The House Of Cain

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Wasting no further time in vain attempts to rise, he set off along the passage on his hands and knees, rolling from side to side like a grotesquely drunken dog. Agonized groans reached him from Mrs. Jonas’ room in passing, but at the moment these interested him but little. His mission, the sole object to be accomplished, must be carried out without delay. Austiline was calling to him in terrified accents; Oakes was coming on behind him to rob him of the satisfaction of finishing Anchor. To stop, even to pause, meant final submergence in the strange black sea surging upwards to engulf him. He was tired, so tired that even to think was torture.

  Subconsciously he noticed that Anchor’s and the doctor’s rooms were open. He heard Austiline scream again, and wondered why the dickens she made so much noise. The farther he progressed towards the farther door, the farther it appeared to recede, the passage magically lengthening to infinity.

  His breathing now rasped between his teeth and the automatic. Onward he lurched for years and years; and then, when the world had grown old and dead, he came to Austiline’s door. Like a cat trying its claws on a wooden post, he clawed upward to the handle, turned it, and then the weight of his body sent the door flying inward.

  The significance of Martin’s facing and menacing Anchor was lost on Monty. He failed to note the crouching figure of Austiline, although he heard her urgent call. With a mighty, torturing effort he pulled himself up by the door-post, steadied himself as a man about to walk a wire, paused for a final tremendous mental effort, and, stiffly as a soldier on parade, marched the length of the room, halting only when he came to Anchor’s rigid back.

  The leaping inky sea was now lapping his mouth. The rising tide was beating his will to remain conscious. Knowing that it would overwhelm him before Martin could secure the millionaire, whilst he, Monty, covered him; knowing also that Martin would be beaten once his weapon wavered from the glaring eyes: there was but one thing left to do. He brought the butt of his automatic down on the back of Anchor’s head.

  Anchor collapsed. “Lash him up tight, Martin, old son,” he wheezed. “Tell Cotton, who is Oakes, that peace has been declared.”

  And then the flood engulfed him, and he fell on the prostrate figure of William J. Anchor.

  * * * * *

  Monty had many and strange dreams. Whispering voices sometimes came to him where he dwelt in darkness on a dead world. It seemed to him that this world was very small, and that if he moved it would turn over and precipitate him into an immeasurable void.

  Although it was impossible for him to see it, he knew that not far away hung a gigantic curtain of black velvet: and it was from beyond this curtain that he heard the voices of Austiline, Mrs. Minter, Martin, Sir Victor Lawrence, and Mary Webster. While the others spoke of him, it was Mary who kept calling him. But how could he move from his dead world and past the velvet curtains?

  He experienced no physical feeling whatever, unless the faint scent of attar of roses could be named one. He was trying to recollect, after a long sojourn on the small unstable world, where had he met before that alluring scent; when he felt the velvet curtain brushing his face, and, thrusting it aside, jumped off his planet and found himself lying on a bed. And he was looking straight into the rust-flecked eyes of Austiline Thorpe.

  “Monty!” she breathed, her face gradually breaking into a tender smile.

  “You ought to scorn a great big brute of a man like me for fainting like a––like a girl,” he said, surprised to find how difficult it was to speak loud enough for her to hear.

  “Hush!” With the touch of an angel she smoothed his pillow and raised his head so that he could drink some lemon-water. “I must get you your medicine now. I’ll not be long.”

  He watched her almost run to the door, and when she disappeared heard her run along the passage. Smiling at her anxiety about the medicine, he lay there listening to the fall of water from the bore-head. Through the open window came happy excited cries of a small child, and in them he recognized the voice of Bubbles. Then fleeting footsteps ran along the passage to pause at his door. Slowly he turned his head. The thought of the coming medicine brought a shadow of a smile to his lips.

  And when a woman entered, to stand regarding him with wide and misty eyes, he saw with a catch of breath that it was Mary Webster.

  “Mary!”

  “Oh, don’t rise, Monty dear!” she cried, darting to the bed, where she fell on her knees and laid her face beside his. “Oh, Monty! Dear, dear Monty!”

