“The evidence collected from the loft, suggesting that a large case had been moved in and out and that a gas cylinder had been opened, you will say was of the flimsiest. And so it was. But the effects of evidence are cumulative. To estimate the value of these observations made in the loft, you must add them to the facts just obtained concerning the artist himself, the position of his house and the date on which he vacated it; and these coincidences and agreements must be added to—or, more strictly, multiplied into—the body of coincidences and agreements which I have already described.
“But the evidence collected at the house was the least important part of the day’s ‘catch.’ On returning to Jardine’s rooms I ventured to borrow the sketch and took it home with me; and when I compared the thumb-print on it with the photograph of the thumb-print on the letter—employing the excellent method of comparison that is in use at Scotland Yard—there could be no possible doubt (disregarding for the moment, the chances of forgery) that they were the prints of one and the same thumb.
“Here, then, at last I had stepped out of the region of mere hypothesis. Here was an item of positive evidence, and one, moreover, of high probative value. It proved, beyond any reasonable doubt, the existence of some connection between the house on the Heath and the factory in Norton Street; and it established a strong presumption that the artist and the man at the factory were the same person; the weak point in this being the absence of proof that the thumb-print on the painting was made by the artist.
“And here, Jardine, I would draw your attention to the interesting way in which, when a long train of hypothetical reasoning has at length elicited an actual, demonstrable truth, that truth instantly reacts on the hypothesis, lifting it as a whole on to an entirely different plane of probability. I may compare the effect to that of a crystal, dropped into a super-saturated solution of a salt, such as sodium sulphate. So long as it is at rest, the solution remains a clear liquid; but drop into it the minutest crystal of its own salt, and, in a few moments the entire liquid has solidified into a mass of crystals.
“So it was in the present case. In the instant when it became an established fact that the house at Hampstead and the factory in Norton Street had been occupied by the same person, the entire sequence of events which I had hypothetically constructed sprang from the plane of mere conceivability to that of actual probability. It was now more likely than unlikely that the unknown cleric had been murdered, that his body had been conveyed to the artist’s house, that it had there been frozen, transferred to the factory, preserved there for some weeks, passed over the wall to the Samways’ house, and finally cremated under the name of Septimus Maddock.
“All that now remained to be done was the verification and identification of the body. As to the first, I examined the will at Somerset House and found it, as the American detectives suspected, a mere notification to the New York authorities that Septimus Maddock was dead. I wrote to the detective agency and in due course came O’Donnell with the answers to my questions; from which we learned for certain that the artist was Septimus Maddock and that the assumed peculiarity of the hands consisted of brachydactyly. And then came the good Father Humperdinck to enable us to give a name to the body and to furnish us with that unlocked for means of identification. Henceforward, all was plain sailing with only one possible source of failure; the possibility that the bullet might have been subsequently extracted. But this was highly improbable. We knew that the wound had healed completely, and it was pretty certain that the bullet was lying quietly encysted or embedded in the bone. Still, I will confess that I have never in my life been more relieved than I was when my eyes lighted on that dent in the ilium with the stain of lead oxide round it.”
“So I can imagine,” said Jervis. “It was a triumph; and you deserved it. I have never known even my revered senior to work out the theory of a crime more neatly or with less positive matter to work from. And I suppose you have a pretty clear and connected idea of the actual sequence of events.”
