Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “I should like to see Mrs. Caroline Beagham.”

  The big man shook his head.

  “If Mrs. Beagham lives here,” he said slowly after a full minute of reflection, “she doesn’t receive any visitors.” He ended with a smile of contentment. He was intending to be very crafty and astute, and in his own opinion he was triumphantly successful.

  “She will see me,” Trevor remarked confidently, and producing a card, he handed it to the man.

  “I am Mrs. Beagham’s bailiff and manage the business of the farm,” the man answered.

  “That won’t do. I am not concerned with the business of the farm,” said Trevor, holding his ground.

  The bailiff read the name upon the card as slowly as if he were spelling it out letter by letter. Then he made a singular remark.

  “We make no complaint. Nothing of any value was taken.”

  “Oh!” Trevor exclaimed sharply. “Then you have had a burglary here!”

  The bailiff now looked surprised — and a little chagrined. He had not been quite so politic as he imagined.

  “Then you are not of the police?” he asked.

  “Nothing whatever to do with the police,” said Trevor cheerfully.

  But the bailiff was inclined to visit his own indiscretion upon the two travellers.

  “Then you have no need to come worrying us here. We buy nothing at the door, not even sewing machines. So good evening to you,” he said roughly and he made as if to close the door.

  “You take my card in to Mrs. Beagham,” said Trevor with a sudden violence. “How dare you keep me standing here? Do you think I want to talk with you?”

  The unexpected attack, carried out with every sign of resentment, baffled the slow wits of the bailiff. He stepped back and fingered his beard.

  “Oh!” he said, and again “Oh!” He looked afresh at the card. “Well, wait here!” he muttered grudgingly.

  He closed the door and locked it, and his slow footsteps retreated heavily.

  Trevor turned to his companion with a look of speculation in his eyes.

  “Curious that, eh? I mean about the burglary. I wonder.”

  At what he wondered Strickland had no time to inquire, for the bailiff’s footsteps were heard once more. But they approached now with a new alacrity. He opened the door, made quite a civil apology and brought them into the house. Then he led them down a narrow corridor of old gleaming panels and opened a door.

  “In here,” he said, and clumped away.

  Strickland found himself in a bright, small parlour looking on to an orchard, and furnished in the heavy style of early Victorian days. It was ugly but solid, and the two travellers were at all events spared the gilt gimcrackery of the ‘eighties. Antimacassars hung over the backs of chairs, wax fruit, painted such yellows and reds as real fruit even in these days of paint would have blushed to wear, stood exposed under glass cases on the mantelshelf, whilst small pictures in big, over-decorated frames hung upon walls papered with enormous roses. And everywhere — on the sofa, the chairs, the table, even on the floor which Brussels had carpeted — was spread such a litter of torn envelopes, ill-written letters, and the cheapest sort of periodical as made the room a refuse heap for a bonfire. In the window at one of those ridiculous little desks of walnut wood with twisted pillars and side drawers and a sloping, narrow, leather-covered lid, sat the inhabitant of the room, a stout, middle-aged, slatternly woman attired in a cotton wrap and with a pair of carpet slippers upon her feet. Her hair was done up in an untidy ball at the back of her head, and she had a pale, roughly featured, large face with small eyes set too close together and a prominent, hard jaw. It was definitely an unpleasant face, but upon the appearance of Trevor it lightened to something like amiability.

  The room had a scent of tobacco and on the desk at which the woman wrote was a briar pipe smoked as black as the panels in the corridor. This was Mrs. Caroline Beagham.

  “Carrie,” said Trevor as he shook her by the hand. “You owe me a good turn, don’t you? I saved you from appearing as a witness in a libel action which would have blown your flourishing little factory sky-high, didn’t I? Went to no end of trouble to get the case settled out of court. Not for your beautiful eyes, you will say. Agreed. Your beautiful eyes, Carrie, were purely incidental. But they were saved, weren’t they? So now stand and deliver! I want you to help my friend, Colonel Strickland.”

