The Bride of Fu Manchu f-6 Page 5

Yes, most utterly damnable thing, I, in whose blood there runs a marked streak of Puritanism, I, with poor Petrie lying there in the grip of a dread disease, suddenly wanted to crush this woman—his wife—in my arms!

  It was only a matter of hours since I had met Fleurette on the beach of Ste Claire de la Roche and had become so infatuated with her beauty and charm that I had been thinking about her almost continuously ever since. Yet here I stood fighting against a sudden lawless desire for the wife of my best friend—a desire so wild that it threatened to swamp everything—friendship, tradition, honour!

  Perhaps I might have conquered—unaided. I am not prepared to say. But aid came to me, and came in the form of what I thought at the time to be a miracle. As I looked down into those enigmatical, mocking eyes, in a silence broken only by the hushing of the pines outside the window—a voice—a groaning, hollow voice, a voice that might have issued from a tomb—spoke.

  “Beware...of her,” it said.

  Mrs. Petrie sprang back. A fleeting glimpse I had of stark horror in the long, narrow eyes. My heart, which had been beating madly, seemed to stop for a moment.

  I twisted my head aside, staring down at Petrie.

  Was it imagination—or did I detect a faint quivering of those swollen eyelids? Could it be he who had spoken? That slight movement, if it had ever been, had ceased. He lay still as the dead.

  “Who was it?” Mrs Petrie whispered, her patrician calm ruffled at last. “Whose voice was that?”

  I stared at her. The spell was broken. The glamour of those bewitched moments had faded—dismissed by that sepulchral voice. Mrs. Petrie’s eyelashes now almost veiled her long, brilliant eyes. One hand was clenched, the other hidden beneath her cloak. My ideas performed a complete about-turn. Some sudden, inexplicable madness had possessed me, from the consequences of which I had been saved by an act of God!

  “I don’t know,” I said hoarsely. “I don’t know...”

  chapter ninth

  FAH LO

  SUEE

  the end of that interview is hazy in my memory. Concerning one detail, however, I have no doubt: Mrs. Petrie did not again approach the sick man’s bed. Despite her wonderful self-discipline, she could not entirely hide her apprehension. I detected her casting swift glances at Petrie and—once—upwards towards the solitary window.

  That awful warning, so mysteriously spoken— could have related only to her....

  I rang for Sister Therese and arranged that the night concierge should conduct the visitor to her car. I suspected that the neighbourhood was none too safe.

  Mrs. Petrie gave me the address of a hotel in Cannes, asking that she be kept in touch. She would return, she said, unless summoned earlier, at eight in the morning. She had fully regained her graceful composure by this time, and I found myself wondering what her true nationality could be. Her languid calm was hard to reconcile with wifely devotion:

  indeed, I had expected her to insist upon remaining.

  And when, with a final glance at Petrie and an enigmatical smile to me, she went out with Sister Therese, I turned and stared at the doctor. I could detect no change whatever, except that it seemed to me that the purple shadow on his brow was not so dark.

  Could it be he who had spoken?

  His face was dreadfully haggard, looking almost emaciated, and his lips dry and cracked, were slightly parted so as to expose his teeth. In that unnatural smile I thought I saw the beginning of the death grin which characterized this ghastly pestilence.

  He did not move, nor could I detect him breathing. I glanced at the window, high above my head, where not so long before I had seen those crooked yellow fingers. But it showed as a black patch in the dull white mass of the wall.

  The pines began whispering softly again: “Fleurette— Derceto....”

  If Petrie had not spoken—and I found it hard to believe that he had—whose was the voice which had uttered the words, “Beware...of her?”

  I had ample time to consider the problem and many others as well which had arisen in the course of that eventful day. Dr. Cartier looked in about eleven o’clock, and Sister Therese made regular visits.

  There was no change to be noted in Petrie’s condition.

  It was a dreary vigil; in fact, an eerie one. For company I had an apparently dead man, and some of the most horrible memories which one could very well conjure up as a background for that whispering silence.

