“I am bound to say that Maltby was pleasant,” Mordaunt continued. “He seemed to know already all that I was telling him.”
Mr. Ricardo smiled wisely. “He was checking up the statement I had already made.”
Mordaunt stared at his companion and leaned forward eagerly. “Perhaps you can help, Mr. Ricardo. I must leave England on Monday. Ticket taken, cabin booked. All that could stop me would be the police.”
“You’re not involved in any way,” said Mr. Ricardo confidently. “You did all that a reasonable man in a hurry could be expected to do. I am here. We told the same story, no doubt. I am sure that Maltby won’t want you to stay.”
Captain Mordaunt was greatly relieved. His voice lightened, his face lost its gloom and, as he looked at the trim and decorous Mr. Ricardo, a smile came and went upon his lips.
“So there is an affair of a kind?” he suggested. Mr. Ricardo seemed to weigh his inclination to talk against his reticence as an unofficial sleuth. “Yes. I can say so much — there is,” he said darkly.
“And you are in it, of course.”
In a whisper, attended by a knowing smile, Mr. Ricardo replied: “Up to the neck.”
“Crime, then?”
Crime, the wonderful word. It drew the two men together in a net. That crime fascinated Mr. Ricardo was known to all his acquaintances. But were they not fascinated, too? Let a man say in any company that he has been present at the Old Bailey when any crime is being probed and established, a silence will follow upon his words, however carelessly he may speak them. He may be merely the dullard, the last-wicket-rabbit brought in to make up the party, but at once he becomes the cynosure. He will be plied with questions. He will not relapse into obscurity until all that he can contribute on the characters, the passions, and the event which have woven the dark pattern, has been brought to light. And even then each one of the party with a small pang of regret, reflect: “If only I had been in his place, I should have noticed so much more.”
So now Captain Mordaunt, though his hopes were cast overseas, leaned forward with shining eyes. “Yes. You are known to be a student of crime, Mr. Ricardo.”
At such moments Mr. Ricardo was apt to become a trifle fatuous. He laughed affectedly. “Not really? A dilettante, perhaps. But a student? Well, perhaps others might say so.”
“Maltby said that you had got the little Frenchman with you.”
“Little! My dear Mordaunt! He’s as big as a bull and quite as obstreperous.”
“I’d like to meet him,” said Mordaunt; and there was a great deal more than mere curiosity in the warmth of his voice.
“My dear fellow,” said Ricardo, “nothing could be easier.”
He had his cue, and over the luncheon table he told Mordaunt all that he knew of the Horbury puzzle.
“Devisher has disappeared. Yes, an ominous fact. Yet Hanaud seems to set as much — no, I am inexact — more importance upon the sealed letter with the enclosures addressed by Horbury to Septimus Crottle. Has he received it? If so, why does he keep it to himself? Does he know nothing about it? Hanaud would very much like to make Crottle’s acquaintance.”
“Septimus Crottle is a queer old bird,” said Mordaunt doubtfully.
“A crotchety patriarch, I think you called him,” Mr. Ricardo added. “Hanaud is aware that he must tread gently.”
“Yes, but the old man doesn’t,” replied Mordaunt. “He’s a trampler.” He thought for a moment. “I tell you what. We’ll have some coffee and a cigar upstairs whilst I see what I can do.”
They went upstairs to the smoking-room. Coffee and liqueurs of brandy were put beside them on small stools.
“Cigars,” ordered Mordaunt, and at once Mr. Ricardo broke in.
“Claro, please! At this hour not a Colorado.”
“Good God, man,” Mordaunt exclaimed, “I’m not offering you a beetle;” and, having established Mr. Ricardo in comfort, he went off to the telephone office. He returned in a quarter of an hour.
“It is all right. I didn’t mention the letter or, indeed, anything about Horbury’s death. I should think he’ll go straight up in the air when he hears that Horbury has written to him at all. But that’s your pigeon. All I said was that Hanaud and you want to have a word with him.”
“And he’s willing?”
