Tonight, at eight o’clock, the Continental mail train would start from Charing Cross Station with seventy-five thousand pounds worth of bullion for the Bank of France. If Eustace Margraf succeeded in his enterprise, it would reach Paris with the same weight of valueless shot in the strong iron boxes.
Everything had been nicely and minutely arranged. The shot had been carefully weighed to a quarter of a grain, and portioned into three equal lots to match the cases of bullion, which would be weighed on leaving London, again at Dover, once more at Calais, and finally on arrival at Paris. A key to fit the cases had been secretly made from a wax impression of the original, how obtained none but Margraf knew. This key he would hand to his confederates this evening at Charing Cross Station, after which he would go down by the seven o’clock train preceding the mail.
The stoker of the mail, an old railway hand, had been bribed, together with the guard in whose compartment the bullion would travel. It had been thought desirable to deal differently with the front guard and the driver; a specially prepared and powerful drug was to be given them in a pint of beer just before starting, which would take effect about an hour after administration and last till the sleepers should be aroused by brandy. During their slumber the stoker would pull up at convenient places on the line to allow the robbers to enter the guard’s carriage and leave it with their booty, when they would make off to where Margraf had arranged to meet them; he would manage the rest. The front guard and the driver, meanwhile, would for their own sakes be glad enough to say nothing about their long slumber.
All these arrangements had been made with great nicety, and told over twice; and yet Margraf was uneasy and nervous as he thought of all the risk he ran. Twice he stretched out his hand for the bell-rope for telegram forms to stay the whole business; once he went so far as to ring the bell, but he altered his mind by the time the servant answered it, and ordered hot brandy instead. It was now six o’clock; in another hour he must hand over the duplicate key to his accomplices and board the train for Dover.
Every moment he grew more nervous, his hand became so shaky that brandy failed to steady it; his face grew pale and haggard; his nerves were strung to a painful tension; and all sorts of possibilities of failure in his scheme haunted him till he could have cried out from sheer nervousness.
“God!” he exclaimed, as he drained a glass of brandy and water and rose to go. “A life like this would kill me. Well, this shall be the last risk. If it turns out all right—as it must—I shall give this kind of business up. I shall have plenty then, and old Charlie will go off and live quietly and comfortably.”
* * * *
The rear guard of the seven o’clock Continental finished his last cup of tea, put on his thick winter coat, kissed his wife and baby girl, and took up his lantern preparatory to joining his train. He reached the station as the great engine was being coupled and gave the driver a cheery salute, which that official acknowledged with a surly growl.
“Something put Jimmy out tonight,” he laughed to the fireman, a young, inexperienced fellow, making his trial trip, and passed on to make his inspection of things in general before starting.
At the last moment a richly-dressed gentleman, wearing a long fur coat, and carrying a large travelling rug, entered a first-class smoking compartment. This gentleman, whom numerous people on the platform recognised as he passed and saluted respectfully, was Eustace Margraf, Esq. The carriage he got into was an empty one, and, lying full length on the seat, covered with his rug, he lit a cigar and composed himself to make the best of a long and tiresome railway journey. The guard blew his whistle, the great engine reproduced it in a loud, deep tone, and the train steamed slowly out of the station, twenty minutes late in starting.
Left to his own reflections, which were none of the liveliest, and lulled by the motion of the train, our traveller soon fell into a fitful sleep, wherein he was haunted by dreams that wrought upon his brain until he was almost as nervous as he had been in his own room some hours before.
He awoke suddenly, with a vague sense that the train was travelling at a most unusual and unaccountable speed: and, as he leapt to his feet in a half-dazed fright, they shot through Tunbridge—a place at which they were timed to make a ten minutes’ stop—and he was conscious of seeing, as in a flash, a crowd of frightened and awe-struck faces looking at the train from the platform. He sank back on the cushioned seat, seized with a nameless terror. Time and space seemed to his overwrought nerves to be filled with tokens of some approaching calamity which he was powerless to prevent; the terrific speed and violent swaying of the train, the shrill howl of the ceaseless whistle, the terrible darkness and silence of everything outside his immediate surroundings, and the recollection of that crowd of terrified faces, all seemed to thrill him with a sense of impending horror, and the wretched man sat terror-stricken on his seat, a mere mass of highly-strung and delicate nerves.
