CONTENTS

I. The Men of the Moor

II. Dr. Laffin Commands

III. Pawter’s Services

IV. Captain Harvey Hale

V. Benson

VI. Betty Consents

VII. At Thames Head

VIII. The Proud Sons

IX. No-Arrest Bullott

X. The Desk Store

XI. Mr. Lambert Stone

XII. The Man from Nowhere

XIII. The Message

XIV. The Locked Room

XV. Getting in

XVI. The Novitiates

XVII. Brother John

XVIII. A Shot in the Street

XIX. The Man in Charge

XX. The Initiation

XXI. Jenny Hamshaw

XXII. Dr. Laffin’s Offer

XXIII. Gone!

XXIV. The Dream

XXV. Betty Does Not Remember

XXVI. A Talk with Dr. Laffin

XXVII. Ragousa Talk

XXVIII. The Seen Prior

XXIX. A Strange Occurrence

XXX. Dope

XXXI. In Epping Forest

XXXII. Toby Marsh Goes to a Party

XXXIII. The Listener in the Chimney

XXXIV. Mr. Pawter Explains

XXXV. The Priory

XXXVI. The Grand Prior Shows His Hand

XXXVII. A Trip to Devon

XXXVIII. A Man and a Maid

XXXIX. The Test

XL. The Woman with the Jug

XLI. Florette Complains

XLII. An Additional Passenger

XLIII. On Board the “Escorial”

XLIV. Betty’s Fear

XLV. “Sir John and Lady Wilford”

XLVI. The Blue Bottle

XLVII. An Attack in the Night

XLVIII. A Radio from New York

XLIX. Bullott Explains

L. The Evening of the Ball

LI. The Control

LII. Changed Conditions

LIII. Bill Has a Plan

LIV. In the Wireless House

LV. The “Thomas Inland”

LVI. Harvey Hale and Laffin

LVII. Warships

LVIII. Toward the Fog

LIX. The Siren

LX. The Man in Control

LXI. Bullott Makes an Arrest

LXII. Bullott’s Story

Endnotes

CHAPTER I. THE MEN OF THE MOOR

A gale of wind and rain swept across the barren face of Dartmoor, that ancient desolation. The howl and shriek of it came to Betty Carew above the rattle and roar of the motor engine as the old car grunted and groaned up the steep hill.

The lights of Tavistock had long since disappeared. Princetown was three miles beyond the crest of the hill. About them was an infinite loneliness, and the sobbing of wind that drove the needle-sharp sleet into their faces. The yellow-faced old man who drove did not speak—he had not spoken since they left Tavistock; would not willingly break his silence before they reached Exeter—or after.

The car laboured up the twisting road, skidding and sliding from left to right, and with every lurch the girl’s heart came into her mouth.

At the top of the hill the full force of the gale caught them and all but brought the car to a stand-still. Rain smacked viciously against the screen, whipped under the lowered brim of her hat, thrashing her face till it smarted intolerably.

“Don’t you think we’d be wise if we went back to Tavistock?”

She had to raise her voice to a scream before he heard her.

“No!”

The answer came like a pistol shot, and she said no more.

Dr. Laffin had bought the car cheap at a sale of Army derelicts—it had been old before the requisitions of war had called it for military service. It served him well enough; gave him the illusion of economy at a moment when economy was necessary. He had a small starveling property on the edge of the moor, a farm where a ploughshare touched rock every rood or so. His tenant was a man who complained regularly and paid his rent occasionally. The further illusion of proprietorship almost compensated Dr. Laffin for other deficiencies.

West of Princetown, the wind slackened and normal speech was possible.

“You won’t try to get beyond Exeter to-night?” asked the girl nervously. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that he would continue the journey to London.

“I don’t know.” His tone was uncompromising.

Betty could have said something unpleasant, but wisely held her tongue. They skirted the prison fields; the lights of the car showed momentarily the ugly arch before the jail, and a muffled figure leaning upon a rifle beyond the gate; and in another minute they had passed through Princetown and were facing the winds of the open moor.

In spite of her oilskin coat, the girl was soaked through; she was cold and stiff and hungry, and for the first time in her life thought longingly of the grim house in Camden Road. Then, to her surprise, the man spoke.

“This is better than play-acting… living reality… there are spirits in this place… I can feel them. Hail thou!”

His hand came off the driving wheel and was raised in stiff salute. Betty, shivering with terror, shut her eyes.

