Chapter Twenty Eight. Describes certain Curious Events.

Has it never struck you that this twentieth century of ours is the essential age of the very young girl?

Supreme to-day reigns the young woman between the age of—well say from sixteen to twenty—who dresses her hair with a parting and a pigtail, wears short skirts, displays a neat ankle, and persists in remaining in her teens. Grumpy old fossils tell us that this species is a product of an advanced state of civilisation which insists that everything must be new, from a dish of pèches à la Melba to the tint of that eternal hoarding in front of Buckingham Palace. One can only suppose that they are correct. Ours is a go-ahead age which scoffs at the horse, and pokes fun at the South-Eastern Railway, which forsakes Saturday concerts for football, yet delights in talking-machines.

Is it any wonder therefore that the statuesque beauty and the skittish matron of a year ago no longer finds herself in demand for supper-parties, Sandown or Henley? No, she must nowadays stand aside, and watch the reign of her little sister who dashes off from the theatre to the Savoy in a motor-brougham still wearing her ribbon bow on her pigtail, much as she did in the schoolroom.

The young of certain species of wild fowl are termed “flappers,” and some irreverent and irascible old gentleman has applied that term to the go-ahead young miss of to-day. Though most women over twenty-one may attempt to disguise the fact, it is plain that the young girl just escaped from the schoolroom now reigns supreme. Her dynasty is at its zenith. She is the ruling factor of London life. Peers of the realm, foreign potentates, hard-bitten soldiers from the East, magnates from Park Lane all hurry to her beck and call. The girl in the pigtail and short skirt rides over them all roughshod. And what is the result of all this adulation upon the dimple-faced little girl herself? In the majority of cases, I fear it results in making her a stuck-up, blasé and conceited little prig, for she nowadays takes upon herself a glory and exalted position to which she is entirely unsuited, but which she has been taught to consider hers by right.

Gwen Griffin was a perfect type of the very young girl, courted, petted and flattered by all the men of her acquaintance. Having no mother to forbid her, she was fond of going motor-rides and fond of flirtation, but through it all she had, fortunately, never developed any of those objectionable traits so common in girls of her age. She had managed to remain quite simple, sweet and unaffected through it all, and six months before, when she had found the man she could honestly love, she had cut her male friends and entered upon life with all seriousness.

A week had gone by, and Frank had called every evening. Once he had taken her to dine at the Carlton, and on to the theatre afterwards, for now they had, by tacit though unspoken consent, agreed that all bygones should be bygones.

Often he felt himself wondering what had been the real cause of her mysterious absence from home, yet when such suspicions arose within him, he quickly put them aside. How could he possibly doubt her love?

The Doctor was back again at Horsford, leading the same rural uneventful life as before, but daily studying everything that had any possible bearing upon the assertion of Professor Holmboe.

Frank came down to visit Lady Gavin one day, and as a matter of course was very soon seated with the ugly little man in his cottage home.

Diamond, over a cigar, was relating the result of his most recent studies, and lamenting that they were still as far from obtaining a knowledge of the actual cipher as ever.

“Yes,” murmured the young man with a sigh, “I’m much afraid that old Haupt will get ahead of us—even if he has not already done so. How is it that you can’t get your friend Mullet to assist us further?”

“He has left London, I believe. He disappeared quite suddenly from his rooms, and curiously enough, has sent me no word.”

“You hinted once that he’s a ‘crook.’ If so, he may have fled on account of awkward police inquiries—eh?”

“Most likely. Yet it’s strange that he hasn’t sent me news of his whereabouts.”

“Not at all, my dear Doctor,” responded the other. “If a man is in hiding, it isn’t likely that he’s going to give away his place of concealment, is it?”

“But he trusts me—trusts me implicitly,” declared Diamond.

“That may be so. But he doesn’t trust other persons into whose hands his letter might possibly fall. The police have a nasty habit of watching the correspondence of the friend of the man wanted, you know.”

“Perhaps you’re right, Mr Farquhar,” said the Doctor, with a heavy expression upon his broad brow. “The more I study the problem of the treasure of Israel, the more bewildered I become,” he went on. “Now as regards the original of the Old Testament, it is not all written in Hebrew, I find. Certain parts are in Aramaic, often erroneously called Chaldee. (From Daniel, ii, 4, to vii, 28; Ezra iv, 8, to vi, 18; vii, 11 to 26; and Jeremiah x and xi.) Again, we have a difficulty to face which even Professor Griffin had never yet mentioned to me. It is this. On the very lowest estimate, the Old Testament must represent a literary activity of fully a thousand years, and therefore it is but reasonable to suppose that the language of the earlier works would be considerably different from that of the later; while, on other grounds, the possible existence of local dialects might be expected to show itself in diversity of diction among the various books. But, curiously enough—though I am handicapped by not being acquainted with the Hebrew tongue—all the authorities I have consulted agree that neither of those surmises find much verification in our extant Hebrew text.”