  At some time shortly after midnight I hard swift footsteps coming along the passage which led to Petrie’s room. The door opened, and Nayland Smith walked in.

  One glance warned me that something was amiss.

  He crossed and stared down at Petrie in silence, then turning to Sister Therese, who had entered behind him:

  “I wonder, Sister,” he said rapidly, “if I might ask you to remain here until Dr. Cartier arrives, and allow Mr. Sterling and myself the use of your room?”

  “But of course, with the greatest pleasure,” she replied, and smiled in her sweet, patient way.

  Together we went along the narrow corridor and presently came to that little room used by the nurse on duty. It was very simple and very characteristic.

  There was a glass-fronted cabinet containing medicines, dressings, and surgical appliances. Beside a little white table was placed a very hard white enamelled chair. An open book lay on the table; and the only decoration was a crucifix on the distempered wall.

  Sir Denis did not speak for a moment, but paced restlessly to and fro in that confined space twitching at the lobe of his ear—a habit which I later came to recognize as indicative of deep thought.

  Suddenly he turned and faced me.

  “Sir Mansion Rorke died early yesterday morning,” he said, “from an overdose of heroin or something of that kind!”

  “What!”

  I had been seated on the edge of the little table, but at that I sprang up. Sir Denis nodded grimly.

  “But was he—addicted to drugs?”

  “Apparently. He was a widower who lived alone in a flat in Curzon Street. There was only one resident servant—a man who had been with him for many years.”

  “It’s Fate,” I groaned. “What a ghastly coincidence!”

  “Coincidence!” Sir Denis snapped. “There’s no coincidence! Sir Mansion’s consulting rooms in Wimpole Street, where he kept all his records and pursued his studies, were burgled during the night. I assume that they found what they had come for. A large volume containing prescriptions is missing.”

  “But, if they found what they came for——”

  “That was good enough,” he interrupted. “Hence my assumption that they did. Sir Manston had a remarkable memory. Having destroyed the prescription book, the next thing was to destroy...that inconvenient memory!”

  “You mean—he was murdered?”

  “I have little doubt on that point,” Sir Denis replied harshly. “The butler has been detained—but there’s small hope of learning anything from him, even if he knows. But I gather, Sterling—” he fixed a penetrating stare upon me—”that a similar attempt was made here to-night.”

  “Here? Whatever do you mean, Sir Denis?”

  But even as I spoke the words I thought I knew, and:

  “Why, of course!” I cried—”the dacoit!”

  “Dacoit,” he rapped. “What dacoit?”

  “You don’t know? But, on second thoughts, how could you know! It was shortly after you left. Someone looked in at the window of Petrie’s room——”

  “Looked in?” He glanced up at the corresponding window of Sister Therese’s room. “It’s twelve feet above ground level.”

  “I know. Nevertheless, someone looked in. I heard a faint scuffling—and I was just in time to catch a glimpse of a yellow hand as the man dropped back.”

  “Yellow hand?” Sir Denis laughed shortly. “Our cross-eyed friend from the Villa Jasmin, Sterling! He was spying out the land. Shortly after this, I suggest, the lady arrived?”

  I stared at him in surprise.<
br />
  “You are quite right. I suppose Sister Therese told you?

  Mrs. Petrie came a few minutes afterwards.”

  “Describe her,” he directed tersely.

  Startled by his maritaer, I did my best to comply, when:

  “She has green eyes,” he broke in.

  “I couldn’t swear to it. Her veil obscured her eyes.”

  “They are green,” he affirmed confidently. “Her skin is the colour of ivory, and she has slender, indolent hands. She is as graceful as a leopardess, of the purring which treacherous creature her voice surely reminded you?”

  Sir Denis’s sardonic humour completed my bewilderment. Recalling the almost tender way in which he had spoken the words, “Poor Karamaneh,” I found it impossible to reconcile those tones with the savagery of his present manner.

  “I’m afraid you puzzle me,” I confessed. “I quite understood that you held Mrs. Petrie in the highest esteem.”

