Finger of Fate Read online

Del Vittore, his hands shaking, took out the two revolvers. He handed me a round of ammunition, and then looked away.

  “I don’t even wish to know which revolver it is,” he said. “Hand them both to me when you’ve finished.”

  I handed them to him, and then turned round.

  “I will spin a coin,” I said. “The Baron will call.”

  “Heads,” he muttered.

  “It’s tails,” I remarked. “Barstow, will you have the revolver in the Marquis’ right hand or in his left?”

  He flung away his cigarette.

  “Right,” he said laconically.

  I handed it to him, and del Vittore gave the other to the Baron. Then we placed the two men facing one another.

  And suddenly del Vittore lost his nerve.

  “Get it over!” he shouted. “For God’s sake get it over!”

  There came a click: the Baron had fired. His revolver was not the loaded one. For a moment he stood there, while the full realisation of what it meant came to him. Then he gave a strangled scream of fear, and his hand went to his heart. His knees sagged suddenly and he collapsed and lay still.

  “What’s the matter with him?” muttered Barstow. “I haven’t fired.”

  “He’s dead,” said del Vittore stupidly. “His heart – Weak…”

  George Barstow flung his revolver away.

  “Thank God! I didn’t fire,” he said hoarsely.

  And silence fell on us save for the discordant screaming of the gulls.

  “The result of the exertion of climbing,” said del Vittore after a while. “That’s what we must say. And we must unload that revolver.”

  “There’s no need,” I said slowly. “It was never loaded. Neither of them were.”

  THE DIAMOND HAIR-SLIDE

  “Pity one can’t turn ’em on to fight it out like a couple of dogs.” The doctor looked thoughtfully across the smoking-room.

  “It won’t be necessary to do much turning if this heat continues,” I said. “As a matter of fact I thought they were going for one another last night.”

  As usual there was a woman at the bottom of it, and in this particular case it was aggravated by what appeared to be an instinctive dislike at first sight. Funnily enough I had happened to be a witness of their introduction to one another.

  It was our first night out from England and I was having a gin and vermouth before dinner when one of them came in. A biggish red-faced man – the type who might have been in cattle in Australia. Mark Jefferson by name, and after he’d ordered a drink himself we started chatting. The usual desultory stuff: bad weather till we get to Gib – hot in the Red Sea, and so on.

  Quite a decent fellow I thought – but the sort of man I’d sooner have as a friend than an enemy. Powerful great devil with a fist like a leg of mutton.

  We’d just ordered the rest of the half section when the second of them appeared. Completely different stamp of man, but just as tough a nut. Tougher if anything. Hatchet-faced without much colour, but with an eye like a gimlet. His name was Stanton Blake, and at first sight you’d have thought him far the less powerful of the two. At second you’d have realised that there wasn’t much in it. Different sort of strength, that’s all. The sinewy power of the thin steel rope as against the massive strength of the big rope cable.

  However – to get on with it. The ship gave a roll, and Blake lurched into Jefferson. And Jefferson spilt his drink on his trousers. A thing that might happen to anyone. But I’ve always believed myself that there is such a thing as instinctive antipathy between two people. I mean the sort of dislike that isn’t dependent on any specification or spoken word. And it was present in this case. The spilling of the drink was merely the spark that brought it to life.

  Blake said, “Sorry.” That I swear.

  Jefferson growled something about “Clumsy devil” and turned his back. Which he had no right to do.

  My own belief, in view of what I’ve seen since of Jefferson’s alcoholic consumption, is that those two cocktails were not exactly his first that day. Not that he was in the slightest degree drunk; I’ve never seen any man on whom liquor had less obvious effect. But when a man who is quick-tempered by nature has had a few… Well, you know what I mean.

  Be that as it may – the fat was in the fire. Blake controlled himself – he didn’t say anything. But I saw the look that flashed into his eyes as he stared at the back of Jefferson’s head. And there was no mistaking it. I remember it crossed my mind at the time that it would be better for all concerned if they weren’t at the same table.

