The first complete impressions he had were the words of a song, with a rather thin metallic accompaniment; they were sung in a foreign accent and a voice that was still strange and yet faintly familiar. And yet he could hardly feel sure that he was not making up poetry in his sleep.
Over the land and over the sea
My flying fishes will come to me,
For the note is not of the world that wakes them,
But in—
He struggled to his feet and saw that his fellow-guardian was already out of bed; Jameson was peering out of the long window on to the balcony and calling out sharply to someone in the street below.
“Who’s that?” he called out sharply. “What do you want?”
He turned to Boyle in agitation, saying. “There’s somebody prowling about just outside. I knew it wasn’t safe. I’m going down to bar that front door, whatever they say.”
He ran downstairs in a flutter and Boyle could hear the clattering of the bars upon the front door; but Boyle himself stepped out upon the balcony and looked out on the long grey road that led up to the house, and he thought he was still dreaming.
Upon that grey road leading across that empty moor and through that little English hamlet, there had appeared a figure that might have stepped straight out of the jungle or the bazaar—a figure out of one of the Count’s fantastic stories; a figure out of the Arabian Nights. The rather ghostly grey twilight which begins to define and yet to discolour everything when the light in the east has ceased to be localized, lifted slowly like a veil of grey gauze and showed him a figure wrapped in outlandish raiment. A scarf of a strange sea-blue, vast and voluminous, went round the head like a turban, and then again round the chin, giving rather the general character of a hood; so far as the face was concerned it had the effects of a mask. For the raiment round the head was drawn close as a veil; and the head itself was bowed over a queer-looking musical instrument made of silver or steel, and shaped like a deformed or crooked violin. It was played with something like a silver comb, and the notes were curiously thin and keen. Before Boyle could open his mouth, the same haunting alien accent came from under the shadow of the burnous, singing words of the same sort:
As the golden birds go back to the tree
My golden fishes return to me.
Return—
“You’ve no right here,” called out Boyle in exasperation, hardly knowing what he said.
“I have a right to the goldfish,” said the stranger, speaking more like King Solomon than an unsandalled Bedouin in a ragged blue cloak. “And they will come to me. Come!”
He struck his strange fiddle as his voice rose sharply on the word. There was a pang of sound that seemed to pierce the mind, and then there came a fainter sound, like an answer; a vibrant whisper. It came from the dark room behind where the bowl of goldfish was standing.
Boyle turned towards it; and even as he turned the echo in the inner room changed to a long tingling sound like an electric bell, and then to a faint crash. It was still a matter of seconds since he had challenged the man from the balcony; but the old clerk had already regained the top of the stairs, panting a little, for he was an elderly gentleman.
“I’ve locked up the door, anyhow,” he said.
“The stable door,” said Boyle out of the darkness of the inner room.
Jameson followed him into that apartment and found him staring down at the floor, which was covered with a litter of coloured glass like the curved bits of a broken rainbow.
“What do you mean by the stable door?” began Jameson.
“I mean that the steed is stolen,” answered Boyle. “The flying steeds. The flying fishes our Arab friend outside has just whistled to like so many performing puppies.”
“But how could he?” exploded the old clerk, as if such events were hardly respectable.
“Well, they’re gone,” said Boyle shortly. “The broken bowl is here, which would have taken a long time to open properly, but only a second to smash. But the fish are gone, God knows how, though I think our friend ought to be asked.”
“We are wasting time,” said the distracted Jameson. “We ought to be after him at once.”
“Much better be telephoning the police at once,” answered Boyle. “They ought to outstrip him in a flash with motors and telephones that go a good deal farther than we should ever get, running through the village in our nightgowns. But it may be there are things even the police cars and wires won’t outstrip.”
While Jameson was talking to the police station through the telephone in an agitated voice, Boyle went out again on to the balcony and hastily scanned that grey landscape of daybreak. There was no trace of the man in the turban, and no other sign of life, except some faint stirrings an expert might have recognized in the hotel of the Blue Dragon. Only Boyle, for the first time, noted consciously something that he had all along been noting unconsciously. It was like a fact struggling in the submerged mind and demanding its own meaning. It was simply the fact that the grey landscape had never been entirely grey; there was one gold spot amid its stripes of colourless colour, a lamp lighted in one of the houses on the other side of the green. Something, perhaps irrational, told him that it had been burning through all the hours of the darkness
