The Mummy and Miss Nitocris Part 26

"REVAL.--Professor fell overboard three days ago. Body not recovered. Horus Stone did its work. N. consents. I marry her at Oscarburg. Russia ready. Fool International for a few days and come to Viborg when you have done with them.

O."

"That is good news," said Phadrig, in a confidential whisper to himself; "for a man on the lower plane of existence the Prince is wonderfully clever. This is a master-stroke. If he really has the Queen in his power all the rest will be easy."

"There's two gentlemen to see you, Mr Amena." The door opened, and his landlady's dirty little daughter put her towsled head through the little s.p.a.ce behind the doorpost. "They're down below; shall I send 'em up?"

"Certainly, Jane. Tell the gentlemen that I shall be pleased to see them."

The dirty face vanished as the door closed. Phadrig shut down the top of the big escritoire and locked it. Heavy treads sounded on the rickety stairs. There was a shuffle of feet on the little landing, a sharp knock at the door, and he said in a low tone:

"Come in, gentlemen. I have been expecting you."

The door opened and Nicol Hendry entered, followed by his German colleague. Practised as they were in all the arts of their profession, they looked about the mean, miserably appointed room with curious eyes.

Phadrig, dressed in the same shabby semi-Oriental costume in which he had received Isaac Josephus, salaamed, and said:

"Gentlemen, although this is but a poor room to receive you in, I am pleased that you have come. You are officers of the International, if I am not mistaken."

Then his speech changed to German, and he went on:

"You, sir, are M. Nicol Hendry, and your friend is the Herr von Hamner, Chief of the Berlin Section. What can I do to serve you?"

It was anything but the greeting that they expected. They thought that they had tracked the real criminal to his last hiding-place. They had established the ident.i.ty between Phadrig, the poor seller of curios, and Phadrig Amena, the worker of miracles, whom all the smart set in London was talking about; and here he was in this miserable, shabby room, dressed in clothes that no p.a.w.nbroker would advance a couple of s.h.i.+llings on, smiling and bowing before them as though they were lords of the earth, and he--the man who had sent three men and a woman to their deaths by, as it were, a mere word of command--a worm beneath their feet. Nicol Hendry managed to keep his self-possession, but Von Hamner was already sorry that he had come, and his face showed it.

"We have come to ask you, Mr Amena," said Hendry, thinking it best to come to the point at once, "why you found it necessary to kill those people. I needn't mention names. You know them as well as we do."

"I did not kill them, gentlemen. They killed themselves, according to the newspaper reports. And now, may I ask you why you found it necessary to set these spies of yours to watch my every movement night and day?

What have I done to bring myself within the four corners of your English law?"

"Nothing, unfortunately, that we can get a warrant for," replied Hendry, trying not to look into his eyes, "and so we have taken the law into our own hands. Come, Mr Amena, the game is up. We know all about your share in the conspiracy to remove Prince Zastrow in order to make room for your patron Prince Oscarovitch. We have copies of his manifesto at Scotland Yard, and we know that you received a telegram in cypher from him to-day."

"Ah!" said Phadrig, in a tone whose smoothness was intensely aggravating, "that is very interesting. May I ask if you have translated the cypher?"

"No, d.a.m.n you and your Prince!" burst in Von Hamner. "If we had done that we should know even more about you than we do now--and that ought to be enough to hang you."

He had spluttered the words out before Hendry had time to stop him. He expected a tragedy there and then, but it did not happen. Phadrig took the telegram out of his coat pocket, handed it to Von Hamner with a graceful bow, and said:

"Your information is quite correct, gentlemen. That is the telegram, and this is the meaning of it."

Then as they read the unintelligible jumble of words, he repeated the meaning of them as though they formed the most ordinary message, instead of a dispatch that might, as they well knew, shake Europe to its social and political foundations within the next week or so.

"Then this is another of your devilries, I suppose," snarled Von Hamner.

"So you have killed the great Professor Marmion, the most gifted genius in the whole world, as you killed the others, to promote your infernal schemes; and you have helped that scoundrel Oscarovitch to abduct his daughter. Well, law or no law, this shall be the end of your doings. You will come with us as our prisoner, or you will not leave this room alive."

"Those are hard words, mein Herr," said Phadrig, still speaking in German. "I your prisoner! Why? What have I done to make this outrage on English law possible?"

"You will do better to come, Mr Amena," said Hendry, in his quiet official tone; "it will save a good deal of trouble both to you and us.

It must be the same in the end, you know. We have got you, and we don't mean to let you do any more mischief. You have done quite enough already. Now, will you come quietly, or shall we take you? We shall charge you at Lambeth as a receiver of stolen goods: you will be remanded for a week in custody, and by that time we shall have your Prince in safe keeping in St Petersburg."

"Will you, really?" asked Phadrig, lifting his eyelids for the first time during the interview. "I should have thought that a man of your European experience would have called the Russian capital by its proper name. Surely you know that only newspaper people make that mistake. It is the city of Peter the Great, not Saint Peter the apostle. The fortress of Petro-paulovsky is not named after saints--only after Tsars."

There was a sneer in his voice as he made this trivial correction which roused both Hendry and Von Hamner to anger. The German pulled his revolver out of his hip pocket, and Hendry produced a beautiful pair of polished handcuffs from his left trouser pocket.

