Jamison wavered only a moment; then he and his constables set off at a rapid trot along the rise toward the roadside where the tinker's van stood.
Pons regarded me quizzically. "You are surprised, Parker?"
"Nothing you say or do any longer surprises me," I answered. "But just the same, if I may ask. . . ."
"It was all plainly in evidence," he replied. "The tinker's van had been in place not more than a week, possibly less, as you could have seen by the condition of the grass beneath it. Rain had not fallen there; it had fallen around the van. Hence it was present yesterday. But the place where the horse was tethered indicated that animal's presence for several days, or approximately just before the coming of the angling expedition, brought there by the same source from the Foreign Office which had information about Spencer. The tinker's van was so obvious that Jamison, eager to follow the Foreign Office's directive in regard to foreign agents, hardly considered a vehicle so indigenous to the scene. And the young lady who came to the door? Was she not pretty? Young, charming? And would not her appeal for help because her old, crippled father had fallen and injured himself have moved any British gentleman, even you, Parker? Come, admit it, you have always had a soft spot for the ladies, Parker!"
I smiled ruefully.
"Besides, the entire theory was of a piece; if any part of it were wrong, then the whole could manifestly be in error. But the Royal Coachmen divulged their secret, proving that Spencer was enticed away. And in the van we found an agent who could scarcely be improved upon for her ability to be enticing to a young man like Rigby Spencer.
"As for Spencer's ingenious flies, we shall post them to Lord Kilvert and ease his mind."
Young Rigby Spencer called at 7B three days later, his alert blue eyes twinkling, his good-natured face still somewhat abashed by the ease with which he had been taken. About his head he still bore signs of maltreatment.
"I came to thank you, Mr. Pons. Though the papers tell us it was all Inspector Jamison's work, I have other facts from my superiors," he said. "We have stopped up the leak in our office, and Lord Kilvert has destroyed my Royal Coachmen."
"A clever hiding-place," said Pons. "But no angler could ever lose five Royal Coachmen one after another."
"And only someone appreciative of the niceties of that royal pastime would have come to that conclusion," answered Spencer immediately. "The young lady is an accomplished actress, Mr. Pons. The two of them gave me a rough time of it, though I think the worst of it was being so well trussed up as to be helpless in that false roof when the men from the Yard searched the van."
"I daresay. But in the interests of that monarch whom we both acknowledge as our sovereign, Mr. Spencer, I suggest that in matters of state, gallantry must come second," said Pons.
Watching him go off down Praed Street, Pons added, "That young man bids fair to become a valuable and trusted public servant, Parker. He has learned a lesson no amount of instruction could have conveyed to him."
"So have I," I answered. "I would never have dreamed that so much could be done with a common Royal Coachman!"
The Adventure of the Frightened Baronet
FROM THE CHESS problem in which he had been absorbed, Solar Pons slowly raised his head, cocked a little, and smiled. His fingers relinquished their hold upon the knight; he leaned back.
"Yes, yes, as I thought," he murmured, "we are about to have company."
London was lost in fog, a heavy autumnal curtain shutting the city away from our lodgings in Praed Street, and at first there was only the distant hum of diminished traffic that was the pulse of the city, and the several small noises of water dropping; then I heard the curiously muffled sound of hoofbeats, traveling a short distance, stopping, then coming forward again.
"Surely he is looking for Number 7," observed Pons with satisfaction, for time had been pressing heavily on his hands since the bizarre adventure of the Octagon House. "To whom else would he address himself at this hour of the night? Nor is it amiss to surmise that he has come up from the country not far from London; horse- drawn carriages are uncommon indeed within the city. Clearly now," he went on, listening intently, "he has got down just a few doors away; he has gone up to the door, flashed his light on the number. No, that is not number seven; yet, number seven cannot be far away. Hear him! He returns to his carriage —but he does not get in; no, he is too close to the desired address for that —he leads his horse down the street a few doors, and here he is."
