Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison

by Arthur Morrison

  Before she had recovered from her surprise the door was shut behind her. She struggled stoutly and screamed, but the place she was in was absolutely dark; she was taken by surprise, and she found resistance useless. They were men who held her, and the voice of the only one who spoke she did not know. He demanded in firm and distinct tones that the “sacred thing” should be given up, and that Mrs. Mallett should sign a paper agreeing to prosecute nobody before she was allowed to go. She however, as she asserted with her customary emphasis, was not the sort of woman to give in to that. She resolutely declined to do anything of the sort, and promised her captors, whoever they were, a full and legal return for their behaviour. Then she became conscious that a woman was somewhere present, and the man threatened that this woman should search her. This threat Mrs. Mallett met as boldly as the others. She should like to meet the woman who would dare attempt to search her, she said. She defied anybody to attempt it. As for her uncle Joseph’s snuff-box, no matter where it was, it was where they would not be able to get it. That they should never have, but sooner or later they should have something very unpleasant for their attempts to steal it. This declaration had an immediate effect. They importuned her no more, and she was left in an inner room and the key was turned on her. There she sat, dozing occasionally, the whole night, her indomitable spirit remaining proof through all those doubtful hours of darkness. Once or twice she heard people enter and move about, and each time she called aloud to offer, as Hewitt had heard, a reward to anybody who should bring the police or communicate her situation to Hewitt. Day broke and still she waited, sleepless and unfed, till Hewitt at last arrived and released her.

  On Mrs. Mallett’s arrival at her house Mrs. Rudd’s servant was at once despatched with reassuring news and Hewitt once more addressed himself to the question of the burglars. “First, Mrs. Mallett,” he said, “did you ever conceal anything — anything at all mind — in the frame of an engraving?”

  “No, never.”

  “Were any of your engravings framed before you had them?”

  “Not one that I can remember. They were mostly uncle Joseph’s, and he kept them with a lot of others in drawers. He was rather a collector, you know.”

  “Very well. Now come up to the attic. Something has been opened there that was not touched at the first attempt.”

  “See now,” said Hewitt, when the attic was reached, “here is a box full of papers. Do you know everything that was in it?”

  “No, I don’t,” Mrs. Mallett replied. “There were a lot of my uncle’s manuscript plays. Here you see ‘The Dead Bridegroom, or the Drum of Fortune,’ and so on; and there were a lot of autographs. I took no interest in them, although some were rather valuable, I believe.”

  “Now bring your recollection to bear as strongly as you can,” Hewitt said. “Do you ever remember seeing in this box a paper bearing nothing whatever upon it but a wax seal?”

  “Oh yes, I remember that well enough. I’ve noticed it each time I’ve turned the box over — which is very seldom. It was a plain slip of vellum paper with a red seal, cracked and rather worn — some celebrated person’s seal, I suppose. What about it?” Hewitt was turning the papers over one at a time. “It doesn’t seem to be here now,” he said. “Do you see it?”

  “No,” Mrs. Mallett returned, examining the papers herself, “it isn’t. It appears to be the only thing missing. But why should they take it?”

  “I think we are at the bottom of all this mystery now,” Hewitt answered quietly. “It is the Seal of the Woman.”

  “The what? I don’t understand. The fact is, Mrs. Mallett, that these people have never wanted your uncle Joseph’s snuff-box at all, but that seal.”

  “Not wanted the snuff-box? Nonsense! Why, didn’t I tell you Penner asked for it — wanted to buy it?”

  “Yes, you did, but so far as I can remember you never spoke of a single instance of Penner mentioning the snuff-box by name. He spoke of a sacred relic, and you, of course, very naturally assumed he spoke of the box. None of the anonymous letters mentioned the box, you know, and once or twice they actually did mention a seal, though usually the thing was spoken of in a roundabout and figurative way. All along, these people — Reuben Penner and the others — have been after the seal, and you have been defending the snuff-box.”