"Ah, I see that you have come prepared, gentlemen!" said Phadrig, with a laughing sneer in his low-voiced whisper. "Those are what you call the bracelets in England, are they not? Well, since you are determined to take the law into your hands--here are mine. Put them on M. Hendry, and then your friend may not think it necessary to try and shoot me."

He held his hands out. The way in which he said "try and shoot me" did not sound well in their ears, but Nicol Hendry thought that the work had to be put through now or not at all. He took a couple of steps towards Phadrig, and a couple of sharp snaps told Von Hamner that their prisoner was safe. But the prisoner did not seem to think so. He raised his hands and looked at the handcuffs. He seemed to examine them as though they were curiosities.

"Are these really what you take criminals to prison with? They don't seem very strong. I could break them as though they were thread."

"That will do, Mr Amena. You've got them on now, and we don't want any more of your conjuring tricks. Come along, and take it quietly like a sensible man."

Hendry was fast losing patience, and Von Hamner was doing all he could to keep his finger off the trigger of the revolver.

"Ah yes, conjuring tricks you call them, you ignorants! Now look. You have put the handcuffs on to my wrists. Is this a conjuring trick? See!"

He held his arms out towards them, his two hands chained together.

"Mr Hendry, be good enough to take my right hand, and you, Herr von Hamner, my left. So; now shake my hands. You see, there are the handcuffs on the floor."

It was only a shake of the hands, but the clink of the steel followed as the bracelets dropped from his wrists. He stooped down, and inside ten seconds they were clipped round Von Hamner's. In the same instant he had twitched the revolver out of his hand and pointed it at Hendry's face.

"Now, gentlemen, you were talking about taking the law into your own hands. I, you see, have taken it into mine. What do you propose to do? I am quite at your service. Your idea of arresting me on a charge of receiving stolen goods is, if you will allow me to say so, absurd. You could no more make me guilty of that than you could hang me for the deaths of those foolish spies of yours. Now, what is it to be? Pardon me, Herr von Hamner: the bracelets inconvenience you. Allow me." He took the handcuffs between his finger and thumb, shook the chain, and they dropped into his hand. "You will feel more comfortable now."

"Yes, and I'll make you less comfortable in h.e.l.l, where you should have been long ago," shouted Von Hamner, jumping at him the moment his hands were free, and s.n.a.t.c.hing the revolver out of his hand. The pistol went up before Hendry could get hold of his arm, and he fired. Phadrig put his hand up, and when the smoke had drifted away, he held it out to Von Hamner, and said:

"I think that is your bullet, mein Herr."

The bullet was lying in the palm of his hand, a little out of shape through pa.s.sing the rifling, but still the same bullet.

The German's face turned a reddish-grey, and Nicol Hendry, with all his courage, was not feeling particularly well. As a matter of fact, he was, for the first time in his life, absolutely frightened. A man who could deal with handcuffs as though they were made of cotton, and catch a bullet in his hands, was not the sort of criminal he had been trained to hunt. As for Von Hamner, he was in a state of utter collapse. He dropped upon a chair, a pitiable spectacle of craven fear, looking about half his real size so physically shrunken did he seem.

"Let the devil go, Hendry," he mumbled. "He is more than man. What is the use? If you cannot shoot him, you cannot hang him, and if handcuffs won't hold him, prison doors won't. Let us go and leave the devil to himself. I've had enough of it."

"But perhaps the devil has not," said Phadrig, with a politeness which was infuriating in its mildness. "You gentlemen will understand that I do not wish to have this espionage going on any longer. If you cannot promise that it shall stop at once I shall, for my own protection, have to suggest to you that you shall remove yourselves, as the others have done."

"No, no, not that, man, not that!" shouted Von Hamner, springing from his seat and making for the door. "I have done with the whole business, curse it! Let me go, let me go! Hendry, do as you like, but do it alone.

I have finished."

Before Hendry could reply, or before Von Hamner could reach it, the door was flung open, and Franklin Marmion strode into the room. Von Hamner crawled back to his chair. He did not like the look of a dead man who had come to life again. Nicol Hendry held out his hand, and said:

"And is it really you, Professor? Mr Amena here has just had news that you were dead--'fallen overboard in the Baltic from Prince Oscarovitch's yacht. Body not recovered,' is what the telegram says."

"The body is here right enough, M. Hendry. I did not fall overboard. I was bound hand and foot, had a ma.s.s of iron tied to my feet, and was thrown out of a port-hole by the Prince and his captain. Of course, I got rid of the rope and the iron even more easily than this man got rid of your handcuffs a short time ago, and after keeping myself afloat for half an hour or so, I was picked up by a fis.h.i.+ng-boat which took me to Stralsund. I got a change of clothes there, and came home _via_ Hamburg and Ostend. My daughter has gone on in the yacht to Oscarburg, where the Prince expects to make her his wife, and where she will make a very considerable fool of him. That is all, and now I suppose I had better deal with this man."

"Mercy, mercy, Thou Who Knowest! Pity, pity!"

Phadrig raised his hands above his head, turned round thrice slowly, and sank in a heap on the floor.

"Thou who wast once High Priest in the House of Ptah: thou who hast held the Doctrine: thou darest to ask for mercy, knowing well that there is no forgiveness of sins: thou hast taken innocent lives, believing thyself above human law. A wasted life is behind thee: see that thou doest better for thy soul's sake in the next. Die now! The High G.o.ds have spoken, and the penalty of sin is death--and the life beyond. Die!"