The First R. Austin Freeman Megapack: 27 Mystery Tales of Dr. Thorndyke & Others

by R. Austin Freeman

  My legal instincts rose in revolt at the proposal, though I was devoured by curiosity. But Leyland was immovable, and, after a few ineffectual protests, I put on my spectacles and addressed myself to the decipherment of the microscopic script.

  “Louvain,

  “August the 3rd, 1753.

  “My dearest Child,—I am writing these words (with a crow’s-quill-pen), lying on the bed whence I shall presently be borne to an alien grave, trusting that, by the Christian charity of some stranger, they shall come safely to your hand. I am dying in a strange land, with no friend near me, and no fellow-countryman save my partner, James Bonnington; to whose care, therefore, I must needs commit my little son, your brother Jonathan. But this I do with much misgiving, for I trust not Mr. Bonnington, who is a shrewd and worldly man; and who hath been most willing and even eager to undertake the duty, which makes me mistrust him the more. To be plain, I fear he may practise some fraud. For you are to know that this Bonnington is a widower (his wife died in the late sickness which carried off your dear mother), and hath one little son but a month or two older than your brother; a poor, mis-shapen wretch, having one arm and leg withered from his birth, on whom his father doteth—though I blame him not for that. But my fear is that he shall set this poor bantling in your brother’s place; which he may readily do since he is your brother’s guardian, and no one knoweth the children. Perchance I misjudge him; and God grant that it be so. Yet, for safety, I tell you this. That your brother is a lusty child, well-shapen and fair like his mother. That he hath a mole on his left cheek, and on his right breast a mother-mark of a red colour, about the bigness of a groat. By these you shall know the child; for Bonnington’s son is sallow and black, and, as I have said, maimed from birth.

  “Should that happen which I fear, and this letter reach you safely, keep it till you are of age, and then seek counsel of some wise and honest man.

  “I commend you, dear child, to the good God, and so farewell.

  “From your loving Father,

  “Anthony Leyland.”

  “To Mistress Susan Leyland.”

  “August the 11th. Mr. Desborough, the attorney, is now in Louvain, and comes to me tomorrow, when I shall deliver this to his keeping to convey to you.

  A.

  There was profound silence for a while after I had finished reading. Then Leyland asked:

  “‘What is the other paper, Mitchell?”

  I picked up the paper, and, glancing at it, replied: “It is Desborough’s statement. Shall I read it?

  “Certainly,” said Leyland, and accordingly I read aloud:

  “I, Phineas Desborough, of 16, Field Court, Gray’s Inn, Attorney at Law, do affirm and declare as follows:

  “That I received the attached statement from Anthony Leyland, Gent. in a sealed packet: that I opened the packet and withheld the letter from Susan Leyland to whom I had promised to deliver it: that I did afterwards conspire with James Bonnington to substitute his son Walter for Jonathan the son of the said Anthony. That with my connivance and assistance the said Walter did enter into possession of the estate real and personal to which the said Jonathan was entitled which estate he doth continue to hold; that the said Walter did and still doth pass under the name and style of Jonathan Leyland and that the said Jonathan was and still is unlawfully and fraudulently caused to believe that his name is Walter Bonnington and that he is the son of the said James Bonnington.

  “Given under my hand this 29th day of March, 1785.

  “Phineas Desborough.”

  Signed in my presence,

  “William Horrell, of 6 Hand Court, Holborn, Clerk.”

  I laid down the paper, and looked at my three friends, but for some time none of us spoke. Leyland was the first to break the silence; and his first words framed the inevitable question.

  “How did you know those papers were in that book, Mitchell?”

  There was no occasion for secrecy or reticence. My audience was not likely to be sceptical. In a few words, I told the story of my midnight visitor and the mysterious letter. And when the wonder of this had a little subsided, there came the further and equally inevitable question.

  “By the light of those two statements, Mitchell, what do you say is the present position? It seems that my governor is playing cuckoo.”

  “The position is,” said I, “that you are Frank Bonnington, and that Miss Kate here is Kate Leyland.”

  “And would those papers be good evidence in a court of law?”

  “Probably. But I must point out that after the lapse of a hundred and fifty years, it might prove very difficult to oust a tenant from possession. And your father has the sinews of war, and would probably fight to the last ditch.”

