“Yes,” I agreed, “you undoubtedly sold him a pup. Precious mug he must have been to let you. But I suppose, as it was Saturday night, he was pretty busy.”
“He was. The shop was crowded with buyers. But, my son, we shall have to make restitution: though, really, in the present circumstances of—ah—financial stringency—”
He explored his various pockets, which appeared to be rich in truncated fragments of lead pencil, in addition to which they yielded a small bunch of keys, a pen knife with a broken blade, a sixpence and three half pence. These treasures he regarded disconsolately and returned them whence they came. Then he turned an enquiring and appealing eye on me. He knew, of course, that I had received my wages on the previous day but delicately refrained from explicit allusion to the fact. However, as the entire sum reposed untouched in my pocket, in the form of four half-crowns and the fishmonger had to be paid, I produced the necessary coin and pushed it across the table. Usually, I was a little chary of handing money to Pontifex, preferring to pay our debts myself. For Ponty’s ideas on the subject of meum and tuum were a trifle obscure—or perhaps I should say communistic—where my property was concerned, and the establishments of the tobacconist and the spirit merchant exercised a fatal fascination. But he was scrupulous enough in regard to strangers and I had no misgivings as to my present contribution safely reaching its proper destination. Accordingly, when I had furnished him with the means wherewith to make restitution to the defrauded fishmonger, I considered the incident of the “snide” half-crown as closed.
But it was not, as I discovered when I arrived home on Monday night. The fishmonger, it appeared, had communicated with the police, and the police were profoundly interested in the coin, which they recognised as one of a series which was being issued in considerable numbers by a coiner whom they had failed to locate or identify. In consequence, Pontifex had been requested to ascertain from me how the coin had come into my possession and to communicate the information to the fishmonger for transmission to the police.
Now, in my mind, there was little doubt as to the source of that half-crown. It had come from the work shop or studio of the mysterious artist who had been referred to as ‘Chonas.’ But my experiences under the too-hospitable roof of Mr. Ebbstein had begotten an unwillingness to be involved in any affair connected with that establishment. I am not peculiarly secretive, but I have a habit of keeping my own counsel. ‘Chonas’s’ proceedings were no concern of mine and I was not disposed to meddle with them. Wherefore, in reply to Ponty’s not very eager enquiries, I stated simply and quite truthfully, that I had received the coin from a man who was a total stranger to me. This answer satisfied Pontifex, who was not acutely interested in the matter, and once more I assumed that I had finished with that disreputable coin. And once more I was mistaken.
CHAPTER III
A MYSTERY AND A DISAPPEARANCE
(Dr. Jervis’s Narrative)
There are some—and not a few, I fear—of the dwellers in, or frequenters of London to whom the inexhaustible charms of their environment are matters of no more concern than is the landscape which the rabbit surveys indifferently from the mouth of his burrow. For them the sermons in stones are preached in vain. Voices of the past, speaking their messages from many an ancient building or historic landmark, fall on deaf ears. London, to such as these, is but an assemblage of offices and shops, offering no more than a field for profitable activity.
Very different from these unreflective fauna of the town was my friend Thorndyke. Inveterate town-sparrow as he was, every link with the many-coloured past, even though it were no more than an ancient street-name, was familiar and beloved, never to be passed without at least a glance of friendly recognition. Hence it was natural that when, on a certain Tuesday morning, we crossed Chancery Lane to enter Lincoln’s Inn by the spacious archway of the ancient gatehouse, he should pause to glance round the picturesque little square of Old Buildings and cast his eyes up to the weathered carving above the archway which still exhibits the arms of the builder and the escutcheons of the ancient family whose title gave the inn its name.
We were just turning away, debating—not for the first time—the rather doubtful tradition that Ben Jonson had worked as a bricklayer on this gateway, when we became aware of a remarkably spruce-looking elderly gentleman who was approaching from the direction of New Square. He had already observed us, and, as he was obviously bearing down on us with intent, we stepped forward to meet him.
