"You know he stole from me my Lilian—promised she should be his wife! They were to have been married in a month. And now he's jilted her—thrown her over—as if she were a thing of no account. Made her the laughing stock of all the town! And for whom do you think, of all the women in the world? Mary Hartopp—a widow that should know better! It's not an hour since I was told. I came here straight. And now Mr. Vernon knows something of my mind."
I could not help but think, as he went striding away, as if he were beside himself with rage—without giving me a chance to say a word—that all the world would quickly learn something of it too.
The moment seemed scarcely to be a propitious one for interviewing Decimus Vernon. He would hardly be in a mood to receive a visitor. But, as the matter of which I wished to speak to him was of pressing importance, and another opportunity might not immediately occur, I decided to approach him as if unconscious of anything untoward having happened.
As I began to mount the stairs there came stealing, rather than walking down them, Vernon's man, John Parkes. At sight of me, the fellow started.
"Oh, Mr. Benham, sir, it's you! I thought it was Mr. Crampton back again."
I looked at Parkes, who seemed sufficiently upset. I had known the fellow for years.
"There's been a little argument, eh, Parkes?"
Parkes raised both his hands.
"A little argument, sir! There's been the most dreadful quarrel I ever heard."
"Where is Mr. Vernon?"
"He's in the library, sir, where Mr. Crampton left him. Shall I go and tell him that you would wish to see him?"
Parkes eyed me in a manner which plainly suggested that, if he were in my place, he should wish to do nothing of the kind. I declined his unspoken suggestion, preferring, also, to announce myself.
I rapped with my knuckles at the library door. There was no answer. I rapped again. As there was still no response, I opened the door and entered.
"Vernon?" I cried.
I perceived at a glance that the room was empty. I was aware that, adjoining this apartment was a room which he fitted up as a bedroom, and in which he often slept. I saw that the door of this inner room was open. Concluding that he had gone in there, I went to the threshold and called "Vernon!"
My call remained unanswered. A little wondering where the man could he, I peeped inside. My first impression was that this room, like the other, was untenanted. A second glance, however, revealed a booted foot, toe upwards, which was thrust out from the other side of the bed. Thinking that he might be in one of his wild moods, and was playing me some trick, I called out to him again.
"Vernon, what little game are you up to now?"
Silence. And in the silence there was, as it were, a quality which set my heart in a flutter. I became conscious of there being, in the air, something strange. I went right into the room, and I looked down on Decimus Vernon.
I thought that I had never seen him look more handsome than he did then, as he lay on his back on the floor, his right arm raised above his head, his left lying lightly across his breast, an expression on his face which was almost like a smile, looking, for all the world as if he were asleep. But I was enough of a physician to feel sure that he was dead.
For a moment or two I hesitated. I glanced quickly about the room. What had been his occupation when death had overtaken him seemed plain. On the dressing table was an open case of rings. Three or four of them lay in a little heap upon the table. He had, apparently, been trying them on. I called out, with unintentional loudness—indeed, so loudly, that, in that presence, I was startled by the sound of my own voice.
"Parkes?"
Parkes came hurrying in.
"Did you call, sir?"
He knew I had called. The muscles of the fellows face were trembling.
"Mr. Vernon's dead."
"Dead!"
Parkes' jaw dropped open. He staggered backwards.
"Come and look at him."
He did as I told him, unwillingly enough. He stood beside me, looking down at his master as he lay upon the floor. Words dropped from his lips.
"Mr. Crampton didn't do it."
I caught the words up quickly.
"Of course he didn't, but—how do you know?"
"I heard Mr. Vernon shout 'Go to the devil' to him as he went downstairs. Besides, I heard Mr. Vernon moving about the room after Mr. Crampton had gone."
I gave a sigh of relief. I had wondered. I knelt at Vernon's side. He was quite warm, but I could detect no pulsation.
"Perhaps, Mr. Benham, sir," suggested Parkes, "Mr. Vernon has fainted, or had a fit, or something."
