“Wait!” said Darwent. “When I was in the drawing room today, with Till Lewis, I could have sworn I heard a noise from that house. Was it you?”
“Ay, Dick. I was still as drunk as Davy’s whole farmyard; and most uncommon nonsilent. Rot me, why are we wasting time?”
Whereupon he lifted up his voice.
“Ho!” bellowed Mr. Mulberry, striking an attitude which he imagined to belong to a Jacobite king and no pig-snouted Hanover. “Candles for these good people! Lights! A bedroom candlestick, a candle, to see the den of evil and the secret of the lost room!”
And then, for no reason, terror struck into the dining room here.
Perhaps it was Darwent’s terror alone. He had lived too long with grisly imaginings. That room had woven through goblin-ridden dreams; it had made him start awake, with sweat on his body; it followed him and tapped his shoulder by day. About it he now felt prophetic. What really frightened him, now, was the feeling that some new catastrophe would spring at them out of the room.
His feeling of prophecy proved to be right. Meanwhile:
“Very well,” he said.
The next few minutes, until the time they faced the door of the room, afterwards were confused in his mind. Caroline brought candles whose brass stemholders ended in a kind of brass dish. Grunting some words like, “Alius ’ave me darbies,” Townsend bent over the fallen Jemmy and locked the handcuffs over Jemmy’s right wrist to his own left wrist. After this he kicked and slapped Jemmy into hissing wakefulness, lifting Jemmy to his feet with an iron-shod toe cap.
Five of them, each carrying a lighted candle in a brass dish holder, went down the front steps of the house into cool air.
It was deathly quiet. Outside stood Mr. Hereford’s carriage, driver dozing on the box. In St. James’s Square Darwent discerned the movement of a military busby, evidently some officer going home late. The black sky had turned gray, with tinges of dawn.
Dawn. Darwent looked at the sky, and remembered several events.
“This,” declared Mr. Mulberry, pointing toward the edge of the pavement outside number thirty-six next door, “is where the blue coach stopped.
“This,” he continued, holding the candle flame toward the eight stone steps leading up to the front door, “is the ‘staircase’ you were carried up. Dick, Dick! You said ‘broad’ staircase; but how the devil could you have known that? It was stamped on your imagination by that country drive, and also by …
“Never mind!” said Mr. Mulberry, unlocking the big front door. “This is the door the coachman opened with his foot, as I do. Now hold up your lights, all of you.”
They obeyed the order. But there was a short, slight struggle between handcuffed Jemmy and handcuffed Townsend, with lights going up and down in two opposite hands, until Jemmy’s rib was slightly nicked by the blade in Townsend’s left hand. Jemmy began to wail, but fell silent.
“That’s order, that is!” Mr. Mulberry said approvingly.
“Thank’ee kindly, sir,” bowed Townsend. “Sometimes I slits their wizzends,” he explained seriously, “but a flash cull’s better took alive.”
Darwent’s voice was harsh with nervousness. “Can’t we get on with this, Mulberry?”
“Observe!” said Mr. Mulberry, sweeping the candle flame inside the hall. “In the two houses, they’ve built front room against front room, each facing opposite. The first door down, in this house, the door is on the right-hand side as you enter. Now, Dick! Are you ready?”
“Whatever it is, I’m ready! Yes.”
“Then walk forward to the first door on the right …. That’s it; stop! That’s where the coachman carried you. Now turn and face the door. That’s it! That’s where the coachman turned you.”
The others had crowded into the hall after Darwent. Caroline’s voice rose up.
“Isn’t there someone following us?” she asked quietly.
“Gently, now, m’lady!” scoffed Townsend, with a wink meant to be reassuring.
“Dick,” said Mr. Mulberry, “open the door and go in. But don’t take more than three steps inside. That’s all you said you took; remember?”
Darwent gritted his teeth. He felt exactly as he had felt when he prepared himself to go out to the hangman.
“Very well,” he agreed.
Shifting the candleholder to his left hand, Darwent opened the door. He took three steps inside, almost nerveless to lift his eyes; then, determined, he looked up. It was the same room.
First he saw the three candles burning in the glass castle of a chandelier, now lightly filmed with dust. But these were even skimpier candles, low-burning and almost ready to go out.