  “Now there you are quite wrong,” said Leyland. “The governor is as obstinate as the devil, but he’s an honest man, and generous, too. If you show him those papers and give him all the facts, I’ll undertake that he’ll march out, bag and baggage, without any action at law at all.”

  Here Mr. Bonnington rose and reached out for the papers. “If that is the case,” said he, “I think we had better pop those two statements in the grate, and put a match to them.” And he would have done it, but that I, with a lawyer’s solicitude for documents, whisked them out of his reach and, clapping them in my pocket-book, buttoned my coat.

  “Quite right, Mitchell,” said Leyland. “I am sure you agree with me that justice must be done.”

  “I do. I agree most emphatically. But I must insist on its being done in a reasonable manner.”

  “As for instance—”

  “Well, I understand that Mr. Bonnington, as I will still call him, has no son and only one daughter. Now supposing he enters an action against your father, and succeeds in ousting him; what is the result? The result is that Miss Kate Bonnington becomes transformed into Kate Leyland. But surely, my dear boy, the same result could be reached by a much shorter and less costly process.”

  Leyland stared at me for a few moments and then his face broke out into an appreciative grin. “By Jove, Mitchell,” said he, “you ought to be Lord Chief Justice. Of course, that’s the plan.” He turned his gaze on Miss Kate (whose complexion had suddenly assimilated itself to that of the peony), and added:

  “That is to say, if Miss Leyland would condescend to marry a poor, penniless devil like Frank Bonnington.’

  That weighty question they subsequently settled to their mutual satisfaction and everyone else’s. For the “governor” justified his son’s estimate of his character by “climbing down” with the agility of an opossum. Thus, by a short and inexpensive procedure, Kate Bonnington became Kate Leyland—it happened the very day after I took silk—and thus, after a century and a half, did Phineas Desborough make restitution.

  THE LUCK OF BARNABAS MUDGE (1918)

  Barnabas Mudge was a man whose intellect was above his station in life; which is not necessarily to rate him with Aristotle or Herbert Spencer. For his station was only that of a jobbing bricklayer. Still, there are bricklayers and bricklayers; and Barnabas was of the brainy variety, which is by no means the most common.

  Hitherto, however, his mental gifts had not materially advanced him along the road to prosperity. Possibly luck had been against him, or it may have been that the village of Baconsfield offered but a limited scope for the working of his philosophic mind. At any rate, when we make his acquaintance on a sweltering day in June, we find him occupied in the unworthy task of demolishing a ruinous, isolated cottage on the extreme outskirts of the village.

  It was a roasting day. As Barnabas stood on the summit of the wall, sulkily pecking at the solid old brickwork, the sweat ran down his face and arms and even wetted the haft of his pick. To make matters worse, old Joe Gammet was depositing a liberal dressing of fish manure on the adjacent field. The deceased fish were presently to be sown evenly over the ground, not with the design—as the unagricultural reader might suppose—of producing a crop of mackerel, but for the purpose of enriching the soil; but
at present the enrichment was more diffused, for the fish, set out in symmetrical heaps, lay under the broiling sun, “wasting their sweetness on the desert air.”

  “Paw!” exclaimed Barnabas, driving his pick viciously into a joint of the hard old brickwork, “them fish do stink. Talk about the plagues of Egypt! Frogs is nothin’ to it. And here comes that old swine with another load.”

  He glanced sourly at the approaching cart and, taking aim at a spot lower down the wall, struck with the energy of exasperation. But here he encountered mortar of a somewhat different quality. The pick buried itself in a crumbling joint, and, as he wrenched at the haft, a considerable mass of brickwork detached itself and fell to the ground.

  “Hallo!” said Barnabas. And well he might. For the falling bricks had disclosed a small, cubical chamber in the wall; which chamber, as he could see by craning forward, was occupied by a covered, earthenware jar. This was highly interesting. It was also just a trifle inopportune; for old Gammet had now approached to within a hundred yards and was smiling with ominous geniality.

  Barnabas clambered down and began hastily to repair the effects of his last vigorous stroke, fitting the dislodged bricks back in their places as well as he could in the short time at his disposal. Then he climbed up to his former perch and began to work furiously on another part of the wall with his back to the approaching cart. But this aloofness of manner availed him nothing; for Joe Gammet, having arrived opposite the cottage, halted his cart, and, displaying a miscellaneous assortment of variegated teeth, hailed his acquaintance in a fine, resonant agricultural voice.

