by John Buchan
I explained the etiquette of my profession.
“Oh, then you can tell him what to do. You’ll understand his silly talk, which I don’t. You make him obey you.”
“My dear young lady,” I said, “I cannot undertake private business. You see I’m in the employ of the Government.”
“Don’t be afraid, I can pay you all right.” The words were too naïve to be insulting.
I said nothing, and she darted before me and looked me in the face.
“You mean that you won’t help me?” she asked.
“I mean that I’m not allowed,” I replied. Without another word she swung round and disappeared up a side glade. As she vanished among the beech trees, a figure as russet as the drift of leaves, I thought I had never seen anything more quick and slender, and I fervently hoped that I should never see her again.
CHAPTER V.
In that hope I was mistaken. A fortnight later the Treasury Solicitor sent me the papers in one of those intricate international cases which were the debris of the war. It was a claim by a resident abroad, who had not lost his British nationality, for compensation for some oppressive act of one of the transient Greek Governments. I left the thing to my “devil,” and just skimmed his note before the necessary conference with the plaintiff’s solicitors. To my surprise I saw that it had to do with the island of Plakos and the name of Arabin.
Mr. Mower, of the reputable firm of Mower and Lidderdale, was not unlike a sheep in appearance — a Leicester ewe for choice. He had a large pale high-boned face, rimless spectacles, a crop of nice fleecy white hair, and the bedside manner of the good family solicitor. My hasty study of the papers showed me that the oppressive acts were not denied, but that the title of the plaintiff was questioned.
“This is a matter of domestic law,” I said—”the lex loci rei sitæ. If the title to the land is disputed, it is a case for the Greek courts.”
“We have reason to believe that the defence is not seriously put forward, for the title is beyond dispute, and we are at a loss to understand the attitude of the Greek Government. The documents are all in our possession, and we took Mr. Blakeney’s advice on them. His opinion is among the papers left with you — and you will see that he has no doubt on the matter.”
Mr. Blakeney certainly had not, as I saw from his opinion, nor had my “devil.” The latter characterized the defence as “monstrous.” It seemed to be based on an arbitrary act of the old Greek National Assembly of 1830. My note said that the title was complete in every respect, and that the attempt to question it seemed to be a species of insanity. A name caught my attention.
“What is Koré?” I asked.
“It is Miss Arabin’s Christian name. Greek, I presume,” said Mr. Mower, very much in the tone in which Mr. Pecksniff observed, “Pagan, I regret to say.”
I read the note again, and Blakeney’s opinion. Blakeney was an authority from whom I was not disposed to differ, and the facts seemed too patent for argument. As I turned over the papers I saw the name of another solicitor on them.
“You have not always acted for the Arabin family?” I asked.
“Only within the last few months. Derwents were the family solicitors, but Miss Arabin was dissatisfied with them and withdrew her business. Curiously enough, they advised that the claim of the Greek Government was good, and should not be opposed.”
“What!” I exclaimed. Derwents are one of the best firms in England, and the senior partner, Sebastian Derwent, was my oldest client. He was not only a sound lawyer, but a good scholar and a good fellow. What on earth had induced him to give such paradoxical advice?
I told Mr. Mower that the matter seemed plain enough, but that for my own satisfaction I proposed to give further consideration to the papers. I took them home with me that evening, and the more I studied them the less I could understand Derwent’s action. The thing seemed a bluff so impudent as to be beyond argument. The abstract of title was explicit enough, and Blakeney, who had had the original documents, was emphatic on the point. But the firm of Derwents was not in the habit of acting without good cause. . . . I found myself becoming interested in the affair. Plakos was still a disquieting memory, and the outrageous girl at Wirlesdon was of a piece with its strangeness.
A day or two later I was dining at the Athenæum before going down to the House, and I saw Sebastian Derwent eating a solitary meal at an adjacent table. I moved over beside him, and after some casual conversation I ventured to sound him on the subject. With another man it might have been a delicate task, but we were old and confidential friends.