Suddenly, as he looked into the black night, a face passed the window, as of someone walking along the footboard to the engine; a stern-set face, as of one going to certain danger and needing all the pluck he possessed to carry him through: and at the apparition the traveller fairly shrieked aloud; but the face passed on and was gone.
In another moment there was a sudden shout—a terrific crash—a wild chaos of sight and sound—and our traveller knew no more.
When next he found his senses, he was lying among cushions and rugs in the waiting-room at Tunbridge Wells Station. He awoke with a faint shiver, and tried to raise himself, but found to his astonishment that he could not so much as lift a finger. As a matter of fact, he was among those whom the busy surgeons had given up as a desperate case; and, after doing all in their power to ease him, abandoned in favour of more hopeful subjects; but this he did not know.
Several of the passengers whose injuries were only very slight were discussing the accident in an animated manner, and, as usual in such cases, many wild and fanciful conjectures were passed about as truth. At last one said:—
“Does anyone know the rights of the matter?”
“Yes, I do,” volunteered a young man with an arm in a sling; and Margraf lay silently listening, unable to move or speak.
“Well, what is it?”
“Just after we passed Grove Park, the fireman was on the front of the engine oiling, when he felt the locomotive increasing in speed till it became so appalling that he grew terrified and could not get back. He is a young fellow, and this is his trial trip. At length he managed to crawl back to the cab, where he found the driver lying, as he supposed, dead. This so increased his terror that he was only able to open the whistle and pull the cord communicating with the rear guard, and then fell in a swoon across the tender.
“The rear guard, a plucky young fellow of about six-and-twenty, twigging the situation, came, as we all know, along the footboard to the engine”—Margraf listened with all his remaining strength—“in order to stop the train before it ran into the Ramsgate express, but apparently was too late.”
“But what was up with the driver, and where was the front guard in the meanwhile?”
“Well, it appears from what the front guard says—marvellous how he escaped with hardly a scratch—both these men had been drugged, and as they were both of them to have run the mail train to the Continent tonight, things look very fishy.”
Margraf nearly fainted in his efforts to listen more intensely.
“They were changed on to this train at the last moment, and hence this accident. The rear guard, poor fellow, was shockingly mangled. Stone dead, of course; and leaves, I understand, a wife and child. There will no doubt be a collection made for him. He was a plucky fellow.”
“Does anyone know his name?” asked one.
“Yes; his name was Charlie Osborne.”
There was a heartrending groan from the cushions and rugs.
“Here,” cried a young medical student among the party to a passing surgeon, “you’d better come and have a look at this poor chap. He
isn’t as dead as you thought he was.”
The surgeon came and looked at Margraf.
“Isn’t he?” he said, in his cool, professional way. “He is a good deal farther gone than I thought. He couldn’t be gone much farther.”
A WORK OF ACCUSATION, by Harry How
“Suicide whilst in a state of temporary insanity.”
Such was the verdict of the coroner’s jury, and they could scarcely have declared anything else—there was not a tittle of evidence implicating another as the perpetrator of the deed. The deceased was found lying in his studio at the foot of his easel, shot through the heart. The revolver—a six-chambered one—was tightly gripped in his hand. Four out of the six chambers remained undischarged. It must have been suicide, simple and premeditated! The inquiry into the death of the deceased revealed only one spark of anything approaching sensationalism. It was the evidence of the housekeeper—an old lady of distinctly nervous temperament—who wept bitterly. Previous to the sad occurrence she had heard the firing of a pistol some five or six times during a period of two days. On the first occasion she had hurried to the studio, and the alarmed state of her feelings was sufficient to cause her to overlook the formality of giving the customary tap at the door previous to entering. She entered the room, only to find the deceased artist holding a pistol—the one produced—and looking at its barrel, still smoking, earnestly. He burst into a hearty laugh when he saw her, and told her not to be frightened.