  After a long while he said, with his usual touch of the unexpected:

  “Where is my medicine, Mary?”

  And, with tremulously happy lips, she answered :

  “I am your medicine, Monty. Do you like it?”

  “It is the Nectar of the Gods. But how do you come to be here?”

  “Sir Victor Lawrence brought me. We have been here two weeks. Oh, Monty! I was afraid for you.”

  “Then how long have I been idle like this?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Jumping nannygoats! Tell me, my beautiful medicine, what has happened during those three blank weeks. Don’t move your head, dear; I like that scent in your hair.”

  And so, cheek to cheek, she told him. He made her tell him the whole story.

  “You see, Mr. Oakes happened to be at the Central Police Station at Adelaide one evening engaged with several experts trying to decipher a code message sent from a wireless-station at Mount Barker,” she told him softly. “While there a man walked into the charge office below and said he had murdered a man up in the Adelaide Hills. He told them his name was Cotton.

  “They believed his confession because the body of the man had been discovered. Mr. Oakes then hit on the plan of disguising himself as Cotton, going so far, he told me, as to glue each hair of the false beard and moustache to his face separately.

  “He left the police station as Cotton. You know how he was picked up by one of Anchor’s organization, because he says he told all of you about Cotton’s affair when he arrived here. Mr. Johns, the Sydney detective, who was with Mr. Oakes, shadowed him to the bungalow at Glenelg, and saw him later on board a motor-boat.

  “Mr. Johns, being unable to follow the boat personally, telegraphed to every station along the coast, and when the boat reached Port Augusta the police there didn’t stop them, but let them go to the railway-station, where they booked to Marree.

  “You see, the detectives had long suspected that there was in operation an organization to get murderers away. It was funny because, whilst Mr. Oakes would have it that the organization was directed from somewhere in the bush, Mr. Johns said it was in some city. Mother found that out from him soon after you left, and she told him what Bent Nose told you.

  “So that, directly Mr. Oakes’ companion booked to Marree, Mr. Johns telegraphed to the police at Innaminka, for information regarding the inhabitants in the vicinity of Lake Moonba. This house was the only one in a radius of eighty miles. The Innaminka police were ordered to be here on the Sunday following, and that day Mr. Johns arrived per aeroplane.”

  “Did he arrest Anchor?”

  “Mr. Oakes had already done that,” she said. “He had him, with Lane, Mallowing, and the girl Madeline Fox, locked in Dr. Moore’s laboratory.”

  “Ah! And what of the others?”

  “The others were dead.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes. Dr. Moore was found dead on his operating-table. They say you hit him too hard, Monty. Mrs. Jonas poisoned herself with strychnine.”

  “Poor soul! Well, go on, please.”

  “They took Anchor, the two men, and the girl Fox away,” Mary continued. “They found records, Monty: written records in which were the names of all the chief members of Anchor’s organization, the greatest and most far-reaching of any ever. And, Monty dear, it was you––you who overthrew it; although Mr. Oakes, of course, got most of the praise. He is a detective-inspector now.”

  “He’ll be a detective-superintendent soon. He’
s a detective wonder, anyhow. What about Martin? Where is he?”

  “He is coming back with Sir Victor Lawrence from Innaminka to-day. They’ve been practically living at the telegraph-office. When Martin first sent the story to the Tribune they thought it was a hoax. When they found it was not, Sir Victor decided to come up here himself. Martin wired me, too, about you, Monty, and I went off my head almost. I implored Sir Victor to bring me directly I heard he was chartering a ’plane. He gave me his secretary’s place. Mother was frightfully upset, too.”

  “Poor Martin!” he sighed.

  “Why poor? Is he not supremely fortunate?”

  “Yes, maybe. He’ll have a jewel of a wife, but a jewel he’ll never see.”

  “Oh, Monty! Don’t you know that when Mr. Anchor knocked him down the blow and the mental excitement restored his sight?”

  “Honest?”

