Chapter Fifteen. In Search of the Secret.

For once Casteno was full of sympathy with me.

No sooner did I explain to him the extraordinary development of that mystery at Whitehall Court than he was all eagerness, all attention, all resource to prove to me that I must think the best and not the worst of Colonel Napier’s disappearance.

At first, I own, I was not at all inclined to take help from such a quarter; I had not forgotten those suspicious circumstances in which he left my office at the time the murder was committed. Nevertheless, before we had finished our dinner in that quaint old Shrewsbury hotel he had practically won me over to his way of looking at the occurrence.

“After all,” said he, as he drained his last glass of wine, “you can certainly rely on the impression that Colonel Napier has come to no harm. If he had, Miss Doris would not be here at all as she is, as bright and gay as a lark, and as keen as a hawk on getting the benefit of those manuscripts for Lord Cuthbertson. Neither he nor Lord Fotheringay would dare to keep bad news from her. They are, after all, both of them gentlemen, whatever may happen to be the Chauvinistic tactics they adopt to push themselves forward in their own particular little intrigues in politics. Silence in such a crisis would be monstrous—utterly monstrous.”

“But where can he be?” I cried helplessly. “What is he doing? Why doesn’t he come forward and tell the police as much as he knows of the affair?”

“Perhaps he has,” said Casteno significantly, dealing with my last question first. “Who knows? Naylor has dropped his part in the search, you see, and if that means anything at all it means that the murder has precious little to do with this wild chase after the old parchment records. My own impression is that the daughter is not the only member of the Napier family who has taken sides against us in this hunt for the submerged treasure. When the truth is told I think you will find both father and daughter have determined, in a perfectly friendly way, to work against me, just to prove to you how foolish and futile you have been not to take their advice. Hence Colonel Napier may have been despatched in one direction to circumvent us and Miss Doris in another. That disposition of their forces would be quite fair, you know, and might have most important results.”

“And the man found dead in the colonel’s bed?”

“Any theory could account for his presence,” said the Spaniard, shrugging his shoulders and walking towards the window as though heartily tired of my objections. “One is that he was some burglar who had got the office that the colonel had left the flat, and had disguised himself to resemble the master, had walked in at the front door and personated him over-night, and had been assassinated in error. Such cases of impersonation are much more common than people imagine, but they have such ludicrous, as well as tragic, results that they seldom, if ever, get into the police courts. Another theory—and to me not at all a bad one—is that the whole business has been engineered by some secret society for a purpose that will eventually become apparent. As you know, there are plenty of secret organisations in London that do not content themselves with mystic signs and passwords and occasional extravagances in the shape of nitro-glycerine and dynamite. I know there is a branch of the Spanish ‘Friends of Liberty’ in England, for instance; and I am sure if they have got some hint from Mexico about the discovery of those manuscripts they will stop at nothing—not even a crime like this—to frighten off Colonel Napier.”

“Well, I had better leave it,” I said at last, with a sigh, throwing the paper on to the floor and joining my companion at the casement. “After all, you are really the leader of this expedition, and you have a right to require of me that I shall pay some attention to your conclusions.”

“Yes; leave it,” repeated Casteno. “Remember, you are only one man with one brain and one pair of hands. You can’t do everything in a maze that has such extraordinary ramifications as this. I tried alone, remember, and failed; and, first, I had to get your help, and then Mr Cooper-Nassington’s, and heaven alone knows where we shall end. But this brings me to another point, Glynn,” he went on, with increasing earnestness. “I want you not to approach Miss Doris until this flying machine experiment is over. It is quite natural of you to wish to do so, I admit, but I want you to consider my interests a little for a day or two, and to refrain.”

“I see,” I said meditatively. “You are afraid something might happen, some injudicious word of hers, some careless act, which might scare off some of the people we want to keep blind to our movements, eh?”

“Yes,” answered Casteno; “but that’s not all. You must recollect, too, that the people who are not for us are against us. It is not really to the Napier interest that your side should win. They are fighting, in my opinion, on the side of the authorities as represented by the Foreign Secretary and the earl. Well, let them, that’s all, and only when we’ve won let us put our heads above the hedge.”

Some other conversation followed, but in the end I agreed to do as José Casteno wished. As a consequence, we kept quite quiet in our rooms until we had got word from a friendly waiter that the hunchback, Miss Doris, and Captain Sparhawk had returned to the hotel, apparently on good terms again, and then in the darkness of night we slipped off and had a good tramp about the ancient streets and by-ways of Shrewsbury, rising next morning as fresh and as sturdy as ever. For a time, it is true, we feared that after his compact to help Lord Cyril Cuthbertson the hunchback might deem it prudent to avoid the excursion. As a matter of fact, I was the one who thought so. Casteno didn’t, because, in the first place, he was sure that his father would never in any circumstances help England against Spain; and in the second, the dwarf was too keen on flying machines and their commercial and military possibilities to let Sparhawk slip through his fingers when he had got hold of a really serviceable invention that would take seven or eight people careering through the air at will. And, as it turned out, Casteno was correct, and I wasn’t. The hunchback did turn up in the flying machine enclosure at the great floral fête, all prepared for the expedition, and, oddly enough, he brought with him as companion—he seemed to have quite forgiven all her previous day’s tricks—my own Doris, who looked as bright and gay as though a trip in a flying machine were one of the most enjoyable things in existence.