Play-acting! If that wretched road engagement hadn’t come to an abrupt end—at Tavistock of all places in the world, and, by a hideous coincidence, at the very moment Joshua Laffin was making a half-yearly visit to his “property”!

“There are evil things chained to the dark!” His voice prim, emotionless, pierced the whine and flurry of gale and engine. “Terrors undreamt of by shallow minds… what of the forty million spirits of Atlantis?”

She put her hands to her ears, and the next moment could have shrieked her fears. Ahead of them gleamed a red spot of light in the very centre of the road. It was like a fiery eye glowering from some cyclopean socket.

The car jangled and shuddered to a standstill before she saw the figure with the red lantern.

The lights of the car were poor, aged oil-burning lamps, and the man who had swung the lantern showed dimly. He seemed to be dressed in a long, close-fitting gown like the habit of a monk.… Her mouth opened wide in wonder and fear—the head was shrouded in a cowl that covered the face—and she saw only a gleam of eyes behind narrow slits cut in the cloth.

“May I speak to you, please?” said the cowled man, and now she saw that he had a companion, a sombre companion similarly attired.

“What is it? … What is the meaning of this foolery?” grated Joshua Laffin.

The man walked to his side and said something in a tone so low that Betty could not hear a word.

“Huh… well, I am…”

Laffin’s voice sank to a rumble, and for a minute or two they carried on a conversation in an undertone.

“I’ll draw the car up by the side of the road,” said Dr. Laffin, and, twisting his head toward the girl: “You’ll wait here.”

“Here!” she said, aghast. “In the middle of Dartmoor… alone!”

“This gentleman will look after you—there is no occasion for panic. I would not leave you if there were.”

He indicated the shadowy form of the second “monk” standing just outside the spread of the lamp’s rays.

Betty made no answer, but watched Laffin and his sinister companion till they disappeared in the darkness.

The second man did not stir. Vainly she tried to keep her eyes away from the cowled face.

Laffin had been gone a quarter of an hour, when there came a sound that added to the fearfulness of the night. The deep boom of a bell… She tried to locate it and failed.

Dong!

Again, and then…

The faint sound of voices—deep-chested voices of men chanting.

Dong!

She was trembling in every limb. What did all this portend? She looked around nervously. The man still stood where he had been, watching—what? She had a feeling that he was listening too, his ears strained—for what?

An hour passed before she heard feet on the hard road and somebody saying “Good-night.” It was the doctor and he was returning alone: he must have left his guide somewhere in the darkness. When she looked, the second man had disappeared.

Laffin cranked up his car and climbed in.

“Who were they?” she asked.

He did not reply, and the car jerked on its way. She had added one more to the many questions he never answered.

Fifteen months later he offered a solution to the riddle of the moor: but this she did not know.

CHAPTER II. DR. LAFFIN COMMANDS

Betty Carew listened, aghast. In that gloomy, dusty room, ill-lit, badly ventilated, redolent of musty paper and ancient leather bindings, she had heard many fantastic views and commands expressed by Dr. Joshua Laffin, but never one so bizarre as this.

“I don’t quite understand.” She was speaking no more than the truth. “Why do you wish me to do this?”

He took a pinch of snuff from a tortoiseshell box, replaced the box on the table and leant back in his high-backed chair, his dark eyes fixed on hers. He wore his customary black, and in the candle-light and against the dark background he was just a long, yellow face and a pair of lined, thin hands that moved restlessly.

“I give you neither ‘why’ nor ‘wherefore’,” he said, in a queer voice that had something of the softer tones of an owl in it; the whoo-ing of a man who habitually spoke through lips that were pursed as if to whistle. “I command. You know me, Elizabeth. I will have my way. Especially now. One has had disappointments; certain plans have miscarried. In this last matter there must be no hitch. As you know, I am but the servant of others—not of this plane.”

He waved his hand to the shadowy corners of the room, and the girl experienced all the old terror that this gloomy house had inspired in her during the fourteen years she had been an inmate.

“Here is Kama, the tamed Nemesis, vitalised by my genius. Here the great Manasuputra, divine force of beneficence,” he said. “You, who might have become acquainted with these mysteries, preferred the transient pleasure of sense.”

An old story and an old reproach that left her unperturbed.

“My immeasurable superiority to the world,” he went on, “and, therefore, to its opinions, should have helped you to overcome any stupid qualms. You are vain, you are conceited, just as all girls with a title to prettiness are vain and conceited. Your ego is distorted. Contact with me, which would have humbled most people, has merely puffed you up with pride. I am not even flattered. I would wish that my greatness abashed you. But no! Charity child, workhouse child, though no decent man or woman could know the truth about you without shrinking in horror, you persist in opposing your wishes, your ‘whys’ to my instructions. Gutter brat, gallows child, scum of the very dregs, I cannot teach you humility!”

