Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  Mr. Ricardo turned over the leaves and lighted quickly on the cheap paper and ignoble print of a French provincial newspaper.

  “Le Courier de Grenoble. Yes,” he said.

  There the whole grim story was set out from the first guarded article, entitled “Une Affaire Mysterieuse,” to the last dreadful scene in the Assize Court.

  Like Corinne, Mr. Ricardo set a match to his fire, for a chill of apprehension was upon him too, creeping into his old bones and clutching at his heart. But the flames were soon dancing upon the walls and imparting to the room a cheerful warmth; and in a more comfortable mood, he sat down to refresh his memories.

  The story began in Paris with a dinner party of five men, which took place at the Restaurant of La Rue during the first week of the preceding October. A Greek, named Andreas Eleutheros, who owned a small string of third-rate race-horses, and a rather spotted reputation besides, was the host, and the principal guest was a young Englishman, Archie Clutter, who was blessed with a rich wife and cursed with an ungoverned temper. The Greek’s finances were, at this date, undoubtedly shaky, and no one who followed the course of the events could help suspecting that the dinner had been arranged in order to restore them. Certainly, before they separated, the five men had agreed to meet at Grenoble on a date early in November, and go up to a shooting-box which Eleutheros rented in the Dauphiné Alps, for a few days’ sport.

  Amidst the snows of those high mountains the second phase of the tragedy was enacted. The five men arrived at the shooting-box late in the afternoon, dined early, and after a little conversation upon the most harmless topics, went early to bed, since they were to start upon their expedition before daybreak. The whole of that first evening, in a word, was so much camouflage. The expedition for the next day also had been mapped out in detail. It was intended to take place. There was to be no opportunity given for the knowing to hint that the party was arranged less to shoot chamois than to shear a sheep.

  During the night, however, the weather conspired with Mr. Eleutheros. The early start by lantern light was out of the question, and when the morning broke, the snow was falling as it can fall in those high regions — a white, thick, fleecy shawl against a background of impenetrable black. Thus the little game which was meant to be played at the earliest that night, and probably not until to-morrow, did actually begin at eleven o’clock on the first morning. The snow continued to fall for thirty-six hours without any intermission. So did the cards almost. There were certain fragments of time during which meals were gobbled. But no one retired to bed; and in accordance with the usual procedure of such affairs, Archie Clutter won a handsome sum of money — or, to speak more exactly, a handsome quantity of counters — at the beginning of the engagement, and then lost as steadily as the snow fell. At eleven o’clock on the second night Archie Clutter leaped to his feet with a roar of fury, flung the card-table aside as though it were no heavier than a paper-weight, and drove his fist into the face of one of the players, with a shout of “Cheat! Cheat!”

  According to Mr. Eleutheros, the Comte de Rozart, the player in question, was a gentleman of unsmirched reputation. The accusation was baseless, and the only explanation possible was that Archie Clutter, exasperated by his very serious losses — for they were playing stud-poker with an unlimited rise — and by the length of the sitting, had been suddenly mastered by his passionate temper. Mr. Eleutheros, indeed, reproached himself in the handsomest fashion for having allowed the game to go on for so many hours and the stakes to rise so high.

  “Yes, I am to blame. I am very deeply to blame, Monsieur le Président,” he said frankly in the Assize Court, and his admission was punctuated with many censorious “Ah’s” and “Oh’s” from the pen in which stood such of the public as could crowd into the court. “But it was difficult. Archie Clutter was the great loser. We could not break off the game unless he consented, and he insisted on continuing.” Here the “Ah’s” and “Oh’s” took on a milder tone of comprehension, almost of sympathy. Mr. Eleutheros had his difficulties as host. Yes, that began to see itself!

  “Besides,” the frank man continued, “we were shut up in that thin air, so high above the world, so isolated, with the snow plastering the windows, we were none of us quite normal, I think.”

  The spectators in the pen, and even the law-students in the body of the court, were inclined to believe that the observation was just. Certainly a psychological effect was to be expected from that forced sequestration. Opinion began to sympathise with the loyal Mr. Eleutheros, who would take upon his shoulders the blame for the crime committed by his guest.

