Chapter Fifteen. Reveals the Rivals.

Sir Felix Challas, Baronet the well-known financier and philanthropist, was seated in his cosy library in Berkeley Square, dictating letters to his secretary between the whiffs of his mild after-breakfast cigar. He was a man of middle age, with slight side whiskers, a reddish face, and opulent bearing. In his frock-coat, fancy vest, and striped trousers, and white spats over his boots, he presented the acmé of style as far as dress was concerned. The whole world knew Sir Felix to be something of a dandy, for he had never, for the past ten years or so, been seen without a flower in his buttonhole. Like many another man in London he had amassed great wealth from small beginnings, until he was now a power in the world of finance, and as a philanthropist his name was a household word.

From a small leather shop somewhere in the Mile End Road he had risen to be the controlling factor of several of the greatest financial undertakings in the country; while the house of Challas and Bowen in Austin Friars was known in the City as one of the highest possible standing.

Though he owned that fine house in Berkeley Square, a beautiful domain in Yorkshire which he had purchased from a bankrupt earl, a villa at Cannes, racehorses, motors, and a splendid steam-yacht, he was still a bachelor, and a somewhat lonely man.

The papers mentioned his doings daily, gave his portrait frequently, and recorded with a flourish of trumpets his latest donation to this charity, or to that. Though he made enormous profits in his financial deals, yet he was a staunch churchman, his hand ever in his pocket for the various institutions which approached him. Indeed, if the truth were told, he, like others, had bought his birthday Baronetcy by making a princely donation to the Hospital Fund. This showed him to be a shrewd man, fully alive to the value of judicious advertisement.

In the years gone by he had mixed with many of the shady characters of the complex world of the City, but now, in his opulence, he had apparently cut himself adrift from them all, and prided himself upon his eminent respectability.

As he sat there that winter’s morning, leaning back in his big leather armchair before the fire, he was dictating a letter to the governors of a great orphanage at Bristol, promising to defray the cost of building a much needed wing of the institution.

Then, having done so, he added to his secretary, a rather smug looking man in black:

“And you might also write a paragraph to-day, Stone, and send it to the Press Association. You know what to say—‘magnificent gift,’ and all that sort of thing. They’ll send it out to the newspapers.”

“Yes, Sir Felix,” answered the man, making a note in shorthand.

“Let’s see, what else is there? Ah! The Malms Syndicate! Write saying that I withdraw,” he remarked.

His secretary hesitated.

“But that, Sir Felix, means ruin to all three. They are all poor men.”

“That’s just what I intend,” he answered with a smile. “We shall do that business ourselves, as soon as they are out of it.”

So Mr Stone scribbled rapidly a letter in shorthand, which meant the ruin of three honest men, who, believing in the great financier’s promises, had taken upon themselves liabilities which they could not meet.

Such letters are not infrequent. The great philanthropist, whom the world looked up to as a model man, who did his utmost for the benefit of suffering humanity, and who had been rewarded by his Sovereign, collected his wealth by ways that would often not bear investigation. But being a big man, he was able to do things which a little man would fear to do. For were not Challas and Bowen, with their huge operations and big bank balances, above suspicion?

While dictating another letter, the butler, an elderly and pompous person, entered announcing: “Mr Jannaway, Sir Felix.”

“That will be enough for to-day, Stone,” the red-faced man said to the secretary, who rose at once, and followed the servant out of the room.

Next moment the man who had posed on the previous evening as “Captain Wetherton” entered the room, looking smart and spruce in a well-cut suit of blue serge.

“Well, Jim?” exclaimed the financier anxiously, as he rose to meet his visitor. “I’ve been expecting you all the morning. What news—eh?”

“Oh! It’s all right,” answered the man cheerily, flinging himself into an armchair without invitation, apparently quite at home in Challas’s house.

“Found out anything of interest?” inquired Sir Felix, pushing over the big silver cigar-box that stood upon the smoking-table.

“Well—I hardly know,” he answered hesitatingly. “Where’s the girl?”

“In Charlie’s rooms. I’ve had a devil of a scene with her. She’s obdurate.”

“A day’s confinement there will break her spirit, no doubt,” remarked Sir Felix. “Especially if she believes she’ll lose her lover.”

“I don’t know,” he answered dubiously. “She’s got a mind of her own, I can tell you. She’s a regular little spit-fire.”

The red-faced man laughed.

“Well, Jim,” he said. “You ought to know how to manage women, surely. Did my scheme work well?”

“Excellently. She got your ‘wire,’ and went to Earl’s Court at once. I followed and after a little persuasion she fell into the trap. While she was unconscious, I took the latch-key, and at half-past two let myself and old Erich into the house in Pembridge Gardens.”

“Well—did he find anything?”