  “But why the seal?”

  “Did you never hear of Joanna Southcott?”

  “Oh yes, of course; she was an ignorant visionary who set up as prophetess eighty or ninety years ago or more.”

  “Joanna Southcott gave herself out as a prophetess in 1790. She was to be the mother of the Messiah, she said, and she was the woman driven into the wilderness, as foretold in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation. She died at the end of 1814, when her followers numbered more than 100,000, all fanatic believers. She had made rather a good thing in her lifetime by the sale of seals, each of which was to secure the eternal salvation of the holder. At her death, of course, many of the believers fell away, but others held on as faithfully as ever, asserting that ‘the holy Joanna’ would rise again and fulfil all the prophecies. These poor people dwindled in numbers gradually, and although they attempted to bring up their children in their own faith, the whole belief has been practically extinct for years now. You will remember that you told me of Penner’s mother being a superstitious fanatic of some sort, and that your uncle Joseph possessed her extravagances. The thing seems pretty plain now. Your uncle Joseph possessed himself of Joanna Southcott’s seal by way of removing from poor old Mrs. Penner an object of a sort of idolatry, and kept it as a curiosity. Reuben Penner grew up strong in his mother’s delusions, and to him and the few believers he had gathered round him at his Tabernacle, the seal was an object worth risking anything to get.

  “First he tried to convert you to his belief. Then he tried to buy it; after that, he and his friends tried anonymous letters, and at last, grown desperate, they resorted to watching you, burglary and kidnapping. Their first night’s raid was unsuccessful, so last night they tried kidnapping you by the aid of a cabman. When they had got you, and you had at last given them to understand that it was your uncle Joseph’s snuff-box you were defending, they tried the house again, and this time were successful. I guessed they had succeeded then, from a simple circumstance. They had begun to cut out the backs of framed engravings for purposes of search, but only some of the engravings were so treated. That meant either that the article wanted was found behind one of them, or that the intruders broke off in their picture-examination to search somewhere else, and were then successful, and so under no necessity of opening the other engravings. You assured me that nothing could have been concealed in any of the engravings, so I at once assumed that they had found what they were after in the only place wherein they had not searched the night before — the attic — and probably among the papers in the trunk.”

  “But then if they found it there why didn’t they return and let me go?”

  “Because you would have found where they had brought you. They probably intended to keep you there till the dark of the next evening, and then take you away in a cab again and leave you some distance off. To prevent my following and possibly finding you they left here on your looking-glass this note” (Hewitt produced it) “threatening all sorts of vague consequences if you were not left to them. They knew you had come to me, of course, having followed you to my office. And now Penner feels himself anything but safe. He has relinquished his greengrocery and dispensed his stock in charity, and probably, having got the seal he has taken himself off. Not so much perhaps from fear of punishment as for fear the seal may be taken from him, and with it the salvation his odd belief teaches him it will confer.”

  Mrs. Mallett sat silently for a little while and then said in a rather softened voice, “Mr. Hewitt, I am not what is called a woman of sentiment, as you may have observed, and I have been most shamefully treated over this wretched seal. But if all you tell me has been actually what has happened I have a sort of p
erverse inclination to forgive the man in spite of myself. The thing probably had been his mother’s — or at any rate he believed so — and his giving up his little all to attain the object of his ridiculous faith, and distributing his goods among the poor people and all that — really it’s worthy of an old martyr, if only it were done in the cause of a faith a little less stupid — though of course he thinks his is the only religion, as others do of theirs. But then” — Mrs. Mallett stiffened again— “there’s not much to prove your theories, is there?”

  Hewitt smiled. “Perhaps not,” he said, “except that, to my mind at any rate, everything points to my explanation being the only possible one. The thing presented itself to you, from the beginning, as an attempt on the snuff-box you value so highly, and the possibility of the seal being the object aimed at never entered your mind. I saw it whole from the outside, and on thinking the thing over after our first interview I remembered Joanna Southcott. I think I am right.”

