The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “But he did try putting up a lucrative proposition to him,” commented Middleton bitterly, “and that proposition was accepted by my double. I can see that Fortescue knew insanity and that he perceived the possibilities lying in a legal procedure where the accused does not even see his own trial.” He nodded. “Yes, it’s quite obvious now why he wanted me to publicly announce my intention of wearing those glasses — so that this fellow could take my place with his blue eyes covered up. What was the proposition? And why — why? That question has not been answered yet.”

  “Five hundred dollars a week,” responded the lawyer, “was the proposition. One half of Fortescue’s own salary. And one half of the big killing — the big ten-strike.”

  “The big killing? The big — ”

  “Yes — the real prize. For you see, Mr. Middleton, one afternoon, considerably before your double arrived on the secne, Fortescue happened to call at your home and you likewise happened to be out. The Swedish woman and the old negro told him that they had witnessed for your father a paper of some sort — had signed it, in other words — on Monday the nth of August, which your father had stated was something for his son. Fortescue surmised mighty quickly what it constituted, for he had thought all along that your father never intended to cut you off as he had. It was a will. He knew it. Such a will undoubtedly was intended to put you in complete control of your estate and must consequently throw Fortescue into the street, as well as result in putting in auditors which would make necessary his immediate flight to Honduras or going to prison. But where was this will? It was, he concluded in short order, in the hands of some old friend of your father’s who, if you proceeded to follow out your father’s difficult wishes about those spectacles, was to reveal it and produce it in due course.”

  “And so,” commented Middleton, “being one who was in a position where he had everything to gain and nothing to lose, he threw the dice represented by this ingenious plot, knowing that he and his cohort — if the will turned up — would split a ten million dollar estate. It was masterly, indeed.”

  There seemed little indeed now left to ask about. With which he turned to the girl. “And you, Anne — that is — Miss Holliston — you got my message yesterday morning?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly, “I did get your message.”

  “But why — didn’t you come — to the place agreed upon?”

  “For this reason,” she said slowly. “Since completing all my plans there came into my hands a letter — a letter actually signed by your usurper. And although you did not know it, I have had all the time a letter once signed by you — in far-off Sydney — a letter to your father — a letter that I forgot to mail for you. And with that evidence I felt that I had a tremendous case — that I should no longer violate the laws by aiding you to escape over the State line. There was no possible way to communicate with you at that late date — and all I could do was to let you go blindly ahead — to be recaptured as it surely seemed you would be — and then to fight it out for you with the evidence that I had,” She paused. “The one serious trouble about a fight was that I had no money to finance it. I had rich, vital evidence — but no money. And there I was when your startling message came over the wires to me yesterday morning. I could not understand it, of course. Well, I gambled on you — on your mental status. I sold those two valuable letters to your usurper for nearly a thousand dollars plus a key to the stoutly boarded up Lake Park Avenue lot. Now I had the money to finance a fight, but no longer the specific evidence of which I had spoken. But, as I say, I trusted your message — I believed in your words over the long distance wire. And as to the thousand dollars or so, I intended just the same to fight your battle for you — to get you out of here.”

  “But you might have had a hard time,” commented Middleton curiously, “with that precious evidence gone?”

  She gave him a peculiar look. “Perhaps not so hard as you think, Mr. Middleton.” She paused, then went hurriedly on. “Well, about the Lake Park Avenue lot, I did exactly as you said. I went to it. It was surrounded with its ten-foot fence exactly as I had learned that morning, but now I had the key to the main gate. I bribed four boys, at a dollar apiece, to get fishing-poles and to come in with me. I laid out the central lines of the lot with two long strings running at right angles to each other. Down about four feet directly beneath the intersection of my two strings, I came to a piece of sewer pipe. Inside the pipe was a metal lockbox. I took it to a room in a Chicago hotel. There I sent out for a can-opener, and after I got the instrument I opened the box. Inside were two documents. And that — well that, as the actors say, concludes my performance.”

  “One of those documents was — a will? “asked Jerry Middleton tensely.

  The attorney reached down in his portfolio and then withdrew two documents, which he handed to the girl. She, in turn, silently handed one of them to Middleton.

  He read it eagerly, eyes wide open. It was short, and its brief message ran:

  August 11, 1924.

  “Being of sound mind and memory, I hereby revoke all wills heretofore made by me, particularly that dated August 9th, 1924, and to my son Herbert, fully christened Jerome Herbert Middleton, who, if he has found this will, has followed certain ideas of mine, I leave and bequeath my entire estate, real, personal and otherwise, to own, manage, handle and control as his own.

  “Signed Digby Middleton,

  “Witnessed Jed Skoggins,

  “Christina Neilson.”

