Thereby Hangs a Tale.
“You believe now, I hope,” said Mr. Fortescue, as we walked homeward.
“Believe what, sir?”
“That I have relentless enemies who seek my life. When I first told you of this you did not believe me. You thought I was the victim of an hallucination, else had I been more frank with you.”
“I am really very sorry.”
“Don’t protest! I cannot blame you. It is hard for people who have led uneventful lives and seen little of the seamy side of human nature to believe that under the veneer of civilization and the mask of convention, hatreds are still as fierce, men still as revengeful as ever they were in olden times…. I hope I did not make a mistake in sparing young Griscelli’s life.”
“Sparing his life! How?”
“He sought my life, and I had a perfect right to take his.”
“That is not a very Christian sentiment, Mr. Fortescue.”
“I did not say it was. Do you always repay good for evil and turn your check to the smiter, Mr. Bacon?”
“If you put it in that way, I fear I don’t.”
“Do you know anybody who does?”
After a moment’s reflection I was again compelled to answer in the negative. I could not call to mind a single individual of my acquaintance who acted on the principle of returning good for evil.
“Well, then, if I am no better than other people, I am no worse. Yet, after all, I think I did well to let him go. Had I killed the brigand, there would have been a coroner’s inquest, and questions asked which might have been troublesome to answer, and he has brothers and cousins. If I could destroy the entire brood! Did you see the look he gave me as he went away? It meant murder. We have not seen the last of Giuseppe Griscelli, Mr. Bacon.”
“I am afraid we have not. I never saw such an expression of intense hatred in my life! Has he cause for it?”
“I dare say he thinks so. I killed his father and his grand-father.”
This, uttered as indifferently as if it were a question of killing hares and foxes, was more than I could stand. I am not strait-laced, but I draw the line at murder.
“You did what?” I exclaimed, as, horror-struck and indignant, I stopped in the path and looked him full in the face.
I thought I had never seen him so Mephistopheles-like. A sinister smile parted his lips, showing his small white teeth gleaming under his gray mustache, and he regarded me with a look of cynical amusement, in which there was perhaps a slight touch of contempt.
“You are a young man, Mr. Bacon,” he observed, gently, “and, like most young men, and a great many old men, you make false deductions. Killing is not always murder. If it were, we should consign our conquerors to everlasting infamy, instead of crowning them with laurels and erecting statues to their memory. I am no murderer, Mr. Bacon. At the same time I do not cherish illusions. Unpremeditated murder is by no means the worst of crimes. Taking a life is only anticipating the inevitable; and of all murderers, Nature is the greatest and the cruellest. I have—if I could only tell you—make you see what I have seen—Even now, O God! though half a century has run its course—”
Here Mr. Fortescue’s voice failed him; he turned deadly pale, and his countenance took an expression of the keenest anguish. But the signs of emotion passed away as quickly as they had appeared. Another moment and he had fully regained his composure, and he added, in his usual self-possessed manner:
“All this must seem very strange to you, Mr. Bacon. I suppose you consider me somewhat of a mystery.”
“Not somewhat, but very much.”
Mr. Fortescue smiled (he never laughed) and reflected a moment.
“I am thinking,” he said, “how strangely things come about, and, so to speak, hang together. The greatest of all mysteries is fate. If that horse had not run away with you, these rascals would almost certainly have made away with me; and the incident of to-day is one of the consequences of that which I mentioned at our first interview.”
“When we had that good run from Latton. I remember it very well. You said you had been hunted yourself.”
“Yes.”
“How was it, Mr. Fortescue?”
“Ah! Thereby hangs a tale.”
“Tell it me, Mr. Fortescue,” I said, eagerly.
“And a very long tale.”
“So much the better; it is sure to be interesting.”
“Ah, yes, I dare say you would find it interesting. My life has been stirring and stormy enough, in all conscience—except for the ten years I spent in heaven,” said Mr. Fortescue, in a voice and with a look of intense sadness.
“Ten years in heaven!” I exclaimed, as much astonished as I had just been horrified. Was the man mad, after all, or did he speak in paradoxes? “Ten years in heaven!”
Mr. Fortescue smiled again, and then it occurred to me that his ten years of heaven might have some connection with the veiled portrait and the shrine in his room up-stairs.
“You take me too literally,” he said. “I spoke metaphorically. I did not mean that, like Swedenborg and Mohammed, I have made excursions to Paradise. I merely meant that I once spent ten years of such serene happiness as it seldom falls to the lot of man to enjoy. But to return to our subject. You would like to know more of my past; but as it would not be satisfactory to tell you an incomplete history, and to tell you all—Yet why not? I have done nothing that I am ashamed of; and it is well you should know something of the man whose life you have saved once, and may possibly save again. You are trustworthy, straightforward, and vigilant, and albeit you are not overburdened with intelligence—”
Here Mr. Fortescue paused, as if to reflect; and, though the observation was not very flattering—hardly civil, indeed—I was so anxious to hear this story that I took it in good part, and waited patiently for his decision.