  “Well, if you are, as I said, I half believe I shall forgive the man. We will advertise if you like, telling him he has nothing to fear if he can give an explanation of his conduct consistent with what he calls his religious belief, absurd as it may be.”

  That night fell darker and foggier than the last. The advertisement went into the daily papers, but Reuben Penner nevers saw it. Late the next day a bargeman passing Old Swan Pier struck some large object with his boat-hook and brought it to the surface. It was the body of a drowned man, and it was afterwards identified as that of Reuben Penner, late greengrocer, of Hammersmith. How he came into the water there was nothing to show. There was no money nor any valuables found on the body, and there was a story of a large, heavy-faced man who had given a poor woman — a perfect stranger — a watch and chain and a handful of money down near Tower Hill on that foggy evening. But this again was only a story, not definitely authenticated. What was certain was that, tied securely round the dead man’s neck with a cord, and gripped and crumpled tightly in his right hand, was a soddened piece of vellum paper, blank, but carrying an old red seal, of which the device was almost entirely rubbed and cracked away. Nobody at the inquest quite understood this.

  THE END

  THE RED TRIANGLE

  In this set of stories, published in The London Magazine in 1903, we are introduced to Hewitt’s arch enemy, master criminal Mayes, the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’ foe Moriarty. Mayes goes by a number of aliases, one of them being Myatt, and is a highly ruthless criminal that thinks nothing of disposing of his underlings once he has no more use for them. He has a number of skills, one of which is hypnotism, a popular party trick in the Victorian era that was also used for therapeutic purposes; yet in contemporary stories, it was often employed to compel people to do things they would not normally do. Thus Mayes is endowed with a skill that could unsettle many worthy middle class readers, who took pride in their personal qualities of free thinking and self reliance. The red triangle in the title was literally that, a mark left on Mayes’ victims using a soapstone-like implement and a waxy red substance. It was also used as part of Mayes’ hypnosis methods, to enslave fellow criminals so that they would do his bidding.

  In the story The Case of the Burnt Barn we find out more about this mysterious criminal mastermind – as the story unfolds it is revealed that Mayes has acted in the past as a ruthless “heavy” for the corrupt ruling powers in Haiti, actions which come full circle to create the mystery of the burnt barn with a murdered man in its remains. It would seem that Mayes’ motive for targeting the Peytral family in Haiti is classed based, a notion that would have sent a thrill of unease through the middle class reader of the story, bearing in mind the fear of anarchists and foreign threats to the great British institutions – such as the patriarchal family.

  However, Morrison sticks to familiar themes for the stories, with two of them — The Affair of Samuel’s Diamonds and The Case of the Lever Key — having theft as a basis, the former of diamonds, and the latter of bonds. In The Case of the Admiralty Code, Brett, Hewitt’s journalist assistant and chronicler, comes face to face with Mayes, in the course of a case that revolves around a missing admiralty code. Mayes tries to recruit Brett into his service, and it is revealed that he even has ambitions to turn Hewitt to the criminal lifestyle.

  The stories come full circle in the last tale, The Adventure of Channel Marsh, when there is a deadly confrontation between Mayes, and Peytral from a previous story.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  THE AFFAIR OF SAMUEL’S DIAMONDS

  THE CASE OF MR. JACOB MASON

  THE CASE OF THE LEVER KEY

  THE CASE OF THE BURNT BARN

  THE CASE OF THE ADMIRALTY CODE

  THE ADVENTURE OF CHANNEL MARSH

  THE AFFAIR OF SAMUEL’S DIAMONDS

  I

  I have already recorded many of the adventures of my friend Martin Hewitt, but among them there have been more of a certain few which were discovered to be related together in a very extraordinary manner; and it is to these that I am now at liberty to address myself. There may have been others — cases which gave no indication of their connection with these; some of them indeed I may have told without a suspicion of their connection with the Red Triangle; but the first in which that singular accompaniment became apparent was the matter of Samuel’s diamonds. The case exhibited many interesting features, and I was very anxious to report it, with perhaps even less delay than I had thought judicious in other cases; but Hewitt restrained me.

