One did not know, I went on; there was every conjecture. Backmartin’s big, loose face worked like soft rubber.
“And he said that thing up there,” he indicated the mantel with his hand, “would tell where he hid it, if anybody could understand what it meant?”
“Yes.”
“And what did the other learned Johnnies say about it?”
They said it was nonsense, I continued. They said it was an absurdity on its face. No inscription ever had two royal figures drawn in; the wedge was never inclined to the left; it was always pointed toward the right, or downward or aslant to the right, or two combined at their heads to form an angle. They said no word or syllable or gunu-sign of either the Persian, Susian, or Babylonian language was indicated; they said the thing was a hoax.
“But the old cock said they were only fit for puzzles, didn’t he?—an’ he would make one to fit their wits—eh, what?”
It was what Sir Hector had uttered about it, I told him. He held these learned men in a bitter contempt. Their knowledge of deciphering inscriptions, he said, was confined to the Black Cabinets of Berlin and Vienna, and their knowledge of Assyriology to the sacred books of the Jews—he would leave them an inscription within the zone of their intelligence.
I heard the casement door of the drawing-room to the terrace open, and I went out, Backmartin followed me with a sharp look. He had grasped the situation. He knew that things had gone to pieces and why I came; some of it by inquiry, no doubt, and the remainder by a sort of instinct. He was slack and despicable—baggy in the chair—and the glance seemed to emerge from a trace, in the beast, of something firmer.
I found Marjorie on the terrace; and I advanced toward her as toward something heavenly and denied. She was lovely beyond any descriptive words that I can write here. To catalogue her would be to give no adequate impression. Dark hair, and great deep eyes, and the alluring figure of a Nereid are not descriptive phrases, but they are fragments of fancy that another man—to know the thing I mean—must fit his own beloved woman into.
I loved her, and, to me, she possessed the charm of dreams.
And now that God denied her to me I adored her more. There is this quality, strange and bitter, in a loss, that it doubles the value of the thing removed; when it is gone once, wholly, one sees with an uncanny clearness how incomparable it was. To-night this terrace was some delicate, vague kingdom of illusion. It would presently vanish. There would be only an hour of it with her. And it seemed to me, as I walked slowly beside her the length of the flag-paved terrace, that this hour was priceless. Into it the mysterious purpose of every day that I had lived, of every day that I would yet live, seemed to converge, and to escape with the sound of my footsteps moving on the flag. I must convince her!
And I labored to that end with every argument, with every insistence. And in the vague light I noted every detail of her: the long lashes, the exquisite mouth, the slender body. But it was not these visible things, however potent, that so wholly overcame me. It was a thing for which we have no word, of which there is no material evidence, that moved subtly from this girl into every fiber of me. The perennial charm of romance attended her. She came forth from haze, from shadow; there clung about her the freshness, the mystery of those fairy women that the soul of a man eternally longs for.
And unless I could persuade her, she was lost to me!
I cannot remember what I said; it must have been to offer what I had, to replace the things this disaster had swept out. My insistence must have revolved about this fixed idea; for she would only shake her heavenly head. I must not bribe her—she could not take a bribe.
I looked up finally like a man sinking in the pit, and I saw, beyond her across the terrace, a face pressed against the glass door of the library. For a moment the face seemed unfamiliar—or was I unhinged by my emotion?—there was something fine in it; something having a momentary control; something that had no proper being in the sodden features; something long submerged, trodden down, filth-covered, in a sort of awful effort to get on its feet.
Then the face relaxed into its vacuous abominations, and Backmartin opened the door.
“Oh! I say,” he called to us, “if I might have a Bible I would read a chapter before I turn in—it’s a sort of habit, y’ know.”
I had to turn, sharp, to conceal the disgust in me. But Marjorie went in to him with some courteous word—I don’t remember—found a big old family Bible on a shelf among the dictionaries, and put it on his table. He was stooping over it when she came out to me.
She made no comment.