“To relate it viva voce” he went on, thoughtfully, “would be troublesome to both of us.”
“I am sure I should find it anything but troublesome.”
“Well, I should. It would take too much time, and I hate travelling over old ground. But that is a difficulty which I think we can get over. For many years I have made a record of the principal events of my life, in the form of a personal narrative; and though I have sometimes let it run behind for a while, I have always written it up.”
“That is exactly the thing. As you say, telling a long story is troublesome. I can read it.”
“I am afraid not. It is written in a sort of stenographic cipher of my own invention.”
“That is very awkward,” I said, despondently. “I know no more of shorthand than of Sanskrit, and though I once tried to make out a cipher, the only tangible result was a splitting headache.”
“With the key, which I will give you, a little instruction and practice, you should have no difficulty in making out my cipher. It will be an exercise for your intelligence”—smiling. “Will you try?”
“My very best.”
“And now for the conditions. In the first place, you must, in stenographic phrase, ‘extend’ my notes, write out the narrative in a legible hand and good English. If there be any blanks, I will fill them up; if you require explanations, I will give them. Do you agree?”
“I agree.”
“The second condition is that you neither make use of the narrative for any purpose of your own, nor disclose the whole or any part of it to anybody until and unless I give you leave. What say you?”
“I say yes.”
“The third and last condition is, that you engage to stay with me in your present capacity until it pleases me to give you your congé. Again what say you?”
This was rather a “big order,” and very one-sided. It bound me to remain with Mr. Fortescue for an indefinite period, yet left him at liberty to dismiss me at a moment’s notice; and if he went on living, I might have to stay at Kingscote till I was old and gray. All the same, the position was a good one. I had four hundred a year (the price at which I had modestly appraised my services), free quarters, a pleasant life, and lots of hunting—all I could wish for, in fact; and what can a man have more? So again I said, “Yes.”
“We are agreed in all points, then. If you will come into my room “—we were by this time arrived at the house—“you shall have your first lesson in cryptography.”
I assented with eagerness, for I was burning to begin, and, from what Mr. Fortescue had said, I did not anticipate any great difficulty in making out the cipher.
But when he produced a specimen page of his manuscript, my confidence, like Bob Acre’s courage, oozed out at my finger-ends, or rather, all over me, for I broke out into a cold sweat.
The first few lines resembled a confused array of algebraic formula. (I detest algebra.) Then came several lines that seemed to have been made by the crawlings of tipsy flies with inky legs, followed by half a dozen or so that looked like the ravings of a lunatic done into Welsh, while the remainder consisted of Roman numerals and ordinary figures mixed up, higgledy-piggledy.
“This is nothing less than appalling,” I almost groaned. “It will take me longer to learn than two or three languages.”
“Oh, no! When you have got the clew, and learned the signs, you will read the cipher with ease.”
“Very likely; but when will that be?”
“Soon. The system is not nearly so complicated as it looks, and the language being English—”
“English! It looks like a mixture of ancient Mexican and modern Chinese.”
“The language being English, nothing could be easier for a man of ordinary intelligence. If I had expected that my manuscript would fall into the hands of a cryptographist, I should have contrived something much more complicated and written it in several languages; and you have the key ready to your hand. Come, let us begin.”
After half an hour’s instruction I began to see daylight, and to feel that with patience and practice I should be able to write out the story in legible English. The little I had read with Mr. Fortescue made me keen to know more; but as the cryptographic narrative did not begin at the beginning, he proposed that I should write this, as also any other missing parts, to his dictation.
“Who knows that you may not make a book of it?” he said.
“Do you think I am intelligent enough?” I asked, resentfully; for his uncomplimentary references to my mental capacity were still rankling in my mind.
“I should hope so. Everybody writes in these days. Don’t worry yourself on that score, my dear Mr. Bacon. Even though you may write a book, nobody will accuse you of being exceptionally intelligent.”
“But I cannot make a book of your narrative without your leave,” I observed, with a painful sense of having gained nothing by my motion.
“And that leave may be sooner or later forthcoming, on conditions.”
As the reader will find in the sequel, the leave has been given and the conditions have been fulfilled, and Mr. Fortescue’s personal narrative—partly taken down from his own dictation, but for the most part extended from his manuscript—begins with the following chapter.