  Mrs. Beagham rose from her desk, swept the litter from two arm-chairs and invited her guests to be seated.

  “Gentlemen, you can smoke,” she said, and lighting her own briar pipe, she sat down at her ease in a third chair. Mrs. Beagham’s voice was hard like her face, and of a high pitch. But, again, it was not unamiable. The interview certainly was beginning in a more promising style than the encounter with the bailiff could have led the two men to anticipate.

  “I haven’t said a word to Colonel Strickland about the way in which you possibly may be able to help him. I propose to do so now. You can rely upon his reticence.”

  “A gentleman and a soldier,” Caroline Beagham agreed, speaking with a provincial accent.

  Strickland blushed and bowed, and Angus Trevor turned to him.

  “Mrs. Beagham has a touch of genius,” he observed. “You can recognise it in her face and in the eccentricity of her dress.”

  A glimmer of a smile appeared in the woman’s eyes.

  “Get along with you, mister,” she said, puffing at her pipe.

  “She invented an ingenious and lucrative business,” he resumed, getting along as he was bidden. “This old and innocent manor is the clearing house for the scandals and gossips and secrets of the butlers and servants belonging to the gentry of England. The business is conducted on the strictest principles. All information is paid for at its commercial value; and he who once lets Carrie in can never more be officer of hers. From this sylvan retreat radiate the spicy pars about Lady O —— and Mr. T —— and the Duke of Omnium Gatherum. Here, too, the prudent moneylender can discover whether he had better send another registered envelope stuffed with bank-notes or whether to put on the screw instead. A host of useful duties are discharged in this house. It would not be too much to say that Carrie is one of the Pillars of Society, though to be sure it is a Pillar in the crypt rather than one in the transept.”

  Mrs. Caroline Beagham listened to Angus Trevor’s oration with the kind of amusement which a very serious philosopher might feel in the antics of a funny man at a fair.

  “These London gentlemen do go on,” she said complacently to Strickland. She looked again towards Angus Trevor. “Yes, I said I would prove my gratitude if ever I could. What do you want of me?”

  Angus Trevor dropped his air of raillery.

  “All the details you possess with reference to Elizabeth Clutter and Corinne the dancer.”

  What little expression there was and what little colour ebbed out of Mrs. Beagham’s face as she listened. But for the eyes in it, it might have been taken for a vegetable. The body, too, was suddenly very still.

  So she sat for the space of a good many seconds. Then, lifting herself with an effort out of her chair, she opened the parlour door. In some neighbouring room a typewriting machine was now clicking and clacking and ringing its tiny bell after brief intervals, as if Society was indeed only preserved from tumbling to pieces by the work done in Peacock Farm.

  “Judy!” shouted Mrs. Beagham; and the clack of the typewriter ceased. “My daughter,” she explained to her visitors; and a tall and very pretty girl in a red dress ran briskly into the room.

  “You wanted me, mother—” she began, and stopped as she caught sight of the two men.

  Judy was twenty-one years old and, to make up perhaps for the slatterliness of her mother, she was impeccably trim from her sleek dark head to her bois-de-rose silk stockings and bright strapped shoes.

  “Yes, dear! Just find me, will you, please? that letter of Lord Culalla’s butler. Cowcher — George Cowcher.”

  Judy Beagham sta
rted violently. She gazed at her mother in doubt and surprise.

  “About — ?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  Judy shot a quick glance at the two visitors.

  “Then these gentlemen—” she began.

  “No,” replied her mother.

  Strickland wondered whether that truncated question was the same one which the bailiff had asked of them in the porch. But Judy Beagham made no further protest. She took a bunch of keys from one of the side drawers of the foolish little writing-table and unlocked a cupboard in the wall of the room. A row of big volumes very like those in Mr. Ricardo’s library was exposed to view. Only the backs of these here were lettered A, B, C, D, etc., instead of marked with the dates of years. At the end of the row stood a little index-book.

  This Judy Beagham took down, and seating herself crossed her knees.