And I returned to my labor of a cursed Sisyphus. But I changed the tenor of it. If we must be equal before she would listen to me, then I would make us equal. If she would not be as well off as I was, then I would be as poor as she. I would abandon what I had, and we would go empty-handed into some new land. I was as good a man as that first one in Asia. I would till the earth and build a home and face the wilderness for her. And I would do it like one who finds a kingdom! We would go this very night, the two of us, with nothing. We would step out of the world leaving forever the rubbish of these great possessions!
She looked at me with a high face.
She stood with her arms hanging, her lips parted, her slender face gleaming like a flower; her hair spun darkness—her great eyes on me as though she saw a man there that she had never seen before.
Then a voice startled us as from another world.
Backmartin was standing before the library, with his hand on the latch of the closed door behind him. He was speaking to us, he was making some interrogation. Whether he had come out at that moment, or been there a long time, I do not know.
My forbearance with the beast very nearly went to pieces; but something in the voice, something strange, peculiar, unlike the creature, restrained me.
“Is any place about this house paved with stones?”
There was an unstable quality in Backmartin’s voice, as though it issued from one holding himself together with an immense effort. And there was sincerity in it. I could not see the man’s face.
“This terrace,” I said, “is paved.”
He came running out, at that, and over the whole length of the terrace. Then he came back to the library door and stood with his hand pressed against his mouth as in some reflection.
“But upon it!” he said. “There is nothing upon it.”
Then he flung the door open.
“Come in here,” he said.
We went in behind him.
I was astonished at the man when the light uncovered him. He was the Backmartin of the old days; a ruin of that man, surely, and yet the man returned as by some sorcery into a brief, unstable control of this debauched, abandoned creature. That this control was unstable, at the virtue of a breaking effort, and uncertain of continuance, the aspect of him and the quavering voice evidenced. But while it held the ruin of the man together it gave that ruin a certain authority of life and a certain dignity of manner.
“And put it upon a pavement of stones!” he repeated; “that’s the direction, ‘upon a pavement of stones.’”
“What direction?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
He indicated the vellum with its cuneiform inscription above the mantel.
“The direction in that cipher,” he replied. “It says, ‘upon a pavement of stones.’”
“You have deciphered that inscription?” I was incredulous. “After all the learned men in Europe failed on it?”
A faint smile struggled into his tense, hard-held face.
“Did not Sir Hector say that their knowledge of Assyriology was confined to the sacred books of the Jews, and that they were only fit to work out puzzles?—well, that’s what it is, a puzzle, connected with the sacred books of the Jews!”
He went over to the mantel and took up the framed inscription. He put his finger on the two royal Assyrian figures.
“That’s a ‘King,’ ” he said; “there are two of them, that would be ‘Kings,’ and the
re are two wedges before them, that would be two ‘Kings.’ And the remainder of it is made up of cuneiform characters put together to form the reference in Roman numerals: sixteen, seventeen, five. That is to say: ‘Two Kings, sixteen, seventeen, five.’ That would be ‘Second Kings, chapter sixteen, verse seventeen, line five.’ ”
He turned about and put his big finger on a line of the Bible open on the table before him.
“And that line says: ‘And put it upon a pavement of stones.’” He turned about to us. “Somewhere on a pavement of stones Sir Hector has concealed whatever it was that he brought out of Asia.”
We looked at him in a sort of wonder. The girl’s fingers were on my arm; she was tense now in a consuming interest.
Backmartin went on: “The terrace out there is paved with stones, and if this verse said under a pavement of stones I would know where to look. But it doesn’t say under; it says upon … now, how could it be upon that terrace? There’s nothing upon it.”
Marjorie suddenly cried out as with an inspiration. “But there is something ‘upon it’; there is a square of tiles laid down before this door; they would be ‘upon’ it.”
Backmartin stood up at that; he looked a moment at the mosaic making a wide step before the door. Then he turned to me.