“Yes. A nice bit of crime, you know! I am going to him on Sunday evening and I’ll take you and the Frenchman with me. But I warn you. You have got to fit in. Sunday night is his company night. There’s a ritual. The family, one or two friends. We have a glass of port, then someone reads a book, then the girls — there isn’t one of them under thirty — are sent off to bed, and then you’ll get your conversation. You’re not to dress, and you have your dinner before you go. I’ll come to your house at ten minutes to eight.”
Mr. Ricardo drew back. The order of the day was not to him a phrase for committees.
“Then we must dine at seven!” he exclaimed incredulously.
“Yes, the old man moves with the times,” said Mordaunt. “When he was captain of the steam-packet Tunis he dined at six.”
CHAPTER 15
SEPTIMUS READS A BOOK
SEPTIMUS CROTTLE LIVED in a big Victorian house in a big Victorian way. There was now no outward sign upon him that he had not lived upon the land all his life. The weather had faded from his cheeks, and neither an eye of steel nor an aura of tremendous authority are qualities limited to sea captains. It might, indeed, have been Mr. Dombey who received his three new guests at eight o’clock of the evening in his dining-room in Portman Square. He wore a long frock-coat of broadcloth, and above the folds of a black satin neckcloth, decorated with a single pearl of great size, two sharp points of white and glossy collar clipped his face.
“You will drink a glass of port, gentlemen,” Septimus said. “Mary, set some chairs and glasses.”
There was no manservant in the house; patriarchs, after all, are waited upon by maidens. Mary cleared three places at the long table, one upon Crottle’s right for Monsieur Hanaud and two upon his left for Mordaunt and Mr. Ricardo. The ladies, of course, had already retired to the drawing-room.
“I welcome you to my house, Monsieur Hanaud,” said Septimus, holding up his glass of wine.
“It was gracious of you to invite me, Mr. Crottle,” Hanaud returned, holding up his.
Both men bowed and drank, and Hanaud, as he put his glass down, exclaimed in an ecstasy: “And this is a wonderful glass of Porto which you are giving me!”
“It’s the best,” said Septimus, quite simply. “It’s mine. George, fill Monsieur Hanaud’s glass.”
A fair-haired youth upon Ricardo’s right obeyed with a broad grin upon his face and a twinkle in his eye.
“The guv’nor decanted it himself from his own private bin, Monsieur Hanaud,” he said genially. “There aren’t many to whom he shows that consideration.”
Hanaud tasted his wine and looked up at the ceiling. He tasted it again and held it for a long time in his mouth, and swallowed it at last slowly, with his eyes closed. Mr. Ricardo was disgusted with his friend’s behaviour. To Hanaud, Porto was Porto, and the blacker it was and the stickier it was, the more Hanaud enjoyed it. “Look at the hypocrite,” Mr. Ricardo said to himself. “He’s obsequious.”
But obviously Septimus was pleased. “I shall offer you a cigar,” he continued, “but I am afraid that must wait until after our reading. Mean while I should like to present to you my nephew, George Crottle. The gentleman sitting on the other side of Captain Mordaunt you may perhaps know.”
Hanaud looked at a thin, tall, narrow man with a grey moustache.
“Yes, yes,” he said with an air of surprise as he held out his hand. “I certainly have had the honour to meet him.”
“Mr. Alan Preedy is one of the Line’s solicitors.”
“But in a very small way,” Preedy put in modestly. “I don’t aspire to famous cases.”
“No doubt they will come,” Hanaud protested.
“Bu
t not, I hope, in connection with the Dagger Line,” said George Crottle in mock dismay.
“I think that is unlikely,” said Septimus, with a touch of irritation in his voice. “I have another nephew “ — and the irritation was still audible— “who apparently is not giving us the pleasure of his company to-night.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Preedy interrupted rather eagerly, as if he recognised that a smooth relationship between the elder and the younger branches of the Crottle firm was one of his duties. “I fancy Mr. James arrived a moment ago.”
Septimus turned his head and listened.
“I can’t hear a sound,” said George. “Old James has carted us, this night of all nights, when our Uncle Septimus is reading.”
Septimus looked at his nephew with approval, but Alan Preedy still appeared for the absent one.
