“Thank you, my dear George,” said Gonsalez briskly. “It was very good of you, and I did not like troubling you, but——”
“It was a small thing,” said Manfred with a smile, “and involved merely the changing of my shoes. But why? I am not curious, but why did you wish me to telephone the night watchman at Oberzohn’s to be waiting at the door at eleven o’clock for a message from the doctor?”
“Because,” said Leon cheerfully, rubbing his hands, “the night watchman is an honest man; he has a wife and six children, and I was particularly wishful not to hurt anybody. The building doesn’t matter: it stands, or stood, isolated from all others. The only worry in my mind was the night watchman. He was at the door—I saw him.”
Manfred asked no further questions. Early the next morning he took up the paper and turned to the middle page, read the account of the “Big Fire in City Road” which had completely gutted the premises of Messrs. Oberzohn & Smitts; and, what is more, he expected to read it before he had seen the paper.
“Accidents are accidents,” said Leon the philosopher that morning at breakfast. “And that talk I had with the clerk last night told me a lot: Oberzohn has allowed his fire insurance to lapse!”
| Chapter XVI | Rath Hall |
IN one of the forbidden rooms that was filled with the apparatus which Dr. Oberzohn had accumulated for his pleasure and benefit, was a small electrical furnace which was the centre of many of his most interesting experiments. There were, in certain known drugs, constituents which it was his desire to eliminate. Dr. Oberzohn believed absolutely in many things that the modern chemist would dismiss as fantastical. He believed in the philosopher’s stone, in the transmutation of base metals to rare; he had made diamonds, of no great commercial value, it is true; but his supreme faith was that somewhere in the materia medica was an infallible elixir which would prolong life far beyond the normal span. It was to all other known properties as radium is to pitch-blende. It was something that only the metaphysician could discover, only the patient chemist could materialize. Every hour he could spare he devoted himself to his obsession; and he was in the midst of one of his experiments when the telephone bell called him back to his study. He listened, every muscle of his face moving, to the tale of disaster that Monty Newton wailed.
“It is burning still? Have you no fire-extinguishing machinery in London?”
“Is the place insured or is it not?” asked Monty for the second time.
Dr. Oberzohn considered.