"And Henning did as he was told, nor did he or his wife hear anything more during the night. But in the early morning when Mrs. Henning came downstairs she was horror-struck to find Mr. Stonebridge in the dining-room, lying across the table, to which he was securely pinioned with a rope; a serviette taken out of the sideboard drawer had been tied tightly around his mouth and his eyes were blindfolded with his own pocket handkerchief.
"The woman's screams brought her husband upon the scene; together they set to work to rescue their master from his horrible plight. At first they thought that he was dead, and Henning was for fetching the police immediately, but his wife declared that Mr. Stonebridge was just unconscious and she started to apply certain household restoratives and made Henning force some brandy through Mr. Stonebridge's lips.
"Presently, the poor man opened his eyes, and gave one or two other signs of returning consciousness, but he was still very queer and shaky. The Hennings then carried him upstairs, undressed him and put him to bed; and then Henning ran for the doctor.
"Well, it was days, or in fact weeks before Mr. Stonebridge had sufficiently recovered to give a coherent statement of what happened to him on that fateful night, and—which was just as much to the point—what had happened the previous day. The doctor had prescribed complete rest in the interim. The patient had suffered from concussion and I know not what, and those events had got so mixed up in his brain that to try and disentangle them was such an effort that every time he attempted it it nearly sent him into a brain fever. But in the meanwhile his friends had been busy—notably, Mr. Stonebridge's head clerk, Mr. Medburn, who was giving the police no rest. There was, even without the evidence of the principal witness concerned, plenty of facts to go on, to make out a case against the perpetrator of such a dastardly outrage.
"That robbery had been the main motive of the assault, was easily enough established—a small fire- and burglar-proof safe which stood in a corner of the morning-room had been opened and ransacked. When examined it was found to contain only a few trinkets which had probably a sentimental value, but were otherwise worthless. The key of the safe—one of a bunch—was still in the lock, which went to prove either that Mr. Stonebridge had the safe open when he was attacked, or what was more likely—considering the solicitor's well-known careful habits—that the assailant had ransacked his victim's pockets after he had knocked him down. A pocket-book, torn, and containing only a few unimportant papers, lay on the ground; there had been a fire in the room at the time of the outrage, and careful analysis of the ashes found in the hearth revealed the presence of a quantity of burnt paper.
"But robbery being established as the motive of the outrage did not greatly help matters, because, while Mr. Stonebridge remained in such a helpless condition, it was impossible to ascertain what booty his assailant had carried away. Soon, however, the first ray of light was thrown upon what had seemed until this hour an impenetrable mystery.
"It appears that Mr. Medburn was looking after the business in High Street during his employer's absence, and one morning—it was on the Monday following the night of the outrage—he had a visit from a client, who sent in his name as Felix Shap. The head clerk knew something about this client, who had recently come over to England from somewhere abroad, in order to make good his claim to certain royalties on what is known as the Shap Fuelettes—a kind of cheap fuel which was launched some time before the War by Sir Alfred Carysfort, Bart., of Tytherton Grange, and out of which that gentleman made an immense fortune, and incidentally got his title thereby.
"This man, Shap—a Dutchman by birth—was, it appears, the original inventor and patentee of these fuelettes, and Mr. Carysfort, as he was then, had met him out in the Dutch East Indies, and had bought the invention from him for a certain sum down, and then exploited it in England first and afterwards all over the world at immense profit. Sir Alfred Carysfort died about a year ago, leaving a fortune of over a million sterling, and was succeeded in the title and in the managing-directorship of the business by his eldest son David, a married man with a large family. The business had long since been turned into a private limited liability company, the bulk of the shares being held by the managing-director.
"The fact that the patent rights in the Shap Fuelettes had been sold by the inventor to the late Alfred Carysfort had never been in dispute. It further appeared that Felix Shap had at one time been a very promising mining engineer, but that in consequence of incurable, intemperate habits he had gradually drifted down the social scale; he lost one good appointment after another until he was just an underpaid clerk in the office of an engineer in Batavia, whose representative in England was Mr. Alfred Carysfort. The latter was on a visit to the head office in Batavia some twelve years ago when he met Shap, who was then on his beam-ends. He had recently been sacked by his employers for intemperance, and was on the fair way to becoming one of those hopeless human derelicts who usually end their days either on the gallows or in a convict prison.
"But at the back of Shap's fuddled mind there had lingered throughout his downward career the remembrance of a certain invention which he had once patented, and which he had always declared would one day bring him an immense fortune; but though he had spent quite a good deal of money in keeping up his patent rights, he had never had the pluck and perseverance to exploit or even to perfect his invention.