The Cipher Machine that Mr. Lockhart found
We all looked at each other in silence.
"That is conclusive proof," I said at length. "Of course, you will have Doctor Upjelly arrested directly he comes back."
"And thank you!" said my brother. "So kind of you to put up your little turn, Johnny! Will you have a cigar or a cocoanut? My dear boy, if we had this man arrested, ten to one his tracks would be absolutely covered and we could prove nothing. Don't you see, what we want to do is to catch him in the act, to find out what he does and how he does it. No such rough and ready methods!"—his voice became very grave and stern.
"Quarter-deck!" I thought to myself.
"This has not got to be taken lightly," he went on. "I believe that fate has put my finger upon the very pulse of what has been puzzling the Admiralty for weeks. I honestly believe that here, in this lonely house, is hidden the intellect of the Master Spy of Germany. We are up against it. We must work in silence and in the dark. The slightest slip would be fatal. I cannot exaggerate the importance of this affair, nor," he concluded, looking keenly at Lockhart and myself, "nor the danger."
Little Lockhart's face positively brightened at this. "Danger!" he cried, as if someone had made him a present. "Then I shall be able to do something to help! We shall all be able to do something and——"
Lockhart started and broke off. At that moment, from behind Smith's classical dictionary and Liddell and Scott's Greek ditto there came a faint, muffled whirr.
"Good God, what's that?" said Lockhart.
"Oh, it's all right," I answered, and I expect I looked about as big an ass as I felt. "That is—er—a little contrivance of my own. By the way, you fellows must keep it absolutely dark."
To say that they watched me with interest is to put it mildly. I withdrew "Our House Telephone, Not a Toy, 27s. 6d. net" from its hiding place. Doris was speaking. She knew that my brother had come and she was dying to meet him. Old Mrs. Gaunt was sleeping peacefully; in fact I fear, so prone are all of us to error, that Doris had administered just twice the amount of opiate that the doctor had prescribed.
Doris suggested that she and Marjorie should come at once to my room. They also suggested that we should dine there, with the connivance of a friendly housemaid. I told her to hold the line for a minute, and explained.
My brother's face lost all preoccupation. He was a naval officer, you will remember, and, though a distinguished one, was as young gentlemen in that Service usually are in both age and inclination.
"Can a duck swim?" said my brother.
"Well, I'll go," Lockhart remarked, with just a trace of his old bitterness.
"You sit where you are, old soul," I told him. "Bernard, both the girls are only stepdaughters of the Doctor, who, they have told me, did not treat their mother very well and who is a perfect tyrant to them. They're as true as steel; I can answer for them. They will be of tremendous help."
"Leave it all to me," he replied. "I am skipper of this from now onwards. You follow my lead."
A minute or two afterwards the girls came in. Doris, as I have already explained, was as pretty as Venus, Cleopatra, and Gertie Millar all in one, and she only beat Marjorie by a short head. All the other girls I've ever met were simply "also ran."
Marjorie's hair was black. She was a brunette with olive-coloured skin and green eyes, like very dark, clear emeralds. She was extraordinarily lovely. Indeed, all three of us had seriously considered starting a picture postcard firm, with the girls as models and I to manage it, so that Doris and I could get married and have Marjorie to live with us. Rather a good scheme, only it would have needed at least two hundred pounds capital, which we hadn't got! Doris had on her engagement ring, which she generally wore on a string round her neck, underneath her blouse. I had put thirty shillings each way on "Baby Mine" for the Grand National and it had come off—hence the ring.
"Let me introduce you to my fiancée, Miss Joyce," I said to Bernard.
He took her hand and bowed over it, looking out of the corner of his eyes at Marjorie.
Little Lockhart gasped. "Babe that I am!" he said, "blind mole! To think that I have lived in this house with young John Carey for so long, the house honeycombed with secret wires, and an illicit engagement in progress under my nose, and I knew nothing of it!"
"Well, you are not the only person, Mr. Lockhart," Marjorie said. "And now I am going to fetch up dinner. Cook is out for the evening. Amy is in the plot. We've got soup—only tinned, but quite nice; there's a round of cold beef; and we will make an omelette on John's fire."
"I'll come and help you carry the things," said my brother, and they left the room as friendly as if they had known each other for years.
"Well, what do you think of my brother?" I asked Doris. I'm afraid my arm was round her waist and I had forgotten Lockhart.