  “Cowcher?” she asked.

  “Cowcher, George,” the mother repeated.

  Judy opened the book at the letter C and ran a slim finger down the page.

  “Page 23,” she said, and springing up she replaced the index and took down the big volume entitled C. With this in her arms she resumed her seat. The covers of the book were locked together. Judy chose a tiny key upon her bunch and unlocked them; and in her every movement there was a neatness and an efficiency which took Angus Trevor by storm.

  “We keep very little,” Mrs. Beagham explained placidly. “All these letters you see scattered here — Judy and I will gather them up and make a great bonfire of them as soon as they have served their turn. It’s only the things which might be of importance and value in the future that we keep and classify.”

  Strickland was struck dumb by the woman’s serenity and composure. She sat there in her cotton wrapper and her carpet slippers, describing a business which certainly included blackmail as one of its side-lines, and never turned a hair. He could but stare at her open-mouthed. As for Angus Trevor, his eyes were fixed upon Judy, who sat with the big volume open upon her knee and dismay stark upon her face.

  “Mother!” she said in a whisper; and the whisper was so urgent that it drew all the eyes in that room at once upon her.

  “What’s the matter, dear?”

  “It was that they were after. Cowcher’s letter. Look!”

  She inclined the volume so that all could see. A title to the page written in ink, and underneath the line a bare white page on which shone here and there a spot of viscous fluid. A letter had been gummed upon that bare white page, and the letter had gone.

  XVIII. COWCHER’S LETTER

  STRICKLAND’S HOPES CRASHED. Trevor had brought him in a straight line to the very door of the cavern, but others had been before him with the magic word upon their lips. The cavern was empty.

  “They?” he cried in a flutter of alarm. “They were after the letter too? Who are they?”

  Caroline Beagham could only shake her head distressfully.

  “We none of us know. The house was broken into.”

  “When?” Strickland burst in.

  “Two nights ago,” said Mrs. Beagham, and Strickland uttered a cry of dismay.

  Two nights ago — twenty-four hours, then, before Archie Clutter made his nocturnal call upon Corinne. If he and his rat of a friend were “they!” Why, then, they were moving quickly, appallingly quickly — two days ahead of them.

  “We knew nothing about it until the morning,” Mrs. Beagham continued, “for no one heard a sound during the night. We should have known nothing about it even then but for Judy. For the windows and the doors were bolted, no object was missing, and only one disarranged — a candle — that one.”

  Mrs. Beagham pointed to one of those green-shaded candle lamps still in use where no electric light exists.

  “It stood upon my little escritoire,” she resumed. “Judy is certain that it was left there when we went to bed.”

  “I blew it out myself,” Judy interposed.

  “And in the morning it was standing upon the seat of the chair by the escritoire.”

  Angus Trevor gazed at Judy with reverent eyes.

  “Good work,” he said, and Judy smiled.

  “Yes, Judy’s a noticing girl,” Caroline Beagham agreed. “We found corroborative evidence afterwards in a couple of sets of footmarks in the mould just outside this window.”

  “What sort of footmarks?” Strickland once more interposed.

  “One set was that of a small man wearing pointed shoes,” Judy answered. “The other,” — she looked at Strickland’s feet— “well, if you had been bigger, you might have made them.”

  “Good work,” Mr. Trevor repeated fervently.

  Strickland sat like a man turned to stone. Without a doubt the men who had broken in were Archie Clutter and his friend whom Mr. Ricardo knew as Hospel Roussencq! Somehow — oh, easily enough! through some private servant out of a job and filling in his time by waiting at banquets — they had learnt of this address. But what had they learnt at this address?

  Meanwhile Mrs. Beagham continued:

  “We said nothing, of course. We don’t want the police — drat them! — pushing their long noses into things which don’t concern them. The more particularly since we couldn’t find anything missing till this blessed minute—” She broke off with a look of perplexity. “But, Judy, dear, that book was locked when you took it down from the cupboard!” she exclaimed.

