The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer (ebook reader below 3000 .TXT) đź“•
"Good man!" he cried, wringing my hand in his impetuous way. "We start now."
"What, to-night?
"To-night! I had thought of turning in, I must admit. I have not dared to sleep for forty-eight hours, except in fifteen-minute stretches. But there is one move that must be made to-night and immediately. I must warn Sir Crichton Davey."
"Sir Crichton Davey--of the India--"
"Petrie, he is a doomed man! Unless he follows my instructions without question, without hesitation--before Heaven, nothing can save him! I do not know when the blow will fall, how it will fall, nor from whence, but I know that my first duty is to warn him. Let us walk down to the corner of the common and get a taxi."
How strangely does the adventurous intrude upon the humdrum; for, when it intrudes at all, more often than not its intrusion is sudden and unlooked for. To-day, we may seek for romance and fail to find it: unsought, it
Read free book «The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer (ebook reader below 3000 .TXT) 📕» - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: Sax Rohmer
- Performer: -
Read book online «The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer (ebook reader below 3000 .TXT) 📕». Author - Sax Rohmer
of his cause—the triumph of the yellow races.
I glanced at our notes. “Lord Southery,” I replied.
Smith tossed the morning paper across to me.
“Look,” he said shortly. “He’s dead.”
I read the account of the peer’s death, and glanced at
the long obituary notice; but no more than glanced at it.
He had but recently returned from the East, and now, after a
short illness, had died from some affection of the heart.
There had been no intimation that his illness was of a
serious nature, and even Smith, who watched over his flock—
the flock threatened by the wolf, Fu-Manchu—with jealous zeal,
had not suspected that the end was so near.
“Do you think he died a natural death, Smith?” I asked.
My friend reached across the table and rested the tip of a long
ringer upon one of the sub-headings to the account:
“SIR FRANK NARCOMBE SUMMONED TOO LATE.”
“You see,” said Smith, “Southery died during the night,
but Sir Frank Narcombe, arriving a few minutes later,
unhesitatingly pronounced death to be due to syncope,
and seems to have noticed nothing suspicious.”
I looked at him thoughtfully.
“Sir Frank is a great physician,” I said slowly; “but we must
remember he would be looking for nothing suspicious.”
“We must remember,” rapped Smith, “that, if Dr. Fu-Manchu
is responsible for Southery’s death, except to the eye
of an expert there would be nothing suspicious to see.
Fu-Manchu leaves no clews.”
“Are you going around?” I asked.
Smith shrugged his shoulders.
“I think not,” he replied. “Either a greater One than Fu-Manchu
has taken Lord Southery, or the yellow doctor has done his work
so well that no trace remains of his presence in the matter.”
Leaving his breakfast untasted, he wandered aimlessly about the room,
littering the hearth with matches as he constantly relighted his pipe,
which went out every few minutes.
“It’s no good, Petrie,” he burst out suddenly; “it cannot be a coincidence.
We must go around and see him.”
An hour later we stood in the silent room, with its drawn blinds and
its deathful atmosphere, looking down at the pale, intellectual face
of Henry Stradwick, Lord Southery, the greatest engineer of his day.
The mind that lay behind that splendid brow had planned the construction
of the railway for which Russia had paid so great a price, had conceived
the scheme for the canal which, in the near future, was to bring
two great continents, a full week’s journey nearer one to the other.
But now it would plan no more.
“He had latterly developed symptoms of angina pectoris,”
explained the family physician; “but I had not anticipated a fatal
termination so soon. I was called about two o’clock this morning,
and found Lord Southery in a dangerously exhausted condition.
I did all that was possible, and Sir Frank Narcombe was sent for.
But shortly before his arrival the patient expired.”
“I understand, Doctor, that you had been treating Lord Southery
for angina pectoris?” I said.
“Yes,” was the reply, “for some months.”
“You regard the circumstances of his end as entirely consistent
with a death from that cause?”
“Certainly. Do you observe anything unusual yourself?
Sir Frank Narcombe quite agrees with me. There is surely
no room for doubt?”
“No,” said Smith, tugging reflectively at the lobe of his left ear.
“We do not question the accuracy of your diagnosis in any way, sir.”
The physician seemed puzzled.
“But am I not right in supposing that you are connected with the police?”
asked the physician.
“Neither Dr. Petrie nor myself are in any way connected with the police,”
answered Smith. “But, nevertheless, I look to you to regard our recent
questions as confidential.”
As we were leaving the house, hushed awesomely in deference to the unseen
visitor who had touched Lord Southery with gray, cold fingers, Smith paused,
detaining a black-coated man who passed us on the stairs.
“You were Lord Southery’s valet?”
The man bowed.
“Were you in the room at the moment of his fatal seizure?”
“I was, sir.”
“Did you see or hear anything unusual—anything unaccountable?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“No strange sounds outside the house, for instance?”
The man shook his head, and Smith, taking my arm, passed out into the street.
“Perhaps this business is making me imaginative,” he said;
“but there seems to be something tainting the air in yonder—
something peculiar to houses whose doors bear the invisible
death-mark of Fu-Manchu.”
“You are right, Smith!” I cried. “I hesitated to mention the matter, but I,
too, have developed some other sense which warns me of the Doctor’s presence.
Although there is not a scrap of confirmatory evidence, I am as sure that he
has brought about Lord Southery’s death as if I had seen him strike the blow.”
It was in that torturing frame of mind—chained, helpless,
in our ignorance, or by reason of the Chinaman’s
supernormal genius—that we lived throughout the ensuing days.