  Jerry Middleton looked hurriedly up. “Then this means — ”

  “That you are the sole owner of about ten million dollars in cash, stocks and real estate,” said the lawyer. “And, by the way, Mr. Middleton, we would have got you out of here by midnight last night, but we’ve been trying to build some sort of a case against this fellow who is now an attendant over in Ward X. We’ve been trying to see whether he would specifically request to shave you or to work upon you in privacy. For Fortescue, while admitting that he intended to have this man despatch you neatly, would not come clean about what he had on Vianello. He was afraid of the long arm of the Mafia even in prison where he is going. But he has since issued a supplementary confession, and this fellow Vianello will go out of here to-night charged with a certain murder. You have been in no danger, however. Not for a single moment has he been allowed to be alone with you, for the chief day attendant over in Ward X has been apprised of matters since he went on duty this morning; there are two Chicago detectives there now in white jackets, and the young fellow who came over here with you a while ago was a detective from our office with instructions never to let you out of his sight for an instant.”

  It was almost too much for Jerry Middleton to digest. He shook his head dazedly. Then he turned to Anne Holliston. “And you say — there were two documents?”

  She handed him the other without a word. This was longer than the first, covering several sheets, and it was in the handwriting that was familiar to him.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  THE SPECTACLES OF MR. CAGLIOSTRO

  “MY DEAR BELOVED SON.

  “If you have found this letter which even now may be before your very eyes, it means that you have also found that will which gives to you all that I have garnered in my long and lonely existence without you. It means that you have performed a certain small labour of love, that you have lived up to a supposed obligation of your father’s, and that shows that you, too, have a sense of honour such as I myself have.

  “My dear boy, there is much that must be incomprehensible to you, occurring as it has in years to which your memory does not reach. And in particular I refer to your mother — and the reasons why I have had to keep you in Australia all these years. Your mother, dear boy, was Nell Bainbridge of Brisbane, Queensland. I married her while on a youthful trip to Australia, and I brought her back with me to San Francisco, where we were very poor. It was there, too, that my brother, your uncle, Schuyler Middleton, came into your mother’s life and mine. Perhaps Nell would not
have loved him as she did — or thought she did — had he not made vague overtures about taking her back to Australia. There was but one inevitable result. She confessed she had made a mistake in marrying me — in coming far, far away from the people and land that she knew. And when they both put it up to me, I agreed to grant the divorce which they asked. But, my dear boy, I would not let you go — I told them if they left, the child should stay with me.

  “Torn between her love of you and her love of him, but decided in her course by her desperate homesickness for Australia and — I hope — some slight pity for me who loved you so much, they went together after our divorce and their marriage and left me a broken and heartsick man. I managed to keep you with me through the help of an old woman, who knew something of young children, and thus things went along until the fateful day — several years afterward — when I received a cablegram from Nell begging me to come to Brisbane at once — a most frantic cablegram indeed. I took you and embarked for Australia the very next day, closing down for the time being the little business I had gradually built up in San Francisco. We — you and I — reached Australia thirty long days later, and your mother! Well — she was dying — she had but a few months to live. She hugged you to her arms, she clung to you, she loved you as she never had when you had been a younger baby. And reason enough, too. For in the years that had passed, there had come to her another baby — another boy — the son of her and Schuyler. But she had been cruelly despoiled. For the wastrel, the wanderer, the ne’er-do-well, had tired of her and of their life together as he must have inevitably have tired of any woman — and had fled; but he had taken with him that little boy which was half her flesh and blood as well as his.

  “Well, dear boy, I could not take you from her — for you were, after all, hers as well as mine; you were the only solace that it was possible to give her; you were her substitute baby. But to my consternation she made me, as I arranged to go back to the States, give her my solemn promise that I would make you stay in Australia until you became twenty-five years of age, so that you might not only know the land which was so dear to your mother, but might profit by a will of her grandfather’s which stipulated that any grandchildren of his who spent their lives until twenty-five in his country should have five thousand pounds. Oh, boy, in the years that followed I could have set aside for you a hundred times this amount which waits you over there now, but I had given the word of honour of a Middleton, and I kept that word, for through all these years I have allowed you — even compelled you — to stay there in your mother’s land, my own self waiting, waiting, waiting, for the happy day when you could be with me.

  “And now, my son, before I go on to the explanation — if explanation you need — of the means which I have adopted to try you out, I want to say one thing. If you have read this letter, you own all the Middleton estate. But there is that other boy — hers and his. I leave it to your judgment what to do about him — whether or not you wish to donate to him a moderate sum of money out of your own fortune. Through the few clues left by his father when he fled from your mother, I have had this boy traced by several detective agencies, without revealing to them my own identity. It seems that his father took the name of Fairsley after he fled to South Africa, which changed the little boy’s name from Clyde Middleton to Clyde Fairsley. The father was then later killed in a wreck on the Pretoria-Durban railway; the child was adopted by a couple named Catesby, members of a cheap theatrical troupe on the same train, who gave him the name of Lionel, thus making him Lionel Catesby, and the boy has ever since followed the profession of the stage, turning up, in the last report I have on him, in an act of his own in England.”

  At this point Jerry Middleton looked up from the document he was. reading. “And so — this poor devil was my cousin — half-brother? Is that known for certain, however?”