“I’ve always understood that,” Frank remarked. “Yes. I’ve been reading deeply, Mr Farquhar. Curiously enough the most ancient documents and the youngest are remarkably similar in the general cast of their language, and certainly show nothing corresponding in the difference between Homer and Plato, or Chaucer and Shakespeare. Though we know that the Ephraimites could not give the proper (Gileadite) sound of the letter shin in Shibboleth, (Judges, xii 8) yet all attempts to distinguish dialects in our extant books have failed.”

“I think,” said Farquhar, “that such remarkable uniformity, while testifying to the comparative stability of the language, is in part to be explained by the hypothesis of a continuous process of revision and perhaps modernising of the documents, which may have gone on until well into our era.”

“Exactly,” remarked the Doctor, “yet in spite of this levelling tendency there appear to remain certain diversities, particularly in the vocabulary, which have not been eliminated, and these serve to distinguish two great periods in the history of the language, sometimes called the gold and silver ages, respectively, roughly separated by the return from the exile. To the former belong, without doubt, the older strata in the Hexateuch, and the greater prophets; to the latter, almost as indubitably, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Ecclesiastes and Daniel, all of which use a considerable mixture of Aramaic of Persian words. Then, the great question for us is whether the ancient text of Ezekiel preserved in St. Petersburg is an original, or a modernised version. If the latter, much of the cipher, perhaps all, must have been destroyed!”

“I quite follow your argument, my dear Diamond,” Farquhar replied, “but has not Holmboe established to his own satisfaction that the cipher still exists in the manuscript in question? He has, therefore, proved it to be an exact copy of the original—if not the original itself.”

“Experts all agree that it cannot be the original,” declared the Doctor. “It is quite true that Holmboe alleges that the cipher exists, and gives quotations from it. Yet now that I have been reading deeply I have become a trifle sceptical. I’m anxious for Griffin to discover the key number, and prove it for himself. Personally, I entertain some doubt about the present text of Ezekiel being the actual text of the prophet.”

“That can only be proved by the test of the cipher,” was Farquhar’s reply. “If you accept any part of the dead man’s declaration, you must surely accept the whole.”

“I have all along accepted the whole—just as Griffin accepts it.”

“Then why entertain any doubt in this direction? The Professor has never mentioned it, which shows us that there is no need why we should query it.”

“Yes, but may not the fact of the text having been modernised be the reason of Griffin’s non-success in discovering the key number?”

“Holmboe discovered it,” remarked the other, “therefore, I see no reason why Griffin—with Holmboe’s statement before him and in addition that scrap of manuscript which evidently relates to the key—should not be equally successful.”

“Ah!” sighed the ugly little man whose fidgety movements showed his increasing anxiety, “if we could but know what the old German was doing—or in what direction he is working.”

“He’s not back at his own home. I received a telegram from our Leipzig correspondent only yesterday. His whereabouts is just as mysterious as that of your friend Mullet. By the way—would he never tell you who were the principals in this opposition to us?”

“No, he has always steadily refused.”

“Some shady characters, perhaps—men whom he is compelled to shield, eh?”

“I think so,” answered the Doctor. “I wanted him to stand in with us, but he’s a strange fellow, for though he promised to help me, he refused to participate in any part of the profit.”

“Has some compunction in betraying his friends, evidently,” laughed Frank. “I’m very anxious to meet him. He promised to call on Griffin, but has never done so.”

“He’s been put on his guard, and cleared out, that’s my candid opinion. ‘Red Mullet’ is a splendid fellow, but a very slippery customer, as the police know too well. He’s probably half-way across the world by this time. He’s a very rapid traveller. I’ve sometimes had letters from him from a dozen different cities in as many days.”

“To move rapidly is always incumbent upon the adventurer, if he is to be successful in eluding awkward inquiry. He never writes to the child, I suppose?” Frank asked, as Aggie at that moment passed the window.