“I think so,” replied Thorndyke, “although much of it is necessarily conjectural. I take it that Maddock, while hiding in Bruges under the name of Burton, made the acquaintance of Reinhardt, and saw in the rich, friendless, eccentric bachelor a suitable subject for a crime which he had probably already considered in general terms. I should think that they were probably somewhat alike in appearance and that the idea of personation was first suggested by the circumstance that they both wore gloves habitually. Maddock will have learned of Reinhardt’s intended visit to England and immediately begun his preparations. His scheme—and a most ingenious one it was, I must confess—was clearly to cause Reinhardt to disappear in one locality and produce his body after a considerable interval in another at some distance; and the house on the Heath was apparently taken with this object and to be near Reinhardt’s haunts. I take it, that on the night of the murder, Reinhardt had an appointment to visit him at that house, but that, having learned at Miss Vyne’s of the sudden illness of Brother Bartholomew, he suddenly altered his plans and refused to go. Then Maddock—who had probably waited for him on the road—seeing his scheme on the point of being wrecked, walked with him as he was going home and took the risk of killing him in Millfield Lane. The risk was not great, considering the time of night and the solitary character of the place, and the distance from the house was not too great for a strong man, as Maddock seems to have been, to carry the body.
“Death was almost certainly produced by a stab in the back; and Maddock was probably just about to carry the body away when destiny, in the form of Jardine, appeared. Then Maddock must have lurked, probably behind the fence which had the large hole in it, until Jardine went away, when he must instantly have picked up the body, carried it down the lane, pushed it over the fence—detaching the reliquary as he did so—carried it away to the house, stripped it and proceeded at once to freeze it, having provided a bottle of the gas in readiness.
“The next morning he will have gone to Marchmont’s office, probably dressed in Reinhardt’s clothes, from thence to Charing Cross, and, with Reinhardt’s luggage, gone straight on to Paris, leaving the body packed in an abundance of the carbonic acid snow. At Paris he will have made his arrangements with Desire and then disappeared, returning in disguise to England to carry out the rest of the plan. And a wonderfully clever plan it was, and most ingeniously and resolutely executed. If it had succeeded—and it was within a hair’s breath of succeeding—the hunted criminal, Maddock, would have been beyond the reach of Justice for ever, and the fictitious Reinhardt might have lived out his life in luxury and absolute security.”
As Thorndyke concluded, he rose from his chair, and, stepping over to a cabinet, drew from some inner recess a cigar of melanotic complexion and repulsive aspect.
Jervis looked at it and chuckled. “Thorndyke’s one dissipation,” said he. “At the close of every successful case he proceeds, as a sort of thanksgiving ceremony, to funk us out of these chambers with the smoke of a Trichinopoly cheroot. But listen! Don’t light it yet, Thorndyke. Here comes some harmless and inoffensive stranger.”
Thorndyke paused with the cigar in his fingers. A quick step ascended the stairs and then came a sharp, official rat-tat from the little brass knocker. Thorndyke laid the cigar on the mantelpiece and strode over to the door. I saw him take in a telegram, open it, glance at the paper and dismiss the messenger. Then, closing the door, he came back to the fireside with the “flimsy” in his hand. “There, Jardine,” said he, laying it on my knee; “there is your order of release.”
I picked up the paper and read aloud its curt message. “Maddock arrested Folkestone now in custody Bow Street. Miller.”
“That means to say,” said Thorndyke,” that the halter is already around his neck. I think I may light my Trichinopoly now.”
And he did so.
There is little more to tell. This has been a history of coincidences and one more coincidence brings it to a close. The very day on which my formal engagement to S
ylvia was made public, chanced to be the day on which the execution of Septimus Maddock was described in the papers. On that day, too, the portrait of poor Letitia, painted by that skilful and murderous hand, was placed in the handsome ebony frame that I had caused to be made for it. As I write these closing words, it hangs before me, flanked on either side by the little jar of violets that are renewed religiously from day to day by my wife or me. The pale, inscrutable eyes look out on me, her friend whom she loved so faithfully and who so little merited her love; but as I look into them, the picture fades and shows me the same face glorified, waxen, pallid, drowsy-eyed, peaceful and sweet—the dead face of the woman who gave her heart’s blood as the price of my ransom, and who was fated then to pass—out of my life indeed, but out of my heart’s shrine and my most loving remembrance, never.