"Hurry and fetch a doctor. We shall see."
Parkes vanished. Although my pretensions to medical knowledge are but scanty, I had no doubt whatever that a doctor would pronounce that Decimus Vernon was no longer to be numbered with the living. How he had come by his death was another matter. His expression was so tranquil, his attitude, as of a man lying asleep upon his back, so natural; that it almost seemed as if death had come to him in one of those commonplace forms in which it comes to all of us. And yet—
I looked about me to see if there was anything unusual which might catch the eye. A scrap of paper, a bottle, a phial, a syringe—something which might have been used as a weapon. I could detect no sign of injury on Vernon's person; no bruise upon his head or face; no flow of blood. Stooping over him, I smelt his lips. There are certain poisons the scent of which is unmistakable, the odour of some of those whose effect is the most rapid lingers long after death has intervened. I have a keen sense of smell, but about the neighbourhood of Decimus Vernon's mouth there was no odour of any sort or kind. As I rose, there was the sound of some one entering the room beyond.
"Decimus?"
The voice was a woman's. I turned. Lilian Trowbridge was standing at the bedroom door. We exchanged stares, apparently startled by each other's appearance into momentary speechlessness. She seemed to be in a tremor of excitement. Her lips were parted. Her big, black eyes seemed to scorch my countenance. She leaned with one hand against the side of the door, as if seeking for support to enable her to stand while she regained her breath.
"Mr. Benham—You! Where is Decimus? I wish to speak to him."
Her unexpected entry had caused me to lose my presence of mind. The violence of her manner did not assist me in regaining it. I stumbled in my speech.
"If you will come with me into the other room, I will give you an explanation."
I made an awkward movement forward, my impulse being to conceal from her what was lying on the floor. She detecting my uneasiness, perceiving there was something which I would conceal, swept into the room, straight to where Vernon lay.
"Decimus! Decimus!"
She called to him. Had the tone in which she spoke, then, been in her voice when she enacted her parts in the dramas of the mimic stage, her audiences would have had no cause to complain that she was wooden. She turned to me, as if at a loss to comprehend her lover's silence.
"Is he sleeping?" I was silent. Then, with a little gasp, "Is he dead?" I still made no reply. She read my meaning rightly. Even from where I was standing, I could see her bosom rise and fall. She threw out both her arms in front of her. "I am glad!" she cried, "I am glad that he is dead!"
She took me, to say the least of it, aback.
"Why should you be glad?"
"Why? Because, now, she will not have him!"
I had forgotten, for the instant, what Crampton had spluttered out upon the doorstep. Her words recalled it to my mind. "Don't you know that he lied to me, and I believed his lies."
She turned to Vernon with a gesture of scorn so frenzied, so intense, that it might almost have made the dead man writhe.
"Now, at any rate, if he does not marry me, he will marry no one else."
Her vehemence staggered me. Her imperial presence, her sonorous voice, always were, theatrically, among her finest attributes. I had not supposed that she had it in her to display
them to such terrible advantage. Feeling, as I did feel, that I shared my manhood with the man who had wronged her, the almost personal application of her fury I found to be more than a trifle overwhelming. It struck me, even then, that, perhaps, after all, it was just as well for Vernon that he had died before he had been compelled to confront, and have it out with, this latest illustration of a woman scorned.
Suddenly, her mood changed. She knelt beside the body of the man who so recently had been her lover. She lavished on him terms of even fulsome endearment.
"My loved one! My darling! My sweet! My all in all!"
She showered kisses on his lips and cheeks, and eyes, and brow. When the paroxysm had passed—it was a paroxysm—she again stood up.
"What shall I have of his, for my very own? I will have something to keep his memory green. The things which he gave me—the things which he called the tokens of his love—I will grind into powder, and consume with flame."