I looked toward the night-bell, back to Pons's expectant features, marking his keen eyes, his aquiline nose, his firm, thin-lipped mouth, touched still by his smile, and once more at the bell. On the instant it jangled. Pons stepped to the speaking tube and invited our visitor to come up, and in a few moments there was a tap on the door giving to our lodgings. I strode across the room and opened it.
Across the threshold stepped a short, stout, sturdily built gentleman of approximately sixty years of age, swarthy of skin, heavily bearded, and still dark-haired; he fixed his small glittering eyes on Pons, bowed curtly, and handed him an envelope. It was unsealed.
I crowded up to Pons and looked over his shoulder at the card he took from the envelope. Alexander Taber Rowan, K.C.B. Chiltern Manor. Pons turned the card over. In a shaky script someone had scrawled thereon: "For God's sake, come! I can't stand it much longer." I flashed a glance of inquiry at Pons, and saw that his eyes had lit up with the excitement of the chase.
"Late of His Majesty's Service, attached to the staff of the Viceroy of India," said Pons, returning the card to the envelope and dropping both to the table. He looked across the lamplight to where Sir Alexander's man stood, fingering his cap.
"I am Kennerly, sir."
"What is it?" asked Pons.
"It's the curse of the stone, Mr. Pons."
His voice was gruff but not discourteous. What he said apparently conveyed something to Pons, though it meant nothing to me, and I saw that at the moment at least Pons had no intention of enlightening me. He nodded.
"You were sent to bring us?"
"If possible."
"Good. We'll be with you in a few moments."
While Pons got into his raincoat, I saw him scrutinizing Kennerly with marked interest.
"A veteran of India yourself, I see," he said presently.
"Yes, sir."
"Of great personal service to the Maharajah of Indore."
"I saved his life, sir."
"Very likely in the encounter in which you lost your foot."
"Yes, sir."
By this time Pons was ready; he turned to me, his eyes twinkling at the sight of my obvious efforts to observe the bases for his deductions and seeing only the telltale smoothness of the shoe which betrayed the lack of a foot. "Coming, Parker?"
We descended the stairs after leaving a message for Mrs. Johnson, our landlady, and passed into the thick fog which lent to Pons and Kennerly a shadowy, almost intangible being. The carriage loomed abruptly out of the night. We entered it. Kennerly mounted before us; and soon we were traveling northwest through London in the direction of the St. John's Wood. Our pace was necessarily slow, but the horse seemed to proceed with an uncanny instinct and, as far as I could determine, no errors in direction were made. I must have dozed for a time because when I awoke we had cleared the suburbs.
Pons sat deep in thought, his visored cap low over his face, and I hesitated to disturb him; yet I rankled within at my own inability to follow his deductions, and finally I could contain myself no longer.
"Doubtless it is a most elementary matter, but how in the devil did you know that this fellow is a veteran of India?"
"Come, come, Parker—it should be obvious. For one thing, his military bearing; for another, he is the trusted servant of the baronet. What more likely than that he was his orderly in service? But, primarily, he wears a ring he could have got only in India."
"I can follow the observation about the lost foot easily enough, but what about his service to the Maharajah of
Indore?"
"The ring he wears bears the crest of the Maharajah. Such rings are not for sale. It follows therefore that he must have been given it by the Maharajah himself. Since such a ring is not given simply as a gift, for it is too personal, but rather as a mark of esteem, it is not at all a shot in the dark to assume that our visitor did the Maharajah a personal service of such vital importance that nothing short of the crested ring would satisfy the Maharajah's sense of gratitude. "
"And the card?" I asked, determined that nothing should escape me. "What did you make of that?"
"Only that our client is badly frightened, that his sending for me is done with the knowledge of no one else in the household save this man, that the matter is one in which he hesitates to seek police protection, very probably because of the attendant publicity, and that he has been drinking to keep up his nerve. From what his man has said, I take it that something has come up to remind him that the Eye of Siva which he acquired some thirty years ago during a campaign in the hill country of India was, after all, cursed, and that the fruits of this curse are now being visited upon him."