  “Yes,” Judy answered; “and I certainly took the keys up to my bedroom on that night and slept with them under my pillow as usual.”

  She sprang up and went close to the window, where she stood closely scrutinising the lock.

  “There are some little scratches, as if a wire had made them,” she announced.

  “May I see?” Trevor asked eagerly. He actually ran to the window and bent his head close to Judy’s the better to examine the book.

  “Yes, there’s one,” he said.

  “And there’s another,” said Judy.

  Each of them was pointing and touching the particular scratches each one had identified, so that it was no wonder that their fingers became entangled.

  “A wire certainly made that one,” said he.

  “And the same wire this one,” added Judy.

  “Yes, I can see it quite well. There’s no need to move your hand away. How wonderfully clever of you to have spotted it! It was assuredly a wire.”

  “There’s no doubt that it was a wire,” said Judy, and suddenly she laughed, a full-throated quiet laugh with an upward lilt at the end of it; which drove Strickland mad. It was all very well for these two young people to be shamelessly making love to one another in a farm-house window, but, for himself, he was not engaged upon a rural idyll. What he wanted to know was the nature of the letter written by Cowcher, George, the butler to Lord Culalla, which Archie Clutter and his small friend the waiter had carried away with them.

  “You will be able to remember the contents of the letter, Mrs. Beagham, I am sure,” he pleaded.

  Mrs. Beagham shrugged her shoulders.

  “I am thinking of the loss of credit to the business if Cowcher, George, gets into trouble,” she ruminated dolefully. “It will be put down to carelessness at the best, and treachery at the worst. We may lose some of our clientele “ — which she pronounced as though it rhymed with genteel. “As for the letter, since it was important we shall have a copy of it. Judy!”

  Judy turned once more to page twenty-three.

  “Yes. There’s a note here that we have a copy. I’ll get it.”

  “I’ll come and help you,” said Trevor enthusiastically. “With a business carried on with so much method there would inevitably be a copy.”

  He went out of the room with Judy and left Caroline Beagham to deplore the damage which might be done to the good name of her business, and Colonel Strickland to fume and fret over the delay. Archie Clutter had two days’ start of him. Archie Clutter had walked into Corinne’s little house with this letter written by Cowcher, George, in his pocket. He was w
ild to learn its contents and there were those two young people actually laughing — he heard them through the door — actually laughing, as if the search for the copying-book were a game of kiss-in-the-ring. Certainly they did take an unconscionable time, and though Judy’s hair was still as neat and sleek as ever, she wore a higher colour in her cheeks and her dark eyes sparkled with a brighter lustre when they did return.

  “It is here somewhere,” she said.

  She carried a book into which letters were copied by the old-fashioned method of a press, so that the orthography and the very character of the handwriting was transferred as faithfully as the words. She laid the book upon a table and, wetting her finger, turned over the flimsy pages until she reached the letter she wanted. She gave a gasp as she scanned it, and all the laughter died out of her face.

  “I had forgotten it was as bad as this,” she said thoughtfully.

  Strickland drew up his chair to the table, and sat in front of the open book for a long while. There was no longer any merriment in that room. A grim oppression settled upon it like a cloud. No one spoke, no one dared to stir whilst Strickland sat with that strange document beneath his eyes. For strange it was and a hundred times more startling than anything which Angus Trevor had conjectured. This was no record of a pronouncement about an expected legacy made to a harassing creditor. Had the police known of it, surely Maung H’la would have stood in the dock and Corinne beside him. When Strickland rose at last from the table and released the others in the room from the spell which his very immobility had laid upon them, he knew by heart every word that he had read. He could see the pages before him and read them out in the air. The whip-hand of Corinne! To be sure, he had it now — or would have had it, if only Archie Clutter had not read those same lines and stolen the original letter just two days before.

  For this is what he learnt by heart:

  Madam, — You said any news as was interesting. So I take up my pen on this seventeenth day of June, to record a most extraordinary occurrence. The significance of it can only be appreciated by one who keeps a close eye upon the date.