"I'm decidedly of the opinion," she said, "that Commander Carey knows more than enough to come indoors when it rains."
Lockhart here revealed qualities of an unsuspected nature—I had never really appreciated Lockhart until the night before.
"I happen to have, locked up in the cupboard of my sitting-room," he said, "a bottle of claret wine and a bottle of sherry wine. I will go and fetch them to grace this feast."
"You nasty, horrid villain, so you drink in secret, do you?" I remarked.
"Only Bovril, but please don't let it be known," was the reply, and then Doris and I were alone.
I have never been one of those people who kiss and tell, so I will pass over the next minute; but after some business of no importance, she put her hands on my shoulders and looked me straight in the face.
"John," she said, "there is something up!"
"What do you mean?"
"I don't exactly know, but there is something up. I can feel it—and something has happened, too, that I have got to tell you about. Before the Doctor left this morning, he told Marjorie that Mr. Jones had fallen in love with her and that she would have to marry him after the war was over, when he has straightened out his business affairs."
"Good Lord!" I said, "that thing? Why——"
"What have you got against him?" she asked quickly. "He's wealthy, the Doctor says, he has got good manners; of course, he's older than Marjorie, but he's not an old man. I thought you said you rather liked him?"
"I did say so, and I liked him better than ever after meeting him this morning. You know I had breakfast with the Doctor?"
"I know, and there is something up. Something to do with your brother—I am certain of it. But why do you object to Mr. Jones for Marjorie?"
"What does Marjorie say herself?"
"She told the Doctor"—the girls would never call the Doctor "Father"—"that if Mr. Jones had a million a minute and was the last man left on earth after a second flood, she would rather spend her life in the garden eating worms than marry him!"
"Marjorie's plenty of pluck," I answered, "and is obviously of romantic temperament. Anyone else in the wind?"
"Anyone else?" she said, with a bitter note in her voice, "whom do we ever see? We live as prisoners here, as you very well know, Johnny, and if it were not for you I should long ago have jumped into Thirty Main Creek and ended it all."
I held her close to me. "Dear," I said, "it will all come right, I am certain. Somehow or other, we shall be able to be married soon, and then you need never see Morstone or the Doctor any more."
"I love Morstone," she replied. "I love the lonely marshes and the bird-noises and the great red dawns and the sweet salt air, but"—she shuddered—"that fiend who married my poor dear mother and drove her to death, I would see burnt to-morrow without a pang of remorse. He has been worse lately, John, far worse. Mrs. Gaunt has been put to watch us like a spy. I can't tell whether he suspects anything about you and me. He may or may not. At any rate, there is something going on which frightens me. I've no doubt you will think me quite hysterical, quite foolish, and I feel it rather than know it, but I am frightened. Only this morning, the Doctor said things to dear Marjorie which were awful. He caught her by the arm and twisted it when she defied him, and his voice was so ugly and cruel, it seemed so inhuman, that I felt as if someone had put ice to the back of my neck. Oh, take me away soon, take Marjorie away too!"
She clung to me in a passion of appeal, and then and there I resolved that, come what might, we would marry and leave this ill-omened and mysterious place.
"What a long time they are!" Doris said after a moment or two, when I had soothed her. "Oh, here they come!"
But it wasn't, it was only Lockhart, who knocked at the door loudly and waited for several seconds before coming in with his contribution to the dinner.
"I'll run down and hurry them up, as there is no one about," I said.
"You'll do nothing of the sort!" she replied quickly. "Really, what a babe you are, John!"
I was just the least bit in the world offended, not seeing why I should not hurry up the truants, especially as I was extremely hungry again; but they came at last, carrying two piled trays of provisions. I had never seen Marjorie look prettier. Her eyes were brighter than ever, and she showed not the slightest trace of unhappiness. Obviously, she had quite forgotten the events of the morning.
I cannot tell you what fun the dinner was. The soup was top-hole—mock turtle, and one of Elizabeth Lazenby's finest efforts. Lockhart was a tremendous success as butler, and the "claret wine"—I should have thrown it at my scout's head at Oxford—tasted like "Château la Rose" at least.
Bernard and Marjorie made the omelette over my fire, while the rest of us sat waiting and Lockhart and I smoked a cigarette. Marjorie ordered my brother about most unmercifully. Suddenly, it was nearing a critical moment and both of them were crouching over the pan, I happened to turn my eyes in their direction. They were not looking at the omelette at all. They were looking at each other and their faces were almost solemn. Then it burst upon me and I fear I was indiscreet. I said aloud: "The very thing! Oh, my holy aunt, the very thing!"
