Complete works of a e w.., p.26
Complete Works of a E W Mason, page 26
With a smile upon his face, Hanaud led the way across the room. He had the dramatic instinct, and rejoiced in it. He was going to produce a surprise for his companion and, savouring the moment in advance, he managed his effects. He walked towards the mantelpiece and stopped a few paces away from it.
“Look!”
Mr. Ricardo looked and saw a broad Adams mantelpiece. He turned a bewildered face to his friend.
“You see nothing?” Hanaud asked.
“Nothing!”
“Look again! I am not sure — but is it not that Celymène is posing before you?”
Mr. Ricardo looked again. There was nothing to fix his eyes. He saw a book or two, a cup, a vase or two, and nothing else really expect a very pretty and apparently valuable piece of — and suddenly Mr. Ricardo understood. Straight in front of him, in the very centre of the mantelpiece, a figure in painted china was leaning against a china stile. It was the figure of a perfectly impossible courtier, feminine and exquisite as could be, and apparelled also even to the scarlet heels exactly as Calladine had described Joan Carew.
Hanaud chuckled with satisfaction when he saw the expression upon Mr. Ricardo’s face.
“Ah, you understand,” he said. “Do you dream, my friend? At times — yes, like the rest of us. Then recollect your dreams? Things, people, which you have seen perhaps that day, perhaps months ago, pop in and out of them without making themselves prayed for. You cannot understand why. Yet sometimes they cut their strange capers there, logically, too, through subtle associations which the dreamer, once awake, does not apprehend. Thus, our friend here sits in the window, intoxicated by his drug, the music plays in the Semiramis, the curtain goes up in the heated theatre of his brain. He sees himself step upon the stage, and who else meets him but the china figure from his mantelpiece?”
Mr. Ricardo for a moment was all enthusiasm. Then his doubt returned to him.
“What you say, my dear Hanaud, is very ingenious. The figure upon the mantelpiece is also extremely convincing. And I should be absolutely convinced but for one thing.”
“Yes?” said Hanaud, watching his friend closely.
“I am — I may say it, I think, a man of the world. And I ask myself” — Mr. Ricardo never could ask himself anything without assuming a manner of extreme pomposity— “I ask myself, whether a young man who has given up his social ties, who has become a hermit, and still more who has become the slave of a drug, would retain that scrupulous carefulness of his body which is indicated by dressing for dinner when alone?”
Hanaud struck the table with the palm of his hand and sat down in a chair.
“Yes. That is the weak point in my theory. You have hit it. I knew it was there — that weak point, and I wondered whether you would seize it. Yes, the consumers of drugs are careless, untidy — even unclean as a rule. But not always. We must be careful. We must wait.”
“For what?” asked Ricardo, beaming with pride.
“For the answer to a telephone message,” replied Hanaud, with a nod towards the door.
Both men waited impatiently until Calladine came into the room. He wore now a suit of blue serge, he had a clearer eye, his skin a healthier look; he was altogether a more reputable person. But he was plainly very ill at ease. He offered his visitors cigarettes, he proposed refreshments, he avoided entirely and awkwardly the object of their visit. Hanaud smiled. His theory was working out. Sobered by his bath, Calladine had realised the foolishness of which he had been guilty.
“You telephone, to the Semiramis, of course?” said Hanaud cheerfully.
Calladine grew red.
“Yes,” he stammered.
“Yet I did not hear that volume of ‘Hallos’ which precedes telephonic connection in your country of leisure,” Hanaud continued.
“I telephoned from my bedroom. You would not hear anything in this room.”
“Yes, yes; the walls of these old houses are solid.” Hanaud was playing with his victim. “And when may we expect Miss Carew?”
“I can’t say,” replied Calladine. “It’s very strange. She is not in the hotel. I am afraid that she has gone away, fled.”
Mr. Ricardo and Hanaud exchanged a look. They were both satisfied now. There was no word of truth in Calladine’s story.
