In these modern times of breathless hurry and great combines, when birth counts for nothing; when fortunes are made in a day and credit is lost in an hour, men’s secrets are sometimes very strange ones. It is one of these which I have here revealed; one that will, I anticipate, both startle and puzzle the reader. The mystery is, in fact, one taken from the daily life about us, the truth concerning it having hitherto been regarded as strictly confidential by the persons herein mentioned, although I am now permitted by them to make the remarkable circumstances public.
William Le Queux.
Lastra a Signa, Florence.
“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 fund