They whipped round.
"What is?" Bernard asked.
"Why, the omelette, you blighter!" I replied, and kicked Doris under the table. She understood at once. Girls are so quick, aren't they?
When we had eaten the omelette and the round of cold beef had "ebbed some," as I once heard a Rhodes' Scholar say at Oxford, my brother rose, glass in hand.
"Mr. Vice," he said, "the King!"
I had dined in the wardroom with Bernard when he was on board the Terrific, and I knew what to do.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the King!" I said, and we drank that loyal toast in silence. Somehow it altered the mood of each individual. A gravity fell upon us, not sadness or boredom, but we stopped to think, as it were. Only two hundred miles away, over the marshes and over the sea, the great German battleships were waiting. Nearer than Penzance is to London, the armies of England at that moment were shivering in the trenches round Ostend. And in Morstone House School—what was there that hung undefined, but heavy and secret, like a miasma upon the air?
Then Bernard said: "Miss Joyce, I have taken the liberty to bring you a little present from London."
"'Doris,' please," she answered.
"Very well then, Doris. It is a bracelet, a little affair of turquoises and pearls, to commemorate our meeting and in the hope that you will always be a good girl and love your brother-in-law."
"Oh, Commander Carey!"
"'Bernard,' please!"
"Well then, Bernard, how sweet of you!"
Poor Doris, and Marjorie too, were not in the way of getting many presents. Upjelly saw to that!
My brother put his hand in his pocket, and then into another pocket, finally into a third. He hesitated, he stammered, and looked positively frightened. It was the first and last time I ever saw the old sport thoroughly done in.
"Damn!" he said, and then grew more embarrassed still. "I am the biggest fool in the Service. I remember now I left the case on my dressing-room table at the Morstone Arms."
Poor little Doris's face fell. She could not help it. But I had a bright idea.
"Oh, that's all right," I said. "There's a certain young imp of mine called Dickson max——"
"Dear boy!" Marjorie murmured, and my brother looked at her quickly.
"He's seventeen, and quite trustworthy," I went on. "He will be delighted to run and fetch it. Anything to be out of school at night!—and as I am headmaster of this East Anglian Eton, I can do as I like. I will ring for him."
Lockhart looked slightly upset, but I didn't care.
"But I thought," my brother remarked, "that this was somewhat in the nature of a—well, shall we say 'secure-from-observation' dinner party."
"Oh, Billy Dickson won't breathe a word," Marjorie said emphatically.
"Well, you command this ship," my brother said, "and it is up to you. Certainly I should like to send for the bracelet, and if you don't keep Whale Island discipline aboard, it's not my affair."
I rang for Dickson max. He arrived, knocked at the door, stepped in, and then his eyes grew very round indeed, but he said not a word. I told him what was wanted and asked him if he would go.
"Rather, sir," he said, "I would be only too delighted."
I gave him the key of the masters' door.
"It's a bitter cold night," my brother put in, "supposing you take my coat and this shooting hat. It'll keep you as warm as toast."
Of course Dickson max. would have scorned the idea of an overcoat under ordinary circumstances, though Bernard didn't know that. But the opportunity of wearing the ulster of a Wing-Commander of Submarines, who had been wounded off Heligoland, was too much for the youthful mind. He flushed with pleasure, and I won't swear that, as he went out into the passage, he didn't salute.
I went downstairs with him, helped him on with the big coat—he was the same height as Bernard and much the same figure—and pressed the heather-mixture shooting hat on his head.
"Now scoot as hard as you can go," I told him, opening the door, and he was gone like a flash into the dark night.
When I got back there was a curious silence. Somehow or other we none of us seemed to know what to say. I can't account for it, but there it was. It was then that my brother came in and I found a side of him I had only suspected but never seen before.
Leaning forward in his chair, he began to talk very quietly, but with great earnestness. I saw what he was up to. He was leading the conversation very near home indeed. It was astonishing how he dominated us all, how we hung on his words and how the sense of sinister surroundings grew and grew as he spoke.
It was the girls who responded. The skill with which he introduced the subject was enormous, but they were marvellously "quick in the uptake." It was Marjorie who leant forward, her great eyes flashing and her lips compressed to a thin line of scarlet.