  For a crime had been committed. There was no possibility of doubt about that. Moreover, the crime committed had been the irreparable one. As soon as the blow was struck, Mr. Eleutheros, being eminently a man of peace, had sought safety behind a writing-table in the corner of the room. From that vantage he exhorted his two remaining guests, of whom one managed his horses, and the other was his handy man and jackal.

  “Clutter’s mad. Hold him, Kettler Hold him, Paton.”

  Kettler and Paton flung themselves at once upon Archie Clutter, seizing his arms, and there the brawl might have ended, or, at all events, have been adjourned until the nerves of the party, frayed by excitement and want of sleep, had recovered their calm. Unfortunately the Comte de Rozart, after picking himself up from the floor with a bleeding forehead, sprang lightly forward and slapped the struggling and helpless Clutter again and again upon the cheeks with his open hand.

  “There is for you!” he cried. “And there! And there, pig that you are!”

  A moment of confusion and whirlwind ended all. Archie Clutter possessed naturally a strength which the slenderness of his figure belied. A Berserk rage doubled it. He flung his two custodians from him, and seizing by the neck an empty champagne bottle which stood within reach of his hand upon a sideboard, he in his turn struck and struck again. The bottle burst into fragments, the Comte de Rozart crumpled and slid down the wall to the floor, and even then Archie Clutter was not content with his work. He must dash the jagged fragment of glass, which his hand still grasped, down upon the face of the dead man, already masked in blood. Mr. Eleutheros screamed at the top of his voice, some of his guides and huntsmen came running from their quarters through the snow. The room became a shambles of broken furniture, and men cursing and whirling. The very sash of the window was burst from its frame, and the floor, slippery with blood and snow, gave no purchase to the feet. A rope was brought, and corded like a package from neck to heels Archie Clutter was flung into an adjoining room, and there locked in.

  Thus far, the facts of the case. Mr. Ricardo turned now to the description of the concluding scene. By the offices of his good friend, Hanaud, he had secured a seat amongst the law-students in the well of the court; and through the smudged and dingy lines of foreign print he looked now as through some magic window opening upon ancient days. The Judge and his Assessors, in their red robes, confronted him upon the bench. From his pulpit, just above the jury, the Procureur Géneral — he red-robed too — launched his violent denunciation. From the well of the court in front of the dock, the famous grey-bearded Maitre Virobert replied with floods of sentiment, and the jury, after a short retirement, returned its verdict.

  Mr. Ricardo listened once more to the scathing savagery of the President of the Court, who seemed to wield a cudgel rather than pronounce a judgment. He heard the very tones of the resonant voice as clearly as through the ear-pieces of a wireless set; and the appalling sentence: Twenty-one years of servitude in one of the penal colonies of France. And, as they had done on that actual day ten years ago, his eyes turned towards the prisoner in the dock standing between his gendarmes.

  Mr. Ricardo was what the French euphemistically call an amateur. It is truer to say that he had become so in his later years. He had developed a passion for the horrible and the bizarre. His favourite walk in Paris was taken under the colonnades of the Palais Royal. Were a crime committed, he must hasten to
the spot, bribe his way into the very room, and reconstruct with a delicious shiver of fear the horrors which had there taken place. Thus every detail of Archie Clutter’s appearance during those terrible moments had been so greedily observed that it needed but a glance at these cuttings to restore the portrait. He was a young man of twenty-nine, and looked even younger than his years. He was noticeable for the quiet perfection of his dress, in which there was trace neither of dandy nor sloven, and the scrupulous care which he devoted to his body. From the fineness of his linen to the tips of his fingers his fastidiousness was written upon him. Thus he had stood, comely, even elegant, and then had wilted and dropped like a log upon the floor of the dock.

  Mr. Ricardo closed his book of cuttings and put it away on its shelf.

  “Archie Clutter escaped then,” he reflected. “Escapes are not so rare from those convict stations. The French look to the sharks as their best jailers. But every now and then one or two get through.”