In spite of herself, her language smacked of the theatre. She looked round the room, as if searching for something portable, which it might be worth her while to capture. Her glance fell upon the open case of rings. With eager eyes she scanned the dead man's person. Kneeling down again, she snatched at the left hand, which lay lightly on his breast. On one of the fingers was a cameo ring. On this her glances fastened. She tore, rather than took it from its place.
"I'll have that! Yes! That!"
She broke into laughter. Rising she held out the ring towards me. I regarded it intently. At the time, I scarcely knew why. It was, as I have said, a cameo ring. There was a woman's head cut in white relief, on a cream ground. It reminded me of Italian work which I had seen, of about the sixteenth century. The cameo was in a plain, and somewhat clumsy, gold setting. The whole affair was rather a curio, not the sort of ring which a gentleman of the present day would be likely to care to wear.
"Look at it. Observe it closely! Keep it in your mind, so that you may be sure to know it should you ever chance on it again. Isn't it a pretty ring—the prettiest ring you ever saw? In memory of him"—she pointed to what was on the floor behind her—"I will keep it till I die!"
Again she burst into that hideous, and, as it seemed to me, wholly meaningless laughter. Her bearing, her whole behaviour, was rather that of a mad woman, than a sane one. She affected me most unpleasantly. It was with feelings of unalloyed relief that I heard footsteps entering the library, and turning, perceived that Parkes had arrived with the doctor.
Chapter II
When Vernon's death became generally known, a great hubbub arose. Mrs. Hartopp went almost, if not quite, out of her senses. If I remember rightly, nearly twelve months elapsed before she was sufficiently recovered to marry Phillimore Baines. The cause of Vernon's death was never made clear. The doctors agreed to differ; the post-mortem revealed nothing. There were suggestions of heart-disease; the jury brought it in valvular disease of the heart. There were whispers of poison, which, as no traces of any were found in the body, the coroner pooh-poohed. And, though there were murmurs of its being a case of suicide, no one, so far as I am aware, hinted at its being a case of murder.
To the surprise of many people, and to the amusement of more, Arthur Crampton married Lilian Trowbridge. He had been infatuated with her all along. His infatuation even survived her yielding to Decimus Vernon—bitter blow though that had been—and I have reason to believe that, on the very day on which Vernon was buried, he asked her to be his wife. Whether she cared for him one snap of her finger is more than I should care to say; I doubt it, but, at least, she consented. At very short notice she quitted the stage, and, as Mrs. Arthur Crampton, she retired into private life. Her married life was a short, if not a merry one. Within twelve months of her marriage, in giving birth to a daughter, Mrs. Crampton died.
I had seen nothing since their marriage either of her or her husband. I was therefore the more surprised when, about a fortnight after her death, there came to me a small package, accompanied by a note from Arthur Crampton. The note was brief almost to the point of curtness.
Dear Benham,—
My wife expressed a wish that you should have, as a memorial of her, a sealed packet which would be found in her desk.
I hand you the packet precisely as I found it.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur Crampton.
Within an outer wrapper of coarse brown paper was an inner covering of cartridge paper, sealed with half a dozen seals. Inside the second enclosure was a small, duodecimo volume, in a tattered binding. Half a dozen leaves at the beginning were missing. There was nothing on the cover. What the book was about, or why Mrs. Crampton had wished that I should have it, I had not the faintest notion. The book was printed in Italian—my acquaintance with Italian is colloquial, of the most superficial kind. It was probably a hundred years old, and more. Nine pages about the middle of the volume were marked in a peculiar fashion with red ink, several passages being trebly underscored. My curiosity was piqued. I marched off with the volume there and then, to a bureau of translation.
There they told me that the book was an old, and possibly, valuable treatise, on Italian poisons and Italian poisoners. They translated for me the passages which were underscored. The passages in question dealt with the pleasant practice with which the Borgias were credited of having destroyed their victims by means of rings—poison rings. One passage in particular purported to be a minute description of a famous cameo ring which was supposed to have belonged to the great Lucrezia herself.