My friend began to look like a man consumed by a burning fever.
Yet, we could not act.
In the growing dark of an evening shortly following I
stood idly turning over some of the works exposed for sale
outside a second-hand bookseller’s in New Oxford Street.
One dealing with the secret societies of China struck me
as being likely to prove instructive, and I was about to call
the shopman when I was startled to feel a hand clutch my arm.
I turned around rapidly—and was looking into the darkly beautiful
eyes of Karamaneh! She—whom I had seen in so many guises—
was dressed in a perfectly fitting walking habit, and had much
of her wonderful hair concealed beneath a fashionable hat.
She glanced about her apprehensively.
“Quick! Come round the corner. I must speak to you,” she said,
her musical voice thrilling with excitement.
I never was quite master of myself in her presence.
He must have been a man of ice who could have been,
I think for her beauty had all the bouquet of rarity;
she was a mystery—and mystery adds charm to a woman.
Probably she should have been under arrest, but I know I would
have risked much to save her from it.
As we turned into a quiet thoroughfare she stopped and said:
“I am in distress. You have often asked me to enable you to capture
Dr. Fu-Manchu. I am prepared to do so.”
I could scarcely believe that I heard right.
“Your brother—” I began.
She seized my arm entreatingly, looking into my eyes.
“You are a doctor,” she said. “I want you to come and see him now.”
“What! Is he in London?”
“He is at the house of Dr. Fu-Manchu.”
“And you would have me –”
“Accompany me there, yes.”
Nayland Smith, I doubted not, would have counseled me against
trusting my life in the hands of this girl with the pleading eyes.
Yet I did so, and with little hesitation; shortly we were traveling
eastward in a closed cab. Karamaneh was very silent, but always when I
turned to her I found her big eyes fixed upon me with an expression
in which there was pleading, in which there was sorrow, in which there
was something else—something indefinable, yet strangely disturbing.
The cabman she had directed to drive to the lower end of the Commercial Road,
the neighborhood of the new docks, and the scene of one of our early
adventures with Dr. Fu-Manchu. The mantle of dusk had closed about
the squalid activity of the East End streets as we neared our destination.
Aliens of every shade of color were about us now, emerging from
burrow-like alleys into the glare of the lamps upon the main road.
In the short space of the drive we had passed from the bright world
of the West into the dubious underworld of the East.
I do not know that Karamaneh moved; but in sympathy, as we neared
the abode of the sinister Chinaman, she crept nearer to me,
and when the cab was discharged, and together we walked down
a narrow turning leading riverward, she clung to me fearfully,
hesitated, and even seemed upon the point of turning back.
But, overcoming her fear or repugnance, she led on, through a maze
of alleyways and courts, wherein I hopelessly lost my bearings,
so that it came home to me how wholly I was in the hands of this
girl whose history was so full of shadows, whose real character
was so inscrutable, whose beauty, whose charm truly might mask
the cunning of a serpent.
I spoke to her.
“S-SH!” She laid her hand upon my arm, enjoining me to silence.
The high, drab brick wall of what looked like some part of a dock
building loomed above us in the darkness, and the indescribable
stenches of the lower Thames were borne to my nostrils through
a gloomy, tunnel-like opening, beyond which whispered the river.
The muffled clangor of waterside activity was about us.
I heard a key grate in a lock, and Karamaneh drew me into the shadow
of an open door, entered, and closed it behind her.
For the first time I perceived, in contrast to the odors
of the court without, the fragrance of the peculiar perfume
which now I had come to associate with her. Absolute darkness
was about us, and by this perfume alone I knew that she,
was near to me, until her hand touched mine, and I was led
along an uncarpeted passage and up an uncarpeted stair.
A second door was unlocked, and I found myself in an exquisitely
furnished room, illuminated by the soft light of a shaded lamp
which stood upon a low, inlaid table amidst a perfect ocean
of silken cushions, strewn upon a Persian carpet, whose yellow
richness was lost in the shadows beyond the circle of light.
Karamaneh raised a curtain draped before a doorway, and stood
listening intently for a moment.
The silence was unbroken.
Then something stirred amid the wilderness of cushions, and two
tiny bright eyes looked up at me. Peering closely, I succeeded
in distinguishing, crouched in that soft luxuriance, a little ape.
It was Dr. Fu-Manchu’s marmoset. “This way,” whispered Karamaneh.
Never, I thought, was a staid medical man committed to a more
unwise enterprise, but so far I had gone, and no consideration
of prudence could now be of avail.
The corridor beyond was thickly carpeted. Following the direction
of a faint light which gleamed ahead, it proved to extend
as a balcony across one end of a spacious apartment.
Together we stood high up there in the shadows, and looked
down upon such a scene as I never could have imagined to exist
within many a mile of that district.
The place below was even more richly appointed than the room into
which first we had come. Here, as there, piles of cushions formed
splashes of gaudy color about the floor. Three lamps hung by chains
from the ceiling, their light softened by rich silk shades.
One wall was almost entirely occupied by glass cases containing
chemical apparatus, tubes, retorts and other less orthodox indications
of Dr. Fu-Manchu’s pursuits, whilst close against another lay
the most extraordinary object of a sufficiently extraordinary room—
a low couch, upon which was extended the motionless form of a boy.
In the light of a lamp which hung directly above him, his olive
face showed an almost startling resemblance to that of Karamaneh—
save that the girl’s coloring was more delicate. He had black,
curly hair, which
Comments (0)