“It is nothing, Mrs. Thompson,” he said, “and should you hear the firing again, do not be alarmed. Don’t be frightened.”
So the firing was frequent, and though it played pitifully with the old housekeeper’s nerves and shook her seventy-year-old bones considerably, she quietly submitted to it and “hoped it was all right.”
I knew Godfrey Huntingdon well. He often chatted over his pictures with me. As a medical man and a student somewhat beyond the range of physic and prescriptions, the pros and cons of an idea to be eventually carried to the canvas gave rise to many interesting and discussable points. I liked the man—he was so frank and true and positively simple in his unassuming manner. Poor fellow! He never dreamt for a moment that he was a genius, but what he did not know the public were quick to recognise. Every picture from his brush was watched and waited for—a canvas from him meant a vivid, striking, often sensational episode, which seemed to live. I have some of his work in my dining-room now. I often look at his figures. They are more human than anything I have seen by any other modern painter. They seem possessed of breath and beating[Pg 634] hearts of their own, with tongues that want to speak, and eyes that reveal a thinking brain. The trees in his landscapes appear to be gently shaken by the breeze from across the moorland, the clouds only need touching by the breath of the firmament to lazily move across the face of the blue sky. He was indeed a genius.
It was always an open question in the minds of the public and the judgment of the critics as to who excelled the other—Godfrey Huntingdon or Wilfred Colensoe. They both belonged to the same school of ideas. Their works were equally impressive, their figure and portrait painting particularly so, and the judges said it would be a life-long race between them for supremacy with the brush. Huntingdon’s sad death was a terrible blow to the artistic world. I went to his funeral.
He had not forgotten me. He left me all his studies. There were several hundreds of them. Many were familiar to me, for he had made them whilst we were smoking a pipe together, as I pointed out to him the necessary laws of science he must needs regard in order to insure accuracy in his work. The studies made quite a number of huge bundles, and in the evening I would delight in sorting them through. It was a long task, for I found something to admire and think over in every single one of them.
A fortnight had passed away since they first came into my possession. I had only another parcel to go through, and I should be finished. I was quietly sitting in my chair with my legs stretched out on another chair, as is my custom—I find it remarkably restful—and lighting up my brier I cut the string of the last bundle. Slowly, one by one, I lifted up those pieces of brown paper. They were still objects of reverence to me. Here was the head of a child, a sweetly pretty child, and next to it a study of a dissipated character, the face of a man fast losing every working power of his brain and body by liquor. I realized the genius of my dead friend more and more.
I had gone through quite a score of these play studies, when my hand stretched out for another from the pile by my side. I turned the piece of paper round and round, and it was some time before I grasped what the subject was intended for. It appeared to be a piece of round tubing from which smoke was protruding. The next half-dozen studies were of a similar character. In one the smoke was very small, just a thin streak; in another it was a full volume, as though to represent the after effect of the discharge of a bullet from a revolver. I looked again. The chalk drawing of the tubing was evidently intended for the barrel of a pistol! Huntingdon always put the date on every study he made, and I found my hand trembling as I turned the paper over. Great heavens—10th October, 1872—the day before his death! Another paper bore the same date, and the others had the date of the previous day—the 9th. Was his death, then, the result of an accident and not a suicide after all? Here was the simple explanation of it so far—here was the reason for the several shots which the old housekeeper had heard fired. He had discharged the revolver at these times in order to watch the effect and immediately place[Pg 635] his impressions on the pieces of paper I now held in my hand. My knowledge of Godfrey Huntingdon—both medically and fraternally—told me that, at the time of his death, there was positively nothing on his mind to cause such an act, and I now began reasoning the whole within myself once again, as I had done many times since the occurrence.
