Chapter II

“Mind you,” continued the man in the corner, after he had assured himself of my undivided attention, “all these details were unknown to the public at first. I have merely co-ordinated them, and told them to you in the actual sequence in which they occurred, so that you may be able to understand the subsequent events.

“At the time—that is to say, on 3rd December, 1903—the evening papers only contained an account of what was then called ‘the mysterious outrage at Gastle Street, Portsmouth.’ A private gentleman was presumably assaulted and robbed in broad daylight, and inside a highly respectable house in a busy part of the city.

“Mrs. Bowden, the landlady, was, as you may imagine, most excited and indignant. Her house and herself had been grossly insulted by this abominable outrage, and she did her level best to throw what light she could on this mysterious occurrence.

“The story she told the police was indeed extraordinary, and as she repeated it to all her friends, and subsequently to one or two journalists, it roused public excitement to its highest pitch.

“What she related at great length to the detective in charge of the case, was briefly this:

“Captain and Mrs. Markham, it appears, arrived at 49, Gastle Street, on Wednesday afternoon, 2nd December, and Mrs. Bowden accommodated them with a sitting-room and bedroom, both on the ground floor. In the evening Mrs. Markham went out to dine with her brother, a Mr. Paulton, who is a well-known Portsmouth resident, but Captain Markham stayed in and had dinner alone in his sitting-room.

“According to Mrs. Bowden’s version of the story, at about nine o’clock a stranger called to see Captain Markham. This stranger was obviously a foreigner, for he spoke broken English. Unfortunately, the hall at 49, Gastle Street, was very dark, and, moreover, the foreigner was attired in a magnificent fur coat, the collar of which hid the lower part of his face. All Mrs. Bowden could see of him was that he was very tall, and wore gold-rimmed spectacles.

“‘He was so very peremptory in his manner,’ continued Mrs. Bowden, ‘that I had to show him in at once. The Captain seemed surprised to see him—in fact, he looked decidedly annoyed, I might say; but just as I was closing the door I heard the stranger laugh, and say quite pleasantly: “You gave me the slip, my friend, but you see I have found you out all right.”’

“Mrs. Bowden, after the manner of her class, seems to have made vigorous efforts to hear what went on in the sitting-room after that,” continued the man in the corner, “but she was not successful. Later on, however, the Captain rang and ordered whiskies and sodas. Both gentlemen were then sitting by the fire, looking quite friendly.

“‘I took a look round the room,’ explained the worthy landlady, ‘and took particular notice that the jewel-case was on the table, with the lid open. Captain Markham, as soon he saw me, closed it very quickly.’

“The stranger seems to have gone away at about half-past ten, and subsequently again Mrs. Markham came home accompanied by her brother, Mr. Paulton. The next morning she went out at a quarter past eleven o’clock, and about half an hour later the mysterious stranger called again.

“This time he pushed his way straight into the sitting-room; but the very next moment he uttered a cry of intense horror and astonishment, and rushed back into the hall, gesticulating wildly, and shrieking: ‘A robbery!—a murder!—I go for the police!’ And before Mrs. Bowden could stop him, or even could realise what had occurred, he had dashed out of the house.

“‘I called to Meggie,’ continued Mrs. Bowden, ‘I was so frightened, I didn’t dare go into the parlour alone. But she was more frightened than I was, and we stood trembling in the hall waiting for the police. At last I began to have my suspicions, and I got Meggie to run out into the street and see if she could bring in a policeman.’

“When the police at last arrived upon the scene, they pushed open the sitting-room door, and there found Captain Markham in a most helpless condition, his hands tied behind his back, and himself half-choked by the scarf over his mouth. As soon as he recovered his breath, he explained that he had no idea who his assailant was; he was standing with his back to the door, when he was suddenly dealt a blow on the head from behind, and he remembered nothing more.

“In the meantime Mrs. Markham had come home, and of course was horrified beyond measure at the outrage which had been committed. She declared that her jewel-case was in the sitting-room when she went out in the morning—a fact confirmed by Captain Markham himself.

