Who was this General Fordibras, and what did the daughter know of his life? I have written that I invited them both to my house in Suffolk, and thither they came in the spring of the year. Okyada, the shrewdest servant that ever earned the love and gratitude of an affectionate master, could not help me to identify the General. We had never met him in our travels, never heard of him, could not locate him. I concluded that he was just what he pretended to be so far as his birth and parentage were concerned—a Frenchman naturalised in America; a rich man to boot, and the owner of the steam yacht Connecticut, as he himself had told me. The daughter Joan astonished me by her grace and dignity, and the extent of her attainments. One less persistent would have put suspicion by and admitted that circumstances justified no doubt about these people; that they were truly father and daughter travelling for pleasure in Europe, and that any other supposition must be an outrage. Indeed, I came near to believing so myself. The pearls which had been stolen from me in Paris, was it not possible that the General had bought them in market overt? To say that his agents had stolen them, and that his daughter wore them under my very nose, would be to write him down a maniac. I knew not what to think; the situation baffled me entirely. In moments of sentiment I could recall the womanly tenderness and distress of little Joan Fordibras, and wonder that I had made so slight a response. There were other hours when I said, “Beware—there is danger; these people know you—they are setting a trap for you.” Let us blame human nature alone if this latter view came to be established at no distant date. Three men burgled my house in Suffolk in the month of June. Two of them escaped; the third put his hands upon the brass knob of my safe, and the electric wires I had trained there held him as by a vice of fire. He fell shrieking at my feet, and in less than an hour I had his story.
Of course I had been waiting for these men. An instinct such as mine can be diverted by no suggestions either romantic or platonic. From the first, my reason had said that General Fordibras might have come to Deepdene for no other reason than to prepare the way for the humbler instruments who should follow after. Okyada, my little Jap, he of the panther’s tread and the eagle eye—he stood sentinel during these weeks, and no blade of grass in all my park could have been trodden but that he would have known it. We were twice ready for all that might occur. We knew that strangers had come down from London to Six Mile Bottom station one hour after they arrived there. When they entered the house, we determined to take but one of them. The others, racing frantically for liberty, believed that they had outwitted us. Poor fools, they were racing to the gates of a prison.
I dragged the thief to his feet and began to threaten and to question him. He was a lad of twenty, I should say, hatchet-faced and with tousled yellow hair. When he spoke to me I discovered that he had the public school voice and manner, never to be mistaken under any circumstances.
“Now come,” I said; “here is seven years’ penal servitude waiting for you on the doorstep. Let me see that there is some spark of manhood left in you yet. Otherwise——” But here I pointed again to the electric wires, which had burned his hands, and he shuddered at my gesture.
“Oh, I’ll play the game,” he said. “You won’t get anything out of me. Do what you like—I’m not afraid of you.”
It was a lie, for he was very much afraid of me. One glance told me that the boy was a coward.
“Okyada,” I said, calling my servant, “here is someone who is not afraid of you. Tell him what they do to such people in Japan.”
The little fellow played his part to perfection. He took the craven lad by both his hands and began to drag him back toward the wires. A resounding shriek made me tremble for the nerves of my dear sister, Harriet. I went to the door to reassure her, and when I returned the lad was on his knees, sobbing like a woman.
“I can’t stand pain—I never could,” he said. “If you’re a gentleman, you won’t ask me to give away my pals.”
“Your pals,” I said quietly, “being the refuse of Europe—rogues and bullies and blackmailers. A nice gang for a man who played cricket for his house at Harrow.”