Then, above the Turkey carpet, he saw Frank’s tortoise-shell wood desk; with tall chair behind it. Midway down the woven chair back was a dark-brown bloodstain and the thin cut where the rapier had stabbed through. Glancing to his right, Darwent saw (apparently) the same tall, close-shuttered windows.
But worst of all, when he looked straight ahead at the wall, papered in dull red patterned with gold, which faced him from the other side of the room …
There was the tall window, in the wall well behind Frank’s desk. Through it Darwent saw moonlight falling softly on what seemed to be a lawn outside. He saw the white statue of the god Pan, leering back. He saw the apparently real shrubbery. The power of darkness, to twist and deceive the mind!
“But there’s no …” he began.
“Yes, lad?” whispered Mr. Mulberry, who was breathing hard.
“There’s no open lawn there, as I don’t have to tell you! The other side of that wall is the wall of Caroline’s dining room.”
“Not quite the other side,” corrected Mr. Mulberry, who seemed half in a fit.
“What do you mean?”
“Why, rot me, Mr. Caliban, the moneylender, wanted to construct a room which should be pretty much like one at Kinsmere House in the country, where there was a real statue outside the window. That wasn’t hard, if you have big rooms like the rooms here.
“Don’t you see what he did? He had all the bricks removed, and the ceiling propped up with iron and wooden joints. Frank Orford wanted depth: eh? He wanted to build a partition wall, a dummy wall of wood, down the length-of that side of the room. But he had to have at least four feet depth, or maybe five, behind that wall: eh? So the dummy window could be set in, and a fine illusion behind it would show a country-house lawn? I turned the lamps on, laddie, the way it was when you saw it. Damme, look here!”
Mr. Mulberry strode forward, putting down his candleholder on the now-dusty desk.
From beside the little table with a bowl of shriveled, moldy oranges, he picked up a chair.
“Don’t do it!” cried Caroline, who had slipped in beside Darwent. “I think I understand! We …”
There was no reply.
The window was a full-length one, with two sashes horizontal across the middle. Swinging back the chair, Mr. Mulberry drove it at the lower half.
Even as to crash of glass exploded, the moonlight trembled and the statue as well. When the lawyer ducked inside and stood up, the swish of his foot against manufactured glass destroyed reality. He slapped his hand down in the statue; it was plaster. He faced out at them through the upper glass, with that inexplicable wild look on his face and the white hat crammed down on his head.
“I saw it,” muttered Darwent, “only three feet from the door. And (deliberately) in the light of only three candles. Other persons must have seen it closer, I think: but not many feet closer. The power of”—He stopped.
Mr. Mulberry ducked out from under the window.
“Why, Dick, you saw that same effect of moonlight, done with lamps, at the opera! You saw something, maybe, a thought similar in the way o’ what they call perspective with greenery.” Suddenly he pointed to the window behind. “But was it as good as that, lad? Was it the job of a master craftsman?”
“No, it wasn’t nearly as good! But what difference …”
Mr. Mulberry regar
ded him savagely.
“Ask yourself,” he said, “how many men could have painted that background, designed each shrub or grass-blade, worked and painted it into a stage scene you could swear was real!”
He pointed to the bowl of oranges on the table.
“Then ask yourself,” he snapped, “how many men, potential enemies, would be permitted close to Frank Orford when that man held a sword? Only a man famous for sword-jugglery, Dick! Why were the rapiers there at all? Only a man who could throw up four or five oranges, and catch them on a rapier point when …”
“One moment,” proclaimed a new voice, just as Townsend dragged the protesting Jemmy into the room.
The newcomer, who also held a candle, straightened up and looked slowly round.
“Oh, I killed Orford,” said Mr. Augustus Raleigh, with a look of contempt on his gaunt features. “But why should there be any fuss or sadness at his taking off?”
Chapter XXIII
Hopes to Show That We Do Not Always Suspect Everybody
TO DARWENT, AT LEAST, the shock of that realization came slowly. When Mr. Raleigh spoke, Darwent was looking at the two long, close-shuttered windows in the right-hand wall.
