The Mystery of the Skeleton Key

by Bernard Capes

  ‘O! I know very little about him,’ was young Kennett’s answer. ‘I believe the governor picked him up in Paris originally, but how or where I can’t say. He’s a marvel at chess; and you remember that’s the old man’s obsession. They’re at it eternally while he’s down here.’

  ‘This isn’t his first visit then?’

  ‘No, I believe not; but it’s the first time I’ve seen him. I’m quoting Audrey for the chess. Why, what’s the matter? Is anything wrong with him?’

  ‘There you go, you rabbit! Who said anything was wrong with him? I’ve met him before, that’s all.’

  ‘Have you? Where?’

  ‘Why, in Paris. You remember the Montesquieu, and my French Baron?’

  ‘I remember there was a Baron. I don’t think you ever told me his name.’

  ‘Well, it was Le Sage, and this is the man.’

  ‘Is it? That’s rather queer.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The coincidence of your meeting again like this.’

  ‘O, as to that, coincidence, you know, is only queer till you have traced back its clues and found it inevitable.’

  ‘Well, that’s true. You can trace it in his case to the governor’s being down with the gout again, and confined to the house, and wanting something and somebody to distract him.’

  ‘There you are, you see. He thought of chess, and thought of this Le Sage, and wrote up to him on the chance. Your father probably knows more about his movements than we do. So we’re both accounted for. No, what is queer to me is the man’s confounded habit of secrecy. Why didn’t he say, when I met him in Paris, that the friend I was waiting for was known to him? Why didn’t he admit yesterday, admit until we actually met on the platform today, that we were bound for the same place? I hate a stupidly reticent man.’

  Kennett laughed, and then frowned, and turned away to chalk his cue. The two men were in the billiard-room, playing a hundred up before dinner.

  ‘Well,’ he said, stooping to a losing hazard, ‘I hope a fellow may be a good fellow, and yet not tell all that’s in him.’

  ‘Of course he may,’ answered Bickerdike. ‘Le Sage, I’m sure, is a very good fellow, a very decent old boy, and rare company when he chooses—I can answer for that. But there’s a difference between telling all that’s in one and not telling anything.’

  ‘Well, perhaps he thinks,’ said the other impatiently, ‘that if he once opened the sluice he’d drain the dammed river. Do let him alone and attend to the game.’

  Bickerdike responded, unruffled. He had found his friend in a curiously touchy state—irritable, and nervous, and moody. He had known him to be so before, though never, perhaps, so conspicuously. Hugo was temperamentally high-strung, and always subject to alternations of excitement and despondence; but he had not yet exhibited so unbalanced a temper as he seemed inclined to display on this occasion. He was wild, reckless, dejected, but seldom normal, appearing possessed by a spirit which in turns exalted or depressed him. What was wrong with the boy? His friend, covertly pondering the handsome young figure, found sufficient solution in the commonplace. He was in one of his nervous phases, that was all. They would afflict men subject to them at any odd time, and without apparent provocation. It was one of the mysteries of our organic being—a question of misfit somewhere between spirit and matter. No one looking at the young soldier would have thought him anything but a typical example of his kind—constitutionally flawless, mentally insensitive. He belonged to a crack regiment, and was popular in it; was tall, shapely-built, attractive, with a rather girlish complexion and umber-gold hair—a ladies’ man, a pattern military man, everything nice. And yet that demon of nerve worked in him to his perfection’s undoing. Perhaps it was the prick of conscience, like a shifting grit in one’s shoe, now here, now there, now gone—for the boy had quite fine impulses for a spoilt boy, a spoilt child of Fortune—and spoilt, like Byron by his mother, in the ruinous way. His father, the General, alternately indulgent and tyrannical, was the worst of parents for him; he had lost his mother long ago; his one sister, flippant, independent—undervalued, it may be, and conscious of it—offered no adequate substitute for that departed influence. And so the good in Hugo was to his own credit, and stood perhaps for more than it might have in another man.

  His father, Sir Calvin—he had got his K.C.B., by the way, after Tel-el-Kebir in ’82, in reward for some signal feat of arms, and at the expense of his trigger-finger—was as proud as sin of his comely lad, and blind to all faults in him which did not turn upon opposition to himself. He designed great connexions for the young man, and humoured his own selfishness in the prospect. He was a martinet of fifty-five, with a fine surface polish and a heart of teak beneath it, a patrician of the Claudian breed, irascible, much subject to gout for his past misdeeds, and an ardent devotee of the game of chess, at which he could hold his own with some of the professed masters. It was that devotion which had brought him fortuitously acquainted with the French Baron—a sort of technical friendship, it might be called—and which had procured the latter an occasional invitation of late to Wildshott. Le Sage came for chess, but he proved very welcome for himself. There was a sort of soothing tolerance about him, the well-informed urbanity of a polished man of the world, which was as good as a lenitive to the splenetic invalid. But nobody, unless it were Sir Calvin himself, appeared to know anything concerning him; whether he were rich or indigent; what, if dependent on his wits, he did for a living; what was the meaning or value of his title in an Englishman, if English he were; whether, in short, he were a shady Baron of the chevalier d’ industrie order, or a reputable Baron, with only some eccentricities to mark him out from the common. One of these, not necessarily questionable, was his sly incommunicativeness; another was his fondness for half-crowns. He invariably, whether with Sir Calvin or others, made that stake, no more and no less, a condition of his playing at all, and for the most part he carried it off. Vivian Bickerdike soon learned all that there was to be told about him, and he was puzzled and interested—‘intrigued’, as they would say in the horrible modern phrase. But being a young man of caution, in addition to great native curiosity, he kept his wits active, and his suspicions, if he had any, close.