  As a matter of fact they were at opposite ends of the saloon, but there was always the smoking-room as a common meeting ground. And as they were both good sailors the foul passage we had as far as Gibraltar didn’t affect them. But it affected most other people, which was a pity. For after dinner that night there were only five of us who were taking an interest in things and one of those didn’t play bridge.

  I confess that I very nearly refused to play myself. I am accounted a good player: I love the game. But I play it for pleasure. And after the little episode before dinner it struck me as problematical if much pleasure would be gained from a table which contained Jefferson and Blake.

  I was right: the trouble started at once. I sat with Blake, against Jefferson and a man called Murgatroyd. Tea in Ceylon – he was. And the first thing naturally was how much we played for. I said, “Half-a-crown” straight away, and Murgatroyd agreed. But that wouldn’t do for Jefferson. He looked at Blake and suggested a ten pound corner. And Blake shrugged his shoulders and agreed.

  “Provided,” he said, “we always have it through the trip, Mr Jefferson.”

  The point of which remark became obvious as the evening went on. Jefferson was a player above the average: but Stanton Blake was easily the best bridge player I have ever sat down to a rubber with. His card sense was simply uncanny. And just once or twice the faintest suspicion of a smile would twitch round his lips – one hand, for instance, when Jefferson did quite obviously throw away a trick he should have made.

  It wasn’t until the last rubber that they cut together and by then Blake was thirty pounds up on Jefferson apart from ordinary stake money. And it was during this last rubber that the buttons really came off the foils. Bridge, as we all know, can cease to be a pleasant pastime and become the vehicle of more concentrated rudeness and unpleasant back-chat than almost any other game. And though there was no actual rudeness on this occasion Blake got a thrust in that, for sheer malignant venom, was hard to beat.

  Jefferson again made a mistake: I forget exactly what it was. He placed the king on his left when quite obviously it lay on his right, or something of that sort. And when the hand was over Blake picked out the trick containing the king in question. He spread it out on the table in front of him, and then he spoke.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t care to make our little arrangement a twenty pound corner, Mr Jefferson?”

  Jefferson’s face went purple.

  “Thirty if you like,” he said thickly.

  “The limit is in your hands, Mr Jefferson,” said Blake. “However, thirty will suit me admirably.”

  You see – that was the trouble. From the very first those two men loathed one another: long before the girl came in to complicate the question. She turned the feeling between them into bitter, dangerous hatred – the hatred out of which murder arises. The night when the doctor spoke to me there was murder in the air.

  But to go back again a bit. The girl was sitting at my table, and she appeared for breakfast next morning. And though it is only the very young who can work up much enthusiasm over the opposite sex in the early hours, I confess that she gave my elderly heart a very pleasant kick. Her name was Beryl Langton, and she was one of the most adorably pretty creatures I’ve ever seen. And since we were the sole performers at our table it was only natural that we should start talking.

  The rougher it was the more she liked it, she told me – and proceeded to lower two sausages an
d some fat bacon. She was going to Shanghai – an uncle and aunt were there who had asked her to stay.

  “It’s simply too wonderful all this,” she said. “Of course it’s stale to you, but I’ve never done a longer sea trip than from Weymouth to Jersey.”

  Her enthusiasm was positively infectious. As far as I am concerned a sea voyage is a necessary evil to be suffered as best one can. But as we staggered up and down the deck that morning – she was doing a sort of corkscrew lurch – I found myself actually looking forward to the present one. I told her stories about the East, and she clung on to my arm and looked up into my face with eyes that shone with excitement.

  “I think it’s glorious,” she said. “The sea is glorious, and life is glorious, and all the things I’m going to see are glorious.”

  “You might change your mind about the sea,” I laughed, “if you were on board a boat like that.”

  An aged tramp was wallowing past with the waves breaking clean over her, so that she looked like a half-submerged submarine.