  “So I do,” he snapped. “But we are not talking about Mrs. Petrie!”

  “Not talking about Mrs. Petrie! But——”

  “The lady who favoured you with a visit to-night. Sterling, is known as Fah Lo Suee (I don’t know why). She is the daughter of the most dangerous man living to-day. East or West—Dr. Fu Manchu!”

  “But, Sir Denis!”

  He suddenly grasped my shoulders, staring into my eyes.

  “No one can blame you if you have been duped. Sterling. You thought you were dealing with Petrie’s wife: it was a stroke of daring genius on the part of the enemy——”

  He paused; but his look asked the question.

  “I refused to permit her to touch him, nevertheless,” I said.

  Sir Denis’s expression changed. His brown eager face lighted up.

  “Good man!” he said in a low voice, and squeezed my shoulders, then dropped his hands. “Good man.”

  It was mild enough, as appreciation goes, yet somehow I valued those words more highly than a decoration.

  “Did she mention my name?”

  “No.”

  “Did you?”

  I thought a while, and then:

  “No,” I replied. “I am positive on the point.”

  “Good!” he muttered, and began to pace up and down again. “There’s just a chance—just a chance he has overlooked me. Tell me, omitting no detail that you recall, exactly what took place.”

  To the best of my ability, I did as he directed.

  He interrupted me once only: when I spoke of that sepulchral warning—

  “Where was the woman when you heard it?” he rapped.

  “Practically in my arms. I had just dragged her back.”

  “The voice was impossible to identify?”

  “Quite.”

  “And you could not swear to the fact that Petrie’s lips moved?”

  “No. It was a fleeting impression, no more.”

  “It was after this episode that she subjected you to her hypnotic tricks?”

  “Hypnotic tricks!”

  “Yes—you have narrowly escaped. Sterling.”

  “You refer,” I said with some embarrassment for I had been perfectly frank—”to my strange impulses?”

  He nodded.

  “No. It was the voice which broke the spell.”

  He twitched his ear for some moments, then:

  “Go on!” he rapped.

  And when I had come to the end:

  “You got off lightly,” he said. “She is as dangerous as a poised cobra! And now, I have another job for you.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “Hurry back to Villa Jasmin—and call me up here if all’s well there. Have you a gun?”

  “No. I lent mine to the chauffeur.”

  Take this.” He drew an automatic from his topcoat pocket.

  “Drive like hell and shoot if necessary. You are a marked man.

  »

  As I hurried out. Dr. Carter hurried in. “Ah!” Nayland Smith exclaimed. “I regret troubling you, doctor; but I want you to examine Petrie very carefully.” “What! there is some change?” “I don’t know. That’s what I want you to find out.”

  chapter tenth

  GREEN EYES

  the two-seater which had been placed at Petrie’s disposal was no beauty, but the engine was fairly reliable, and I set out along the Comiche about as fast as it is safe to travel upon such a tortuous road.

  I suppose it had taken me a ridiculously long time to grasp the crowning horror which lay behind this black business. As I swung around the dangerous curves of that route, the parapet broken in many places and the mirror of the Mediterranean lying far below on the right, my brain grew very active.

  The discovery of a fly-catching plane near the place where a man had been seized by this frightful infection, coupled with our finding later a similar specimen in Petrie’s laboratory, had suggested pretty pointedly that human agency was at work. Yet, somehow, in spite of the apparition of that grinning yellow face in the kitchen garden of the villa, I had not been able to realize, or not been able to believe, that human agency was actually directing the pestilence.

  Sir Denis Nayland Smith had adjusted my perspective. Someone, apparently a shadowy being known as Fu Manchu, was responsible for these outbreaks!

  And the woman who had posed as Petrie’s wife, the woman who had tried, and all but succeeded in her attempt to bewitch me, was of the flesh and blood of this fiend. She was Chinese; and her mission had been—what?

  To poison Petrie—as Sir Mansion Rorke had been poisoned?

  As I swung into the lighted tunnel cut through the rock, I laughed aloud when that seeming absurdity presented itself to my mind.