“Your car is standing out there; get a chisel and a hammer from the tool box.”
I got the implements and we raised the tiles. Under them, upon the flag pavement, was a thin, square copper box. We took it into the library and put it on the table. No one spoke.
Backmartin carried the box, and we followed after him. He put it on the table. And then he did an inexplicable thing. He went on through the library door into the hall. I thought he went to seek a tool to cut the copper, and I followed. I found him in the hall putting on my greatcoat. In the light his contorted face was covered with sweat.
“Awaken your driver,” he said, “and get me to the coast.”
I hesitated in my profound astonishment.
And he turned suddenly on me, the sweat trickling in the lines of his hard-pressed, dreadful face.
“Hurry, man.” He very nearly spat on me in his extremity.
I stood outside, with my head uncovered, until the roar of the car racing south was a faint echo. Then I went in. Marjorie was standing by the library table. She had got the lid of the box unfastened, and within were row upon row of emeralds, big, gleaming, priceless.
But I was not happy. I felt a little man beside the big one who was gone. God, only, in His heaven knew the mortal struggle of this damned creature, or the dreadful thing he had considered and been held back from by the thin line of something noble that never wholly dies in us.
I spoke to the girl, looking strangely at me, from her place beyond the box of jewels.
“You will never love me?”
“Never!” she said. “… never, but for what has happened on this night.”
“The finding of the emeralds?”
She made a gesture as of one who tosses away a bauble.
“The finding of a man … out there on the terrace … when I was poor.”
THE HOLE IN THE GLASS
I looked carefully at the girl as I went up the stairway.
I must have delayed my companion, behind me, for I went slowly and with the wish to retain every detail of this picture. It was so conspicuously in life what I had heard of these Americans; this idle, decadent breed of women; soft, steeped in luxury and useless.
The girl sat in the hotel drawing-room, visible through the open door.
It was early in the afternoon. The place was nearly deserted. The hunting folk assembled here in Sommerset, were all at a distant meet of the hounds at Haddon; in the saddle from dawn and until the night should fall. But this soft creature sat in a great chair piled up with cushions; and an immense American motor, more luxurious than the state carriage of a Louis, awaited her outside.
She had every aspect of luxury.
The fur coat thrown open among the cushions of the chair must have cost a fortune; the smart gown was from a Paris shop on the Rue de la Paix; the very Pekinese dog in the hollow of her arm was worth the price of a polo pony at Tatterhalls.
It wasn’t so much these evidences of luxury that impressed me. One may have the best, if one is able. It was the conspicuous effect of these things on their possessor. The girl was quite young, about twenty, I imagine; a blonde, slender and dainty with big blue eyes and an exquisite mouth. For a doll she was perfect, but for any mortal use as a human woman she was an absurdity. She sat with a cocktail before her on the table and a Turkish cigarette idly in her fingers.
I broke out with what I thought when we were in my sitting room on the floor above.
“Did you see that girl, Barclay?”
The big man turned about and looked at me with a rather strange expression; I thought he was going to make some comment. But he evidently decided to reserve it.
“Yes, Sir James … do you know who she is?”
“I know what she is,” I replied. “She is a hot-house orchid and about as useful in the world as the Pekinese dog in her lap.”
Barclay squinted at me. He is a big man with a face wrinkled by the tropics.
“Don’t be deceived about the Pekinese dog, Sir James,” he said. “The Pekinese dog’s all right. He’s kept in every shop in China to warn against thieves.… You can’t slip in on a Pekinese dog.”
“Dash the dog!” I replied. “It’s the girl, I mean, of what earthly use could such a soft creature be to anybody!”
Barclay looked down at me. He’s an immense bulk of a man. I thought the strange expression on his face was even more peculiar.
“You’d take me to be pretty tough, Sir James … pretty hard to fag out!”
“Surely,” I said, “or Marquis wouldn’t have taken you into Africa with him. Marquis is no fool, if he is Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. And I wouldn’t take you on for this expedition.”
