on the night following the regrettable disaster to the seahorse i was back again in the cheap and rather comfortable rooms i had occupied for a couple of years or so in keppel street, chelsea. it is a thoroughfare in which nearly every house exhibits the enticing legend, “apartments to let,” mostly in permanent, neatly-framed signs of black and gold.
mrs. richardson, my landlady, was “full” and had been for a year past, so no. 83, where i had diggings, was a quiet, eminently respectable house, a fitting, residence for a man of my serious calling. when, however, i returned with the mysterious man in a well-worn seaman’s suit, unkempt head, and his sword in hand instead of a cane, mrs. richardson looked askance at me.
i explained that my friend had come to live with me for a few weeks, and that i should want an extra room; when she, good soul, looked him up and down, noticed the big cracks in his sea-boots and the slit in the sleeve of his pea-jacket, and rather reluctantly replied that she would turn one of the servants out and prepare the room for my friend.
presently, however, i took her aside and explained the curious facts, whereupon she said:?—
“lor’, doctor! only fancy! the old gentleman may be two hundred years old!”
“ah!” i remarked, “his age is only one of the minor mysteries connected with the affair. it is in order to solve them that i’ve decided that he shall remain under my care and treatment. he’s just a little wrong in his head, you know. nothing at all serious.”
“he didn’t answer me when i spoke to him.”
“no, for a very good reason. he’s dumb.”
“two hundred years old, insane, and dumb! lawk a mercy! he is a strange old gentleman.”
“well, mrs. richardson,” i said, “you’ve been very kind to me for the past two years, and i hope that you will do me the favour of looking after my friend.”
“of course i will, doctor. but what’s his name?”
“he has no name. we call him the mysterious man.”
“old mister mystery the girls will call him, i expect. but it don’t matter what they nickname him if he’s wrong in his head.”
i laughed and, leaving her, returned to my sitting-room, where the old castaway was engaged in examining all the objects in the room. he had opened the back of my small american timepiece and was watching the movement as though he had never hitherto seen any such mechanical contrivance.
the day had been a busy one for me. i had arranged with seal that the old fellow should remain with me while the mystery of the seahorse was solved, and as regards the gold we had placed the whole of it in a big sea chest, sealed it, and that afternoon had deposited it in the care of the manager of the tottenham court road branch of the london and south-western bank, where i had a small account.
the documents, manuscripts, armour, and silver tankard which i had secured from the ancient vessel i had carried to keppel street. the skipper was, of course, busy on the first day of landing, but his chagrin was intense that he had lost the seahorse. that we had really discovered it could, of course, be proved by those vessels that had spoken us in the channel, but proof of that sort was not like towing the remarkable relic up the thames.
his owners, it appeared, were extremely angry at his being nearly a fortnight overdue, and that he had wasted time and fuel upon what they declared was a worthless derelict. according to what he afterwards told me, he had a bad half-hour with the senior partner of his firm, and very nearly got his notice of dismissal. he pointed out to the smug, go-to-meeting old gentleman, who was a churchwarden down at chislehurst, that the boilers of the thrush were in such a state that he dare not steam at any pressure, whereupon the senior partner replied:?—
“that matters nothing whatever to us, seal. the boat’s insured, and we should lose nothing.”
“no; but myself and the crew may lose our lives,” observed the skipper.
“if your berth does not suit you, seal, there are many other men quite ready to sail in your place,” was the calm rejoinder.
and after that seal left the office as quickly as he could, in order to give vent outside to his private opinion of the firm and their line of ships. this he did very forcibly, in language that only a mediterranean skipper is in the habit of using.
now that i was back again, enjoying the comfort of my own shabby little sitting-room after the small, stuffy cabin of the thrush, one rather curious incident caused me to reflect.
it occurred on the morning after the loss of the seahorse. the squall had gone down. we had passed the nore and were steaming full ahead into the mouth of the thames. i had been seated on the bridge with seal and thorpe for a couple of hours or so when i had occasion to descend to my cabin.