“This meeting,” said he, as we shook hands, “is what some people would describe as providential, if you know what that means. I don’t. But the fact is that I was just coming to call on you. Now you had better walk back with me to my chambers—that is, if you are at liberty.”
“May I take it,” said Thorndyke, “that there is some matter that you wish to discuss?”
“You may, indeed. I have a poser for you; a mystery that I am going to present to you for solution. Oh, you needn’t look like that. This is a genuine mystery. The real thing. I’ve never been able to stump you yet, but I think I’m going to do it now.”
“Then I think we are at liberty. What do you say, Jervis?”
“If there is a chance of my seeing my revered senior stumped, I am prepared to stay out all night. But I doubt if you will bring it off, Brodribb.”
Mr. Brodribb shook his head. “I should like to think you are right, Jervis,” said he, “for I am absolutely stumped, myself, and I want the matter cleared up. But it is a regular twister. I can give you the facts as we walk along. They are simple enough, as facts. It is the explanation of them that presents the difficulty.
“I think you have heard me speak of my client, Sir Edward Hardcastle. I am the family solicitor. I acted for Sir Edward’s father, Sir Julian, and my father acted for Sir Julian’s father. So I know a good deal about the family. Now, yesterday morning I received a letter which was sealed on the outside with Sir Edward Hardcastle’s seal. I opened the envelope and took out the letter, naturally assuming that it was from Sir Edward. Imagine my astonishment when I found that the letter was from Frank Middlewick, your neighbour in the Temple.”
“It certainly was rather odd,” Thorndyke admitted.
“Odd!” exclaimed Brodribb. “It was astounding. Here was Sir Edward’s private seal—the impression of his signet ring—on the envelope of a man who, as far as I knew, was a perfect stranger to him. I was positively staggered. I could make no sense of it; and as it was obviously a matter that called aloud for explanation, I slipped the letter in my pocket and hopped off to the Temple without delay.
“But my interview with Middlewick only made confusion worse confounded. To begin with, he didn’t know Sir Edward Hardcastle even by name. Never heard of him. And he was perfectly certain that the seal wasn’t put on in his office. He had written the letter himself—I had already observed that it was in his own handwriting—but the envelope was addressed and the letter put in it by his clerk, Dickson, after the copy had been taken and the entry made in the index. Dickson states that he put the letter in one of the ordinary envelopes from the rack and he is quite certain that, when he closed it and stuck the stamp on, there was no seal on it. Of course, there couldn’t have been. Then he took the letter, with a number of others, and posted it with his own hand at the post office in Fleet Street.”
“Did he check the letters when he posted them?” Thorndyke asked.
“No, he didn’t. He ought to have done so, of course. But it seems that he was in a deuce of a hurry, so he shot the whole lot of letters into the box at once. Careless, that was. A man has no business to be in such a hurry that he can’t attend to what he is doing. However it doesn’t matter, as it happens. The post-mark shows that the letter was actually posted there at the time stated. So there’s no help in that direction.”
“And what about your own premises? Who took the letter in?”
“I took it in myself. I was strolling round the square, having my morning pipe, when I saw the postman coming
along towards my entry. So I waited and took my batch of letters from him, and looked them over as I strolled back to the house. This one with the seal on it was among the batch. That is the whole story. And now, what have you got to say about it?”
Thorndyke laughed softly. “It is a quaint problem,” said he. “We seem to be able to take it as certain that the letter was unsealed when it left Middlewick’s office. Apparently it was unsealed when it was dropped into the post office letter-box. It was certainly sealed when the postman delivered it. That leaves us the interval between the posting and the delivery. The suggestion is that somebody affixed the seal to the letter in the course of transit through the post.”
“That seems quite incredible,” said I. “The seal was the impression of a signet ring which couldn’t possibly have been in the possession of any of the post office people, to say nothing of the general absurdity of the suggestion.”