“Yes. Griffin has taken photographic copies of the burnt papers, before giving them back into Farquhar’s hands, and from his copies of various early manuscripts of Ezekiel and Deuteronomy it’s quite plain that he is making a very careful and complete study.”

“It seems, then, that Griffin’s intention, is to discover the cipher for himself, and leave the ugly little Doctor out in the cold,” Sir Felix remarked with a snap. “But, Jim, this business is ours and nobody else’s. We must crush anybody and everybody, who attempts in any way to decipher that secret record. When the Dane brought it to me at the Ritz, in Paris, I laughed at the idea. Treasure-hunting was never in my line. But,” he added with a smile, “I took care to have a complete copy of his precious document made before I gave it back to him the next morning, and it is now in the safe over yonder. Like to see it?”

Jim Jannaway, the man who had on the previous night represented himself to be “Captain Wetherton,” the friend of Frank Farquhar, expressed eagerness to see it. Therefore the financier rose, and with the gold master-key upon his watch-chain, opened the heavy steel door, and handed his visitor a typed document bound in a dark green cover—a complete copy of the manuscript which Doctor Diamond had partly burned in that obscure hotel at the Gare du Nord.

The context of the half intelligible sentences was there—the context which Professor Griffin was longing to obtain. And moreover, as the man turned over the pages, reading swiftly, he came across a geometrical figure—a plan marked with numbers and corresponding explanations.

“Who made the discovery?” asked Jim Jannaway, late of His Majesty’s Army and now gambler, card-sharper, and swell-mobsman.

“The devil only knows,” laughed Sir Felix. “He says he did himself. The fellow was hard up and I gave him a hundred francs, but I believed the whole thing to be a huge hoax, until I consulted old Erich and he began to puzzle his brains. Then I saw that there might be something in it. My only fear is that Griffin and his friends may get ahead of us. But you’ve done well, Jim. You always do.”

“I do the dirty work of the firm,” laughed the man addressed, removing his cigar from his lips, “and devilish dirty work it is at times.”

“Well, you can’t complain of the pay. Isn’t it better to live as you are, a gentleman of means, than as I found you five years ago, a ‘crook’ who might be arrested at any moment?”

“I don’t complain at all, my dear fellow. Only—”

“Only what?”

“Well, I really don’t see your object in enticing the girl to Charlie’s rooms. It might be awkward for us.”

Sir Felix laughed, snapping his fingers.

“What? Are you growing afraid?” he asked.

“Not at all, only I can’t see your object.”

“The object is simply to compromise her,” he said grimly. “She’s a confounded pretty girl. I saw her at the theatre with her aunt a week ago, and she was at Lady Ena’s wedding the other day, with her lover, Frank Farquhar. Of that man we must be wary. With his confounded newspapers, he has power,” he added.

“That’s the very reason why I fear we are treading on dangerous ground.”

“Bosh! leave all to me. The girl is in Charlie’s rooms, there let her stay for the present,” answered the man whom the world believed to be a pillar of the church, and a devout philanthropist.

Jim Jannaway saw that this man whom he served—the man who held him in his toils—had some mysterious evil design upon the unfortunate girl. He could not, however, discern exactly what it was. He had ordered him to keep her in that upstairs room, “and break her spirit,” as he put it.

The midnight search of the Professor’s study had revealed that he was in active pursuit of the truth. That meant Sir Felix taking steps to checkmate his efforts. Ever since the first moment it had been known by a chance visit to the hotel while Jules Blanc was lying there dead, that the fragments of the strange document had fallen into Doctor Diamond’s hands, private inquiry agents, employed by Sir Felix, had been silently watching the movements of the deformed Doctor, Frank Farquhar, and his friend, the Professor. All had been reported to the red-faced man sitting there at his ease—the man who controlled financial interests worth millions.

Sir Felix had been convinced by the foreign expert he had consulted that there really was something in the theory of the unknown discovery, and he intended that none should learn the truth except himself. He had Jim Jannaway, the unscrupulous, at his elbow, ready to do any dirty work, or make any risky move which he ordered. In a day Jim could, if he wished, summon up half a dozen of the most dangerous characters in London, pals of his, to assist him, for be it said he always paid well—with Sir Felix’s money, of course.

Against such a combination as Challas and Bowen, though Mr Thomas J. Bowen lived in New York and was seldom in London, no private person could stand. The great firm, with their agents all over the world, gathered confidential information from everywhere, and could plot to crush any one who attempted to carry through a business that was against their interests.

Hence any attempt on the part of Doctor Diamond, or Professor Griffin, to solve the problem in face of the opposition of Sir Felix, was foredoomed to failure, if not to disaster. But alas! both men were in ignorance of the fact that a complete copy of the dead man’s document was in the possession of the man whose hatred of the Jews, his enemies in business, was notorious; and who would therefore go to any length in order to secure, for his own satisfaction, the sacred relics and vessels of Solomon’s Temple—providing they still existed.