  The game proceeded—badly enough on the part of Hugo, who was generally a skilful player. He fouled or missed so many shots that his form presently became a scandal. ‘Phew!’ whistled his opponent, after a peculiarly villainous attempt; ‘what’s gone wrong with you?’

  The young man laughed vexedly; then, in a sudden transition to violence, threw his cue from him so that it clattered on the floor.

  ‘I can’t play for nuts,’ he said. ‘You must get somebody else.’

  ‘Hugh,’ said his friend, after a moment or two of silence, ‘there’s something weighing on your mind.’

  ‘Is there?’ cried the other jeeringly. ‘I wonder.’

  ‘What is it? You needn’t tell me.’

  ‘O! thank you for that. I tell you what, Viv: I dreamed last night I was sitting on a barrel of gunpowder and smoking a cigarette, and the sparks dropped all about. Didn’t I? That’s what I feel, anyhow. Nerves, all nerves, my boy. O! shut up that long mug, and talk of something else. I told you I was off colour when I wrote.’

  ‘I know you did, and I came down.’

  ‘Good man. You’ll be in at the kill. There’s going to be a most infernal explosion—pyrotechnics galore. Or isn’t there? Never mind.’

  He appeared to Bickerdike to be in an extraordinary state, verging on the hysterical. But no more was said, and in a few moments they parted to dress for dinner.

  M. le Baron, coming up to his room about the same time and for the same purpose, was witness of a little stage comedy, which, being for all his bulk a light treader, he surprised. The actors were his valet Louis and an under-housemaid, the latter of whom was at the moment depositing a can of hot water in the washing basin. He saw the lithe, susceptible little Gascon steal from his task of laying ready his master’s dr
ess clothes, saw him stalk his quarry like a cat, pounce, enfold the jimp waist, heard the startled squeal that followed, a smack like a hundred kisses, a spitting sacré chein! from the discomfited assailant, as he staggered back with a face of fury and a hand held to his ear, and, seeing, stood to await the upshot, a questioning smile upon his lips. Both parties realised his presence at the same instant, and checked the issue of hot words which was beginning to join between them. The girl, giving a defiant toss to her chin, hurried past Le Sage and out of the room; M. Louis Cabanis returned to his business with the expression of a robbed wild-cat.

  Le Sage said nothing until he was being presently helped on with his coat, and then suddenly challenging the valet, eye to eye, he nodded, and congratulated him:

  ‘That is better, my friend. It is not logical, you know, for the injurer to nurse the grievance.’

  The Gascon looked at his master gravely.

  ‘Will you tell me who is the injurer, Monsieur?’

  ‘Surely,’ answered Le Sage, ‘it cannot be she, in these first few hours of your acquaintance?’

  ‘But if she had appeared to encourage me, Monsieur?’

  The Baron laughed.

  ‘The only appearance to be trusted in a pretty woman, Louis, is her prettiness.’

  ‘Monsieur, is her ravishing loveliness.’

  ‘Well, well, Louis, as you will. Only bear it no grudge.’

  He turned away from a parting keen scrutiny of the dark, handsome face, and left the room, softly carolling. The little episode had amused rather than surprised him. Certainly it had seemed to point, in respect of time, to a quite record enslavement on the Gascon’s part; but then the provocation to that passionate impressionable nature! For the girl had been really amazingly pretty, with that cast of feature, that Hebe-like beauty of hair and eye and complexion about whose fascination no two properly constituted minds could disagree. She was a domestic servant—and she was a young morning goddess, fresh from the unsullied dawn of Nature, a Psyche, a butterfly, a Cressid like enough. ‘If I were younger,’ thought Le Sage, ‘even I!’ and he carolled as he went down to dinner.

  CHAPTER IV

  I AM INTERESTED IN THE BARON

  (From the Bickerdike MS.)