THE GREAT PORTRAIT MYSTERY (1918)
PART I
As a collection of human oddments, the National Gallery on copying day surpasses even the Reading Room of the British Museum, and almost equals the House of Commons. The spectacle that it afforded was a source of perennial interest to Mr. Joseph Fittleworth, as were also the productions of the professional copyists, humorously described in official parlance as students. For Joseph Fittleworth was himself a painter, with a leaning to the methods of the past rather than to those of the future, a circumstance which accounted for his professional failure. Which illustrates the remarkable fact that in these days, when even indifferent Old Masters sell at famine prices, while the unsold work of contemporary genius grows mouldy in the studios, an artist’s only chance of popularity is to diverge as far as possible from the methods of those great men of the past whose productions are in such demand.
Hence it had happened that Fittleworth had accepted with avidity a not very lucrative supernumerary post at the National Gallery where he could, at least, have his being amidst the objects of his worship, which we may remark included an exceedingly comely young lady, who came regularly to the gallery to copy pictures, principally of the Flemish school.
On this particular Thursday morning Mr. Fittleworth walked slowly through the rooms, stopping now and again to look at the work of the copyists, and dropping an occasional word of judicious and valued criticism. He had made a tour of the greater part of the building and was about to turn back, when he bethought him of a rather interesting copy that he had seen in progress in a small, isolated room at the end of the British Galleries, and turned his steps thither. The room was approached by a short corridor in which a man was seated copying in water-colour a small Constable, and copying it so execrably that Fittleworth instinctively looked the other way and passed hurriedly to the room beyond. The work in progress here interested him exceedingly. The original was a portrait of James the Second by Sir Godfrey Kneller, and the copy was so perfect a reproduction that Fittleworth halted by the easel lost in admiration of the technical skill displayed. The artist, whose name appeared from an inscription on his colour box to be Guildford Dudley, was seated, looking at his picture and the original, as he deliberately mixed a number of tints on his palette.
“I see you haven’t begun work yet,” Fittleworth remarked.
The painter looked up at him, owlishly through a pair of very large, double focus spectacles, and shook his head, which was adorned by a tangled mass of very long, reddish hair.
“No,” he replied, “I am just having a preliminary look before starting.”
“Do you think your copy wants anything done to it at all?” asked Fittleworth. “It’s excellent as it stands, though just a trifle low in tone.”
“Not lower than the original, is it?” demanded the artist.
“No,” replied Fittleworth, “but it will be in a year or so, when the medium has darkened, and it’s a good deal lower than the original was when first painted.”
The painter reflected. “I’m inclined to think you’re right,” said he. “I ought to have kept it one or two degrees higher. But it isn’t too late,” he added, briskly. “A day’s work or so ought to bring it up to the proper key.”
Fittleworth was doubtful and rather sorry he had spoken. Raising the tone meant practically going over the entire picture afresh, which seemed a risky proceeding in the case of a finished, and highly successful, painting. He attempted gentle dissuasion, but, finding the painter resolved on the alteration, refrained from urging him further.
“I see,” said he, “that the glass is on the original. Wouldn’t you like to have it taken off?”
“Oh, no, thanks,” was the reply. “There’s no reflection in it from here.”
“The glass lets the tone down a little,” Fittleworth began; but there he paused, with his mouth slightly open, and the painter started and fell into a rigid posture, with his palette-knife poised motionless in mid-air. Astonishment was writ large on the faces of both men as they listened. And not without cause; for, clear and distinct, came the notes of a hautboy, playing a lively melody, and most evidently from somewhere within the sacred precincts of the building. Fittleworth remained for some seconds rigid as a statue, with his mouth open and his eyes fixed on those of the painter; but suddenly he recovered himself, and, without a word, darted from the room. Passing the water-colourist, who was looking over his shoulder and grinning, he entered the larger gallery, to find the easels deserted and the students trooping out of the door; and, following them, soon found himself in a momentarily-augmenting crowd of copyists, all surging towards the source of the music and all on the broad grin.