“Oh, yes, very often. But he always encloses her letter to me. He never gives his address to her, for fear, I suppose, that it should fall into other hands. I wired to his rooms in Paris a week ago, but, as yet, have received no response. His rooms in London are closed. I was up there on Thursday. Why he keeps them on when he’s away for years at a time, I can never understand.”

“Probably sub-lets them, as so many fellows do,” Farquhar suggested, “yet it’s unfortunate we can’t get into touch with him.”

“Miss Griffin is acquainted with him—I wonder if she knows his whereabouts?” remarked Diamond quite innocently.

“She knows him!” Frank echoed in surprise. “Are you quite sure of that?”

“Quite. She told me so.”

“How could she know a man who is admittedly an outsider?” asked Frank.

“My dear Mr Farquhar,” he laughed, “your modern girl makes many undesirable acquaintances, especially a pretty go-ahead girl of Miss Griffin’s type.”

Frank bit his lip. This friendship of Gwen’s with the man Mullet annoyed him. What could she possibly know of such a man? He resolved to speak to her about it, and make inquiry into the circumstances of their acquaintance.

He must warn her to have nothing to do with a man of such evil reputation, he thought. Little did he dream that this very man whom the world denounced as an outsider had stood the girl’s best and most devoted friend.

He walked back along the village street to the Manor, and dressed for dinner, his mind full of dark forebodings.

What would be the end? What could it be, except triumph for those enemies, the very names of whom were, with such tantalising persistency, withheld.

Half an hour after he had left the Doctor’s cottage the village telegraph-boy handed Aggie a message which she at once carried to her foster-father.

He tore it open, started, read it through several times, and then placed it carefully in the flames.

Then he hurriedly put on his boots, overcoat and hat, and went forth, explaining to his wife that he was suddenly called on urgent business to London.

That evening, just before ten o’clock, a short dark figure could have been seen slinking along by the railings of Berkeley Square, indistinct in the night mist, which, with the dusk, had settled over London.

The man, though he moved constantly up and down to keep himself warm, kept an alert and watchful eye upon the big sombre-looking mansion opposite—the residence, as almost any passer-by would have told the stranger, of Sir Felix Challas, the anti-Semitic philanthropist.

Over the semicircular fanlight a light burned brightly, but the inner shutters of the ground floor rooms were closed, while the drawing-room above was lighted.

Time after time the silent watcher passed and repassed the house, taking in every detail with apparent curiosity, yet ever anxious and ever expectant.

The constable standing at the corner of Hill Street eyed the dwarfed man with some suspicion, but on winter nights the London streets, even in the West End, abound with homeless loafers.

The Doctor, wearing a shabby overcoat several sizes too large for him and a felt hat much battered and the worse for wear, watched vigilantly and with much patience.

He saw a taxi-cab drive up before Sir Felix’s and a rather tall, good-looking man in opera hat and fur-lined coat descend and enter the house. The cab waited and ten minutes later the visitor—Jim Jannaway it was—was bowed out by the grave-faced old butler, and giving the man directions, was whirled away into Mount Street, out of sight.

“I suppose that’s the fellow!” murmured the ugly little man beneath his breath, as he stood back in the darkness against the railings opposite. Hardly had the words escaped his lips when a hansom came from the direction of Berkeley Street, and pulling up, an old, rather feeble white-bearded man got out, paid the driver, and ascending the steps rang the bell.

He was admitted without question, and the door was closed behind him.

“Erich Haupt, without a doubt,” remarked the Doctor aloud. “Why has he returned to London? Has he made a further discovery, I wonder. The description of him is exact.”

For half an hour he waited, wondering what was happening within that great mansion.

Then Jim Jannaway suddenly returned, dismissed his “taxi,” and was admitted. All that coming and going showed that something was in the wind.

“Red Mullet” had given him due warning from his hiding-place. His telegram had been despatched from Meopham, which he had discovered was a pleasant Kentish village, not far from Gravesend. He was evidently in concealment there.

Just before eleven o’clock another hansom turning out of Hill Street in the mist, pulled up before the house, and he watched a dark figure alight from it.

Notwithstanding the dim light he recognised the visitor in an instant. The figure was that of a tall, dark-eyed girl.

“Good Heavens!” he gasped, staring across the road, rigid. “Mullet was right! He was not mistaken after all! By Jove—then I know the truth! We are betrayed into the hands of our enemy!”

And as the Doctor stood there he was entirely unaware that he, in turn, was being watched from the opposite pavement—and by a woman!