I told him I had had the Plakos case before me. “You used to act for the Arabins?” I said.
He nodded, and a slight embarrassment entered his manner. “My father and grandfather, too, before me. The firm had a difficult time with old Tom Arabin. He had a habit of coming down to the office with a horsewhip, and on one occasion my grandfather was compelled to wrest it from him, break it over his knee, and pitch it into the fire.”
“I can imagine easier clients. But I am puzzled about that preposterous Greek claim. I can’t think how it came to be raised, for it is sheer bluff.”
He reddened a little, and crumbled his bread.
“I advised Miss Arabin not to dispute it,” he said.
“I know, and I can’t imagine why. You advised her to sit down under a piece of infamous extortion.”
“I advised her to settle it.”
“But how can you settle a dispute when all the rights are on one side? Do you maintain that there was any law or equity in the Greek case?”
He hesitated for a second. “No,” he said, “the claim was bad in law. But its acceptance would have had certain advantages for Miss Arabin.”
I suppose I looked dumbfounded. “It’s a long story,” he said, “and I’m not sure that I have the right to tell it to you.”
“Let us leave it at that, then. Of course it’s no business of mine.” I did not want to embarrass an old friend.
But he seemed disinclined to leave it. “You think I have acted unprofessionally?” he ventured.
“God forbid! I know you too well, and I don’t want to poke my nose into private affairs.”
“I can tell you this much. Miss Arabin is in a position of extreme difficulty. She is alone in the world, without a near relation. She is very young, and not quite the person to manage a troublesome estate.”
“But surely that is no reason why she should surrender her patrimony to a bogus demand?”
“It would not have been exactly surrender. I advised her not to submit but to settle. Full compensation would have been paid if she had given up Plakos.”
“Oh, come now,” I cried. “Who ever heard of voluntary compensation being paid by a little stony-broke Government in Eastern Europe?”
“It would have been arranged,” he said. “Miss Arabin had friends — a friend — who had great influence. The compensation was privately settled, and it was on a generous scale. Miss Arabin has fortunately other sources of income than Plakos: indeed, I do not think she draws any serious revenue from the island. She would have received a sum of money in payment, the interest on which would have added substantially to her income.”
“But I still don’t see the motive. If the lady is not worried about money, why should her friends be so anxious to increase her income?”
Mr. Derwent shook his head. “Money is not the motive. The fact is that Plakos is a troublesome property. The Arabin family have never been popular, and the inhabitants are turbulent and barely civilized. The thing is weighing on her mind. It is not the sort of possession for a young girl.”
“I see. In order to rid Miss Arabin of a damnosa hæreditas you entered into a friendly conspiracy. I gather that she saw through it.”
He nodded. “She is very quick-witted, and was furious at the questioning of her title. That was my mistake. I underrated her intelligence. I should have had the thing more ingeniously framed. I can assure you that my last interview with her
was very painful. I was forced to admit the thinness of the Greek claim, and after that I had a taste of Tom Arabin’s temper. She is an extraordinary child, but there is wonderful quality in her, wonderful courage. I confess I am thankful as a lawyer to be rid of her affairs, but as a friend of the family I cannot help being anxious. . . . She is so terribly alone in the world.”
“That is a queer story,” I said. “Of course you behaved as I should have expected, but I fancy that paternal kindliness is thrown away on that young woman. I met her a few weeks ago in a country house, and she struck me as peculiarly able to look after herself. One last question. Who is the friend who is so all-powerful at Athens?”
“That I fear I am not at liberty to tell you,” was the answer.
This tale whetted my curiosity. From old Folliot I had learned something of the record of the Arabins, and I had my own impression of Plakos as clear as a cameo. Now I had further details in my picture. Koré Arabin (odd name! I remembered from my distant schooldays that Koré was Greek for a “maiden” — it had nothing to do with Corisande of the circus) was the mistress of that sinister island and that brooding house of a people who detested her race. There was danger in the place, danger so great that some friend unknown was prepared to pay a large price to get her out of it, and had involved in the plot the most decorous solicitor in England. Who was this friend? I wanted to meet him and to hear more of Plakos, for I realized that he and not Derwent was the authority.