“It’s a mystery—a terrible mystery!” I exclaimed, jumping up and commencing to pace the room. I walked that room for over an hour, and was only aroused from my reverie by the announcement of a servant that supper was served. I ate my meal in silence, and the deliberate mouthfuls I took, and my more than ordinarily methodical manner of eating, must have told my wife that to disturb my present inward argument would have been disastrous to the immediate prospects of domestic harmony. I had come to a conclusion. There is nothing like science and its accompanying occupations for balancing a man’s brain. A game of chess is recreative concentration. So the study of science was with me, whilst physic was my profession. Scientific research and the weighing of Nature’s problems had steadied my thoughts and cooled my actions. It was a settled thing with me that poor Huntingdon had been murdered. By whom? Scientific investigation had transformed me into a calculating individual. Every action, to me, could be proved as a proposition in Euclid or an algebraical problem. I therefore said nothing about my startling discovery, and decided to wait the possibility of a further suggestion coming in my way, and “proving it.”
I suppose it was the deep interest I took in all matters concerning art which brought so many artist-patients to my consulting room. Six months had passed since the fatal 11th October, and the public were loudly expressing their approval of a marvellously impressive bit of painting by Wilfred Colensoe, which was the feature—and very justly so—of one of the early spring exhibitions. It was the picture of a duel—a very realistic canvas indeed. The young man—lying bleeding on the ground—almost told the story of the attempted avenge of an action towards someone dear to him on the part of an elderly roué, whose still-smoking revolver was in his hand. Colensoe came to see me one morning. He was a remarkably handsome man, classically featured, with hair picturesquely scattered with streaks of silver.
“Done up, eh?” I said to him.
“Done up is the word,” he answered.
“You’ve been doing too much,” I said, looking into his grey eyes as I held his hand a moment. “You must cease work for a time. Get away from your easel, go abroad, and forget to take your brushes with you. Go anywhere, a hundred miles from a retail colourman’s.�
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“My dear doctor,” he answered, “your prescription is too strong. You forget I am an artist. It is like taking a man with a dying thirst to a fountain of water and telling him he mustn’t drink. I can’t leave my work.”
“When I tell you that it is either a case of your leaving your work or your work leaving you, my remark may not be very original, but it is undeniably true. Do you sleep well?”
“I can’t say,” was his reply. “When I fall asleep at night I never wake until my hour for rising. But I am more tired in the morning than when I turned in over-night.”[Pg 636]
“Quite so. Do you dream at all?”
“Yes, I dream.”
“Feel sleepy now—eh?”
“Doctor, I could go to bed for a week,” he replied.
“Again, I tell you—overwork,” I said, with strong deliberation. “Now I’ll make you a proposal, which I can couple most heartily with the name of Mrs. Gratton. Come away with us. We are going to Herne Bay for a few weeks. I have taken a house there. Most invigorating place. You want no medicine, you won’t leave your work alone, I won’t be hard in my treatment of your case. Bring your tools with you. I will prescribe so much colour for you during the day—your paints and brushes may become converted into agreeable physic, but—they must be taken at periodical times. What do you say?”
Colensoe consented—gratefully accepted my offer, stayed to lunch, and my wife took care to let him feel that the invitation was one of combined cordiality from both of us. I was a great admirer of Colensoe’s work, and therefore took a deep interest in the worker. In a week’s time we were at Herne Bay. A room—with a good light—was apportioned off as a small studio for Colensoe. A week passed by. Colensoe obeyed my instructions to the letter. I limited his working hours, and he began himself to be thankful when the periodical times for laying aside his brush came round. I noticed this, and lessened the hours of painting more, thinking that by degrees he would soon put his palette away completely and take the undisturbed rest he needed for a time to restore him thoroughly.
The Third Macabre Megapack Page 12