Captain Black/Part 3

Leath kept his room with extraordinary persistence until the last moment. Farnham, with a vague idea of making amends for his recent suspicions by some sort of friendly advances, looked for him on the tender the next morning, but failed to find him in the crowd of passengers; nor did he get a sight of him until the very last of the number were disembarking, when Leath, wearing a mackintosh reaching to his heels, and with a muffler or scarf swathed about the lower part of his face, suddenly appeared at the head of the gangway leading to the landing-stage, and paused irresolutely, as if loath to come ashore. Farnham, who was awaiting his luggage on the landing-stage and chatting meanwhile with the two detectives, was about to attract his attention by a sign of recognition, when Leath, as if suddenly mastering his indecision, strode rapidly down the gangway, and began roughly pushing his way through the throng of waiting passengers. At this moment Lethbridge touched Farnham on the arm and pointed significantly to a woman who was standing at the foot of the gangway with her eyes intently fixed upon Leath. She was a sad-faced woman, plainly clad, and Farnham noticed that she was holding her hand tremulously to her mouth, as if endeavoring to control excessive agitation. As Leath passed her without a glance of recognition, her eyes dilated as with a sudden sickening terror, and then, apparently moved by an uncontrollable impulse, she flung herself before him with her hands against his breast, crying, “Roger! Don’t you know me?” Leath’s face, for an instant, looked as if it had been turned to stone, then, catching sight of Farnham’s astonished gaze, he instantly passed his arm about the imploring figure before him and said hurriedly, “I did not see you. Come away,” and pushed on with the woman, sobbing convulsively, on his arm.

“Rather a rum meeting, that,” observed Mr. Lethbridge, dryly, and Farnham, who had witnessed the scene with an immediate revival of his former antipathy, shrugged his shoulders in infinite disgust, and washing his hands of Mr. Leath and his affairs, went off to look after his own effects.

No further incidents of importance marked Farnham’s sojourn abroad. He traversed the beaten road of insular and continental sightseeing for his allotted time, and returned to his legal grindstone with such agreeable recollections of his vacation, that the following June found him again in London with the pleasant prospect of further rambles before him during the summer months. He had heard the particulars of the forgery while at home, but it was simply the old story of securities raised from their face value, followed by the coarser crime of actual theft, and ending with a ruined firm and a beggared partner; and the affair had almost passed from his memory, when it was suddenly recalled by an incident of the most startling character.

Farnham, waiting for a friend, was standing at the window of that depressing apartment, the smoking-room of Her Majesty’s Hotel, gazing aimlessly into the side street and observing the grimy wall of a noble lord’s grounds on the opposite side of the way, when his attention was attracted to two men who came from the direction of the neighboring thoroughfare, and stopped, conversing leisurely, at the entrance to the hotel. With the man who faced him Farnham had no concern; but he was instantly and strangely interested in the other, who stood with his back toward him. The subtile individuality which occasionally asserts itself in the human back told him that he knew this man, and the consciousness sent an unaccountable thrill through his veins. A moment after, the other of the two walked away and the owner of the expressive back turned to enter the hotel. As Farnham caught sight of his face his first impression was that he had been mistaken; then there arose in his memory, like a flash of light, a vision of the deck of the Servia a year ago and the two consorting men who had so unpleasantly impressed him, and he recoiled as though he had been shot. The full brown beard had disappeared, and a carefully waxed gray mustache and pointed goatee had replaced it; but if Captain Black ever walked upon the earth he stood in the flesh before Farnham at that moment. As this astounding fact divulged itself the man disappeared through the doorway, and Farnham sank breathless into a chair.

The apparition, for it seemed little more to Farnham’s excited fancy, came directly into the smoking-room, glanced casually at him as he sat quaking in his chair, and went out without a sign of recognition. Farnham breathed again. He had grown stouter and wore a beard, and it afforded him unspeakable relief to feel that these changes in his outward man had effectually concealed his identity. He sat still, watching through the open doorway the man who had apparently risen from the sea, and saw him stop for a moment at the office window and then pass through the hall and up the stairs. He was evidently staying at the hotel, and Farnham, presently recovering his composure, sauntered out of the room with as much unconcern as he could assume and inquired of the hall-porter who the gentleman was who had just come in.