He did not raise his voice in anger; the epithets fell in his cold tones, like the tappings of rain upon glass.

She was neither distressed nor amused. The candlelight played upon the mouldings of a spiritual face, singularly lovely. Another mystery than that he spoke about was in the shadowed eyes, mystery in the dusky shadings of her throat. Only the glory of her hair persisted, as superior to the meagre illumination as Dr. Laffin was to the world.

Dr. Laffin saw nothing of beauty in her through his hard, brown eyes.

“I may be all these things,” said Betty calmly, “and yet feel a natural diffidence at sitting in a shop window for people to gape at me. I see no sense in it. I don’t profess to be a great actress—I know I’m not—but I love my profession too much to let it down in the way you suggest. What am I supposed to advertise?”

A gesture answered her.

“That doesn’t matter, I suppose? Well, I’ll not do it.”

She got up slowly from the side of the worn writing-table, resolution in the poise of her head, the set of her fine mouth.

“Good night,” said Laffin, not rising. “You will find your way out. I am going to take my ten. Close the door carefully.”

She never expected him to say any more than this. For a second she looked down at him, her lips curled, a bitter loathing in her heart for the man who had tortured her childhood with fear, and had blasted her future to humour his whim. His head was drooping—the “ten” had overtaken him—that ten minutes of sleep so profound that nothing had ever awakened him. How helpless he was now! For one wild, mad moment she stood over him, her hands clenched, trembling in her impotent anger, and then, wrenching herself free from the hate that gripped her, she ran out of the room, down the uncarpeted stairs and into the street. The door boomed behind her.

“I hope he heard it in his dreams,” she said.

The tall man who had been waiting for her at the garden gate laughed softly.

“That sounds vicious,” he said.

“You like him, Clive?”

Clive Lowbridge chuckled as he helped her into the little coupé that had been waiting outside.

“Yes—in a way. His pomposity doesn’t annoy me, because he is sincere. He really does think he is the greatest man in the world.”

“How did you come to know him?”

Clive did not answer until he had brought the car on to the main road and had dodged a fast-moving tramcar.

“That fellow is exceeding all road-car limits,” he growled savagely. “What were you saying? I’ve known him all my life. He was the family physician. The home of our illustrious family used to be in Bath, and the Laffins have been our doctors for hundreds of years. It is a sort of tradition. He was my tutor—did you know that? Laffin’s clever. Most of these weird birds are. You’re glad to be away from that menage, aren’t you, Betty?”

“Yes.”

“He’s a queer devil. My uncle used to swear by him, and so did my great-uncle, the seventh baron——”

She interrupted him, obviously anxious to turn the subject.

“How do your new honours sit upon you, Clive—heavily?”

The ninth Lord Lowbridge was mildly amused.

“The honours are a featherweight, but the mortgages—phew! How Uncle Ferrers got rid of his money, heaven knows! At least, heaven and the accountants! We always thought he was immensely wealthy. I fear it is art or nothing with me, but I shall be obliged to paint one masterpiece a year to pay the interest on the mortgages.”

She laughed softly.

“Your celebration party was premature.”

He grinned again as he sent the car whizzing through the gates of Regent’s Park, narrowly avoiding a sedate limousine.

“La Florette,” he said tersely, as he glimpsed the woman in its blazing interior. “That woman just hates being unnoticed! Why she doesn’t have her name in lights on the top of the car is a standing wonder to me. You know her, of course?”

Betty Carew made a little face in the dark. She knew La Florette very well, only too well.

“Poor Clive!” she said. “A lord without money is a pathetic creature! Not so pathetic, perhaps, as an ambitious actress who is doomed to be a showgirl—at least, that is what I’m going to be if Robespierre has his way.”

“Robespierre—oh, you mean the doctor? He does look like the sea-green incorruptible now that you mention the fact. What does he want you to do?”

“He has one of his mad schemes—I am to accept an engagement from a man who wishes to advertise a desk. He mentioned a desk early in the conversation, so I suppose that is what it is.”

“But how?”

“I am to sit in a store window for four hours a day—the window is to be built furnished like a study—wearing a green dress, and writing, or pretending to write, at the desk, on which”—she laughed in spite of her anger—“will be a jade vase with one red rose. Can you imagine it?”