  I SEEMED conscious somehow, at dinner on the night of our arrival, of a feeling of electricity in the domestic atmosphere. Having no clue, such as the later course of events came to supply, to its origin, I diagnosed it, simply and vulgarly, as the vibrations from a family jar, of the sort to which even the most dignified and well-regulated households cannot always rise superior. Sir Calvin himself, exacting and domineering, could never at the best of times be considered a tactful autocrat: a prey to his hereditary foe, he appeared often to go out of his way to be thought detestable. When such was the case, his habit of harping on grievances could become an exquisite torture, his propensity for persisting in the unwelcome the more he saw it resented a pure malignancy. On this occasion, observing an obvious inclination in his son, my friend, to silence and self-obliteration, he took pleasure in drawing him out, with something of the savagery, I could not but think, of a fisherman who wrenches an obstinate hermit crab from its borrowed shell for bait. I saw how poor Hugh was rasped and goaded, but could do no more than take upon myself, where I could, the burden of response. Believing at the time that this aggravated fencing between the two was a part, or consequence, of some trouble, the serious nature of which might or might not have been implied in my friend’s recent outburst, I made and could make but an inefficient second; yet, even had I known, as I came to know, that my surmise was wrong, and that the father’s persistence was due to nothing but a perverse devil of teasing, it is not clear to me how else I could have helped the situation. I could not have hauled my host by the ears, as I should have liked to do, over his own dining-room table.

  But the sense of atmospheric friction was not confined to these two. In some extraordinary way it communicated itself to the servants, the very butler, our young hostess. I had not seen Audrey at tea, and now greeted her for the first time. She came in late, to find us, by the Bashaw’s directions, already seated, and to suffer a sharp reprimand for her unpunctuality which brought a flush to her young rebellious cheek. Nor did I better things, so far as she was concerned, by an ostentatious display of attentions; she seemed to resent my sympathy even more than the harshness which had provoked it. It is the way of cats and women to tear the hand that would release them from the trap.

  The dinner, in short, began very uncomfortably, with an irascible host, a moody son, and an offended daughter, the butler taking his cue from his master, and the servants from the butler. They waited nervously, and got in one another’s way, only the more flurriedly for their whispered harrying by the exacerbated Cleghorn. I was surprised, I confess, by the change in that usually immaculate dignitary. The very type and pattern of his kind, correct, imperturbable, pontifical, I had never before known Cleghorn to manifest the least sign of human emotion, unless it were when Mr Yockney, the curate from Leighway, had mixed water with his Château Margaux 1907. Now, preposterous as it appeared, I could have believed the great man had been crying. His globous eyes, his mottled cheeks, bore suspicious evidences of the fact; his very side-whiskers looked limp. Surely the domestic storm, if such, which had rocked the house of Kennett must have been demoralising to a hitherto unknown degree.

  It was the Baron who redeemed the situation, winning harmony out of discord. He had, to do him justice, the reconciliatory faculty, chiefly, I think, because he could always find, as one should, a bright interest in differences of opinion instead of a subject for contention. I never knew him, then or thereafter, to be ruffled by opposition or contradiction. He accepted them placidly, as constituting possible rectifications of his own argumentative frontiers.

  His opportunity came with a growl of Sir Calvin’s over the lateness of the evening papers. The General had been particularly curious to hear the result of a local trial, known as the Antonferry Bank robbery case, which was just reaching its conclusion, and it chafed him to be kept waiting. Le Sage asked for information, and the supplying it smoothed the troubled waters. There is a relish for most people in being the first to announce news, whether good, bad, or indifferent.

  The case, as stated, was remarkable for nothing but the skill with which it had been unravelled. A Bank in Antonferry—a considerable market town lying some eight or nine miles north of Wildshott—had been robbed, and the question was by whom. That question had been answered in the upshot by an astute Scotland Yard detective, who, in spite of the obloquy thrown upon his kind by Mr Sherlock Holmes, had shown considerable sagacity in tracing the crime to its source in the Bank’s own manager—a startling dénouement. The accused, on the strength of this expert’s evidence, had been committed to stand his trial at Winton Quarter Sessions, and it was the issue of that event which was interesting Sir Calvin. He had had some dealings with the Bank in question, and had even been brought into some personal contact with the delinquent official.

  ‘It seems,’ he ended, ‘that there can be no doubt about the verdict. That Ridgway is a clever dog.’

  ‘The detective?’ queried Le Sage; and the General nodded.

  ‘The sort I should be sorry, if a thief, to have laid on my trail.’

  ‘But supposing you left none?’ questioned the Baron, with a smile.

  ‘Ah!’ said Sir Calvin, having nothing better to reply.

  ‘I have often thought,’ said Le Sage, ‘that if crime realised its own opportunities, there would be no use for detectives at all.’

  ‘Eh? Why not?’ asked his host.

  ‘Because there would be nothing to find out,’ answered the Baron.

  ‘How d’ye mean? Nothing to find out?’

  ‘Nothing whatever. My idea, now, of a successful crime is not a crime which baffles its investigators, but a crime which does not appear as a crime at all.’

  ‘Instance, M. le Baron,’ I ventured to put in.

  ‘
Why,’ said Le Sage good-humouredly, ‘a dozen may well present themselves to a man of average inventive intelligence. Direct murder, for example—how crude! when a hundred means offer themselves for procuring plausible ends to life. Tetanus germs and an iron tack; ptomaine, that toxicologic mystery, so easy to introduce; the edge of a cliff and a windy day; a frayed picture cord; a loosened nut or two; a scrap of soap left on the boards by an opened window—given adroitness, timeliness, a little nerve, would not any of these do?’

  Audrey drew back in her chair, with a flushed little laugh.