21 Greatest Spy Thrillers in One Premium Edition (Mystery & Espionage Series)

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  “You wondered why I have spent so much of my time out here,” she said quietly. “Now you will know. If you listen as I am listening, as I have listened for so many weary hours, so many weary years, you will hear them calling to me, David and John and Stephen. ‘The light!’ Do you hear what they are crying? ‘The light! Fentolin’s light!’ Look!”

  She forced him to look once more at the top of the boat-house.

  “They were right!” she proclaimed, her voice gaining in strength and intensity. “They were neither drunk nor reckless. They steered as straight as human hand could guide a tiller, for Fentolin’s light! And there they are, calling and calling at the bottom of the sea—my three boys and my man. Do you know for whom they call?”

  Mr. Fentolin shrank back in his chair.

  “Take this woman away!” he ordered the fishermen. “Do you hear? Take her away; she is mad!”

  They looked towards him, but not one of them moved. Mr. Fentolin raised his whistle to his lips, and blew it.

  “Meekins!” he cried. “Where are you, Meekins?”

  He turned his head and saw at once that Meekins was powerless. Five or six of the fishermen had gathered around him. There were at least thirty of them about, sinewy, powerful men. The only person who moved towards Mr. Fentolin’s carriage was Jacob, the coast guardsman.

  “Mr. Fentolin, sir,” he said, “the lads have got your bully safe. It’s a year and more that Hannah Cox has been about the village with some story about two lights on a stormy night. It’s true what she says—that her man and boys lie drowned. There’s William Green, besides, and a nephew of my own—John Kallender. And Philip Green—he was saved. He swore by all that was holy that he steered straight for the light when his boat struck, and that as he swam for shore, five minutes later, he saw the light reappear in another place. It’s a strange story. What have you to say, sir, about that?”

  He pointed straight to the wire-encircled globe which towered on its slender support above the boat-house. Mr. Fentolin looked at it and looked back at the coast guardsman. The brain of a Machiavelli could scarcely have invented a plausible reply.

  “The light was never lit there,” he said. “It was simply to help me in some electrical experiments.”

  Then, for the first time in their lives, those who were looking on saw Mr. Fentolin apart from his carriage. Without any haste but with amazing strength, Hannah Cox leaned over, and, with her arms around his middle, lifted him sheer up into the air. She carried him, clasped in her arms, a weird, struggling object, to the clumsy boat that lay always at the top of the beach. She dropped him into the bottom, took her seat, and unshipped the oars. For one moment the coast guardsman hesitated; then he obeyed her look. He gave the boat a push which sent it grinding down the pebbles into the sea. The woman began to work at the oars. Every now and then she looked over her shoulder at that thin line of white surf which they were all the time approaching.

  “What are you doing, woman?” Mr. Fentolin demanded hoarsely. “Listen! It was an accident that your people were drowned. I’ll give you an annuity. I’ll make you rich for life—rich! Do you understand what that means?”

  “Aye!” she answered, looking down upon him as he lay doubled up at the bottom of the boat. “I know what it means to be rich—better than you, maybe. Not to let the gold and silver pieces fall through your fingers, or to live in a great house and be waited upon by servants who desert you in the hour of need. That isn’t being rich. It’s rich to feel the touch of the one you love, to see the faces around of those you’ve given birth to, to move on through the days and nights towards the end, with them around; not to know the chill loneliness of an empty life. I am a poor woman, Mr. Fentolin, and it’s your hand that made me so, and not all the miracles that the Bible ever told of can make me rich again.”

  “You are a fool!” he shrieked. “You can buy forgetfulness! The memory of everything passes.”

  “I may be a fool,” she retorted grimly, “and you the wise man; but this day we’ll both know the truth.”

  There was a little murmur from the shore, where the fishermen stood in a long line.

  “Bring him back, missus,” Jacob called out. “You’ve scared him enough. Bring him back. We’ll leave him to the law.”