  “‘The Liner she’s a lady,’” she quoted, her eyes fixed on the other boat. “But it’s fine, you know – fine. That life… Clean and fine.”

  And for a moment there was a strange expression on her face.

  “What about a dish of soup?” I said, and she clapped her hands.

  “Splendid,” she cried. “I’m beginning to feel positively ashamed of my appetite.”

  We battled our way to the saloon and sat down. Two or three rather wan-looking individuals looked up in an aggrieved way as we entered, and the girl’s thoroughly audible remark – “Good Lord! what an unholy frowst!” was received without enthusiasm. Then the soup came, and she concentrated on that. In fact she was concentrating on the second cup when a man’s voice hailed me through the open port-hole behind us.

  “Care to make up a rubber?”

  Somewhat naturally the girl glanced round to see who it was. It was Jefferson, and for a moment I saw his eyes fixed on her face with that sudden gleam which is unmistakable.

  “No thanks,” I said curtly. “I don’t care about playing in the forenoon.”

  “Pity,” he said, but made no movement to go. “This sea seems to have defeated nearly everybody.”

  He was including us both in the conversation, and I felt a quick unreasonable annoyance. I knew, of course, that it was quite impossible to prevent him making the girl’s acquaintance if he wished to: you can get to know anybody on board ship. Besides it was most certainly no affair of mine. At the same time – though I had nothing against him – he wasn’t the type of man I’d have chosen for my daughter, had I possessed one, to have much to do with.

  Then the matter was taken out of my hands.

  “I simply adore it,” she said to him. “Don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,” he smiled. “Having to hold on by one’s eyebrows whenever one moves gets a bit monotonous after a time. But luckily it doesn’t affect me otherwise. You look very comfy in there. May I come and join you?”

  And so the second phase started. Jefferson sat with us till lunch, and it was obvious to the meanest capacity that he was immensely attracted by her. I didn’t blame the man – I was attracted myself. And in his full-blooded, boisterous way he wasn’t a bad fellow I decided after a while.

  Then ten minutes before the bugle went, the first danger rock suddenly showed its head above water. Stanton Blake came in, and nodded good-morning to me. And as he did so he saw the girl and paused close by us. Jefferson beckoned the steward, pointedly ordered “Three cocktails,” and continued his story to Miss Langton. A more blatant request to move on could hardly have been given, and I saw Blake’s face as he did so.

  Of course it was only the first point in a long game. Jefferson couldn’t sit permanently in the girl’s pocket, even had she evinced the smallest desire that he should. And that very afternoon, happening to glance out of the smoking-room, I saw Blake and her walking up and down the deck. Jefferson saw them too, and I noticed his face as he did so.

  From then on the situation developed rapidly. There was nothing novel about it, and had the circumstances been ordinary doubtless one would have watched with a certain amount of amusement. But Mark Jefferson and Stanton Blake were not ordinary, and from the very first there was a substratum of fear in my mind as to how it was going to end.

  The girl seemed supremely unconscious of what was happening, though being a woman I don’t suppose she was so in reality. But she certainly did not seem to realise that there was any difference between them and half a dozen others of us who saw a good deal of her. Moreover she never showed – openly at any rate – the smallest preference for one man over the other. She went ashore at Gib with Jefferson: it was Blake who took her up to Citra Vecchia when we anchored at Malta. And in the intervals she played deck games, and danced, and laughed, and won everybody’s heart – while the strain in the smoking-room whenever those two were there at the same time grew almost unbearable. In fact there was only one point on which they agreed, and that was too trifling to ease matters.

  There are I suppose on board every ship a certain number of women who prefer the smoking-room to the other saloons. And we had two of them. They appeared first just before we reached Gib with a nondescript sort of man in tow.

  One of them was a harmless little thing who continually giggled: the other – well, the other I should imagine was not quite so harmless. Her name as shown on the ship’s list was Delmorton – Mrs Delmorton. She was invariably most beautifully dressed: she was an extremely good-looking woman: but – that terrible but to the man who has lived much abroad – there was an undoubted touch of the tar-brush. That she had pots of money was obvious: her jewellery was simply magnificent. But she was undoubtedly one of those women into whose past it is inadvisable to inquire too closely.