I took a deep breath and considered. "The script and what he writes betray some fright," I ventured.
"Capital! Though obvious."
"But the other matters — ?"
"He comes to us in preference to the police, and he comes at an hour which indicates secrecy; since he himself has nothing to fear from us, clearly he believes his family will disapprove of his sending for us. He therefore summons us at a time when he can present us to his household in fact, as a fait accompli. It is, further, not ill- advised to assume that there are troubled waters there. Finally, there was the distinct odour of rum about his card."
It was in the early hours of the morning that we arrived at Chiltern Manor in the low rolling country immediately adjacent to the hills which give the house its name. We had ridden out of the fog not far from the environs of London, and a waning moon shone down, shedding its pale light upon the wooded country and fields through which we now rode. The estate lay behind a high old stone wall, almost totally concealed by a heavy growth of vines, and surrounded by many trees and bushes. Rowan's man drove through a gate in the side-wall and directly around to the carriage entrance, where he left horse and carriage standing to lead us into the house, which rose up from among trees, an old stone building not without Victorian magnificence, at this early morning hour dark and sombre save for a faint glimmer of yellow light from a window on the second floor.
I could not help observing that we entered the house by a side entrance, and that Kennedy's movements were marked by a singular care, thus confirming Pons's surmise that Rowan had sent for us in secret; moreover, the entrance gave almost at once upon a narrow staircase, which clearly led up between the wall and a room below, almost a part of the wall as it were, for we were forced to proceed in single file by the small light of a pocket-torch which Kennerly used to illumine the stairs.
Pons's client waited in his own rooms. The pale light shed by the single lamp burning there presently disclosed him, an elderly man, deep in an upholstered chair, and wrapped in a steamer rug, as if for warmth. His chin rested upon his chest, and his sunken eyes looked at us from over his pince-nez. A thin moustache and beard, both white, in singular contrast to Kennedy's black growth, and a fringe of white hair seen from under the black skullcap he wore, ornamented his thin, ascetic face, white within the darkness of his immediate environment.
"Ah, Mr. Pons!" he said in a cultured, well-modulated voice. "I had hoped Kennerly could bring you." He glanced interrogatively at me, and Pons introduced me as his colleague. "I am afraid my message may have seemed somewhat incoherent to you."
"Not at all," responded Pons. "In fact, it is perfectly clear that something has happened to make you believe there may after all be something more than legend to the curse on the Eye of Siva."
A wan smile touched the baronet's lips. "I am reassured. I made no mistake in sending for you."
"Let us hope that we may be able to justify your confidence,'' said Pons quietly. "However, if I remember rightly, the stone is now in the British Museum."
"It has been there for twenty-five years." He shrugged. "But apparently this has made no difference. I will not attempt to deny that I am badly frightened, Mr. Pons. Approximately two months ago the first of these mysterious events took place. I thought initially that I was the subject of a practical joke in the worst possible taste. The occasion was the Naval Conference; since Chiltern Manor is not too far from London, friends of mine in the diplomatic service in Britain for the Conference called on me. At the end of one of those days, I found a card in the tray. It read, Puranas Mahadeva. I regret that at the moment the significance of this did not occur to me; I assumed that it had been left by some minor official whom I had met at Delhi and forgotten.