  They were close to the line of surf now; they had passed it, indeed, a little on the left, and the boat was drifting. She stood up, straight and stern, and her face, as she looked towards the land, was lit with the fire of the prophetess.

  “Aye,” she cried, “we’ll leave him to the law—to the law of God!”

  Then they saw her stoop down, and once more with that almost superhuman strength which seemed to belong to her for those few moments, she lifted the strange object who lay cowering there, high above her head. From the shore they realised what was going to happen, and a great shout arose. She stood on the side of the boat and jumped, holding her burden tightly in her arms. So they went down and disappeared.

  Half a dozen of the younger fishermen were in the water even before the grim spectacle was ended; another ran for a boat that was moored a little way down the beach. But from the first the search was useless. Only Jacob, who was a person afflicted with many superstitions, wiped the sweat from his forehead as he leaned over the bow of his boat and looked down into that fathomless space.

  “I heard her singing, her or her wraith,” he swore afterwards. “I’ll never forget the moment I looked down and down, and the water seemed to grow clearer, and I saw her walking there at the bottom among the rocks, with him over her back, singing as she went, looking everywhere for George and the boys!”

  But if indeed his eyes were touched with fire at that moment, no one else in the world saw anything more of Miles Fentolin.

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  Table of Contents

  Mr. John P. Dunster removed the cigar from his teeth and gazed at the long white ash with the air of a connoisseur. He was stretched in a long chair, high up in the terraced gardens behind the Hall. At his feet were golden mats of yellow crocuses; long borders of hyacinths—pink and purple; beds of violets; a great lilac tree, with patches of blossom here and there forcing their way into a sunlit world. The sea was blue; the sheltered air where they sat was warm and perfumed. Mr. Dunster, who was occupying the position of a favoured guest, was feeling very much at home.

  “There is one thing,” he remarked meditatively, “which I can’t help thinking about you Britishers. You may deserve it or you may not, but you do have the most almighty luck.”

  “Sheer envy,” Hamel murmured. “We escape from our tight corners by forethought.”

  “Not on your life, sir,” Mr. Dunster declared vigorously. “A year or less ago you got a North Sea scare, and on the strength of a merely honourable understanding with your neighbour, you risk your country’s very existence for the sake of adding half a dozen battleships to your North Sea Squadron. The day the last of those battleships passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, this little Conference was plotted. I tell you they meant to make history there.

  “There was enough for everybody—India for Russia, a time-honoured dream, but why not? Alsace-Lorraine and perhaps Egypt, for France; Australia for Japan; China and South Africa for Germany. Why not? You may laugh at it on paper but I say again—why not?”

  “It didn’t quite come off, sir,” Gerald observed.

  “It didn’t,” Mr. Dunster admitted, “partly owing to you. There were only two things needed: France to consider her own big interests and to ignore an entente from which she gains nothing that was not assured to her under the new agreement, and the money. Strange,” Mr. Dunster continued, “how people forget that factor, and yet the man who was responsible for The Hague Conference knew it. We in the States are right outside all these little jealousies and wrangles that bring Europe, every now and then, right up to the gates of war, but I’m hanged if there is one of you dare pass through those gates without a hand on our money markets. It’s a new word in history, that little docum
ent, news of which Mr. Gerald here took to The Hague, the word of the money kings of the world. There is something that almost nips your breath in the idea that a dozen men, descended from the Lord knows whom, stopped a war which would have altered the whole face of history.”

  “There was never any proof,” Hamel remarked, “that France would not have remained staunch to us.”

  “Very likely not,” Mr. Dunster agreed, “but, on the other hand, your country had never the right to put such a burden upon her honour. Remember that side by side with those other considerations, a great statesman’s first duty is to the people over whom he watches, not to study the interests of other lands. However, it’s finished. The Hague Conference is broken up. The official organs of the world allude to it, if at all, as an unimportant gathering called together to discuss certain frontier questions with which England had nothing to do. But the memory of it will live. A good cold douche for you people, I should say, and I hope you’ll take warning by it. Whatever the attitude of America as a nation may be to these matters, the American people don’t want to see the old country in trouble. Gee whiz! What’s that?”