  “Wot O! Barney!”

  Barnabas looked round, with a red handkerchief applied to his nose.

  “Here, I say, Joe!” he gasped. “Just you move on with that there perfumery of your’n. It’s a-makin’ me giddy.”

  Old Gammet chuckled and expectorated skilfully through a convenient aperture in the teeth. “You needn’t be so delicut,” said he. “Nice, ’ealthy country smell, I calls it. Nourishin’ too. Wot’s good for the land is good for them wot lives on the land.” He took up a reposeful posture in the dismantled doorway and continued reflectively: “Rare tough job you’ve got there, Barney. Them old coves could build, they could. Used the right sort of stuff, they did. But there’s a patch there that don’t look much class of work. Why, I could pull it down with my ’ands!”

  He fixed a filmy eye on the piece of wall that Barnabas had just reconstituted and made as if to enter the cottage.

  “’Ere, don’t you come inside,” roared Barnabas. It ain’t safe.” In illustration of this, he adroitly dislodged a few bricks just over the threshold, causing the aged Gammet to hop out through the doorway with quite surprising agility.

  “Couldn’t yer see me a-standin’ underneath?’ the old labourer demanded indignantly.

  “I can’t see nothin’,” said Barnabas. “I can only smell. Would you mind movin’ them wallflowers o’ yourn a bit further off?”

  Old Gammet growled an unintelligible reply, and, sulkily grabbing his horse’s bridle, moved away in the direction of the cart track that led into the field. Barnabas watched him impatiently, and, when the cart had fairly entered the field, he looked up and down the lane to satisfy himself that no further interruption threatened, and, once more, scrambled down.

  He removed the bricks more carefully this time, with a view to subsequent rebuilding, if necessary, and, thrusting his head into the mysterious cavity in the wall, took off the cover of the jar.

  “My eye!” he exclaimed as he applied the organ, thus apostrophised to the mouth of the jar. And perfectly natural the exclamation was; for the jar was full to the brim of glistening golden coins.

  For a few seconds he stood petrified with incredulous joy. Then he put forth a tremulous hand and picked out half a dozen or so; and his joy was yet further intensified. He had expected to find some ancient unmarketable coinage that shouted “Treasure Trove” from every worn line of its obsolete device. But nothing of the kind. The quantity of gold that passed through his hands was as a rule; inconsiderable. But he knew a sovereign when he saw it. And he saw it now. Yea, not one, but several hundreds.

  “Immortal scissors!” ejaculated Barnabas; and once more I repeat that the exclamation was justified by the circumstances.

  Now, to the pellucid intellect of Barnabas Mudge certain facts were at once obvious. Here, for instance, was a negotiable property of some hundreds of pounds—wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. That property, it is true, was not strictly speaking his; but Barnabas was a practical man to whom the pedantic subtleties of the law made no appeal. A more immediate problem was how to secure this heaven-sent windfall; and to this he gave his earnest attention as, having replaced the coins and the jar cover, he once more carefully built up the opening of the hiding-place.

  Hitherto, luck had persistently been against him. All the village knew him to be a poor man; and if now he should suddenly blossom out into unexplained wealth, curiosity would be aroused and probably suspicion too. Yet it was useless to be rich if one had to live in the appearance of poverty; and hoarding money was folly as this forgotten treasure plainly demonstrated. However, the final management of this undreamed of wealth could be considered later. The immediate problem was how to get it safely conveyed to his own house unobserved by prying eyes. As his truck, small as it was, could not be pulled in through the doorway, the precious jar would have to be carried out to the road, which might be safe enough if it were previously wrapped in a sack. But the magnitude of the stake was affecting his nerves to the extent of developing a perfectly unreasonable degree of caution and secretiveness.

  At present old Gammet was the insuperable obstacle. It was impossible to reopen the hiding-place and bring out the jar until he was gone; for he had seen the loose brickwork, and, being a crafty old rascal, might smell a rat. Thus reasoned Barnabas with absurdly exaggerated wariness—for conscience doth make cowards of us all—and as he pecked listlessly at the wall he kept an anxious eye on the old labourer, cursing his dilatory movements and his ridiculous care for appearances. For Joe Gammet, if his olfactory sense was not very discriminating, had a fastidious eye, and was evidently bent on disposing his unsavoury commodity in something like a symmetrical pattern; in fact, Barnabas could actually see him carefully counting the already deposited heaps and pacing out the distance to the site for the next one.

