The Double Eye

by William Fryer Harvey

  ‘I thought little of the matter at the time. It was not till late in the day that I realised that it was the 10.30 from Saunchester that had steamed into Marshley station just as we were leaving. Immediately following this, came the thought that the stranger who had entered my carriage was the murderer. I dismissed the idea as preposterous, as unjust to a man of whom I knew no ill, but try as I would, it came back again and again until finally I had to receive it, and to fashion some sort of lurid story around my fellow-traveller.

  ‘As the months went by, I felt at times that I ought to communicate my suspicions to the police, but I comforted myself with the belief that they would probably know as much as I did. I agreed with the stranger’s theory that conscience is the best of sleuth-hounds, and so I let the matter rest. But whenever I think of first-class railway carriages, I think of murder. The two things are linked together in my brain as closely as two things can be.’

  Supper finished, we separated, some of the men strolling on to the veranda for a smoke, while the rest of us went back to the drawing-room.

  The vicar showed us some spiders he had received that morning from a friend in Brazil. He was all enthusiasm, but we were relieved when he left us at last to hunt some reference in his paper-backed German books.

  ‘Let’s unwind!’ said Millicent. ‘Never mind father and the others. They can join in later.’ So we began. We started with three lives each, which when exhausted, were liable to be extended, after the merciful manner of old ladies and children. After we had been unwinding for five minutes, the vicar came in with his book, his five fingers marking the places of the references.

  ‘The Tower of London,’ said Laura, ‘reminds me of Richard the Third.’ ‘Richard the Third,’ said Millicent, ‘reminds me of murder.’ ‘Murder,’ said her mother, ‘reminds me of first-class railway carriages.’

  It was the vicar’s turn, but he was deep in his book.

  ‘Wake up, father!’ said Madge. ‘What do first-class railway carriages remind you of?’

  ‘Mr Cholmondley,’ said the vicar, and went on with his reading.

  Madge shook the old gentleman, and took his book away. ‘Now, father,’ she said, ‘do play properly! You’ve lost five lives already. What do first-class railway carriages remind you of? You can have till we count ten.’

  The vicar took off his spectacles and wiped them carefully. Then with a little nervous smile he had when he thought that his daughters were not treating him with respect that was his due before company, he said: ‘Murder.’

  ‘Oh, dear! I’m afraid he’s hopeless,’ said Millicent to the gentlemen who just then came in from their smoke. ‘Here’s papa saying that first-class railway carriages remind him of Mr Cholmondley, and then that they remind him of murder.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Cholmondley,’ said her mother, ‘you will have to defend yourself. Why he isn’t here! Hasn’t he finished his cigar?’ she asked of Greatorex.

  ‘We thought he was in here with you,’ he replied. ‘I haven’t seen him since supper.’

  There was silence for a minute, broken by a knocking at the door. The maid came in with a note. It was from Cholmondley, apologising for running off without saying good-bye. He had had a telegram from his mother, who was dying in the south of France, and had been obliged to catch the earliest train.

  ‘Poor man!’ said the vicar’s wife, ‘I remember now how silent he was during supper. Our careless talk must indeed have been a trial to him!’ and she began to discuss with Greatorex the insanitary conditions of all continental hotels.

  But the vicar sat in his armchair, and his book on spiders had dropped unheeded to the floor. He was gazing into the fire with an expression of utter incredulity.

  SARAH BENNET’S POSSESSION

  The man looked into the old cracked mirror,

  For years he had ceased to polish it;

  He saw the nature of his error,

  And vowed he would abolish it.

  He cleansed his house of all sign of revel,

  He shuttered his windows to the night;

  And never saw the laughing devil

  In the shadow cast by the candle light!

  Through the long dark night, his fears allaying,

  His eyes were closed and he could not see,

  He knelt in abject terror praying

  To the image nailed on the wooden tree.

  And he has done with wine and revels—

  Was that the gnawing of a mouse?

  Or was it the laughter of the devils

  As they enter again into his house?

  They laugh to themselves, the devils seven,

  As they think of the women and wine of old,

  For the gulf still lies between Hell and Heaven,

  And there’s none to hear in the shrine of gold.

  He’ll tread for ever the easy levels—

  Someone tapped on the window pane;

  And as he knelt, the seven devils

  Laughing came to their own again.

  RISINGHAM FARM stands on the sky-line of one of the great whale-backed Berkshire downs. Its roof of tile, red once, but weathered now by rain and softened by lichen, seems ever in keeping with the soft browns and greys of the short, sheep-trimmed grass.

  Half a mile along the Roman road stands Risingham Castle, from which the farm had taken its name; a great square piece of land, surrounded by ditch and rampart, with a view of hill and valley, ploughland and pastureland for close on fifty miles.

  I first learned to know the farm because it was the home of Frank Dicey. Here he came to spend the week or fortnight’s leave that was given him, before his ship set out once again for the other side of the world, and from the farm, only two years ago, he married the youngest of the three princesses.