  There was a little cry from all of them. Only Hamel stood without sign of surprise, gazing downward with grim, set face. A dull roar, like the booming of a gun, flashes of fire, and a column of smoke—and all that was left of St. David’s Tower was one tottering wall and a scattered mass of masonry.

  “I had an idea,” Hamel said quietly, “that St. David’s Tower was going to spoil the landscape for a good many years. My property, you know, and there’s the end of it. I am sick of seeing people for the last few days come down and take photographs of it for every little rag that goes to press.”

  Mr. Dunster pointed out to the line of surf beyond. “If only some hand,” he remarked, “could plant dynamite below that streak of white, so that the sea could disgorge its dead! They tell me there’s a Spanish galleon there, and a Dutch warship, besides a score or more of fishing-boats.”

  Mrs. Fentolin shivered a little. She drew her cloak around her. Gerald, who had been watching her, sprang to his feet.

  “Come,” he exclaimed, “we chose the gardens for our last afternoon here, to be out of the way of these places! We’ll go round the hill.”

  Mrs. Fentolin shook her head once more. Her face had recovered its serenity. She looked downward gravely but with no sign of fear.

  “There is nothing to terrify us there, Gerald,” she declared. “The sea has gathered, and the sea will hold its own.”

  Hamel held out his hand to Esther.

  “I have destroyed the only house in the world which I possess,” he said. “Come and look for violets with me in the spinney, and let us talk of the houses we are going to build, and the dreams we shall dream in them.”

  THE END

  THE DUMB GODS SPEAK

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  FOREWORD

  Table of Contents

  Seven men were seated around a table in a magnificently proportioned but plainly furnished room on the topmost floor of the famous Humberstone Building. That they were men of consequence was evident by their appearance and general bearing. That they were assembled for a serious purpose was clearly apparent from the general atmosphere of gravity and suspense. They appeared to be mostly between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, except for one who might have been a few years older, and who was dressed in the sombre garb of an ecclesiastic of high rank. They sat in silence save for an occasional uneasy observation. They had all moved their chairs to a slight angle as though to be able to face one side of the room, into the wall of which had been set two large sheets of some sort of metal, the top sheet smooth, the lower one honeycombed with small interstices. Suddenly the man at the end of the oval table raised his finger.

  “Humberstone is coming,” he announced.

  They all turned towards the folding doors, which at that moment swung open. An invalid’s couch on rubber-tyred wheels was pushed quietly into the room by a tall, well-built young man of athletic appearance, but with strongly chiselled features and the fine high forehead of a student. Everyone seated in the room rose for a moment. The man upon the couch, who was propped up into an al most sitting posture, raised his hand in salutation. The couch was wheeled to a convenient position, from which its occupant could see every one of the seven men. His hungry eyes, still bright and powerful, deep-set in his worn face, familiar to the world through the ceaseless efforts of decades of photographers, swept around the table. He ad dressed the man directly opposite him, a man of middle-age and dignified presence. He spoke slowly and his voice was thin. Nevertheless it was marvellously distinct.

  “I must conserve my words,” he said. “Digby Long, you are here to represent the President?”

  “That is so, Mark,” was the friendly reply. “As Vice President of the United States I am empowered to sign any papers you may present, or to come to any agreement with you which I may consider desirable.”

  “I must remind myself of the personality of each one of you,” the man on the couch went on. “I must satisfy my self that you are all here, for my physicians, who are wait ing outside, have issued their last warning.”

  No one attempted any sort of conventional protest. There was, indeed, something grotesque in the idea of death venturing to lay its stranglehold upon a man who had defied and conquered so many of the elemental laws of nature. Words would have seemed utterly inadequate. They kept silent.

