“Look at that,” he said; and Jim Frobisher as he took it noticed with a queer little start that although Hanaud’s eyes were on his face they were blank of all expression. They did not see him. Hanaud’s senses were concentrated on the two girls at neither of whom he so much as glanced. He was alert to them, to any movement they might make of surprise or terror. Jim threw up his head in a sudden revolt. He was being used for another trick, as some conjurer may use a fool of a fellow whom he has persuaded out of his audience on to his platform. Jim looked at the cover of the book, and cried with enough violence to recall Hanaud’s attention:
“I see nothing here to the point. It is a treatise printed by some learned society in Edinburgh.”
“It is. And if you will look again, you will see that it was written by a Professor of Medicine in that University. And if you will look a third time you will see from a small inscription in ink that the copy was presented with the Professor’s compliments to Mr. Simon Harlowe.”
Hanaud, whilst he was speaking, went to the second of the two windows which looked upon the court and putting his head out, spoke for a little while in a low voice.
“We shall not need our sentry here any more,” he said as he turned back into the room. “I have sent him upon an errand.”
He went back to Jim Frobisher, who was turning over a page of the treatise here and there and was never a scrap the wiser.
“Well?” he asked.
“Strophanthus Hispidus,” Jim read aloud the title of the treatise. “I can’t make head or tail of it.”
“Let me try!” said Hanaud, and he took the book out of Frobisher’s hands. “I will show you all how I spent the half-hour whilst I was waiting for you this morning.”
He sat down at the writing-table, placed the treatise on the blotting-pad in front of him and laid it open at a coloured plate.
“This is the fruit of the plant Strophanthus Hispidus, when it is ripening,” he said.
The plate showed two long, tapering follicles joined together at their stems and then separating like a pair of compasses set at an acute angle. The backs of these follicles were rounded, dark in colour and speckled; the inner surfaces, however, were flat, and the curious feature of them was that, from longitudinal crevices, a number of silky white feathers protruded.
“Each of these feathers,” Hanaud continued, and he looked up to find that Ann Upcott had drawn close to the table and that Betty Harlowe herself was leaning forward with a look of curiosity upon her face—“each of these feathers is attached by a fine stalk to an elliptical pod, which is the seed, and when the fruit is quite ripe and these follicles have opened so that they make a straight line, the feathers are released and the wind spreads the seed. It is wonderful, eh? See!”
Hanaud turned the pages until he came to another plate. Here a feather was represented in complete detachment from the follicle. It was outspread like a fan and was extraordinarily pretty and delicate in its texture; and from it by a stem as fine as a hair the seed hung like a jewel.
“What would you say of it, Mademoiselle?” Hanaud asked, looking up into the face of Ann Upcott with a smile. “An ornament wrought for a fine lady, by a dainty artist, eh?” and he turned the book round so that she on the opposite side of the table might the better admire the engraving.
Betty Harlowe, it seemed, was now mastered by her curiosity. Jim Frobisher, gazing down over Hanaud’s shoulder at the plate and wondering uneasily whither he was being led, saw a shadow fall across the book. And there was Betty, standing by the side of her friend with the palms of her hands upon the edge of the table and her face bent over the book.
“One could wish it was an ornament, this seed of the Strophanthus Hispidus,” Hanaud continued with a shake of the head. “But, alas! it is not so harmless.”
He turned the book around again to himself and once more turned the pages. The smile had disappeared altogether from his face. He stopped at a third plate; and this third plate showed a row of crudely fashioned arrows with barbed heads.
Hanaud glanced up over his shoulder at Jim.
“Do you understand now the importance of this book, Monsieur Frobisher?” he asked. “No? The seeds of this plant make the famous arrow-poison of Africa. The deadliest of all the poisons since there is no antidote for it.” His voice grew sombre. “The wickedest of all the poisons, since it leaves no trace.”
Jim Frobisher was startled. “Is that true?” he cried.
“Yes,” said Hanaud; and Betty suddenly leaned forward and pointed to the bottom of the plate.
“There is a mark there below the hilt of that arrow,” she said curiously. “Yes, and a tiny note in ink.”
For a moment a little gift of vision was vouchsafed to Jim Frobisher, born, no doubt, of his perplexities and trouble. A curtain was rung up in his brain. He saw no more than what was before him—the pretty group about the table in the gold of the May morning, but it was all made grim and terrible and the gold had withered to a light that was grey and deathly and cold as the grave. There were the two girls in the grace of their beauty and their youth, daintily tended, fastidiously dressed, bending their shining curls over that plate of the poison arrows like pupils at a lecture. And the man delivering the lecture, so close to them, with speech so gentle, was implacably on the trail of murder, and maybe even now looked upon one of these two girls as his quarry;