  “Yes!” And she recounted the terrible scene of struggle prior to his entrance and final subjugation of Anchor. When she finished he sighed happily.

  “Well, the clouds have rolled away, haven’t they? Bubbles appears to be having a good time. What is he up to?”

  “Do you mean Mabel Hogan’s child?”

  “Yes. My adopted son, Mary. Mabel gave him to me. She died that I might have him.”

  Rising, she looked out through the wide-open French windows. And then, slipping her arm underneath his head, she lifted him up so that he, too, could look. And what he saw sent a strange lump into his throat.

  Over by one of the store-huts Mrs. Minter sat, half-buried in the deep sand. Bubbles, with a tiny spade, was busily covering her lank frame, shrieking with delight while he sent spadeful after spadeful over her. At a little distance, squatted upon his heels, was Mr. Minter, uproariously encouraging the youngster’s efforts. Even from his bed Monty was struck by the wonderful joy on the weather-parched face of the selector’s wife.

  “I bet the boy will be spoiled,” he said, when Mary lowered him again to the pillow.

  “Let them spoil him,” was her whisper. “Monty, don’t you think Mrs. Minter could have him for good? We can all understand her tragedy, so we can all see how much she loves little Bubbles.”

  “Yes, she can have him, Mary. There is no one with a greater claim. I’m going to put the Minters on a small station well east in New South Wales, where it rains two or three times a year, at least. They are going to have a real beautiful home, which shall be Bubbles’ some day.”

  “They will be deliriously happy, those three.”

  “They are not the only people who are going to be happy, Mary,” he told her; and, seeing the look in his grey-blue eyes, she bent her head and kissed him.

  EPILOGUE

  IT was the end of April, and Monty Sherwood had taken his first short walk, leaning lightly on the arm of radiant Mary Webster. On their way from Marree were four hundred camels, chartered by the South Australian Government, which would return to the railway laden with William J. Hook’s priceless collection of art treasures. Another fortnight would see the House of Cain dismantled, an empty shell, which finally no one would buy on account of its unexploitable situation.

  The air exhilarated as wine; the sun was warm and the wind a caressing zephyr from the south. The rain had woven a carpet of brilliant emerald, and the sea of sand-hills which had formerly smoked and danced in the roaring winds of summer was now a mighty tossing sea of waving grass.

  At the base of one of the huge green waves sat Martin Sherwood with Austiline, daintily chewing a wisp of speargrass, at his side. A long pool of water glittered at their feet. When the woman removed the grass stem, she said softly:

  “When are you going to ask me about Peterson’s blackmail, Martin?”

  “Really, I had forgotten all about him. Was he important? I was wondering if a sculptor could get the exact lovely curve of your cheek,” he said simply. “But you remind me of a commission which the recent excitement caused me to forget.” From his pocket he withdrew a foolscap envelope. “Inspector Oakes took this from the body of the blackmailer, and evidently it contains the secret he held over you. I think Oakes was very decent not to examine it. He said that, as the nature of the blackmail had nothing to do with the actual murder of Peterson, he refrained from so doing and entrusted it to me to give you.”

  “You open it, Martin,” she ordered, with laughter-lit eyes.

  A little surprised at her taking the matter so lightly, he broke the seal and disclosed a number of letters neatly pinned together.

  They were letters, written by Austiline to her publishers, which had been stolen by Peterson, who had been a publisher’s clerk. Martin read her urgent request to have the real identity of “A. E. Titchfield” kept a profound secret.

  “But surely you would not have paid the blackguard two hundred pounds for these letters?” he said with wonder.

  “I would have paid him a thousand,” was her emphatic answer. “Oh, Martin! wait till you have met my dear father and mother. Such old-fashioned souls, but just wonderful.” Suddenly she broke into a ripple of laughter. “When I take you home, dear, you bring ‘A. E. Titchfield’s’ writings into the conversation and hear what my father has to say. Only my mother can calm him.”

  Placing the papers on the ground, he struck a match, and they watched them burn. “I am always learning something about you, Austiline,” he said.