“Then there is no reason for us to wait,” said Hanaud. “I shall have my holiday after all.” And while he was yet speaking the voice of a newsboy calling out the first edition of an evening paper became distantly audible. Hanaud broke off his farewell. For a moment he listened, with his head bent. Then the voice was heard again, confused, indistinct; Hanaud picked up his hat and cane and, without another word to Calladine, raced down the stairs. Mr. Ricardo followed him, but when he reached the pavement, Hanaud was half down the little street. At the corner, however, he stopped, and Ricardo joined him, coughing and out of breath.
“What’s the matter?” he gasped.
“Listen,” said Hanaud.
At the bottom of Duke Street, by Charing Cross Station, the newsboy was shouting his wares. Both men listened, and now the words came to them mispronounced but decipherable.
“Mysterious crime at the Semiramis Hotel.”
Ricardo stared at his companion.
“You were wrong then!” he cried. “Calladine’s story was true.”
For once in a way Hanaud was quite disconcerted.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “We will buy a paper.”
But before he could move a step a taxi-cab turned into the Adelphi from the Strand, and wheeling in front of their faces, stopped at Calladine’s door. From the cab a girl descended.
“Let us go back,” said Hanaud.
III
MR. RICARDO COULD no longer complain. It was half-past eight when Calladine had first disturbed the formalities of his house in Grosvenor Square. It was barely ten now, and during that short time he had been flung from surprise to surprise, he had looked underground on a morning of fresh summer, and had been thrilled by the contrast between the queer, sinister life below and within and the open call to joy of the green world above. He had passed from incredulity to belief, from belief to incredulity, and when at last incredulity was firmly established, and the story to which he had listened proved the emanation of a drugged and heated brain, lo! the facts buffeted him in the face, and the story was shown to be true.
“I am alive once more,” Mr. Ricardo thought as he turned back with Hanaud, and in his excitement he cried his thought aloud.
“Are you?” said Hanaud. “And what is life without a newspaper? If you will buy one from that remarkably raucous boy at the bottom of the street I will keep an eye upon Calladine’s house till you come back.”
Mr. Ricardo sped down to Charing Cross and brought back a copy of the fourth edition of the Star. He handed it to Hanaud, who stared at it doubtfully, folded as it was.
“Shall we see what it says?” Ricardo asked impatiently.
“By no means,” Hanaud answered, waking from his reverie and tucking briskly away the paper into the tail pocket of his coat. “We will hear what Miss Joan Carew has to say, with our minds undisturbed by any discoveries. I was wondering about something totally different.”
“Yes?” Mr. Ricardo encouraged him. “What was it?”
“I was wondering, since it is only ten o’clock, at what hour the first editions of the evening papers appear.”
“It is a question,” Mr. Ricardo replied sententiously, “which the greatest minds have failed to answer.”
And they walked along the street to the house. The front door stood open during the day like the front door of any other house which is let off in sets of rooms. Hanaud and Ricardo went up the staircase and rang the bell of Calladine’s door. A middle-aged woman opened it.
“Mr. Calladine is in?” said Hanaud.
“I will ask,” replied the woman. “What name shall I say?”
“It does not matter. I will go straight in,” said Hanaud quietly. “I was here with my friend but a minute ago.”
He went straight forward and into Calladine’s parlour. Mr. Ricardo looked over his shoulder as he opened the door and saw a girl turn to them suddenly a white face of terror, and flinch as though already she felt the hand of a constable upon her shoulder. Calladine, on the other hand, uttered a cry of relief.
“These are my friends,” he exclaimed to the girl, “the friends of whom I spoke to you”; and to Hanaud he said: “This is Miss Carew.”
Hanaud bowed.
“You shall tell me your story, mademoiselle,” he said very gently, and a little colour returned to the girl’s cheeks, a little courage revived in her.
“But you have heard it,” she answered.
“Not from you,” said Hanaud.