Barclay passed his hand slowly over his big square jaw; his fingers look like the coupling pins of a cart.
“You might be mistaken, Sir James!”
He made a sort of vague gesture, as though he included everything I’d said, and it annoyed me.
“I’m pretty good stuff for such a job, Sir James,” he went on, “but I’m not the best stuff for it.”
I suppose I looked a bit puzzled, and Barclay saw it.
“I mean,” he went on, “a silk rope looks soft, and it is soft, but it’s the strongest rope there is.”
“I don’t know what bally rubbish you’re talking,” I replied. “But I know you’re all right or Marquis wouldn’t have taken you into Central Africa, and he wouldn’t write me now to take you.”
Barclay turned at that and went over beyond our big table that was covered with maps. It was an immense table, quite bare except for the maps. I think we had assembled every map in existence on Central Africa. I meant to have a year’s big game hunting in the heart of that continent. When I wrote Marquis for a man he indicated Barclay; and I had him down here at this hotel in Sommerset to plan out the route.
“He’s the best man left since Stanley,” Marquis said, “better get him!”
Barclay sat down in a chair beyond the table. But he wasn’t thinking of the maps.
“Do you know,” he said, “why Sir Henry Marquis went into Central Africa?”
“After young Winton, wasn’t he?” I replied. “He’d taken a shot at his uncle, old Brexford, and got out of the country, as I remember. I suppose Marquis thought the reputation of Scotland Yard was at stake. Had to find Winton, you know … did find him?”
Barclay got up, spread out one of the maps and put his finger on a point on it.
“We found him right here, on the old elephant trail. But if we’d been a little late we’d never found him. If he’d got into that immense forest to the south, he’d been out of Marquis’s reach. Our expedition was fagged, I had a touch of the sun. We couldn’
t have gone on.”
The man’s voice grew firm.
“Nobody has any conception of that hell forest to the south. It’s three thousand miles across it. We couldn’t have found Winton in it. Marquis knew that. It was a piece of God’s luck to have found his camp there on the plateau! … I was all in and Marquis was groggy.”
He paused.
“You have got to keep the sun out of your face; a helmet and a spine pad aren’t enough—the open road to the brain, for a sun’s ray is through the eye and the sponge bones of the face.”
He made a sort of bob of the head down-ward toward the drawing-room.
“Ever see this girl before, Sir James?”
“Used to see her at polo at Hurlingham,” I replied, “on the days Rugby played. This young Winton was on the team … wanted to marry her, didn’t he? Wasn’t that the row with old Brexford?”
Barclay continued as though I had not made an answer.
“Yes,” he said. “It all started from that. Brexford hated Americans; wouldn’t hear of it; went into a devil’s fury; stopped at nothing!”
“So young Winton took a pot shot at him, and cleared, eh?”
Barclay didn’t seem to regard my comment. He went on in a sort of reflection.
“But there was one thing I couldn’t understand. Why didn’t he take the girl with him … that is I couldn’t understand it at the time.”
I laughed.
“I can understand it. She couldn’t leave the cushions … she was too soft!”
Barclay was looking at me, his mouth open; a sort of vague wonder on his big sun-seamed face.
The pose and the expression of the man annoyed me.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said. “What are you gaping at?”
He was silent for some moments. He kept looking at me, in that sort of vague wonder, from the floor up. Finally, he spoke.
“How long have you been out of England, Sir James?”
“Two years,” I replied. “In the Andes.”
“Then you don’t know what’s happened.”
“About young Winton? No; Marquis had got some rumor of him in Central Africa and was just starting out when I left. The grand jury in Hants had found an indictment against young Winton for assault with intent to murder; and the country had begun to howl—rich man’s privilege—letting off the ‘toft’ and so forth. I suppose Marquis thought he had to get him.… Marquis went down to Hants, himself, to see old Brexford, didn’t he, and then the public clamor drove him on.”
The Bradmoor Murder Page 8