  He went upstairs to bed. He could have no shadow of doubt. The slim elegant youth who had dropped like a man shot through the heart ten years ago at Grenoble was the waiter whom he had seen at the Semiramis Hotel to-night; his body thickened, coarsened and hardened, his face disfigured and gross with a baleful look, which told that the ungovernable rage that once from time to time had mastered him, now burnt steadily and fiercely within him, a disciplined servant on the chain.

  XIV. THE TWO GENTLEMEN FROM CAYENNE

  MR. RICARDO DID not resent, as so many people do, a suggestion by any of his acquaintances that he was getting old. On the contrary, he recognised certain advantages in the slow advent of old age. He no longer had to invent excuses for not playing games or indulging in violent sports. He received consideration, too, from the polite people of younger generations. He was frequently addressed by them as “sir.” But he did feel the gradual decadence of the body to be a humiliation; and so a longer and longer time was allotted in the morning before he was prepared to face in public the light of day.

  At eight o’clock his valet, Elias Tomson, after knocking twice, with an interval between the knocks, entered the darkened bedroom, placed the tea-tray on a table at the side of the bed, the newspapers on the bed itself, and retired without a word. By means of a silk cord, finished with a green and gold tassel and an ingenious arrangement of pulleys, Mr. Ricardo was able to withdraw his curtains without leaving his bed and let the morning light flood the room. He then drank his tea, read his newspapers, and smoked a couple of Turkish cigarettes taken from an onyx box. At nine o’clock he rang his bell, and Elias Tomson, proceeding at once to the bath-room, mixed the hot and cold water by the help of a thermometer to the exact degree of heat required, added the precise quantity of bath salts, stropped the razor and set the shaving-water, knocked again upon the bedroom door and again retired. Mr. Ricardo then rose from his bed, donned a brocaded dressing-gown, and passing through a private doorway between his bedroom and his bath-room, entered upon the mysteries of his toilet.

  On the morning, however, after the dinner at the Semiramis Hotel, the leisurely business was interrupted. Mr. Ricardo was still splashing in his bath when his valet announced, through the panels of the door, that a man urgently insisted upon seeing him at once.

  “A man! Nonsense!” cried Mr. Ricardo fretfully — for he had not slept very well. “My habits are well known. Tell him to return at a more gentlemanly hour,” and he continued to splash.

  But only for a very little time. For an uneasiness gained upon him. He dressed more quickly than he had dressed for years, and it was little after half-past nine when he descended into his dining-room. On the table by his plate and apart from his usual batch of letters lay a soiled cheap envelope with his name upon it, but no stamp. Mr. Ricardo turned the envelope over. It was gummed down. Mr. Ricardo rang the bell, and upon Tomson’s appearance he asked:

  “That man who called here?”

  “He has gone, sir. He refused to wait and he left that letter.”

  “Did he write it here?”

  “No, sir, he produced it from his pocket. He said that it was most important that you should have it at once.”

  “No doubt,” said Mr. Ricardo with a laugh, and he tossed the envelope lightly aside. Begging-letters were always most important. He was quite reassured until Elias Tomson added:

  “Important to you, sir.”

  “To me?”

  “That is what he said. He was, indeed, quite contumacious about it.”

  Elias Tomson had a love for a good long fine-sounding word, and when he came across one he made a note of it. But the application of it was apt at times to baffle Mr. Ricardo: as now.

  “Contumacious?” he asked, feeling no longer quite so reassured.

  “Well, I might say nasty,” Elias conceded.

  Mr. Ricardo disliked that word intensely. It threatened to take away altogether his appetite for breakfast.

  “What sort of man was this?” he asked.

  “From his pomatum and his pointed shoes, Solo, I think.”

  Mr. Ricardo nodded his head.

  “A small man?”

  “Typical,” replied Elias. “Quite Lilliputian, sir.”

  “And nasty?”

  “Extremely nasty.”

  “Very well, Tomson”; and Tomson left the room.

  Mr. Ricardo had certainly lost his appetite. He nibbled at a piece of buttered toast and sipped his hot coffee, but his eyes and his thoughts were all upon that dirty envelope.