  From the very first she was obviously attracted by Mark Jefferson. Their total dissimilarity of appearance probably accounted for it. And from the very first Jefferson was equally obviously not attracted by her. Which brings me to the one point on which the two men agreed.

  They were playing bridge as usual – I had cut out for that rubber – and Mrs Delmorton was standing behind Jefferson. At last she turned and left the room, and quite deliberately Jefferson addressed the players in a low voice.

  “If that — nigger stands behind me any more I shall play bridge in my cabin.”

  And the epithet I regret to state was one which is more applicable to underdone roast beef.

  “I agree,” said Stanton Blake quietly, and tears came into the eyes of all who heard. Blake and Jefferson had agreed.

  I tottered to a corner with the purser: such a moment had to be commemorated. And it was only after a solemn two minutes’ silence that I asked him about the woman.

  It seemed that she’d travelled in the boat before, and always haunted the smoking-room.

  “Who or what Mr Delmorton is, I don’t know,” said the purser. “I don’t even know if there is one. But he must have been a pretty wealthy gentleman.”

  “Marvellous pearls she has,” I said idly.

  “They are,” he agreed. “But by far her most marvellous piece of jewellery is a thing you haven’t seen. She’ll wear it before the voyage is out – probably on the night of the fancy dress ball. Made that way, you know: black blood, I suppose. Loves barbaric display.”

  “What kind of a thing is it?”

  “It’s a sort of hair-slide effect,” he answered. “Diamonds and emeralds. Personally I think it’s appallingly vulgar – but its value must be enormous. I keep all her stuff, of course, locked up, and she sends for it as she wants it. And I examined the thing the other day. In fact I showed it to one of the passengers who happened to be in my office, who is a bit of an expert. He valued it at forty thousand pounds. She’ll show it to you if you ask her. She adores parading the things.”

  But I did not trouble Mrs Delmorton: I continued to avoid the lady like the plague. Any interest that
the voyage held for me lay in the human drama – not jewels. And the human drama continued to develop in a way that nobody liked. I even noticed the skipper who had happened to come into the smoking-room one night, staring at them a bit hard. Because – though I’ve said it before, I’ll repeat it again – there were times when there was murder abroad in that ship. And murder it might have come to on the night of the fancy dress ball, but for Mrs Delmorton’s diamond and emerald hair-slide.

  As the purser had prophesied, she wore it. She came in some Oriental costume, and I must admit she looked magnificent in it. And it was the hair-slide that put the finishing touch on it. It was such a magnificent piece of jewellery, in fact, that I overcame my dislike of the lady and asked her to allow me to examine it. There was no doubt about it – if anything, forty thousand was an underestimate. Beryl Langton was with me at the time, and she gave a little gasp of awed envy. A dozen or more large flawless diamonds: the same number of magnificent emeralds, and a quantity of smaller stones in an old-fashioned setting. Barbaric: probably at one time it had belonged to some Eastern potentate. And the net result was that I fully agreed with the purser, though naturally I did not tell the lady so. The final effect was vulgar, unless it was worn with some fancy costume such as she had on that night.

  Beryl Langton agreed with me.

  “If that belonged to me,” she said, in a sort of ecstatic whisper, “I’d have the whole thing reset into a dozen different pieces. Brooches, rings – and imagine a bracelet made of those smaller stones.”

  Then she laughed. “And to think that when I went to the purser today to get my poor little pearl necklace she was getting that out at the same time.”

  And we are not concerned in any way with the fatuous answer I made. Three pink gins before dinner can be responsible for a lot… We are merely concerned with the extraordinary happenings in the smoking-room which took place after dinner that night. And though for reasons that will appear later it is now two years since the events I am about to describe took place, I think my memory is fairly clear on the matter. At any rate I have forgotten nothing of importance.