Captain Sparhawk himself, now that the critical day of trial had dawned, looked, I must confess, very nervous and overwrought. Attired in a costume that proved to be a compromise between what is usually adopted by the driver of a fast motor car and the captain of a penny steamboat, he flitted about from point to point in the enclosure, the personification of anxiety and restlessness.

“First we must think of the weather, Miss Doris,” we caught him saying as, disguised in the uniform of sergeants in the Royal Engineers, we showed our tickets which entitled us to the trip in his company and joined the mob of experts and committeemen who buzzed about him like so many noisy and curious bees. As for our features, they were works of art—the art of the painter and the art of the wig-maker—while our voices had developed a military bluffness and roughness, which left our throats lined with something like sandpaper every time we opened our mouths.

“It all depends on the wind,” he repeated, and he directed her gaze anxiously to the sky, as though she could see at a glance whether the wind were likely at the time of the ascent to blow forty miles an hour, or four. “You see, I have got the inflation well advanced,” he went on, pointing to the huge, slowly-swelling monster, which lay like a gigantic but quarter-filled balloon of fishlike shape on the greensward as men in mechanics’ clothes hastened here and there pulling a hose straight, slackening a rope, or dragging out the folds of the silk as if they were so many sheets of lead. “This particular machine is Number 9 of my series, two ahead of Santos-Dumont. As you are going with us to-day,” at which news both Casteno and I started, for we had not bargained for that, “I crave your permission to name it the ‘Doris.’”

“By all means,” said the girl, beaming with pleasure; “and I trust it will have the best of good luck, and bring all connected with it fame and fortune!” Whereat the little mob I have mentioned broke into a loud cheer, which was taken up by the thousands who lined the ropes that marked off the enclosures, and amongst whom the news of the machine’s informal christening passed like so much wildfire.

At this point somebody—I think it was the chairman of the fête—appeared bearing three or four magnums of champagne, which were opened, and the contents passed amongst the select coterie gathered around the inventor. Thus encouraged, the gallant captain went further.

“You need not really fear the trip, Miss Napier,” he said, raising the glass with a proud gesture to his lips. “Nor you two gentlemen,” he added, nodding in the direction of Casteno and myself, who had been pointed out to him by the gatekeeper as his two paying fellow-passengers. “As for Mr Zouche here,” now he included the hunchback, “he is a practical aeronaut like myself. I always say, where he would lead I would follow; but, for to-day, we have reversed things a bit, although my opinion of his skill and knowledge remains just the same.”

“Then you think the machine is perfectly safe?” said a voice in the crowd.

“It’s as safe as going to heaven in a rocking-chair,” promptly answered the captain, like an oracle. “The fact is,” he proceeded in a lower tone, “I have had the thing well tested. In the first place, I had it filled with air and coal gas, for the purpose of arranging the rigging, and then I took a little trip with it myself with proper hydrogen, and the petroleum motor hard at work, and it sailed aloft like a bird. In form, of course, it is similar to the balloon, ‘La France,’ experimented with as long ago as 1834 by some French officers at Meudon—that is, it is shaped like a plaice—the front end being larger than the rear; while it is provided with a compensating ballonet, which is inflated with air by means of a fan controlled from the motor. The two cars, to hold three passengers each, like the motor, are supported by a pine framework, and are suspended at a distance of fifteen feet under the balloon. The propeller is an exceptionally large and strong one, and resembles a fish’s tail, a mackerel’s, for I contend we find all our true air affinities in the sea. It turns at the rate of two hundred and fifty revolutions a minute, and the whole apparatus is strong enough to let us take a fair amount of ballast; for the secret of my success in my invention does not turn on lightness, where so many flying-machine inventors have gone wrong of late, but on weight—weight to subdue the pressure of the wind, to conquer the dead force of the air, and to answer the power of the motor to get up anything approaching a decent speed.”

The enthusiast stopped. Some detail in the rigging as the great aerial monster rose higher and higher suddenly required his attention; and for the next few minutes none of us spoke at all, as the captain moved hither and thither, directing his subordinates, and getting everything into working order. Curiously enough, all his feverishness left him like magic directly there was any serious work to do. For that time he might have been quite alone in his workshop. He moved and spoke and acted as one who had perfect confidence in himself and in the issue of the daring experiment which he was about to undertake.