Speculation as to his identity occupied a good deal of my leisure, till suddenly I remembered what Lady Nantley had told me. Miss Arabin had been living in London with the Ertzbergers before she came to Wirlesdon. The friend could only be Theodore Ertzberger. He had endless Greek connections, was one of the chief supporters of Venizelos, and it was through his house that the new Greek loan was to be issued. I had met him, of course, and my recollection was of a small bright-eyed man with a peaked grey beard and the self-contained manner of the high financier. I had liked him, and found nothing of the rastaquouère in him to which Mollie objected. His wife as another matter. She was a large, flamboyant Belgian Jewess, a determined social climber, and a great patron of art and music, who ran a salon, and whose portraits were to be found in every exhibition of the young school of painters. It was borne in on me that my curiosity would not be satisfied till I had had a talk with Ertzberger.
Lady Amysfort arranged the meeting at a Sunday luncheon, when Madame Ertzberger was mercifully stricken with influenza.
Except for the hostess, it was a man’s party, and afterwards she manoeuvred that Ertzberger and I should be left alone in a corner of the big drawing-room.
I did not waste time beating about the bush, for I judged from his face that this man would appreciate plain dealing. There was something simple and fine about his small regular features and the steady regard of his dark eyes.
“I am glad to have this chance of a talk with you,” I said. “I have lately been consulted about Plakos, and Miss Arabin’s claim against the Greek Government. Also, a few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Miss Arabin. The whole business interests me strongly — not as a lawyer but as a human being. You see, just before the war I happened to visit Plakos, and I can’t quite get the place out of my head. You are a friend of hers, and I should like to know something more about the island. I gather that it’s not the most comfortable kind of estate.”
He looked me straight in the face. “I think you know Mr. Sebastian Derwent,” he said.
“I do. And he gave me a hint of Miss Arabin’s difficulties, and the solution proposed. His conduct may not have been strictly professional, but it was extraordinarily kind. But let me make it quite clear that he never mentioned your name, or gave me any sort of clue to it. I guessed that you were the friend, because I knew that Miss Arabin had been staying in your house.”
“You guessed rightly. It is not a thing that I naturally want made public, but I am not in the least ashamed of the part I played. I welcome the opportunity of discussing it with you. It is a curious thing, but Miss Arabin has already spoken of you to me.”
“She asked me to advise her, and I’m afraid was rather annoyed when I told her that I couldn’t take private practice.”
“But she has not given up the notion. She never gives up any notion. She has somehow acquired a strong belief in your wisdom.”
“I am obliged to her, but I am not in a position to help.”
He laid his hand on my arm. “Do not refuse her,” he said earnestly. “Believe me, no woman ever stood in more desperate need of friends.”
His seriousness impressed me. “She has a loyal one in you, at any rate. And she seems to be popular, and to have a retinue of young men.”
He looked at me sharply. “You think she is a light-headed girl, devoted to pleasure — rather second-rate pleasure — a little ill-bred perhaps. But you are wrong, Sir Edward. Here in England she is a butterfly — dancing till all hours, a madcap in town and in the hunting-field, a bewitcher of foolish boys. Oh, bad form, I grant you — the worst of bad form. But that is because she comes here for an anodyne. She is feverishly gay because she is trying to forget — trying not to remember that there is tragedy waiting behind her.”
“Where?” I asked.
“In the island of Plakos.”
Tragedy — that was the word he used. It had an incongruous sound to me, sitting in a warm London drawing-room after an excellent luncheon, with the sound of chatter and light laughter coming from the group around my hostess. But he had meant it — his grave voice and burdened face showed it — and the four walls seemed to fade into another picture — a twilight by a spring sea, and under a shadowy house two men with uplifted hands and hate and fear in their eyes.