"Commander Carey," she said, "don't think that I or my sister are entirely ignorant that there is something very wrong about this place. You have turned our thoughts into a new channel."
She was wearing a blouse with loose sleeves, ending in some filmy lace. Suddenly, with her right hand, she pulled up the left-arm sleeve. There were three dark purple marks upon her white arm.
"That was this morning," she said, nodding once or twice. "And now speak out, if you have anything to tell us, about the man who killed my mother as surely as if he did it with a gun, and who has done his best to ruin the lives of my sister and myself. Speak without fear!"
Then Bernard, in crisp, low sentences, told the girls and Lockhart exactly what he believed. The wind howled outside and hissing drops of rain fell upon the window-pane. The fire crackled on the hearth, the smoke of our cigarettes rose in grey spirals in the pleasant, lamp-lit room. It was a strange night, how fraught with consequences to England, the two beautiful girls, the little cripple, the third-rate schoolmaster, and even the young naval officer himself, did not know!
"It has long been suspected," my brother concluded, and his voice sank almost to a whisper, "that one master-mind has been behind all the German espionage, both before and during the war. There is in existence, our Intelligence Department has had indubitable evidence of it, a King of Spies, so subtle of brain, so fertile in resource, that, even now, we cannot find him. We do not know for certain, but it is rumoured that this man's real name is Graf Botho von Vedal, though what name he passes under now none can say."
Doris's eyes clouded. She seemed as if she was making an effort of memory.
"Was he once 'Wirklicher Geheimrat'—Privy Councillor to the German Emperor?" she asked.
Bernard stared at her. "So I am told," he said. "What do you know about him?"
"I can't tell you," she answered with a dazed look upon her face—"some childish memory. The name was familiar. My sister and I speak German as well as we speak English, you know."
"If I could put my finger upon that man," my brother continued, "then one of the gravest perils to which England lies open at the moment would be removed."
"Where is he?" Lockhart asked, speaking like a man in a dream.
We all looked at each other, and there was dawning consciousness and horror in every eye.
"Yes," came from my brother at length, and as he spoke he withdrew one of Dickson's little photographs from his pocket—I hadn't seen him put it there—"and also, what is Admiral Kiderlen-Waechter doing in England?"
We all knew that name. The papers had been full of it at the beginning of the war. Kiderlen-Waechter was the chief of the German Submarine Flotillas. It was owing to his ingenuity and resource that ship after ship of our gallant Navy had been torpedoed, even in the Straits of Dover themselves.
"What do you mean?" I gasped.
"What I say, John. For, unless I am much mistaken—of course, I may easily be mistaken—the gentleman who drove away with Doctor Upjelly to London this morning is that very man."
"Mr. Jones?" Marjorie cried. "The man the Doctor swore that I must marry when the war is over?"
Bernard's eyes blazed. "What?" he said quickly, "I heard nothing of that!"
The two were looking at each other very strangely when there was a knock at the door. It opened and Dickson max. came in.
He went up to my brother and put down a little case of red morocco by his side.
"There you are, sir," he said.
I looked up sharply. There was something unusual in the lad's voice. He caught hold of the back of Lockhart's chair and swayed as he stood. Then we saw that beneath the upturned collar of the overcoat one cheek was all red and bleeding. There was a line across it like the cut from a knife.
"What on earth is the matter?" I cried, in great alarm.
"Oh nothing, sir," he answered, "only as I was coming through the Sea Wood—I took the shorter way—I thought I heard someone behind me. I turned round, and just as I did so there was a noise like a banjo string, and something went past my head singing like a wasp. Then I found my cheek all cut."
"What did you do? Who was it?"
"I plunged into the bushes, sir, but could not find anyone. Then I pulled out my electric torch, and, sticking in the trunk of a tree, I found this."
The boy unbuttoned his coat and held out a long, slim shaft. It was an arrow, such as is used in archery competitions, but the edge had been filed sharp.
"Some silly blighter trying to frighten me," said Dickson max., and then, with a little sob, he fell in a faint upon the floor.
I bent over him and forced some wine between his lips. Bernard looked round the room with a set, stern face.
"They are not losing any time," he said quietly. "You see, they know that I am here, already."
Note.—For convenience sake I end the first portion of this narrative at this point. It divides itself into three parts quite naturally, as I think my readers will agree when they have read it all. At any rate, on this night was formed that oddly assorted, but famous, companionship which led to such great results. We swore no oaths, we made no protestations. There was no need for that.