  “Now, there’s a fat-headed old blighter for you!” Barnabas growled angrily as he watched. “Why can’t he dump the stuff down and hook it?” In his exasperation he found himself counting the heaps, too, and calculating how many more the cart-load would produce. There were at present two complete rows, each of thirty-one heaps, and old Gammet was now engaged in depositing the twenty-sixth heap in the third row; and such is the power of suggestion that Barnabas paused in his labours to see if the dwindling contents of the cart would furnish out the five more heaps that were needed to complete the third row.

  As a matter of fact the “perfumery” petered out at the twenty-ninth heap, to Gammet’s evident regret, for, having deposited it, he solemnly and with extended arm, counted the whole collection over again. And then, at last, he climbed into the empty cart and disconsolately drove away.

  “Now for the oof,” said Barnabas as the cart disappeared up the lane. He climbed down from his perch, and, placing in readiness a sack that he had brought with him, began to remove the loose bricks.

  But at this moment there smote on his ears the sound of wheels approaching from the opposite direction to that which Gammet had taken.

  “Drat it!” he exclaimed, hastily replacing the bricks and creeping to a small side window that commanded a view down the lane. “Who is it now? Why it’s Mother Mooney and that slut of a gel of hers. Now what might they be up to?”

  At present they were up to speering about in an inquisitive and highly suspicious manner, and meanwhile, Mrs. Mooney was mooring to a fence rail a donkey which was harnessed to a primitive cart. Then, from the
latter, the two women extracted each a sack and bustled into the field lately occupied by Mr. Gammet. Barnabas watched them with absolute stupefaction as they bore down on the heaps of fish with unmistakable intentions.

  “Well, I’m blowed!” exclaimed Barnabas. “If they ain’t come to pinch the myrrh and frankincense! So that’s the way you runs a market garden. But I don’t see what they wants a-countin’ of ’em for; that there donkey cart won’t hold the whole bilin’.”

  The object of this mysterious proceeding, however, became evident presently, for it appeared that the two marauders, having noted Mr. Gammet’s symmetrical arrangement, had decided not to disturb it and thereby draw attention to their unlawful proceedings. They accordingly began operations on number twenty-nine, and, having stowed it in their sacks, carried these to the donkey cart, and returning with two empty ones, renewed the assault on Gammet’s property at the last heap on the next row.

  “There now!” exclaimed Barnabas admiringly, “there’s a artful old baggage for yer! Thinks old Gammet won’t miss ’em; and more he won’t neither, if she don’t take too many.”

  His good opinion of her was justified in this also, for the discreet Mrs. Mooney contented herself with the removal of the three terminal heaps, leaving Mr. Gammet’s symmetrical pattern apparently unchanged, and cleanly picking up even the minutest incriminating fragments.

  Barnabas patiently awaited the retreat of the two raiders, and as the donkey cart at length disappeared down the lane, he took another last look round and then once more uncovered the treasure chamber. The jar, though of no great size, was uncommonly heavy, and its introduction to the sack under the agitating circumstances was a matter of some difficulty. When it was safely accomplished and he had staggered out with his prize to the truck and there buried it under a heap of tools, sash-frames, rafters and other debris from the cottage, there followed several agonised minutes, during which he feverishly built up the opening of the chamber—for it would obviously have been madness to leave that cavity exposed to the inquisitive eyes of the villagers. But fortunately no one passed down the lane while he was thus occupied, nor was there anyone in sight when at length he stole forth guiltily and, taking up the pole of the truck, set out homewards at a pace, and with a degree of anxious care, suggestive of a rural funeral. We need not describe that journey in detail; let it suffice to say that at the end of it, Barnabas felt several years older and found himself deeply impressed alike with the surprising populousness of Baconsfield and his own hitherto unsuspected popularity. At length, with a sigh of relief, he trundled his cart into the tiny backyard of the cottage in which he lived all alone; a few moments more and he had borne his treasure in through the back door and shot the bolt; and thus was the first, and most essential, step taken on the road to fortune.