The Bride of Fu-Manchu Read Free Page B

gave me something to think about.
    My father had been invited to lecture at Edinburgh—his old university—during Petrie’s first year, and a close friendship had sprung up between the keen student and the visiting lecturer. They had corresponded ever since.
    During my own Edinburgh days the doctor was established in practice in Cairo; but I spent part of one vacation as his guest in London. And another fast friendship resulted. He had returned from Egypt on that occasion to receive the medal of the Royal Society for his researches in tropical medicine. I remember how disappointed I had been to learn that his wife, of whose charm I had heard many rumours, was not accompanying him on this flying journey.
    His present visit—also intended to be a brief one—had been prolonged at the urgent request of the French authorities. Petrie’s reputation had grown greater with the passage of years, and learning that he was in London, they had begged him to look into this strange epidemic which threatened southern France, placing the Villa Jasmin at his disposal...
    Three weeks later I was invalided home from Brazil. Petrie, who had had the news from my father, met the ship at Lisbon and carried me off to the Villa Jasmin to recuperate under his own watchful eye.
    I fear I had proved to be a refractory patient.
    “You didn’t see the other case, did you?” Petrie asked suddenly.
    “No.”
    “Well.” He set down his glass. “I wish you would come along to the hospital with me. You must have met with some queer diseases on the Amazon, and you know the Uganda sleeping sickness. There’s this awful grin—proof of some sort of final paroxysm—and particularly what Cartier calls the black stigmata . Your bulb hunting has taken you into a few unwholesome places; have you ever come across anything like it?”
    I began to fill my pipe. “Never, doctor,” I replied.
    The sound of a distant gun boomed through the hot silence. A French battleship was entering Villefranche Harbour...

CHAPTER THREE

THE BLOODSTAINED LEAVES
    “G ood God! It’s ghastly! Cover him up again, doctor. I shall dream of that face.”
    I found myself wondering why Providence, though apparently beneficent, should permit such horrors to visit poor humanity. The man in the little mortuary—he had been engaged in a local vineyard—had not yet reached middle age when this new and dreadful pestilence had cut him off.
    “This,” said Petrie, “is the really singular feature.”
    He touched the dead man’s forehead. It was of a dark purple colour from the scalp to the brows. The sun-browned face was set in a grin of dreadful malignancy and the eyes were rolled upward so that only their whites showed.
    “What I have come to recognize as the characteristic sign,” Petrie added. “Subcutaneous haemorrhage; but strangely localized. It’s like a purple shadow, isn’t it? And when it reaches the eyes—finish.”
    “What a ghastly face! I have seen nothing like it anywhere!”
    We came out.
    “Nor have I!” Petrie confessed. “The earlier symptoms are closely allied with those of sleeping sickness but extraordinarily rapid in their stages. Glandular swellings always in the armpit. This final stage—the black stigmata , the purple shadow, which I have managed to avert in some of the other cases, is quite beyond my experience. That’s where plague comes in.
    “But now for the most mysterious thing of all—in which I am hoping you can really help me...”
    If anyone had invited me to name Dr. Petrie’s outstanding characteristic, I should have said “modesty.”
    Having run the car into its garage, Petrie led the way down the steep rocky path to a shed a hundred yards from the villa, which he had fitted up as a laboratory.
    We entered. The laboratory was really an enlarged gardener’s hut which the absent owner of Villa Jasmin had converted into a small studio. It had a glass window running along the whole of one side. A white-topped table now occupied