As I read a flood of memory swept over me—what I was reading was an exact description, so far as externals went at any rate, of the cameo ring, which I had seen Lilian Trowbridge remove after he was dead from one of the fingers of Decimus Vernon's left hand. I recalled the frenzied exultation with which she had thrust it on my notice, her almost demoniac desire that I should impress it on my recollection. What did it mean? What was I to understand? For three or four days I was in a state of miserable indecision. Then I resolved I would keep still. The man and the woman were both dead. No good purpose would be served by exposing old sores. I put the book away, and I never looked at it again for nearly eighteen years.
The consciousness that his wife had spoken to me, with such a voice from the grave, did not tend to increase my desire to cultivate an acquaintance with Arthur Crampton. But I found that circumstances proved stronger than I. Crampton was a lonely man, his marriage had estranged him from many of his friends; now that his wife had gone he seemed to turn more and more to me as the one person on whose friendly offices he could implicitly rely. I learned that I was incapable of refusing what he so obviously took for granted. The child, which had cost the mother her life, grew and flourished. In due course of time she became a young woman, with all her mother's beauty, and more than her mother's charms: for she had what her mother had always lacked—tenderness, sweetness, femininity. Before she was eighteen she was engaged to be married. The engagement was in all respects an ideal one. On her eighteenth birthday, it was to be announced to the world. A ball was to be given, at which half the county was expected to be present, and the day before, I went down, prepared to take my share in the festivities.
In the evening, Crampton, his daughter, Charlie Sandys, which was the name of the fortunate young gentleman, and I were together in the drawing-room. Crampton, who had vanished for some seconds, re-appeared, bearing in both his hands, with something of a flourish, a large leather case. It looked to me like an old-fashioned jewel case. Which, indeed, it was. Crampton turned to his daughter.
"I am going to give you part of your birthday present to-day, Lilian—these are some of your mother's jewels."
The girl was in an ecstacy of delight, as what girl of her age would not have been? The case contained jewels enough to stock a shop. I wondered where some of them had come from—and if Crampton knew more of the source of their origin than I did. Wholly unconscious that there might be stories connected with some of the trinkets which might not be pleasant heari
ng, the girl, girl-like, proceeded to try them on. By the time she had finished they were all turned out upon the table. The box was empty. She announced the fact.
"There! That's all!"
Her lover took up the empty case.
"No secret repositories, or anything of that sort? Hullo!—speak of angels!—what's this?"
"What's what?"
The young girl's head and her lover's were bent together over the empty box. Sandys' fingers were feeling about inside it.
"Is this a dent in the leather, or is there something concealed beneath it?"
What Sandys referred to was sufficiently obvious. The bottom of the box was flat, except in one corner, where a slight protuberance suggested, as Sandys said, the possibility of there being something concealed beneath. Miss Crampton, already excited by her father's gift, at once took it for granted that it was the case.
"How lovely!" she exclaimed. She clapped her hands. "I do believe there's a secret hiding-place."
If there was, it threatened to baffle our efforts at discovery. We all tried our hands at finding, it, but tried in vain. Crampton gave it up.
"I'll have the case examined by an expert. He'll soon be able to find your secret hiding-place, though, mind you, I don't say that there is one."
There was an exclamation from young Sandys.
"Don't you? Then you'd be safe if you did, because there is!"
Miss Crampton looked eagerly over his shoulder.
"Have you found it? Yes! Oh, Charlie! Is there anything inside?"
"Rather, there's a ring. What a queer old thing! Whatever made your mother keep it hidden away in there?"
I knew, in an instant. I recognised it, although I had only seen it once in my life, and that once was sundered by the passage of nineteen years. Mr. Sandys was holding in his hand the cameo ring which I had seen Lilian Trowbridge remove from Decimus Vernon's finger, and which was own brother to the ring described in the tattered volume, which she had directed her husband to send me—"as a memory"—as having been one of Lucrezia Borgia's pretty playthings. I was so confounded by the rush of emotions occasioned by its sudden discovery, that, for the moment, I was tongue-tied.
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