  “Yes,” responded the lawyer. “Certain papers were found among his things in your Astor Street quarters showing that he knew himself to be one Lionel Catesby. He never even knew of the relationship between you and him, but the similarity of himself and you must have puzzled him greatly.” He paused. “Some letters and a photograph there show also that he jilted some auburn-haired chorus girl who played down in the Antipodes. But this is not of interest, I daresay.”

  “Indeed it is,” said Middleton grimly, “considering that a red-headed spitfire came around a bench in Macquarie Street, Sydney, one day and threw a vial of acid in my face, crying that she had watched me for three days and calling me a dog in the bargain as she ran off. Lionel might have been a little more careful in his love affairs, considering that I lived on the same side of the equator as he did!” With which remark he bent his attention once more to the paper in his hands.

  “That very quixotic friend of mine, Abner Colcher, who owns and controls the American Outside Publicity Company, and through whose credit in my early days the Middleton fortune was actually established, has time and again refused to take any bequests or gifts from me. I have had therefore to make an advertising contract with him for one hundred thousand dollars — a gift, if you will honour me by calling it so — a throwing of money away, as the world would term it — by which he is to reproduce around and about Chicago in various positions, some of which are already leased by me, an advertising sign the pattern of which is in the contract, and the execution of which will be passed upon by the National Commercial Inspection Company.

  “And it is in connection with this very sign, my boy, that you will receive from me — as you already know, only a pair of antique spectacles supposedly belonging to one Joseph Balsamo, the notorious Count de Cagliostro of Europe. Whether or not those spectacles have ever belonged to Cagliostro, Heaven alone knows. But if you have worn them, my boy, the day will come when you shall read on every side a message from me to you — and that message has come to you now, if your eyes peruse these lines.

  “What shall cause this message, my boy? In case you have not studied the higher physics among your other studies — and I do not recall that you have — I shall make it clear to you. In the first place I have removed from the antique spectacles the plain blue-tinted glass lenses which they contained. I have placed in their stead, in the leaden frames, two oblong lenses which I have cut from two small squares of Cobalt-Blue — ß glass — a refined and improved form of the well-known Cobalt-Blue glass used in analytical chemistry to determine the colours of flames given off by unknown substances. These lenses, being made of plain glass and being without curvature, will neither refract nor distort.

  “But objects of black, red, yellow or orange appear perfectly black when viewed through Cobalt-Blue — ß glass — because no colours from them reach the eye. In like manner, objects of blue, green or white appear blue, because the blue in each case and nothing else percolates through the glass. On this sound scientific basis, therefore, have I constructed the diagram for my giant sign, which I have tested out to my own satisfaction in minature. The background of this sign will be laid out in a system of small panels of black, red, yellow and orange, all of which will fuse instantaneously into a blackboard, so to speak, when viewed through Cobalt-Blue — ß glass. There are 24 different colour combinations of letters and panels which can be used, and the number of different arrangements possible to achieve this message to you is so great as to approach infinity. Hence it gives, in itself, no clue whatever as to the location of that which with my own hands I buried in the dead of night for your hands to find. You, and you alone, my boy, have the key — the filtering lenses of Cobalt-Blue — ß glass.

  “That is all, my boy. May God bless you and keep you, and may you sustain the Middleton fortune as I have done it for you.

  “Your father,

  “DIGBY MIDDLETON.”

  Jerry Middleton looked up. Whereupon the attorney spoke. “A pretty bright man your father, Mr. Middleton, to have worked out that scheme with his name and his goods to help you win your fortune. Lord, what a newspaper story it’s going to make.”

  “
Yes,” retorted the young man musingly, “what a story it’s going to make. But there’s going to be more to the story than just that. For one thing, I’m not sure that I earned my fortune in the way my father intended I should — but it’s come into my hands and there it is. But I’ve learned a few things about a class of people of which the world knows only too little.” He waved a hand back toward the main part of the building. “Those people — sick people, they’re supposed to be — yet what in God’s name is done to cure them, to attempt to cure them? Why — why hasn’t somebody created a town in which they can work and live, instead of prisons that dot the country from coast to coast?” He shook his head. “Well, you will all hear of the Middleton Foundation before long — a practical foundation and not a theoretical one — and to effect cures here just the same as in the fields where germs and morbid growths instead of inhibitions and complexes cause the trouble. If it’s money that makes the mare go in America, gentlemen, the old mare shall do some right jolly galloping, I promise you that.”

  “Bully for you, Mr. Middleton,” said the lawyer. “I’m with you.” He turned to the superintendent who was taking all this in with a dignified frown. “Well, doctor, suppose we step in there to the adjoining office and get that discharge certificate and commitment cancellation paper signed up so that we three Chicagoans can make the 2-10 train to the city?”

  The superintendent arose creakingly from his swivel chair and together the two men repaired into the adjoining room. As the door closed behind them Jerry Middleton was left alone with the girl. He turned to her.

  “Dear little Anne Holliston,” he said tenderly. “God knows what would have become of me if it had not been for you. You have saved me from a living death — and worse.” He strode over to her and tried to take her in his arms. But she held him off, and her face grew suddenly sad and forlorn.