’twixt earth and heaven, but, luckily, in our consternation we all made various movements that served to right the vessel, and later we found ourselves safe, at all events for the moment, but perfectly helpless. By this time, too, there was not a trace of the world to be seen. We were simply surrounded with clouds, which seethed about us in white, clinging vapour and wrapped themselves about our clothes and faces as though we had been overtaken in a mist on some Scottish moor.
“Something will have to be done,” said the professor sternly, turning suddenly to Casteno and myself, his sole travelling companions in that car. “We can expect no assistance from that old hunchback or that girl, Miss Napier, in the other compartment. Do either of you gentlemen understand anything about air-ships?” And he gave a quick, scrutinising gaze at our uniforms, as though he could find thereon some badge which showed we belonged to the ballooning section of the Royal Engineers.
“We know nothing whatever,” replied José quietly, stamping up and down to keep his feet warm. “We have come, for pleasure we thought it, and here is the result.”
“Besides, professor,” I cut in, “are not you really the one to take charge of operations at this juncture? I understand that you come from the Meteorological Office and that ventures like this fall under your review in your department. Surely you know enough of ballooning by which, even if you couldn’t make the machine perform like the inventor intended it should, you could at least take us back to the earth.”
“I am not so sure about that,” said the man quickly, and then all at once he stopped and bit his lip. It was obvious that he had said a little more than he intended, and a new suspicion about him gathered shape and force in my mind. Suppose he were not the Professor Stephen Leopardi that Doris had pretended but some other spy sent by Cuthbertson to keep an eye on the hunchback?
“Well, at all events, we can’t go blindly to death like this,” I snapped. “Look, there is Miss Napier making signals to us with her handkerchief? Where, though, is the hunchback? Ah! I see. The fright has been too much for him. He has collapsed, fainted, and dropped like a log to the seat on the side of the car. We must do something or she will grow frantic.” And waving a hand to her I, half unconscious of what I had myself resolved upon, scrambled on to the stays of the machine and began to crawl like a monkey towards the tiny platform from which poor Captain Sparhawk had fallen, and on which stood the motor and the different cords and levers that controlled the machine.
“Come back! Come back!” Casteno shouted. “Are you mad, man? Don’t you understand that in a cold, rarefied atmosphere like this the gas in the balloon is bound to condense, and that, as surely as an apple drops from a tree to the earth instead of the sky, by the law of gravitation, we must land on terra firma again?”
But his appeal fell on ears that were deaf to all save one voice. Above the swirl and the wind I had heard Doris call to us, and nought else mattered. Doris was frightened. Doris wanted somebody near to her besides that senseless Spaniard. Doris dreaded what might happen. That must not be, and so, with eyes fixed resolutely on her graceful figure standing silhouetted against the clouds, I shut my lips tightly and crept along that dizzy path that separated me from her. What if she did not know me in that disguise? I, at least, knew her, and, should the need come, I would, I swore to myself, cheerfully lay down my life to save her from harm.
That passage from the car to the platform could not have occupied more than seven or eight seconds. To me it seemed as though hours had passed before I got to that platform and stood up by that complicated series of levers, with hands firmly gripped to the steel rails that ran round on three sides, the bulky outline of the motor shutting in the fourth. At length, however, I stood there, and realised I had not reached it one instant too soon, for just at that moment the air-ship struck a warmer strata of atmosphere and began to move on a dizzy and bewildering course, now shooting upward like a rocket, then striking a cold wind, and collapsing like a stricken bird.
“Pull some of those levers, man. Get the rudder at work,” shouted the professor through his hands as the machine commenced to career sideways through the air like a torpedo. “These cars will be flattened out if you don’t accomplish something soon.”
But my blood was up after my dizzy crawl through space, and I felt I could not brook interference. “Throw that idiot out if he says another word,” I shouted to Casteno. Then I turned to Doris. “Don’t be frightened, Miss Napier,” I cried, “just trust me, and, if all goes well, we shall before five minutes are over be safe on land again.” And then I bent down and studied the machinery by which I was surrounded.
A ship’s compass warned me of the position of the levers that controlled the rudder, and after three or four experimental turns of the latter I got the great monster in hand. Indeed, so queerly constituted are we men who love adventure that, no sooner did I find the air-ship obey my movements, than I promptly forgot all the dangers of my position, and, almost with boyish joy, I began to manoeuvre the vessel, first in one direction and then in another, until in the end I found I could make it head on whatever course I wished.
Unfortunately, none of those movements brought the machine any nearer to the earth, and I had to turn to try other levers, the objects of which were not quite so apparent. My first experiment shut off the control of the motor. My second extinguished the electrical ignition altogether, and I found that as the screw ceased to revolve we began to fall to the earth at a tremendous pace.
What was I to do? For a second, I confess, I had the wildest thoughts of throwing everything portable overboard and trusting to luck to get everything started again. Then, all at once, something seemed to whisper to me: “The motor has stopped. Now the thing is no longer a flying machine but a balloon; treat it as a balloon. Find the cord that controls the valves in the top of the bag and pull those, and let all the gas escape, and come down to earth like a bird that is spent and tired.”
Like a man dazed I threw out my hands and gripped what ropes I could that looked at all like guide-ropes. The first I seized sent my platform heeling over sideways, and it was nothing less than a miracle that I did not fall off its inclined surface so sudden was the change of balance. Happily, the second I snatched controlled the valves in the top of the balloon. It answered to a touch, and the gas went roaring through the aperture like a typhoon.
“Throw yourselves into the bottom of the cars,” I shouted to the occupants of the two compartments. “We are racing towards the earth at a terrific pace. In a few seconds we shall reach it. We shall strike it gently enough because of the law of gravity and of the compensating ballonet we carry above the propeller, but I don’t want one of you to get frightened and to leap out of the ship before all the gas is exhausted, otherwise we shall go careering up again, and the entire ship then will fall and dash itself and us into pieces. Trust to its steady collapse.” And seizing an anchor that was fastened to the guide-rails of the platform I flung this over the side, and then crouched myself on a kind of huge buoy that hung just above the platform, through which all the different ropes of the machine seemed to pass.
Fortunately, everybody was too impressed by the way in which I had guided the ship in the first instance to have noticed how badly I had managed in the second in stopping the use of the motor, and so at my words they dropped down amongst the ballast in the bottom of the cars, and with teeth clenched and hands gripping the framework they awaited the inevitable crash.
Down – down – down we went – down into space!
The clouds shot past us as though they were driven out of our path by some tornado. The wind roared in our ears.
We caught sight of the earth, and it rushed up to meet us as if it would there and then pulverise us into a million atoms.
Next instant everything appeared to change like magic. Instead of one wild, dizzy, headlong flight to the ground we seemed to be upborne on some mighty pinions that were moving with great force but steadiness as we dropped, tired and glad, into our native sphere.