on entering i found an intruder in the person of harding, the seaman who had been told off as the keeper of the mysterious man. he did not notice my approach, for i had on a pair of tennis shoes with rubber soles, therefore i stood in the doorway for a few moments watching him.
he had spread open that document with the seven signatures that had so puzzled me, and with paper and pencil seemed to be scribbling some notes as to its purport. strange, i thought, that a common seaman could decipher those ill-written lines of latin where i had so entirely failed. so i watched and saw how, with his head bent to the open port-hole in order to obtain a good light, he was carefully deciphering the words contained there, and i detected by the expression on his countenance that what he found entirely satisfied him. upon the small piece of paper in his palm he scribbled something now and then, and was just slipping it into his pocket, when i asked in a hard voice:?—
“well, what are you doing here?”
he turned with a start, his face flushed in confusion, and stammered:?—
“nothing, doctor. i—i was only looking at this old parchment you got out of noah’s ark.”
“you’ve been reading it,” i said. “i’ve watched you making some extracts from it. give me that paper.”
he made a movement to place it in his pocket, but at the same moment i snatched the old document from his other hand and arrested his effort to conceal the scrap of paper.
“you have no right here,” i said angrily, “and i demand that paper whereon you have made notes of an affair that does not concern you.”
“i shall not give it you,” he responded defiantly.
“then i shall call the captain.”
“you can do so if you wish. i shall be paid off to-day, so it doesn’t matter.”
“give it to me,” i cried, incensed at the fellow’s insolence, and made a swift movement to seize his wrist. he was, however, too quick for me, for, grasping my arm with his left hand, he screwed up the paper with his right and dropped it through the porthole into the sea.
i saw it flutter for a moment in the air and drop into the surging water ten yards away.
“leave this place at once,” i commanded. “you have no right here, and have evidently entered for some dishonest purpose. i shall inform captain seal at once.”
“all right,” he answered, shrugging his shoulders as he went through the doorway, “you needn’t get your wool off, doctor. i was doing no harm, surely, having a look at that old scribble.”
but the truth was patent. that man, an ordinary seaman, had read and understood what was written there. that look of supreme satisfaction on his face was sufficient to tell me that he had gained knowledge of some secret hidden from me.
benjamin harding was a seaman of exemplary conduct, it was true. he drank little, seldom swore, and was much more careful of his personal appearance than the rest of the grimy crew. his speech betokened a somewhat better education than the others, and i had more than once detected beneath his rough exterior traces of refinement. more than once, too, i had overheard him repress a too expressive imprecation from the mouth of one or other of his shipmates. tall, lean, and muscular, his age i judged to be about forty, his beard and hair sandy, and his eyes a washed-out grey. his cheeks showed marks of smallpox, and under his left eye was a long white scar. i returned to the bridge and told seal of the incident, but the pilot not yet being aboard he was too much occupied with the navigation of the ship to be able to reprimand the man there and then.
so i went again to my cabin and counted over my treasures, finding to my satisfaction that none were missing.
i saw but little more of the man harding. the skipper later on told me that he had given the fellow a good talking too, and that he had expressed his regret at his insolence. he had, however, only shipped for the voyage, and would be paid off that day, therefore it was useless to do more than remonstrate.
nevertheless, the incident disturbed me. i had a strange, indescribable intuition that the man harding had obtained possession of some secret hidden from me; that the apparently ignorant seaman was acquainted with the latin script and with those puzzling abbreviations which had so utterly floored me. before my eyes he had deciphered line after line, reading it off almost as easily as the copies of lloyd’s and the dispatch, that found so much favour in the forecastle. yet why had he taken such precaution to destroy the memoranda he had written if the facts did not relate to some secret from which he expected to receive benefit?
thus, while the mysterious man slept soundly in the room prepared for him, i sat for a long time over my pipe trying to decipher the uneven scribble and pondering over what might be written on that time-stained parchment.
next day seal came to see me, dressed in his shore-going toggery—a neat navy blue suit and a peaked cap a size too small for his ponderous head. the mysterious man so far demonstrated that his senses were returning that he expressed pleasure at meeting the skipper by holding out his hand to him, a fact which gave both of us satisfaction.