  “This is cowardly,” he reflected. “Most undignified and cowardly.”

  He picked the envelope up and slit it open at the edge. He shook out a folded sheet of the commonest foreign paper, crossed from side to side and from top to bottom with fine blue lines, so that its whole surface was covered with little squares. Mr. Ricardo spread out the paper and read the few words scrawled upon it in a spidery sloping hand.

  Please to meet me at ten o’clock in Duke Street Garden, and please to come alone, if you value your good. Hospel Roussencq.

  Now, Mr. Ricardo valued his good extremely, no one more so. He recognised, holding himself, as it were for trial, that he had been unduly talkative last night, and people who were unduly this, that, or the other, must pay for their unduliness. It was only just and right that they should. Therefore he would keep this appointment in the Duke Street Garden — merely as an act of reparation and penance. He stood up and looked at the clock. The hands marked the time as twenty minutes to ten and the meeting place was barely five minutes from his door. Yes, in ten minutes, so that he might be punctual, he would set out — and suddenly Mr. Ricardo felt very cold. He had no longer any bones in his legs, so that he collapsed in his chair, and his heart turned suddenly over inside of him and there was such an emptiness and sinking in the pit of his stomach that he seemed to be descending in a lift of incredible velocity to incredible depths in the bowels of the earth.

  “Brandy,” he whispered to himself, “brandy!” and now he was in a panic lest his strength should fail him altogether and Hospel Roussencq should wait for him in vain. Clutching here at the edge of the table, there at the back of a chair, he hoisted himself on to his feet and crept unsteadily to the sideboard. He filled a wineglass to the brim with a much-prized liqueur cognac, and drank it slowly. A little colour returned to his faded cheeks; he stood upright; he walked.

  Outside the house, in the sunlight and fresh air, he felt better. He must certainly see this troublesome business through, once for all, and have done with it. The sight of a policeman six feet tall strolling, Olympian and good-tempered, round the corner into Duke Street revived his courage. After all, a foreigner plastered with pomade and in spiky shoes! Lilliputian, too! An admirable, enheartening word.

  The garden lies on the west side of Duke Street, not a hundred yards from where it debouches into Oxford Street, and is laid out upon the roof of a huge transforming station belonging to the Westminster Electric Supply Corporation. It is reached by a couple of flights of stone s
teps, which mount one on each side of the great arched doorway of the station. This doorway is surmounted by a heavy stone cupola and ornamented with Gothic columns.

  Up the nearest of these flights of steps Mr. Ricardo climbed. He found himself upon a broad oblong terrace, paved with red and white tiles and enclosed within low stone walls. Rows of privet trees planted in big tubs of concrete ran from end to end; a circular fountain occupied the centre; and wherever possible, banked against the stone walls and massed round the stems of the privet trees in the concrete tubs, geraniums blazed. A big stone seat shaped in a segment of a circle projected from each side wall half-way down the terrace and commanded its approaches.

  On the left-hand seat a youth and a girl were holding hands. Mr. Ricardo’s bosom swelled in sympathy with that couple. They were lost to the world, yet the merest cry for help would bring them back to it. Happily, he discovered, there are always and everywhere a youth and a girl holding hands. Almost he took off his hat to them. If only they would stay in this charming spot, planning out slowly the successive stages of their life, he would be very much obliged. For on the opposite seat one little man sat alone behind an opened newspaper. As Mr. Ricardo approached, Hospel Roussencq folded his newspaper and crouched forward with his elbows upon his knees and a pair of hard, bright, red-rimmed eyes piercing into him, until he fancied that he must be as transparent as a window-pane. It was the little waiter of the Semiramis banqueting-room, but there was not a trace of the obsequious servitor about him now. Nasty, Mr. Elias Tomson had declared him to be, and nasty he was.

  Mr. Ricardo had timed his approach to the second. For he was still some yards away from the stone seat when all the clocks in the neighbourhood struck ten, and resonant above them all from far away sounded the deep majestic notes of Big Ben.

  “You are punctual, old one,” said Roussencq. “How wise you are! For there are bad marks against your name, you know.”