“If you will do me the honour to listen,” Ertzberger was speaking, “I should like to tell you more about Miss Arabin’s case.”
“Have you known her long?” I asked. A sudden disinclination had come over me to go further in this affair. I felt dimly that if I became the recipient of confidences I might find myself involved in some distasteful course of action.
“Since she was a child. I had dealings with her father — business dealings — he was no friend of mine — but there was a time when I often visited Plakos. I can claim that I have known Miss Arabin for nearly fifteen years.”
“Her father was a bit of a blackguard?”
“None of the words we use glibly to describe evil are quite adequate to Shelley Arabin. The man was rotten to the very core. His father — I remember him too — was unscrupulous and violent, but he had a heart. And he had a kind of burning courage. Shelley was as hard and cold as a stone, and he was also a coward. But he had genius — a genius for wickedness. He was beyond all comparison the worst man I have ever known.”
“What did he do?” I asked. “I should have thought the opportunities for wrong-doing in a remote island were limited.”
“He was a student of evil. He had excellent brains and much learning, and he devoted it all to researches in devilry. He had his friends — people of his own tastes, who acknowledged him as their master. Some of the gatherings at Plakos would have made Nero vomit. Men and women both. . . . The place stank of corruption. I have only heard the orgies hinted at — heathenish remnants from the backstairs of the Middle Ages. And on the fringes of that hell the poor child grew up.”
“Unsmirched?”
“Unsmirched! I will stake my soul on that. A Muse, a Grace, a nymph among satyrs. Her innocence kept her from understanding. And then as she grew older and began to have an inkling of horrors, she was in flaming revolt. . . . I managed to get her sent away, first to school, then to my wife’s charge. Otherwise I think there would have been a tragedy.”
“But surely with her father’s death the danger is gone.”
He shook his head. “Plakos is a strange place, for the tides of civilization and progress seem to have left it high and dry. It is a relic of old days, full of wild beliefs and pagan habits. That was w
hy Shelley could work his will with it. He did not confine his evil-doing to his friends and the four walls of his house. He laid a spell of terror on the island. There are horrid tales — I won’t trouble you with them — about his dealings with the peasants, for he revelled in corrupting youth. And terror grew soon into hate, till in his last days the man’s nerve broke. He lived his last months in gibbering fear. There is something to be said after all for mediæval methods. Shelley was the kind of scoundrel whom an outraged people should have treated with boiling oil.”
“Does the hatred pursue his daughter?” I asked.
“Most certainly. It took years for Plakos to recognize Shelley’s enormities, and now the realization has become cumulative, growing with every month. I have had inquiries made — it is easy for me since I have agents everywhere in the Ægean — and I can tell you the thing has become a mania. The war brought the island pretty near starvation, for the fishing was crippled and a succession of bad seasons spoiled the wretched crops. Also there was a deadly epidemic of influenza. Well, the unsettlement of men’s minds, which is found all over the world to-day, has become in Plakos sheer madness. Remember, the people are primitive, and have savagery in their blood and odd faiths in their hearts. I do not know much about these things, but scholars have told me that in the islands the old gods are not altogether dead. The people have suffered, and they blame their sufferings on the Arabins, till they have made a monstrous legend of it. Shelley is in hell and beyond their reach, but Shelley’s daughter is there. She is the witch who has wronged them, and they are the kind of folk who are capable of witch-burning.”
“Good God!” I cried. “Then the girl ought never to be allowed to return.”
“So I thought, and hence my little conspiracy which failed. I may tell you in confidence that it was I who prompted the action of the Greek Government, and was prepared to find the compensation. But I was met by a stone wall. She insists on holding on to the place. Worse, she insists on going back. She went there last spring, and the spring is a perilous time, for the people have had the winter to brood over their hatred. I do not know whether she is fully conscious of the risk, for sometimes I think she is still only a child. But last year she was in very real danger, and she must have felt it. Behind all her bravado I could see that she was afraid.”