  Anew disease had appeared in the world. Yes; of this, I had had painful evidence. It was possibly due, according to Sir Denis, to the presence in France of an unfamiliar fly—what he had called a genus-hybrid.

  So much I was prepared to admit.

  But how could any man be responsible for the appearance of such an insect, anywhere and at any time; much less in such widely separated places as those which had been visited by the epidemic?

  The Purple Shadow...

  I had nearly reached the end of the rock cutting. There was a dangerous comer just ahead; and I had allowed my thoughts to wander rather wide of the job in hand. A big car, a Rolls-Royce, appeared suddenly. The driver—some kind of African, as I saw—was taking so much of the road on the bend that no room was left for me.

  Jamming on the brakes, I pulled close in against the wall of the tunnel...and I acted only just in time.

  The driver of the Rolls checked slightly and swept right— missing me by six inches or less!

  I had a clear, momentary view of the occupants of the car which had so nearly terminated my immediate interest in affairs....

  How long I stayed there after the beautiful black-and-silver thing had purred away into the darkness, I don’t know. But I remember turning round and staring over the folded, dusty hood in a vain attempt to read the number.

  The car had two occupants.

  In regard to one of those occupants I wondered if the wild driving of the Negro chauffeur and my preoccupation with the other had led me to form a false impression. Because, when the Rolls had swept on its lordly way, I realised that my memory retained an image of something not entirely human.

  A yellow face buried in the wings of an upturned fur collar I had certainly seen: a keen wind from the Alps made the night bitingly cold. The man wore a fur cap pulled down nearly to his brows, creating a curious mediaeval effect. But this face had a placid, almost godlike immobility, gaunt, dreadful, yet sealed with power like the features of a dead Pharoah.

  Some chance trick of the lighting might have produced the illusion (its reality I could not admit); but about the second traveller I had no doubts whatever.

  Her charming head framed—as that other skull-like head was framed—in the upturned collar of a fur coat...I saw Fleurette!

  And I thought of a moss-rose....


  I turned to the wheel again.

  Fleurette!

  She had not seen me, had not suspected that I was there. Probably, I reflected, it would not have interested her to know.

  But her companion? I tested the starter, wondering if it would function after the shock. I was relieved to find that it did. The Rolls was miles away, now, unless the furious driving of the African chauffeur had led to disaster....That yellow face and those glittering green eyes—I asked myself the question: Could this be Mahdi Bey?

  Somehow I could not believe the man with Fleurette to be an Egyptian. Yet, I reflected, driving on, there had been that about him which had conjured an image to my mind...the image of Seti the First—that King of Egypt whose majesty had survived three thousand years....

  chapter eleventh

  AT THE VILLA JASMIN

  the car in which Nayland Smith had come from Cannes was standing just where the steep descent to the little garage made a hairpin bend. I supposed that the man had decided to park there for the night. But I was compelled to pull in behind, as it was impossible to pass.

  I walked on beyond the bend to the back of the bungalow. A path to the left led around the building to the little verandah;

  one to the right fell away in stepped terraces, skirting the garden and terminating at the laboratory.

  My mind, from the time of that near crash with the Rolls up to this present moment, had been preoccupied. The mystery of Fleurette had usurped my thoughts. Fleurette—her charming little bronzed face enveloped in fur; a wave of her hair gleaming like polished mahogany. Now, as I started down the slope, a warning instinct spoke to me. I found myself snatched back to dangerous reality.

  I pulled up, listening; but I could not detect the Kohler engine.

  Some nocturnal flying thing hovered near me; I could hear the humming of its wings. Vividly, horribly, I visualised that hairy insect with its glossy back, and almost involuntarily, victim of a swift, overmastering and sickly terror, I began striking out right and left in the darkness....

  Self-contempt came to my aid. I stood still again.

  The insect, probably some sort of small beetle, was no longer audible. I thought of the fly-haunted swamps I had known, and grew hot with embarrassment. The Purple Shadow was a ghastly death; but Petrie had faced it unflinchingly....