Clive Lowbridge did not answer for a long time.

“Do you think he’s mad?” he asked.

“I’m sure—there is no question about it—and oh! there is another thing! A man will one day come to me and ask me for ‘the message’ and I am to give him a letter which will be kept in the top right-hand drawer of the desk.”

“He is mad,” said Lowbridge emphatically, “and of course you’ll do nothing of the kind, Betty.”

“I don’t know. I may be obliged…”

“Obliged! Jumping cats! I’ll talk to him if he starts anything of that kind. The future Lady Lowbridge isn’t going to figure in a puppet show.”

She squeezed his arm affectionately.

“Clive, you’ve other things to think about than marriage—and so have I, my dear. Do you know Pips?”

“Orange or lemon?” he asked, as he helped her alight.

“Pips—Pawter’s Intensive Publicity Service? They are advertisers and press agents. And they have the further handicap of employing the most insufferable young man in London. Clive, that youth haunts me! I’m sure the doctor has engaged him to shadow me.”

“What is his name—I mean the objectionable young man?”

“Holbrook—W. Holbrook. I suppose that the ‘W’ stands for William. Mr. van Campe calls him ‘Bill,’ and so do most people round the theatre. If you ever have the chance will you squash him for me, Clive, dear?”

“He’s squashed,” said Clive solemnly, and brushed her cheek with his lips.

An hour later he was standing before his mirror, fastening his dress tie with great care, a frown on his pink face. A good-looking young man, with the classic features that the old Greek sculptors gave to the heroes of mythology, he had the clear eyes and the frame of a trained athlete. A series of accidents had brought him from the obscurity and poverty of a Chelsea apartment, where he won a precarious livelihood from painting landscapes of dubious originality, to the lordship of Lowbridge and the attenuated income of estates so heavily encumbered that it was difficult to find a labourer’s tumbledown cottage that did not represent collateral security against an overdraft negotiated by his improvident uncle.

His mind alternated between Betty and the eccentric doctor, in whose house he had first met her five years before—slim, a gaunt-eyed child, watchful, suspicious, pitiably ready to shrink at a word, all too willing to humour the tyrant who was both parent and guardian.

Finishing his dressing, he rang the bell for his servant.

“Benson, you used to work in a club before you misguidedly accepted service with me?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Then you ought to know everybody. I want you to discover who Holbrook is—Mr. W. Holbrook of Pawter’s Publicity Service. You’ll find their names in the telephone directory.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Benson, stocky and broad of shoulder, needed no further instructions. Half his attraction to Clive was his taciturnity.

“And, Benson,” as the man was leaving the room, “my cigars have been evaporating at an alarming rate. Will you order a hundred of the cheaper brand? They need not be bad cigars—get some that suit your palate.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Benson was unmoved, neither apologetic nor confused. He had seen Dr. Laffin slip a bundle into his pocket the last time the doctor had called, but it was not his place to report the delinquencies of a guest.

CHAPTER III. PAWTER’S SERVICES

In the bright lexicon of Pawter, President, Chairman and Treasurer of the Pawter Intensive Publicity Service (familiarly called Pips), there was no such word as modesty.

“What most people call modesty is merely the wish that the authorship of anything nice which may be said about them in the Press, shall not be traced to them. Modesty is only a fear of ridicule. The very term, used in a newspaper interview, is evidence of blatant conceit. When a man says: ‘I would rather not talk about myself,’ he just means that he’d rather somebody else did it; all the same, he’d like to have the proofs to correct so that, if the reporters wrote how he killed five lions, he could make it six. Modesty… !”

“Is this one of those extension lectures I read about, or merely an exposition of your philosophy?” asked the patient young man who was Pawter’s solitary audience. “If it is a lecture, I am bored; if it is a mere acriomatic…”

“A which?” Pawter was startled.

“Acriomatic. Work that into the Memory ads. you’re doing. Drag in Aristotle—what right has he to be left out anyway? As I was saying, if you are practising for a Rotarian dinner speech, go to it. I’m your assistant, underpaid and overworked, but loyal despite. This argument started about Miss Betty Carew’s association with this agency. I remind you in case you’ve forgotten.”

Mr. Pawter spun round in his chair and looked over his glasses. So doing, he lowered and exposed the crown of a very bald head.

“Are you mad?” he asked gently—so gently that it might be supposed that he rather thought it likely, and that it would be best not to arouse such homicidal tendencies as lay dormant in the bosom of his hearer.