So for a second time in that room she told the history of that night. Only this time the sunlight was warm upon the world, the comfortable sounds of life’s routine were borne through the windows, and the girl herself wore the inconspicuous blue serge of a thousand other girls afoot that morning. These trifles of circumstance took the edge of sheer horror off her narrative, so that, to tell the truth, Mr. Ricardo was a trifle disappointed. He wanted a crescendo motive in his music, whereas it had begun at its fortissimo. Hanaud, however, was the perfect listener. He listened without stirring and with most compassionate eyes, so that Joan Carew spoke only to him, and to him, each moment that passed, with greater confidence. The life and sparkle of her had gone altogether. There was nothing in her manner now to suggest the waywardness, the gay irresponsibility, the radiance, which had attracted Calladine the night before. She was just a very young and very pretty girl, telling in a low and remorseful voice of the tragic dilemma to which she had brought herself. Of Celymène all that remained was something exquisite and fragile in her beauty, in the slimness of her figure, in her daintiness of hand and foot — something almost of the hot-house. But the story she told was, detail for detail, the same which Calladine had already related.
“Thank you,” said Hanaud when she had done. “Now I must ask you two questions.”
“I will answer them.”
Mr. Ricardo sat up. He began to think of a third question which he might put himself, something uncommonly subtle and searching, which Hanaud would never have thought of. But Hanaud put his questions, and Ricardo almost jumped out of his chair.
“You will forgive me. Miss Carew. But have you ever stolen before?”
Joan Carew turned upon Hanaud with spirit. Then a change swept over her face.
“You have a right to ask,” she answered. “Never.” She looked into his eyes as she answered. Hanaud did not move. He sat with a hand upon each knee and led to his second question.
“Early this morning, when you left this room, you told Mr. Calladine that you would wait at the Semiramis until he telephoned to you?”
“Yes.”
“Yet when he telephoned, you had gone out?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I will tell you,” said Joan Carew. “I could not bear to keep the little diamond chain in my room.”
For a moment even Hanaud was surprised. He had lost sight of that complication. Now he leaned forward anxiously; indeed, with a greater anxiety than he had yet shown in all this affair.
“I was terrified,” continued Joan Carew. “I kept thinking: ‘They must have found out by now. They will search everywhere.’ I didn’t reason. I lay in bed expecting to hear every moment a loud knocking on the door. Besides — the chain itself being there in my bedroom — her chain — the dead woman’s chain — no, I couldn’t endure it. I felt as if I had stolen it. Then my maid brought in my tea.”
“You had locked it away?” cried Hanaud.
“Yes. My maid did not see it.”
Joan Carew explained how she had risen, dressed, wrapped the chain in a pad of cotton-wool and enclosed it in an envelope. The envelope had not the stamp of the hotel upon it. It was a rather large envelope, one of a packet which she had bought in a crowded shop in Oxford Street on her way from Euston to the Semiramis. She had bought the envelopes of that particular size in order that when she sent her letter of introduction to the Director of the Opera at Covent Garden she might enclose with it a photograph.
“And to whom did you send it?” asked Mr. Ricardo.
“To Mrs. Blumenstein at the Semiramis. I printed the address carefully. Then I went out and posted it.”
“Where?” Hanaud inquired.
“In the big letter-box of the Post Office at the corner of Trafalgar Square.”
Hanaud looked at the girl sharply.
“You had your wits about you, I see,” he said.
“What if the envelope gets lost?” said Ricardo.
Hanaud laughed grimly.
“If one envelope is delivered at its address in London to-day, it will be that one,” he said. “The news of the crime is published, you see,” and he swung round to Joan.
“Did you know that, Miss Carew?”
“No,” she answered in an awe-stricken voice.
“Well, then, it is. Let us see what the special investigator has to say about it.” And Hanaud, with a deliberation which Mr. Ricardo found quite excruciating, spread out the newspaper on the table in front of him.
IV
THERE WAS ONLY one new fact in the couple of columns devoted to the mystery. Mrs. Blumenstein had died from chloroform poisoning. She was of a stout habit, and the thieves were not skilled in the administration of the anæsthetic.