  “No, Brett,” he said, “there is more to come of this. This particular case is over, it is true, but there is much behind. I’ve an idea that I shall see that Red Triangle again. I may, or, of course, I may not; but there is deep work going on — very deep work, and whether we see more of it or not, I must keep prepared. I can’t afford to throw a single card upon the table. So, as many notes as you please, Brett, for future reference; but no publication yet — none of your journalism!”

  Hewitt was right. It was not so long before we heard more of the Red Triangle, and after that more, though the true connection of some of the cases with the mysterious symbol and the meaning of the symbol itself remained for a time undiscovered. But at last Hewitt was able to unmask the hideous secret, and for ever put an end to the evil influence that gathered about the sign; and now there remains no reason why the full story should not be told.

  I have told elsewhere of my first acquaintance with Martin Hewitt, of his pleasant and companionable nature, his ordinary height, his stoutness, his round, smiling face — those characteristics that aided him so well in his business of investigator, so unlike was his appearance and manner to that of the private detective of the ordinary person’s imagination. Therefore I need only remind my readers that my bachelor chambers were, during most of my acquaintance with Hewitt, in the old building near the Strand, in which Hewitt’s office stood at the top of the first flight of stairs; where the plain ground-glass of the door bore as inscription the single word “Hewitt,” and the sharp lad, Kerrett, first received visitors in the outer office.

  Next door to this old house, at the time I am to speak of, a much newer building stood, especially built for letting out in offices. It happened that one day as Hewitt left his office for a late lunch, he became aware of a pallid and agitated Jew who was pervading the front door of this adjoining building. The man exhibited every sign of nervous expectancy, staring this way and that up and down the busy street, and once or twice rushing aimlessly half-way up the inner stairs, and as often returning to the door. Apprehension was plain on his pale face, and he was clearly in a state that blinded his attention to the ordinary matters about him, just as happens when a man is in momentary and nervous expectation of some serious event.

  Noting these things as he passed, with no more than the observation that was his professional habit, Hewitt proceeded to his lunch. This done with, he returned to his office, perceiving, as he passed the next-door building, that the distracted Jew was no l
onger visible. It seemed plain that the person or the event he had awaited with such obvious nervousness had arrived and passed; one more of the problems, anxieties or crises that join and unravel moment by moment in the human ant-hill of London, had perhaps closed for good or ill within the past half-hour; perhaps it had only begun.

  A message awaited Hewitt at his office — an urgent message. The housekeeper had come in from next door, Kerrett reported, with an urgent request that Mr. Martin Hewitt would go immediately to the offices of Mr. Denson, on the third floor. The housekeeper seemed to know little or nothing of the business, except that a Mr. Samuel was alone in Mr. Denson’s office, and had sent the message.

  With no delay Hewitt transferred himself to the next-door offices. There the housekeeper, who inhabited a uniform and a glass box opposite the foot of the first flight of stairs, directed Hewitt, with the remark that the gentleman was very impatient and very much upset. “Third floor, sir, second door on the right; name Denson on the door. There’s no lift.”

  “W.F. Denson” was the complete name, followed by the line “Foreign and Commission Agent.” This Hewitt read with some little difficulty, for the door was open, and on the threshold stood that same agitated Jew whom Hewitt had seen at the front door.

  A little less actively perturbed now, he was nevertheless still nervously pale. “Mr. Martin Hewitt?” he cried, while Hewitt was still only at the head of the stairs. “Is it Mr. Martin Hewitt?”

  Hewitt came quietly along the corridor, using eyes and ears as he came. The Jew was a man of middle height, very obviously Jewish, and with a slight accent that hinted a Continental origin.