  The three princesses were his cousins. It was he who gave them their names, in the days before Grimm had been buried with the last of the school books in the lumber-room at the back of the barn. In accordance with the unwritten law of Fairyland, they were known in age order as the Wicked, the Ugly, and the Beautiful.

  They, like Frank, were orphans; and their parents, dying almost before their children could remember, they had been brought to Risingham by their great-aunt, Mrs Bennet (Sarah Bennet she would have called herself, in the plain Quaker fashion), who had ever since been a fairy godmother to her nieces and nephew.

  I remember the old lady best as first I saw her, dressed in the delicate lilac-coloured silk of a bygone age, with a large Quaker bonnet, a purple aureole, enclosing her face.

  Her delicate hands, on which the veins showed so clearly, seemed wonderfully frail; but she was a woman of unlooked-for strength and unabating energy, with a voice clear and distinct, that changed when she spoke in meeting to a musical treble.

  This woman, a saint in true communion with those of old, was closely associated with, was indeed the centre of, a series of unusual occurrences that spread over a period of five years, and which, for all I know, may have been going on for a much longer time. In themselves they seem disjointed, perhaps insignificant. Taken together they form a tragedy.

  ***

  It was a late September evening, dark, for the harvest moon had not yet risen behind the down, and with the faint scent of the cornfields in the air. I had met Frank Dicey in Southampton that afternoon, and now at nine we were climbing the last hill that separated us from the lights of Risingham farm.

  We stopped on the ridge, and as we waited we felt something of the wonderful peace which dwells on the downs, where the sky seems more open and the earth more remote than among the mountains or in the plains.

  Then as I looked, I suddenly saw a lantern flash half a mile to our right, by the dew-pond.

  When Frank was a boy, he and the youngest princess had saved their pocket-money all summer to buy a little signalling lamp, and when autumn came they went about in the evenings flashing their badly spelled messages from hillside to hillside.

  ‘I expect she wants to speak to you now,’ I said.
‘You needn’t mind me; it’s a language I can’t understand.’

  ‘Take down the letters,’ he answered, ‘as I tell you them.’

  It was certainly an unexpected message; part of it was undecipherable, but what Frank made out read as follows. I omit a preliminary string of oaths.

  ‘This is . . . trying to get into communication. Why the devil won’t you answer? I want to say—’

  The point of light had ceased to move. It remained steady for a minute, and then went out.

  I looked at Frank curiously.

  ‘Some joke,’ I suggested.

  ‘I suppose so,’ he answered. It was evidently a joke he did not appreciate. It was not until we had been welcomed and fed, that Frank remembered.

  ‘Who was it signalling down by the dew-pond an hour ago?’ he asked.

  No one had been signalling. They had all been busy in the kitchen, except Aunt Sarah, who had been down with the lantern to see that the paddock gate was closed.

  Frank said he must have been mistaken.

  ‘But I’m blest if I am,’ he added, when the others had left the room.

  ***

  I was at Risingham farm in the September of the following year. It was Sunday, and the others had gone to meeting, leaving me to profit by their absence by indulging in the luxury of a pipe. I am afraid Mrs Bennet believed that I never smoked. From the steep down-side, where I lay, I watched them leave the meeting-house, the old lady leading the way with the Wicked and Ugly Princesses on either side, and Frank and the Beautiful Princess bringing up the rear.

  They had had a quiet meeting, Frank said; no one had spoken, with the exception of aunt. She had preached about heaven, had in fact given a general description of it, from which it seemed that it was just the place for a friend of his, a Bond Street jeweller who had designed his own house on not dissimilar lines.

  I asked leave to accompany them to the evening meeting.

  ‘Aunt generally makes her biggest score in the second innings,’ said Frank, but he was reproved for levity.

  There are times when nothing is so impressive as a Quakers’ meeting. That September evening was certainly one.

  The lamps had not been lit—there was no need for them. The silence was unbroken. Now and then across the open door, for the day had been warm, a bat flitted.

  Sarah Bennet sat alone in the ministers’ gallery, the outline of her bonnet was almost lost against the dark oak of the wainscot.

  At the end of half an hour, just as Frank had produced a pencil and paper to begin a sketch of his cousin’s profile, she spoke.

  She took as her text those terrible words of the Gospel:

  ‘And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot, neither can they pass to us that would come from thence.’

  She described to us a battlefield, not beneath an English sky, but a battlefield burnt and scorched by a tropical sun. She pictured the agonies of the wounded, their unslaked thirst, the unmasking of the beast in those who conquered, the terror of the defeated. She told how all the while up in the blue dome of heaven above the carnage, birds were singing, oblivious of all.

  And with this as a picture, she spoke of hell, of its awful reality, until I shuddered.

  Yet from beginning to end her voice never changed from the sweet, monotonous treble chant. She never raised her eyes from the gallery rail on which she leant, which her thin blue-veined hand clasped so tightly.

  When we left the meeting-house, the red disc of the moon was just showing over the tree-tops. Neither Frank nor I spoke till we were in sight of home. Then he said:

  ‘I remember talking with a fellow once, about those accidents in coal mines. He was an insignificant little chap with spectacles and a stutter, but he knew how to talk. I told him afterwards that he had a morbid imagination. “Oh, no, I haven’t,” he said, “I was shut in the pit once for four days. I’m talking about what I’ve seen.” That’s what I felt when I heard Aunt Sarah.’ Then after a pause, he added: ‘It’s curious, you know. On the face of it her description of heaven ought to have been the best.’