  “I’ll take good care you do not learn all there is to know about me all at once,” she said wisely. “Love requires feeding. Your love shall never grow hungry, nor yet ever be satiated.”

  Late in August, Austiline received the following letter through a firm of American solicitors. It was from Anchor:

  “MY DEAR AUSTLINE,

  “By the time you receive this the undersigned, in all probability, will be but a memory. I claim no tears.

  “Respecting you as the only woman who declined my advances––therefore by love’s political economy enhancing your value in my eyes––I do not want to be remembered by you at greater disadvantage than is necessary. No doubt you think I worse than dishonoured my promise to allow the Sherwoods to leave my Home on parole. I did my best to keep it, and would have kept it, but for unexpectedly adverse events.

  “My hand being forced by the straying of the camels without which the Sherwoods could not set out, and by the imminence of a police raid, I had not only to hide my more conspicuous inmates (such as Lane and ‘The Cat’ and, alas! yourself) in the underground rooms, as was our practice during ordinary police visits, but also to dispose in like manner of the Sherwoods who would have welcomed and assisted the police. The Sherwoods I had been hoping to get rid of pleasantly and quickly before the coming of the police, but the straying of their camels made this impossible, much to my annoyance and regret. To prevent time-wasting argument, I therefore drugged them and had them taken underground and bound so that they could make no disturbance. My intention was merely to keep them thus in harmless security until the police had gone and the strayed camels had been recovered, and then to carry out my promise to let them depart in peace on condition of keeping our secrets. Moore I plainly forbade to operate on them; but as a sop to him I said he might test their nerve by expounding to them the sort of experiments he would like to subject them to. He appears to have done this only too convincingly, and Mr. Montague Sherwood’s too hasty assault on him put it out of his power to explain. I therefore supply the explanation on his behalf, and trust it may enable you to think more kindly of Moore as an enthusiast in research and a martyr to science; and of myself as a man whose good intentions have been overborne by the force majeure of circumstances.

  “As for myself generally, you probably think worse of me than you do of a certain British monarch whose record I have not nearly equalled. Had your inclinations been free, however, I am sure I should have been able to remove all difficulties and induce you to recall your first unconsidered if disinterested refusal. And I think neither of us would have had any cause to deplore the alliance.

>   “So convinced am I of this that I have taken steps to ensure that my various properties after my decease shall be placed at your disposal. While leaving you free to use these resources as you think fit, I should be glad if they could be applied, at least in part, for the benefit of outcasts of society––not necessarily always murderers, but such cases as Bent Nose, in whom you took so kind yet so practical an interest, and that delightful child of Mabel Hogan’s, for whom indeed I was going to provide fittingly myself in due course; and those who, like yourself, have been endangered by purely circumstantial evidence. The funds that should come to you as I devise will be considerable enough to supply a conspicuous example to the world in the direction indicated, and the example once set will certainly be followed. I know that in heart and brain you and Mr.

  Martin Sherwood will be equal to the demands of such a trust, and I implore you to accept it.

  “Sincerely,

  “WILLIAM J. HOOK

  “( alias ANCHOR).”

  This letter was written when the plea of insanity, set up with legal ingenuity and backed by Anchor’s wealth, had broken down. A day or two later he cheated the electric chair, as a last resource, by means of conia.

  * * * * *

  In Australia, at the date of Anchor’s letter, the public had exhausted the interest of the House of Cain. Lane, the glutton, was not hanged, since the law of Queensland dispenses with the death penalty. Mallowing, however, paid the uttermost price, because the State of Victoria still believes in the lex talionis. As for Madeline Fox, she is in safe keeping as a criminal lunatic.

  Conspicuous and lasting interest, however, was shown by the intellectual section of the public and by the medical profession in the carefully compiled notes left by Dr. Walling, alias Moore. Although Dr. Walling did not originate the theory that murderers suffer from a brain lesion, he at least prepared the way for a procedure that eventually will become as familiar as the removal of the appendix. Humanity ever advances. To-day it regards the torture chamber with horror; to-morrow it will look upon legal murder with disgust.