“His name is Pelham, sir,” said the man; “Mr. Francis Pelham, I think. He’s not stopped here before, sir.”

“Thank you,” said Farnham. “Be good enough not to mention that I inquired; he might consider it an impertinence;” and impressing this injunction upon the porter by a judicious bestowal of a shilling, he went out and, oblivious of his appointment, hailed a hansom and was driven to Scotland Yard as fast as an indifferent horse could take him.

Lethbridge was absent, but upon Farnham’s assurance that his business was urgent, he was sent for and presently came in, and Farnham was again reassured by finding that even the detective’s keen eye failed to recognize him in his altered personality. A reference to the events of the preceding summer, however, immediately recalled him to Lethbridge’s memory, and he told, as concisely as possible, the extraordinary discovery which he believed he had made. Lethbridge heard him through and then shook his head incredulously. “I’ve come across strange things in my line, Mr. Farnham,” he said, “but this is the toughest yarn I’ve ever heard yet. It can’t be, sir, it can’t be. Darke and I prodded every corner of the ship, and I tell you the man wasn’t there.”

“And I tell you that the man is in London at this moment,” said Farnham, vehemently. “Apply any test that you please, and you’ll find I’m right.”

Lethbridge pondered dubiously for a moment, and then asked Farnham to repeat to him, in their consecutive order, all the details of Captain Black’s disappearance from the steamer. This Farnham did with scrupulous exactness, Lethbridge listening attentively and checking off the narrative from time to time with affirmative nods of his head.

“Now,” said Lethbridge, “go over the business on the landing-stage in the same way, so I may be sure I’ve got the thing straight in my head.”

Farnham complied as before, and was carefully reciting the sequence of events, when he became suddenly aware of a change in the detective’s manner. Lethbridge was leaning forward in his chair in an attitude of the most alert attention, and with a strange gleam in his eyes that betokened extraordinary emotion; and as the story ended, he brought his hand down upon his knee with a resounding slap and exclaimed exultingly, “By George, I have it!”

“Now look here, sir,” he continued, before Farnham could speak; “you can help us if you will. If this is the right man, he is an extraordinary cool hand, and we mustn’t touch him until we are ready for him. That won’t be until day after to-morrow, as I must send a man out of town to bring up another party that we shall need.”

“But suppose—” said Farnham, who would have preferred immediate action; “suppose, meanwhile, our man takes it into his head to leave.”

“Then I’ll stop him at a venture,” said Lethbridge, with a grim smile, “but I don’t want to move a minute too soon if I can help it. Now, I want you to take a table near him in the coffee-room—say to-morrow at breakfast.”

“But I’m not staying there,” objected Farnham.

“Take a room there over-night,” said Lethbridge, promptly, “and give ’em a wrong name.”

“I don’t fancy doing that,” said Farnham, after a moment’s reflection.

“There isn’t a bit of ’arm in it,” said Lethbridge, “and it will help us a lot.”

“And what then?” said Farnham.

“Why, then,” continued Lethbridge, with a reassuring smile, “when you’re ready to go in to breakfast, just step out of the ’otel door for a moment so I can see you, and then leave word if any one asks for you, to have him shown in direct to your table. That’ll give me a chance for complete observation of your party without attracting any attention whatsoever, and without anybody being any the wiser but me. After that you can go off and leave the business in my hands until everything’s ready. I suppose you’d like to see the end of it, sir?” concluded the detective, with a confident interrogation.

“Well—yes; after having gone so far—I would,” said Farnham.

“Very good, sir, I’ll look you up,” said Mr. Lethbridge, cheerfully. “Mind you sit with your back to him.”

Farnham went away with a disquieting sense of having been cleverly impressed into the English detective service; but an irrepressible desire to follow up the unravelling of the mystery that lay before him enabled him to stifle certain stirrings of conscience by the self-assurance that he was merely furthering the ends of justice. He wandered aimlessly about, avoiding the vicinity of the hotel until bedtime, when he sneaked in, carrying a satchel, and with a humiliating consciousness of imposture lying heavily on his mind, and was allotted a gloomy back room at the top of the house. Here he passed a horrible night, largely occupied in running down preposterous criminals of all grades, and awoke with a pardonable feeling of repugnance for his self-invited breakfast company.