It was in the Venetian room that Fittleworth finally ran the musician to earth. There he found a dense crowd, collected round Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, and at its centre, a tall, thin man of grotesque and whimsical aspect, who wore a steeple-crowned felt hat and a long cloak, apparently quite oblivious of his audience. At the moment of Fittleworth’s arrival, he was giving a spirited and skilful rendering of the “Carnival de Venise” with somewhat florid variations, and meanwhile keeping a pensive eye fixed on the picture. Fittleworth, controlling his features as well as he could, pushed through the crowd and touched the stranger lightly on the shoulder.
“I am sorry,” said he, “to interrupt your really admirable performance, but I’m afraid we can’t allow it to continue here.”
The stranger rolled a solemn, and somewhat reproachful, eye towards the official, and pausing for a moment on a low note, sprang up an octave and opened a fresh suite of variations, of really surprising agility. Fittleworth smothered a grin and waited patiently until the bravura passage came to an end with a most astonishing flourish, when he once more entered his polite demurrer. The stranger removed the instrument from his mouth and, having waited for the applause to subside, turned gravely to Fittleworth.
“Do I understand,” said he, “that you object to music in this establishment?”
Fittleworth replied in the affirmative.
The stranger shook his head solemnly. “That,” said he, “seems to be an extraordinarily mistaken view. Surely you do not dispute the essential kinship of the fine arts?”
Fittleworth smiled evasively, and the stranger continued, amidst a murmur of encouraging giggles from the students:
“You will not deny, sir, that the different fine arts are but various modes of a general sense of beauty.”
Fittleworth was not denying anything; he only objected to the hautboy.
“Then,” the stranger persisted, unmoved, “you will admit that each of the modes of beauty is reinforced by exposition and illustration through the other modes. For my part,” he added finally, “I regard appropriate and sympathetic music as indispensable to the due appreciation of pictorial beauty,” and with this, he turned away and moved off through the gallery followed, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, by an attendant multitude.
Fittleworth was in somewhat of a dilemma. There was no explicit rule against the playing of musical instruments in the galleries and the act was not in itself unlawful; moreover, the stranger’s plea, though fantastic and absurd, was advanced
so suavely and plausibly that it was difficult to deal with. He was still smilingly considering what it were best to do, when the stranger halted before Claude’s “Embarkation of St. Ursula” and forthwith began a plaintive rendering of “Partant pour la Syrie.” For awhile the humour of the situation was too much for Fittleworth, and the performance was nearly at an end before he had recovered himself sufficiently to renew his protests; but as the stranger moved away, he once more addressed him with polite, but urgent, remonstrance. The musician regarded him with reproachful surprise and again urged him to consider the intimate relation between the different modes of beauty, instancing the performances of Miss Maud Allen as a familiar and popular example; and even while Fittleworth was racking his brain for a suitable rejoinder, the stranger drew up abruptly before David’s portrait of Elisa Bonaparte, and fixing a fiery eye upon the picture, burst into the “Marseillaise.”
Fittleworth felt himself becoming hysterical as the students cheered and the stirring phrases of the warlike melody rang through the building. It was useless to protest. The stranger only frowned, and rolled a compelling eye that demanded silence. Bewildered attendants watched the performance from afar with horrified stares and the crowd grew from moment to moment. After a brief appreciation of Fragonard’s “Happy Mother” (to the air of “La Vierge a la Creche”), he moved on into the Dutch Gallery, and pausing before a picture of Van Ostade’s, struck up with surprising spirit and verve “The Dutchman’s Little Wee Dog”; which brought down the house and, incidentally, put a term to the performance. For at this point, to Fittleworth’s great relief, an irritable old lady, who was copying a Rembrandt, came forward and demanded how she could “be expected to work in this disgusting hubbub.” Fittleworth took the opportunity to point out to the musician that the galleries were at present filled with workers to whom his admirable performance, though delightful on a more seasonable occasion, was, just now, a distraction and a hindrance.
The First R. Austin Freeman Megapack: 27 Mystery Tales of Dr. Thorndyke & Others Page 168