  “You, General, I remember perfectly,” he continued, indicating the Vice President’s neighbour—a fine man of military appearance. “You are General Percheron, Commander in Chief of the Army.”

  “That is so, sir,” was the quiet acknowledgment. “Glad you have not forgotten me.”

  “Next to you,” Mark Humberstone proceeded, “I recognise Admiral Powers. You have just been appointed Admiral in Command of the entire Fleet.”

  “That is so, sir.”

  The speaker paused for a moment. He looked around at the others. There was no form of greeting in his gesture or speech. He seemed to recognise them, however, without difficulty.

  “My fellow worker, Daniel Rathborne,” he continued thoughtfully, addressing his immediate neighbour. “Yes, it is right that you should be here. The work is finished but it must be held together. Phineas Laythrop, you are here as Secretary of State, and you, Martin Clough, are the newly appointed Secretary of War. Finally, there is my old friend, Dr. Felton, Bishop of New York.”

  “You have named them all, sir,” the young man who had wheeled in the couch announced, leaning a little forward.

  “I have, alas, no words to spare to bid you greeting or farewell,” Humberstone said, taking into his hand the black cylinder from the bracket attached to the side of the couch. “Will you please, the moment I touch this switch, turn towards the television receiver and listen to the loud speaker. Watch! Now, if you please.”

  There was a murmur from the table. Everyone was leaning forward. The young man had taken
his father’s wrist, the wrist of a child, into his hand. Upon the screen was suddenly depicted a river, and in the middle of the stream a huge man-of-war making apparently slow progress against a powerful tide.

  “The battleship you see,” the man on the couch went on, “is the old City of Washington. She is making her way down the Hudson. You have her visualised?”

  There was an affirmative chorus. Mark Humberstone moved an inch or two in his place, white and ghastly in the strong light, his eyes apparently devouring the screen. He leaned slightly to one side and touched the switch attached to the cylinder. For a moment there was a flash of scarlet light which darted around the room like an escaped ray. The Bishop started in his chair. The Vice President rose involuntarily to his feet. There was a faint staccato murmur of amazement.

  “Continue to watch, if you please,” the still quiet voice from the couch insisted. “By this time I think you discover that the battleship is out of control. Watch. You see her swinging round in the tide? Already she is in process of disintegration…You observe the list?”

  For the last time on earth, Mark Humberstone smiled as he watched their faces.

  “She is helpless,” he told them. “She is four hundred and fifty miles away. It would have made no difference if she had been four thousand. I touch a switch and every electrical appliance which she possesses is dumb and nerve less. Our friend the Admiral there knows what that means. She is finished.”

  There was a rumble of voices from around the table. Astonishment had given place to awe. Everyone was star ing at the tragedy depicted upon that shining plate of metal.

  “Your whole attention, if you please, my friends,” the great scientist begged, and it was noticeable that his voice had become a shade weaker. “What you have seen taking place, the powers which I am handing over can bring about at any time from a battleship, a fort, an observatory. We believed that the discovery of radium itself was the greatest thing that had happened to the world in centuries. Be sides this combination of forces which I present to you, this amplification and concentration of those electric cur rents with which our atmosphere is filled, radium is of no more account than the sands of the desert. I am handing over to you who sit around that table the gravest responsibility that was ever placed upon the shoulders of mankind. The control of these new powers, in collaboration with a staff who know the secret only in sections, will be yours to deal with on these terms: You will each put your signature to the document which the Vice President has already in his hand, and you will swear by the honour of your country that you will never consent to these powers being put into operation except for the holy purpose of proving to the world, by illustration, that war be tween the nations is no longer a possible enterprise. Only if at any time the United States should be attacked by a foreign enemy will you make use of these secret controls, which I have sometimes thought in a nightmare I must have dragged up out of hell. Each one of you will appoint a successor to himself, next in rank and capacity, who will succeed him in the case of his death. Seven you are now, and seven you are to remain till the time of wars is past. This is understood?”