"That night, Mr. Pons," he went on after a short pause, his eyes glittering strangely now, and his breath coming a little faster, testifying to his excitement at the memory of the incident he was about to relate, "that night, as I was preparing to retire, I was summoned from my study by a tap on my door and I stepped into the hall. No one was there. Now, sir, since I am as familiar with this house by night as by day, I did not turn on the light. I stepped out into the hallway, and had begun to walk down toward the stairs when my attention was attracted to what appeared to be a spot of illumination low on the floor along the wall; at second glance, I saw that it was moving steadily before me. And then, sir, I observed that it was not a light at all —but a kind of spectral image. Mr. Pons, it was the image of Siva, the Destroyer! Perfect in every detail, a miniature spectre! I was startled. I was not immediately disturbed; I felt I had experienced an illusion of some kind, and quickly turned on the lights. There was nothing in sight, nothing whatever. I examined the wall, the floor —nothing. I returned to my rooms somewhat shaken, thinking naturally of that old curse; an article not long before in the feature section of an American newspaper had brought all those old painful memories back; and it was then that it struck me with the force of a thunderclap what those words on the calling card stood for: Puranas is the title of Hindu scriptures; and Mahadeva is a less-widely known name for Siva! I took out the card at once —or perhaps I had better say, sir, that I took out the one I thought was the card I wanted. Mr. Pons —there was nothing whatever on it; it was perfectly blank; there was nothing to show that a single letter of printing had ever been on it!"
"Ah," murmured Pons delightedly.
"That was the beginning of a series of events which I am unable to explain save as the malign evidence of the workings of that ancient curse! The pattern has been repeated endlessly; the tap on the door, the strange apparition —nor has this been all; I have seen the spectre with increasing frequency on the top of the estate wall on the north and in other places where I would not have expected to come upon it. Moreover, within the past few nights, events have taken a more serious turn; I have awakened to the sound of voices warning me to prepare for death; I have also heard the strange whistles the Sepoys used to give; I am ashamed to confess that I have had recourse to rum to steady my nerves. It is the firm conviction of the family that I am losing my mind, for no one else has seen any of these apparitions, and they have held out against me in summoning help from outside, no doubt for fear of any publicity which might attend having you here. But last night the mastiff which guards the north gate vanished without a sound; I have no speculation as to what may have happened to him. And now I am convinced that at last the curse on the stone has become active again."
"Why?"
"You know the story of the stone, Mr. Pons. How the priests in that temple opposed the Maharajah —indeed, they made their temple a base of operations. We destroyed the temple, and the Eye of Siva was a prize of war; it is true that in the melee attendant upon the destruction of the temple, one of the guardian priests was slain. The newspapers will have it that it was this man who put a curse upon the stone, but the fact is that the only curse
connected with it was a general and ancient curse upon anyone who desecrated the temple; it is really not attached to the stone at all. However, as you know, the Maharajah died shortly thereafter, three of the soldiers accompanying me into the temple died within a year, and four months ago —the raison d'etre for that American newspaper article —Sir James McLeen, who commanded my right wing in that engagement, fell to his death under mysterious circumstances. These events, looked upon in the light of that ancient curse, naturally point to but one conclusion — to which I did not come until after I had begun to witness these manifestations; only then did the other events fall into their place in the pattern."
"You suggest that the design is to retrieve the Eye of Siva?"
"Not alone that, but to punish those responsible for the destruction of that temple." He touched his lips with his tongue, nervously.
"But I feel that you do not put much credence in the curse, Mr. Pons."
Pons smiled dryly. "Let us say rather that I am at the moment concerned only with the problem of which aspect of the matter is cause, and which is effect. I take it you own more than one dog."
"Yes, of course."
"You have said you have witnessed the apparition of Siva on the estate wall. Was its appearance accompanied by any demonstration from the dogs?"
"None."
"Does this suggest nothing to you?"
"Only that whatever is out there is meant for me alone. The Hindus have many very strange beliefs, Mr. Pons, and stranger things than this have happened in India, without any explanation."
"I have some acquaintance with the lore and legends of India," replied Pons absently. "Have you ever seen the spectre of Siva in someone else's company?"
"Yes, on one occasion my brother Ransom was with me. On another, my daughter's fiance, Geoffrey Saring. Neither of them was able to see anything. Yet the thing was as plain to me as you are, sitting there."
"Your man Kennerly has never seen it?"
August Derleth - The Solar Pons Omnibus Volume 1 Page 25