“Mere absurdity or improbability,” replied Thorndyke, “can hardly be considered as excluding any particular explanation. The appearance of this seal in these circumstances is grotesquely improbable. It appears to be an impossibility. Yet there is the devastating fact that it has happened. We can hardly expect a probable or even plausible explanation of so abnormal a fact; but among the various improbable explanations, one must be true. All that we can do is to search for the one that is the least improbable, and I agree with you, Jervis, that the post office is not the most likely place in which the sealing could have occurred. It seems to me that the only point at which we make anything resembling a contact with probability is the interval between Dickson’s leaving the office and the posting of the letters.”
“I don’t quite follow you,” said Brodribb.
“What I mean is that at that point there is an element of uncertainty. Dickson believes that he posted the letter, but, as he did not check the letters that he posted, it is just barely possible that this one may have in some way escaped from his custody.”
“But,” objected Brodribb, “it was certainly posted at the place and time stated. The post-mark proves that.”
“True. But it might have been posted by another hand.”
“And how does that suggestion help us?”
“Very little,” Thorndyke admitted. “It merely allows us to suggest, in addition to the alternatives known to us—all of them wildly incredible and apparently impossible—a set of unknown circumstances in which the sealing might credibly have happened.”
“That doesn’t seem very satisfactory,” I remarked.
“It is highly unsatisfactory,” he replied, “since it is purely speculative. But you see my point. If we accept Dickson’s statement we are presented with a choice of apparent impossibilities. Middlewick could not have sealed the letter; Dickson could not have sealed it; we agree that it appears impossible for the postal officials to have sealed it, and it is unimaginable that the postman sealed it. Yet it left Middlewick’s hands unsealed and arrived in the postman’s hands sealed. Thus the apparently impossible happened. On the other hand, if we assume that the letter passed out of Dickson’s possession in some way without his knowledge, we are assuming something that is not inherently improbable. And if we further assume—as we must, since the letter was posted by somebody—that there was an interval during which it was in the possession of some unknown person, then we have something like a loop-hole of escape from our dilemma. For, since the assumed person is unknown to us, we cannot say that it was impossible, or even improbable, that he should have had the means of sealing the letter.”
I laughed derisively. “This is all very well, Thorndyke,” said I, “but you are getting right off the plane of reality. Your unknown person is a mere fiction. To escape from the difficulty you invent an imaginary person who might have had possession of Sir Edward’s ring and might have had some motive for sealing with it a letter which was not his and with which he had no concern. But there isn’t a particle of evidence that such a person exists.”
“There is not,” Thorndyke agreed. “But I remind my learned friend that this perfectly incredible thing has undoubtedly happened and that we are trying to imagine some circumstances in which it might conceivably have happened. Obviously, there must be some such circumstances.”
“But,” I protested, “there is no use in merely inventing circumstances to fit the case.”
“I don’t quite agree with you, Jervis,” Brodribb interposed. “As Thorndyke points out, since the thing happened, it must have been possible. But it does not appear to be possible in the circumstances known to us. Therefore there must have been some other circumstances which are unknown to us. Now the suggestion that Dickson dropped the letter (which, I understand, is what Thorndyke means) is not at all improbable. We know that he was in a devil of a hurry and I know that he is as blind as a bat. If he dropped the letter, somebody certainly picked it up and put it in the post; and I agree that that is probably what really occurred. I should think so on grounds of general probability, but I have a further reason.