“It was a taxi stopping at the door which I heard, and the passing of change makes the driver, as a rule, undress himself by several layers of clothes. Ah, there he is!”
Alan Preedy had hardly finished before the housebell rang, but he had finished. Mr. Ricardo looked with admiration at the lawyer, upon whose face there rose a blush.
“Yes,” said George gaily to Ricardo, “if I wanted to listen at a keyhole, I should brief Preedy as my substitute. It’s quite a gift.”
Monsieur Hanaud seemed to be concentrating his attention upon his Porto, and said nothing.
James Crottle, a tall, dark and grim young man, entered the room. He made his apologies to his uncle, clapped Preedy heartily upon the shoulder, and said with a laugh:
“The law’s delays are nothing to a taxicab’s.”
He nodded to Mordaunt, was introduced to Hanaud and Ricardo, and took his seat at the table on the side of the Frenchman. The difference between him and George was remarkable. George, the fair-haired youth, seemed by comparison with him of almost feminine good looks. There was a supple grace in his slim figure and a friendliness in his smile and eyes which James was without. James leaned a little forward and said to Hanaud: “My uncle did not tell us that we were to have the honour to-night of meeting anyone so distinguished as you.”
There was just a hint of a question in his words which Septimus took up: “Monsieur Hanaud has, I gather, some matter of importance which he wishes to talk over with me after wards.”
Coffee was brought in on a great silver tray, and Ricardo, under such security as the clatter of the cups granted him, said to his neighbour, Alan Preedy: “This is to me the greatest blessing of the evening so far. For keep my head from nodding during a reading, that I cannot do.”
“Septimus isn’t so bad,” Preedy returned. “It’s his turn to read to-night, thank the Lord! You’ll see, he’ll probably keep you awake.”
At that moment the parlourmaid entered the room and announced to Septimus that the ladies were assembled in the drawing-room and that the clock had struck the hour three minutes ago.
“Then I suppose that we had better go, Mary,” he said with a smile.
“Yes, sir, and the room all prepared as if it was for a Church Service,” she answered.
For perhaps a minute Mr. Septimus did not budge, a little colour rose into his face, the smile remained upon his mouth, and a sparkle of fire revived the youth of his eyes. He looked and smiled straight ahead of him, savouring in advance the small ritual of the assembly, the resonance of his voice, the stillness of his audience as he held it in a magic web. There was romance in these Sunday nights for Septimus Crottle. At this hour, once in every fourth week, he recaptured some shadow of the thrill and glory of his first command. When he opened the book, he stepped again upon his bridge. He was no longer the owner of the Dagger Line, concerned with questions of policy, he was the young Lord and Master of his ship, of its passengers, its crew and its cargo. He stood at the pilot’s side in Southampton Water with his eyes fixed upon tropical harbours, where after weeks of vigilance he would hear the thunderous rattle of the anchor chains in the bows. He rose from his chair, his old wrinkled face eager and radiant. “Let us go!” he cried on a rising note.
Mordaunt noticed the change and smiled. “He has dropped his pilot. He has set his course between the Spithead Forts for the Nab. Has he the clusters of palm trees in his vision, a scent of strange perfumes in his nostrils, the sing-song of coolies in his ears? And he’s only stepping from a dining-room to a drawing-room in Portman Square.”
But this was Mordaunt’s thought and his alone. It was prompted by the same instinctive sympathy which had once made him row down Helford River to Passage to hear some home-truths from this redoubtable old man.
Mr. Ricardo was not given to such fancies. He was simply troubled by the knowledge that for an hour, in a room where every curtain, every piece of furniture was certain to offend the eye, he must listen to this old fellow droning out the pages of a book. Monsieur Hanaud, for his part, was puzzled, and he was showing that he was puzzled — showing it so much indeed that as he walked towards the door of the room, he felt a hand upon his sleeve. He turned and saw George Crottle at his elbow.
“Something, I can see, is perplexing you, Monsieur Hanaud. Can I help?”
Hanaud was at once all contrition and apology. He stammered, he spread out his hands.
“It was an impoliteness... I beg you to forgive. The habit grows of itself... One asks oneself the questions, and suddenly one is guilty of an inconvenience.”
