Chapter One
The Stranger in Manchester
“Dead! And he’s carried his secret with him to his grave!”
“Never!”
“But he has. Look! His jaw has dropped. Can’t you see the change, man!”
“Then he’s carried out his threat after all!”
“By Heaven, he has! We’ve been fools, Reggie – utter idiots!” I whispered.
“So it seems. I confess that I fully expected he’d tell us the truth when he knew that the end had really come.”
“Ah! you didn’t know him as I did,” I remarked bitterly. “He had a will of iron and a nerve of steel.”
“Combined with the constitution of a horse, or he’d been dead long ago. But we’ve been outwitted – cleanly outwitted by a dying man. He defied us, laughed at our ignorance to the very last.”
“Blair was no fool. He knew what knowledge of the truth meant to us – a huge fortune. So he simply kept his secret.”
“And left us in penniless chagrin. Well, although we’ve lost thousands, Gilbert, I can’t help admiring his dogged determination. He went through a lot, recollect, and he’s been a good friend to us – very good – so I suppose we really oughtn’t to abuse him, however much we regret that he didn’t let us into his secret.”
“Ah, if only those white lips could speak! One word, and we’d both be rich men,” I said in regret, gazing upon the dead, white face, with its closed eyes and closely clipped beard, lying there upon the pillow.
“He intended to hold his secret from the very first,” remarked my tall friend, Reginald Seton, folding his arms as he stood on the opposite side of the bed. “It isn’t given to every man to make such a discovery as he made. It took him years to solve the problem, whatever it was; but that he really succeeded in doing so we can’t for a moment doubt.”
“And his profit was over a million sterling,” I remarked.
“More like two, at the very lowest estimate. Recollect how, when we first knew him, he was in dire want of a sovereign – and now? Why, only last week he gave twenty thousand to the Hospital Fund. And all as the result of solving the enigma which for so long we have tried to discover in vain. No, Gilbert, he hasn’t played the square game by us. We assisted him, put him on his legs, and all that, and instead of revealing to us the key to the secret which he discovered, and which placed him among the wealthiest men of London, he point-blank refused, even though he knew that he must die. We lent him money in the old days, financed him, kept Mab at school when he had no funds, and – ”
“And he repaid us every penny – with interest,” I interposed. “Come; don’t let’s discuss him here. The secret is lost for ever, that’s enough.” And I drew the sheet over the poor dead face – the countenance of Burton Blair, the man who, during the past five years, had been one of London’s mysteries.
A strange, adventurous life, a career more remarkable, perhaps, than half those imagined by writers of romance, had been brought abruptly to an end, while the secret of the source of his enormous wealth – the secret which we both had for the past five years longed to share, because we were in a sense justly entitled to participate in its advantages – had gone with him to that bourne whence none return.
The apartment in which we stood was a small, rather well-furnished bedroom in the Queen’s Hotel, Manchester. The window looked out upon the dark façade of the Infirmary, while to that chamber of the dead there came the roar and bustle of the traffic and trams in Piccadilly. His story was assuredly one of the strangest that any man has ever told. Its mystery, as will be seen, was absolutely bewildering.
The light of the cheerless February afternoon was quickly fading, and as we turned softly to descend and inform the hotel manager of the fatal termination of the seizure, I noticed that the dead man’s suit-case stood in the corner, and that his keys were still in it.
“We had better take possession of these,” I remarked, locking the bag and transferring the small bunch to my pocket. “His executors will want them.”
Then we closed the door behind us, and going to the office imparted the unwelcome intelligence that a death had occurred in the hotel. The manager was, however, quite prepared to learn such news, for, half an hour before, the doctor had declared that the stranger could not live. His case had been hopeless from the very first.
Briefly, the facts were as follows. Burton Blair had bidden his daughter Mabel farewell, left his house in Grosvenor Square on the previous morning, and had taken the ten-thirty express from Euston to Manchester, where he had said he had some private business to transact. Just before the train arrived at Crewe, he suddenly became unwell, and was discovered by one of the luncheon-car attendants in a state of collapse in one of the first-class compartments. Brandy and restoratives being administered, he revived sufficiently to travel on to Manchester, being assisted out of the train at London Road, and two porters had helped him into a cab and accompanied him to the hotel, where, on being put to bed, he again lapsed into unconsciousness. A doctor was called, but he could not diagnose the ailment, except that the patient’s heart was seriously affected and, that being so, a fatal termination of the seizure might ensue. Towards two o’clock next morning, Blair, who had neither given his name nor told the hotel people who he was, asked that both Seton and I should be telegraphed for, and the result was that in anxious surprise we had both travelled up to Manchester, where on arrival, an hour before, we had discovered our friend to be in an utterly hopeless condition.