“Just now I said that I had told you the whole story, but that was not strictly correct. There is a sequel. As soon as I left Middlewick, I sent off a reply-paid telegram to Sir Edward asking him if his signet ring was still in his possession and if he had sealed any strange letter with it. In reply I got a telegram from his butler saying that Sir Edward was away from home and adding that a letter would follow. That letter arrived this morning, and gave me some news that I don’t like at all. It appears that last Tuesday—this day week—Sir Edward left home with the expressed intention of spending a couple of days in Town and returning on Thursday afternoon. But he did not return on that day. On Friday, Weeks, the butler, telegraphed to him at the club, where he usually stayed when in town, asking him when he would be coming home. As no reply to this telegram was received, Weeks telegraphed next day—Saturday—to the secretary of the club enquiring if Sir Edward was still there. The secretary’s answer informed him that Sir Edward had stayed at the club on Tuesday night, had gone out after breakfast on Wednesday morning and had not returned since, but that his suitcase and toilet fittings were still in his bedroom.
“This rather disturbed Weeks, for Sir Edward is a methodical man and regular in his habits. But he didn’t like to make a fuss, so he decided to wait until Monday night, and then, if his master did not turn up, to communicate with me. As I have said, up to the time of his writing to me, Sir Edward had not returned, nor had he sent any message. So the position is that his whereabouts are unknown, and, seeing that he has left his kit at the club, the whole affair has a very unpleasant appearance.”
“It has,” Thorndyke agreed, gravely, “and in the light of this disappearance the seal incident takes on a new significance.”
“Yes,” I hastened to interpose, “and the assumed unknown person seems to rise at once to the plane of reality.”
“That is what I feel,” said Brodribb. “Taken with the disappearance, the incident of the seal has an ominous look. And there is another detail, which I haven’t mentioned, but which I find not a little disturbing. The seal on this letter is impressed in black wax. It may mean nothing, but it conveys to me a distinctly sinister suggestion. Sir Edward, like most of us, always used red wax.”
On this Thorndyke made no comment, but I could see that he was as much impressed as was our old friend and as I was, myself. Indeed, to me this funereal wax seemed to impart to the incident of the seal an entirely new character. From the region of the merely fantastic and whimsical, it passed to that of the tragic and portentous.
“There is just one point,” said Thorndyke, “on which I should like to be quite clear. It is, I suppose, beyond doubt that this is really Sir Edward’s seal—the actual impression of his signet ring?”
“You shall judge for yourself,” replied Brodribb; and forthwith he started forward towards his entry (hitherto we had been pacing up and down the broad pavement of the square). He preceded us to his private office where, having shut the door, he unlocked and ope
ned a large deed box on the lid of which was painted in white lettering: “Sir Edward Hardcastle, Bart.” From this he took out an envelope, apparently enclosing a letter and bearing on its flap a small seal in red wax. This he laid on the table, and then, extracting from his pocket wallet another envelope, bearing a similar seal in black wax, laid it down beside the other. Thorndyke picked them up, and, holding them as near together as was possible, made a careful comparison. Then, through his pocket lens, he made a prolonged inspection, first of the red seal and then of the black. Finally, producing a small calliper gauge which he usually carried in his pocket, he measured the two diameters of each of the little oval spaces in which the device was enclosed.
“Yes,” he said, handing the envelopes to me, “there is no doubt that they are impressions of the same seal. The possible fallacy is not worth considering.”
“What fallacy do you mean?” asked Brodribb.
“I mean,” he replied, “that if you would leave one of these impressions with me for twenty-four hours I could present you with an indistinguishable facsimile. It is quite easy to do. But, in the present case, the question of forgery doesn’t seem to arise.”
“No,” agreed Brodribb, “I don’t think it does. But the question that does arise, is, what is to be done? I suppose we ought to communicate with the police at once.”
“I think,” said Thorndyke, “that the first thing to be done is to call at the club and find out all that we can about Sir Edward’s movements. Then, when we know all that is to be known, we can, if it still seems desirable, put the police in possession of the facts.”
“Yes,” Brodribb agreed, eagerly, “that will be much the better plan. We may be able to do without the police and avoid a public fuss. Can you come along now? It’s an urgent case.”
“It is,” Thorndyke agreed. “Yes, we must let our other business wait for the moment. We had no actual appointment.”
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