They were only the ordinary windows looking out on St. James’s Square. Yet a whisper to the imagination, the power of darkness, even yet conjured up outside the lawns and oak trees of Kinsmere House. Would Frank Orford have risked the noise of carts and carriages out there? Yes; because in summer there were few carts and carriages after nightfall.
But now the new shock, the new spring of catastrophe, was on them again ….
“You!” he said to Mr. Raleigh. Since he like’d the man, he did not particularly care what Augustus Raleigh had done. But the shock remained. “You killed Orford?”
Mr. Raleigh’s dark eyes were steady but very weary in the gaunt face.
“Dick, Dick,” he said, “how often I have betrayed myself! How often I have almost told you!”
Darwent turned to Mr. Mulberry. “How long have you known this?”
Mr. Mulberry’s expression, Darwent realized, had been one of self-hatred because he must speak.
“Only since this morning, Dick, that time after breakfast you had made haste away from us to see Dolly Spencer.” Mr. Mulberry rubbed his nose. “I’d drunk a mort of ale. And your good lady, seeing my needs as she sees all men’s needs, outed herself with a decanter of brandy.
“I was foxed, Dick. I admit it. I made some quotation from the Latin (which escapes me now) about the sanctity of a Roman villa. And back it came to me what I’d heard the day before,”—he pointed to Mr. Raleigh—“in your house, when Dolly Spencer lay on a bed of sickness, and I was in the room.
“The girl said you’d once built a Roman villa, for Julius Caesar, so real she leaned against one of the pillars and toppled over. I’d already told you I had the rest of the mystery as clear-clean as a line of tulips (though damn the Dutch, says I, for that sour shrunk-faced William the Third). But here! And here, abreast of Roman villas, I was looking at a bowl of fruit on the dining-room table, and remembering the cut oranges in the lost room …”
“And remembering,” interposed Mr. Raleigh’s deep voice, with a touch of bitterness, “how many times you had seen me catch oranges on a rapier point at Drury Lane?”
Mr. Mulberry threw his hat into a corner.
“I did,” he roared back, as though confessing a sin. “And at last I knew the assassin of Orford. I tried to send a message to Dick by his good lady …”
“And I took the message,” Caroline pleaded. “Unfortunately, sir, you were—you were not yourself. I can understand now why you flourished a great number of house keys at the dining-room table. But all you could do was tumble into a hackney cabriolet, and call for cider.”
“Well!” said Mr. Mulberry, with a scowl. “The fact is, my lady, I meant the cider cellars in Maiden Lane. I had to sober myself on soda water.” Then he glared at Mr. Raleigh.
“But you’re an honest man and a gentle kind o’ beau,” Mr. Mulberry added. “How could I betray you, even if I knew? How did you come to be associated with this firm of Orford and Fletcher?”
Mr. Raleigh quivered.
“Associated?” he said in a voice of such disgust that serpents might have been crawling over him. “In many ways, sir, I own myself to be vile. But those two? No!”
There was a film over Mr. Raleigh’s eyes as he turned to Darwent.
“My lord,” he said very formally, “when you honored my house in Lewknor Lane by paying a call on Dolly there … she is dead now; how curious! … you must have been surprised at my unmanned and even unmanly conduct, when you tactfully suggested gratitude (for what service to us, my lord?) and a place to live. I was not merely penniless; I was in debt.”
Darwent spoke gently.
“And yet not penniless, I imagine,” he said, “in the way Jemmy Fletcher there always states he is? Mr. Raleigh, he won several thousand pounds from me at piquet; yet he claimed himself too hard up to pay a wager I made him, on the way to a duel, about my own death. It must have tortured his miserly soul to pay the prize fighters. He’s meaner than Frank Orford.”
The strength of Mr. Raleigh’s voice, in its bitterness and its humility, made even Hubert Mulberry step back.
“No man was ever meaner than Lord Francis Orford!” he cried.
“I ask your pardon,” Mr. Raleigh said a moment later, with a faint apologetic smile at the candle flame. “But you will understand if you hear my foolish story. I think I told you, Lord Darwent, I was dismissed from Drury Lane towards the end of April?”
“Yes.”