“i’m busy unloading now, you know, doctor,” the captain said, in his deep, cheery voice, “so i must leave it all to you. act just as you think fit. for my own part i think we ought to get them parchments deciphered. they might tell us something interesting.”
“and the gold?”
“for the present we’ll stick to that,” was his prompt reply. “if anybody claims it we’ll investigate their claim, as the insurance people say, but as far as i can see the only person entitled to it is that lunatic over there,” and he jerked his thumb in the direction of the mysterious man.
he drank deeply of my whisky, and pronounced it good. we chatted for an hour or more, and when i asked about harding he merely answered:?—
“oh, the fellow was paid off last night. i’m quite your way of thinking—there was some mystery about that chap. i’ve made inquiries and find that he hadn’t been many voyages before, because he betrayed ignorance of many common terms at sea, and gave himself away in lots of details.”
“he was an educated man,” i remarked.
“yes, i believe he was. he’s left one or two books about the forecastle which are not the sort that sailors read.”
“what class of books?” i inquired.
“oh, one was a latin dictionary, another an odd volume of chambers’ encyclop?dia, and a third book called old english chronicles, whatever they are.”
the latter was certainly not a work in which a sailor would be interested. i had known it at college, the mediaeval chronicles of geoffrey of monmouth and other monks, a volume of the driest and most uninteresting kind, save to an antiquarian student. yes, i felt more convinced than ever that benjamin harding was not what he had pretended to be.
the mysterious man had taken to smoking. i had purchased for him a shilling briar at a tobacconist’s in king’s road, and while we talked he sat puffing at it and looking aimlessly down on the street. the pity of it all was that the poor old fellow was dumb. even though a lunatic he might, if he could have spoken, have given us some clue to his past. but up to the present we were just as ignorant as to who or what he was as in that first moment when we had discovered him in the dark cabin of that death-ship.
to his old rusty sword he clung, as though it were a mascot. even now he wore it suspended from his waist by a piece of cord that had come from off my trunk, and at night it reposed with him in his room. once it had no doubt been the sharp, ready weapon of some swaggering elegant, but it was now blunt, rusted, and scabbardless, only its maker’s name and the remarkable temper of its blade showed what it once had been.
a week later i set about to discover some one who could decipher the parchments and the book containing the hidden secret of bartholomew da schorno, for therein i anticipated i should discover some clue to the mystery of the seahorse. in the manuscript department of the british museum i obtained the address of a certain charles staffurth, who, i was told, was an expert upon the court and commercial hands of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
so to his address in the clapham park road, i carried my precious book and documents, and sought an interview. a prim old gentleman in steel-rimmed spectacles received me in a back room fitted as a study, and after the first half dozen words i recognized that he was a scholar.
i told the story of my discovery, to which he listened with breathless interest, and when i undid the brown paper parcel and revealed the parchments his eyes fairly danced with expectation and delight. he was an enthusiast.
he bent over them, handling them with a reverence and fondness which showed him to be a true palaeographist. he ran quickly through the pages of the vellum book and remarked:?—
“ah! they are not numbered, i see. sixteenth century hand of central italy!”
he recognized it at once, without looking for dates.
“really doctor—doctor pickering,” he exclaimed, glancing at my card, “this is a most remarkable story. i’m sure it will give me the greatest pleasure to look through these papers, and i will do so if you will leave them with me for a day or two. the book, you see, is voluminous, and will require a good deal of deciphering. they have many such at the museum, so i have experience of the difficulties in reading them. let’s see, to-day is tuesday. will you call on thursday afternoon? by that time i hope to have read the greater portion of what is contained here. if, however, i discover anything of very great importance i will telegraph to you.”
and so it was arranged. i remained chatting with him for nearly half an hour, and then returned to my strangely silent companion, the mysterious man.
the old expert had evidently been much impressed by my story, and had commenced to decipher the documents as soon as i took leave of him, for at eleven o’clock next morning i received a telegram from him, worded as follows:?—
“please call here at once. most important discovery.—staffurth.”