“Not a bit,” George replied. “I could see you looking from James to me and from me to James.”
Hanaud was more confused than ever. “I had no right to make the comparison,” he said.
“No. And I should not have been surprised. So often one sees it — in brothers—”
“Who don’t seem to belong to the same litter, eh?” George returned with a laugh. “James!” and the dark young man turned back from the door.
“‘What is it?” he asked, not too pleasantly.
“All is discovered! We are lost!” George resumed, and he turned again to Hanaud. “You are right, Monsieur Hanaud, we are not brothers at all, and, what’s more, our names aren’t even Crottle.”
James uttered a small cry of impatience and followed the rest of the party out of the room. George, however, detained the Frenchman. He burst into a laugh as he watched James’s abrupt departure. “You may as well have the facts, Monsieur, especially as they throw an amusing light on Uncle Sep’s quarter-deck style.”
Uncle Sep’s sister Maria had married William Martindale, and had had one son, George. But William Martindale was already a widower with a stepson by his first marriage, James Urquhart. Thus both James and George were in no blood relationship to each other. William Martindale was himself a partner in a firm of small prosperity, and upon his death, Septimus bought up the Line, added the few good cargo ships which it owned to the Dagger fleet, and took both boys into the management. James was by three years the elder, but George was the actual nephew, and it was generally understood that on Crottle’s death or retirement, George Martindale would become Chairman of the Line. James, however, was to be left substantially in it, a director and a partner.
“Then one morning,” continued George, “we both woke up to read in The Times that we had changed our names to Crottle. It isn’t what you’d call a pretty name and, as you could see, James is still peeved about it — all the more because the old man, neither before nor since, has ever said a word about it to either of us. He just did it — the bit of brimstone in our treacle, but there’s such a lot of treacle that I, at all events, didn’t notice the bitter taste at all.”
Monsieur Hanaud thanked him for the explanation, and added: “It is, after all, natural that Mr. Crottle should like to leave his name associated with the great Dagger Line. One day, no doubt, he will be Lord Crottle.”
“Not he,” cried George with a laugh. “He’s Mr. Crottle of the Dagger Line — and proud of it.”
But they were in the doorway of the drawing-room now, where conversation was exchanged in low voices, as
if they were all in the porch of a church. Monsieur Hanaud was presented by George to the three daughters of Septimus. It was Mordaunt’s story that the Patriarch had turned a most deliberate back upon suitors for their hands. Certainly all three of them were in their thirties. Anne, the youngest, a large handsome woman with a high colour and pronounced features; Audrey, smaller, prettier, but beginning to look a little like a horse; and Agatha, the eternal spinster, angular, acrimonious, awkward. Her hair, gathered in a tight bun, was already grey, and her face, with its high thin nose and a bitter mouth, had lost, so worn it was and tired, any pretension to charm which it might have had. She gave Monsieur Hanaud a hand so thin that it caused him a little shock, as though he had shaken hands with a skeleton; and whereas the other two sisters had shown some little excitement, not at meeting him, but at the recurrence of this weekly ceremonial, she greeted him with a dull eye and a languid voice. “I hope you won’t be too bored.”
“I?” exclaimed Hanaud. “But I am never bored, even when there is reason to be. So how could I be bored here?”
Mr. Ricardo caught the words and once more whispered “hypocrite.” The room was just what he expected. Not one artistic nerve in him but twanged distressfully. The curtains were of crimson rep with pelmets disfigured by yellow rectangles; the chairs of black painted wood, with thin gold lines, were upholstered tightly in black and green silk with buttons sunk in little pits; and wherever an antimacassar could be hung, it was hung. One particular piece shook Mr. Ricardo to his centre — a cabinet without a curve, made in black painted wood. There was an oblong bevelled mirror in the raised central back, and below the level surface two cupboards with bouquets of roses painted on the doors. His eye, indeed, rested with pleasure upon an oval mahogany table, a Regency cabinet in white and gold in a corner of the room, and an arm-chair by Chippendale in which Septimus was to sit. An electric lamp with a green shade burned upon the table, and the book from which Septimus Crottle was to read lay closed within the circle of light.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 161