“It’s murder none the less,” said Hanaud, and he gazed straight at Joan, asking her by the direct summons of his eyes what she was going to do.
“I must tell my story to the police,” she replied painfully and slowly. But she did not hesitate; she was announcing a meditated plan.
Hanaud neither agreed nor differed. His face was blank, and when he spoke there was no cordiality in his voice. “Well,” he asked, “and what is it that you have to say to the police, miss? That you went into the room to steal, and that you were attacked by two strangers, dressed as apaches, and masked? That is all?”
“Yes.”
“And how many men at the Semiramis ball were dressed as apaches and wore masks? Come! Make a guess. A hundred at the least?”
“I should think so.”
“Then what will your confession do beyond — I quote your English idiom — putting you in the coach?”
Mr. Ricardo now smiled with relief. Hanaud was taking a definite line. His knowledge of idiomatic English might be incomplete, but his heart was in the right place. The girl traced a vague pattern on the tablecloth with her fingers.
“Yet I think I must tell the police,” she repeated, looking up and dropping her eyes again. Mr. Ricardo noticed that her eyelashes were very long. For the first time Hanaud’s face relaxed.
“And I think you are quite right,” he cried heartily, to Mr. Ricardo’s surprise. “Tell them the truth before they suspect it, and they will help you out of the affair if they can. Not a doubt of it. Come, I will go with you myself to Scotland Yard.”
“Thank you,” said Joan, and the pair drove away in a cab together.
Hanaud returned to Grosvenor Square alone and lunched with Ricardo.
“It was all right,” he said. “The police were very kind. Miss Joan Carew told her story to them as she had told it to us. Fortunately, the envelope with the aluminium chain had already been delivered, and was in their hands. They were much mystified about it, but Miss Joan’s story gave them a reasonable explanation. I think they are inclined to believe her; and, if she is speaking the truth, they will keep her out of the witness-box if they can.”
“She is to stay here in London, then?” asked Ricardo.
“Oh, yes; she is not to go. She will present her letters at the Opera House and secure an engagement, if she can. The criminals might be lulled thereby into a belief that the girl had kept the whole strange incident to herself, and that there was nowhere even a knowledge of the disguise which they had used.” Hanaud spoke as carelessly as if the matter was not very important; and Ricardo, with an unusual flash of shrewdness, said:
“It is clear, my friend, that you do not think those two men will ever be caught at all.”
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders.
“There is always a chance. But listen. There is a room with a hundred guns, one of which is loaded. Outside the room there are a hundred pigeons, one of which is white. You are taken into the room blind-fold. You choose the loaded gun and you shoot the one white pigeon. That is the value of the chance.”
“But,” exclaimed Ricardo, “those pearls were of great value, and I have heard at a trial expert evidence given by pearl merchants. All agree that the pearls of great value are known; so, when they come upon the market — —”
“That is true,” Hanaud interrupted imperturbably. “But how are they known?”
“By their weight,” said Mr. Ricardo.
“Exactly,” replied Hanaud. “But did you not also hear at this trial of yours that pearls can be peeled like an onion? No? It is true. Remove a skin, two skins, the weight is altered, the pearl is a trifle smaller. It has lost a little of its value, yes — but you can no longer identify it as the so-and-so pearl which belonged to this or that sultan, was stolen by the vizier, bought by Messrs. Lustre and Steinopolis, of Hatton Garden, and subsequently sold to the wealthy Mrs. Blumenstein. No, your pearl has vanished altogether. There is a new pearl which can be traded.” He looked at Ricardo. “Who shall say that those pearls are not already in one of the queer little back streets of Amsterdam, undergoing their transformation?”
Mr. Ricardo was not persuaded because he would not be. “I have some experience in these matters,” he said loftily to Hanaud. “I am sure that we shall lay our hands upon the criminals. We have never failed.”
Hanaud grinned from ear to ear. The only experience which Mr. Ricardo had ever had was gained on the shores of Geneva and at Aix under Hanaud’s tuition. But Hanaud did not argue, and there the matter rested.