“To be exact, the 21st. Because I had offended a man of title by spilling paint on his boot, I was given no pay in lieu of notice. And I could never save a farthing from my wages, as I have incautiously said to so many.”
Mr. Raleigh’s gaunt face hardened.
“I wonder that Mr. Mulberry, with all his wit, did not wonder how Emma and I had contrived to exist—to keep even a quarter loaf in the cupboard!—between the end of April and the end of July. Whoever wondered that would have seen all.
“But I spoke to you of other matters!
“Of the five noblemen who lodged a complaint against me at the theater, one was Lord Francis Orford. On the very same night as the day of my dismissal, he sent a carriage for me and requested my presence at thirty-six St. James’s Square.
“How I hoped! How I dreamed! How I thought … laugh if you like; it was foolish … that here had come a golden change of fortune. What things I could do for Emma! Emma—Emma is the Christian name of my wife.
“No carriage (if I may correct Mr. Mulberry, whom I overheard) ever stopped at this house. It stopped a door or two or three away, so that this dark, shuttered place, seldom entered except by the back door, should seem deserted. And in some fashion the horses’ hoofs were muffled, so that we made little noise. In this room I met Lord Francis.”
Mr. Raleigh paused, swallowing hard. His gaze moved up to the chandelier, where the last low-burning candle had given a leap of smoke and gone out. Then he looked at the desk in the middle of the room, and the tall bloodstained chair behind it.
“Lord Francis sat there,” continued Augustus Raleigh, pointing to the chair. “His dummy partition wall was finished, together with a certain other object. He’d had the materials brought in bit by bit, the workmen cautioned to work quietly, so no one in the neighborhood knew a thing about it. He wished me to construct the window and design the illusion. He wished it done as soon as possible. He was quite open with-me. If I wished, I could go to Kinsmere House and copy the statue. For this work, he offered the very large, sum of ten pounds.
“Ten pounds! It would support Emma and myself for three months! I promised, and vowed in my soul too, it should be the best work of which I was capable.
“Well! By going without sleep for two days and nights, I finished it. As you see, it is—it is not ill made. On the night I completed it, showing him how
to adjust the wick of the lamp, I was desperate. I had spent my own money, as well as borrowed, to buy the materials.
“And I had the temerity to ask for payment. All three of us were in this room; Lord Francis, Mr. Fletcher, and myself.”
Darwent glanced sideways at Jemmy.
Jemmy, as though the handcuffs became him, had assumed a jaunty air and waggled the candleholder in his left hand. For some time there had been a curious smile on his face.
“Well, I asked for payment,” Mr. Raleigh said heavily. “Lord Francis sat in that chair, reading a newspaper, Doubtless, Lord Darwent, you were familiar with his expression. His eyebrows a little raised; the long nose; the twitch of the nose as though what one just said had offended his nostrils? But it was not that now. It was mere wellbred astonishment.
“‘Pay you?’ says he. ‘Pay a tradesman?’
“He never laughed. But he sometimes smiled, making his false teeth project. Perhaps it was not in his thin-blooded nature to laugh.
“‘My poor man,’ he said, ‘a tradesman is lucky if he’s paid in a year or two.’
“Whereupon, I regret, I lost my head. I said nothing; I only felt. But how shall I explain? How?” demanded Mr. Raleigh, in a puzzled tone. “How shall I gain your ear, much less your sympathy, for this feeling?
“You see, I had never thought of myself as a tradesman. Though that is honorable work too.” Suddenly his voice throbbed with a drum note of pride. “I had thought of myself as a master craftsman, proud of his hands’ work, who would have been honored by the guilds of olden time, and yielded the wall to no man save in the way of friendship!
“But sometimes it is good, perhaps, to have pride chastened.
“All this time, I noticed, Lord Francis Orford had been regarding me in a very odd way. I guess the reason now, of course. In a short time I had learned much of ‘Mr. Caliban,’ who was now in business. Lord Francis and Mr. Fletcher had talked as carelessly in front of me as in front of Pan’s statue. But this never occurred to me then.
“Lord Francis, as pleasantly as he could, made an apology which pleased and surprised me. I was quite right, he assured me. If I would return the next evening, he said, I should be paid.
The Bride of Newgate Page 28