  ***

  The night outside was dark and gusty, a night that made the small room with its large fire more than usually comfortable. The blinds had not been drawn, for unlike most ladies, Sarah Bennet had no objection to see the shadowy branches of the laurels as they tapped against the pane; and the country people liked her the better, for the light of the lamp as it stood on the table by the window served as a beacon for travellers who otherwise might have fancied themselves as alone on the broad back of the downs.

  We had been seated around the fire, talking; Frank and the youngest princess in the corner where the shadows were longest, while I held a skein of soft grey wool for the old lady to wind.

  It was the Wicked Sister who, having finished her book, suggested a game. I forget what we played, but I remember Frank did not win. I think he was busy drawing the Beautiful Princess. She did not admire the likeness, though he was certainly clever with his pencil.

  ‘I could do better with my eyes shut,’ she said.

  ‘Very well,’ he replied. ‘Let us see who can make the best portrait of any one in the room without looking.’

  ‘Turn out the lamp,’ said Margaret, ‘and we’ll begin.’

  The flickering light of the fire had for the time being died down; the flames curling under a huge log of wood were too intent on searching for a hold to show themselves, except in sudden darts and flashes.

  Mrs Bennet sat in her high-backed chair slightly turned from us, looking into the garden beyond. A pencil and paper lay on her lap, but her hands were folded.

  ‘Well, is it to be anyone in the room?’ asked the youngest princess. ‘That rules out Frank, he being nobody. I think we might be allowed a little more light.’

  For three minutes no one spoke.

  ‘Time!’ said Frank. ‘Light the lamp and let’s see the results. Give me the papers, and we’ll guess who they are. So you’ve been drawing, auntie?’ he said as he took her sheet, ‘I thought you had gone to sleep.’

  Frank’s was the first portrait we saw—a most spirited sketch of a goose. ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘if I am to be snubbed by being called nobody, I must have my revenge.’

  Then the rest followed, amusing caricatures, for the most part unrecognisable.

  Suddenly Frank started up.

  ‘Who in the world is that?’ he said.

  He held in his hand the piece of paper that had been in Mrs Bennet’s lap. On it was a drawing, as cleverly executed a sketch as I have ever seen of a man, a young man, dressed in an officer’s uniform of half a century ago. He was kneeling with his hands clasped in the attitude of supplication. His features, coarse and ugly as they were, were cast into an expression that seemed to demand pity. It was not entirely a black-and-white drawing; for on the side of his coat was a little patch of red, put in with coloured chalk. There was a little pool of red on the ground on which he knelt.

  Frank looked puzzled. ‘I never dreamed you could draw as well as that, auntie. But it was to be someone present in the room!’

  Mrs Bennet was still gazing out into the night.

  ‘Well, children,’ she said, ‘what have you been playing at? Francis, what is that thou hast in thy hand? Bring the lamp a little nearer.’

  We stood watching her impatiently. She had placed the spectacles on her nose, and had taken up the paper in her hand, when suddenly her face blanched and she let it drop with a cry.

  ‘Henry!’ she said, in a deep voice that we hardly recognised, and then again: ‘Henry!’ She stood up trembling, and walking to the fire, thrust the paper into the flame.

  Then she turned round.

  ‘Francis,’ she said, ‘I must ask thee never to draw that man again.’

  ***

  A year afterwards we were seated once again in the little parlour. The girls had been singing, and Frank had taken their place at the piano.
He sat down with a sailor’s confidence and began to play; he said he had forgotten the name of the piece, but I think I recognised it as coming from an opera.

  Mrs Bennet had a strong affection for Frank. She had paid little attention to his cousins while they sang, but as soon as her boy began to strum, she left her work and stood behind him at the piano, while her foot beat time to the music.

  I should say while she tried to beat time to the music. For she had no ear for either time or harmony.

  I noticed that as he went on, Frank looked perplexed, nor was he playing as well as he was able. He stopped abruptly. ‘Come outside,’ he said, ‘the room is stifling.’

  ‘You don’t happen to know the Morse code?’ he asked. ‘If you did I think you would be more surprised than you are at present. I wonder how long it took her to learn it?’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I said.

  ‘I’m not quite sure,’ Frank replied, ‘but when you thought Aunt Sarah was marking time to the music, she may have been doing so; but at the same time she was spelling out a message to someone in the Morse code.’

  ‘What was it?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, utter nonsense,’ he replied:

  ‘ “Present arms! Fire! No, damn it. Why won’t you hear me? I shall be done for unless you—”

  ‘I don’t know how it ended, for I couldn’t play any more.’ We went inside again. Mrs Bennet was reading her Bible in the high-backed chair by the fireside.

  ‘I am afraid thou hast caught cold, Frank,’ she said. ‘I will go into the kitchen and make thee some camomile tea.’