“But here, at once, the police were seriously puzzled. Mrs. Bowden, of course, told her story of the foreigner—a story which was corroborated by her daughter, Meggie. Captain Markham, pressed by the police, and by his wife, admitted that a friend had visited him the evening before.

“‘He is an old friend I met years ago abroad, who happened to be in Portsmouth yesterday, and quite accidentally caught sight of me as I drove up to this door, and naturally came in to see me,’ was the Captain’s somewhat lame explanation.

“Nothing more was to be got out of him that day; he was still feeling very bewildered he said, and certainly he looked very ill. Mrs. Markham then put the whole matter in the hands of the police.

“Captain Markham had given a description of ‘the old friend he had met years ago abroad.’ This description vaguely coincided with that given by Mrs. Bowden of the mysterious foreigner. But the Captain’s replies to the cross-questionings of the detectives in charge of the case were always singularly reticent and lame. ‘I had lost sight of him for nearly twenty years,’ he explained, ‘and do not know what his present abode and occupation might be. When I knew him years ago, he was a man of independent means, without a fixed abode, and a great traveller. I believe that he is a German by nationality, but I don’t think that I ever knew this as a fact. His name was Johann Schmidt.’

“I may as well tell you here, at once, that the mysterious foreigner managed to make good his escape. He was traced as far as the South Western Railway Station, where he was seen to rush through the barrier, just in time to catch the express up to town. At Waterloo he was lost sight of in the crowd.

“The police were keenly on the alert; no trace of the missing jewels had as yet been found. Then it was that, gradually, the story of the secret plan of Port Arthur reached the ears of the general public. Who first told it, and to whom, it is difficult to conjecture, but you know what a way things of that sort have of leaking out.

“The secret of Captain Markham’s mission had of necessity been known to several people, and a secret shared by many soon ceases to be one at all; anyway, within a week of the so-called ‘Portsmouth outrage,’ it began to be loudly whispered that the robbery of Mrs. Markham’s jewels was only a mask that covered the deliberate theft of the plans of Port Arthur.

“And then the inevitable happened. Already Captain Markham’s strange attitude had been severely commented upon, and now the public, backed by the crowd of amateur detectives who read penny novelettes and form conclusions of their own, had made up its mind that Captain Markham was a party to the theft—that he was either the tool or the accomplice of the mysterious foreigner and that, in fact, he had been either bribed or terrorised into giving up the plan of Port Arthur to an enemy of the Russian government. The crime was all the more heinous as by this act of treachery a British ship, manned by a British crew, had been sent to certain destruction.

“What rendered the whole case doubly mysterious was that Messrs. Mills and Co. seemed to take the matter with complete indifference. They refused to be interviewed, or to give any information about the _Artemis_ at all, and seemed callously willing to await events.

“The public was furious; the newspapers stormed; every one felt that the _Artemis_ should be stopped at any cost at her next port of call, and not allowed to continue her perilous journey.

“And yet the days went by; the public read with horror at Lloyds’ that the _Artemis_ had called at Malta, at Port Said, at Aden, and was now well on her way to the Far East. Feeling ran so high throughout England, that, if the mysterious stranger had been discovered by the police, no protection from them would have saved him from being lynched.

“As for Captain Markham, public opinion reserved its final judgment. A cloud hung over him, of that there was no doubt; many said openly that he had sold the secret plans of Port Arthur, either to the Japanese or to the Nihilists, either through fear or intimidation, if not through greed.

“Then the inevitable climax came: A certain Mr. Carleton constituted himself the spokesman of the general public; he met Captain Markham one day at one of the clubs in London. There were hot words between them. Mr. Carleton did not mince matters; he openly accused Captain Markham of that which public opinion had already whispered, and finally, completely losing his temper, he struck the Captain in the face, calling him every opprobrious name he could think of.

“But for the timely interference of friends, there would have been murder committed then and there; as it was, Captain Markham was induced by his own friends to bring a criminal charge of slander and of assault against Mr. Carleton, as the only means of making the whole story public, and possibly vindicating his character.”