“Where was the Crottle letter hidden?”
“And how did you find out?”
The questions were fired at him from right and left.
“It was not so difficult to find out, but it was amusing all the same. Maltby, with Bryan Devisher and the Dagger Line and the Caledonian Market all on his shoulders at once, he leaves that little problem to me! Listen! The letter was in the blotting-book. Horbury had come to make a bargain. It was not in nature that he should not have with him his evidence that there was a bargain to be made. That was clear the next day when in the secret drawer in Horbury’s office the letter was no longer to be found. But I was sure of it in the morning. I could not see how, in falling forward, Horbury had pushed that book with its heavy cover off the table. It seemed to me to have been worked from under him by someone else. The book was empty. Who, then, had the letter? Someone had come back for it. Someone who heard the telephone ring hours after Horbury was dead? Had he found it? I thought not. I thought that the lady who faced us in the dining-room would have had the courage to secure that weapon for herself as soon as she was left alone. Well, then, where was it? The police went through the house with a toothbrush...”
“Comb,” said Mr. Ricardo.
“As I said,” Hanaud continued imperturbably, “and they did not find it. Therefore it was not in the house. But it was near.”
“In Olivia Horbury’s handbag,” Ricardo suggested.
“Not safe enough,” replied Maltby.
“And too bulky for her dress,” Hanaud corroborated. “So I smoke a cigarette and I reflect. The garden? — with a gardener one day a week, that’s what it looked like. Yes?”
“Yes,” said Ricardo; and Maltby, looking out on his own patch of carefully tended flowers, nodded vigorously.
“But there was a fine thing in that garden which was tended with all the loving care it merited.”
“The holly hedge,” cried Maltby.
“Yes. It stood twenty feet high. It was clipped. It was smooth as a yew hedge. I wondered. Then, when I called on that kind lady for the money for my patient Gravot of the Place Vendôme, I praise the fine hedge and her face lights up. Always in the old days when they were poor, she had clipped it on a ladder and looked after it herself, and still trusted it to no one. Then, a little quickly, she adds that it requires little attention now. ‘Once a year. I clipped it in the autumn,’ and, rather red in the face, she wished me good morning. So I have it! Carefully wrapped in waterproof rubber, it is, when it is advisable to hide it, hidden in the hedge. Then I make pictures. It will be high, yes. We will need the ladder. It will be at the end near the road. No, no. Then I get from Maltby a description of her bedroom. There are two windows opening on to meadows and one window opposite the holly hedge. I do not need to seek more. On a level with the window, whence it could just be seen, thrust into the hedge out of reach.”
At this moment, Monsieur Hanaud looked at his watch and leaped to his feet.
“My dear friends, I have to fly. I have promised to say good-bye to a young lady at the boat train on the Victoria Station at five o’clock.”
“Oh, you Frenchmen! Ha! ha!” roared Maltby, shaking with delight.
“No, no!” replied Hanaud, catching up his hat and his gloves and his stick. “The days of the wink and the gay twinkle in the eyes are past for me. I say good-bye in all respect to a lady who returns to her duties in Cairo as the secretary of a famous archaeologist.”
“Oh!” cried Ricardo, to whom this announcement was news. “Mrs. Rosalind Leete.”
“Mrs Leete,” Hanaud agreed with a smile “It is pleasant to see the young so devoted to such serious topics as Neferti and the mummies of dead kings. But I do not think that her duties will be prolonged.”
“And how is that?” asked Maltby, who had no liking for allusions.
“I gather from a word dropped here and there that the excellent Mordaunt will be on the quay at Port Said.”
Mordaunt and Rosalind Yes, you have got to have it, you know... Well, perhaps you needn’t. We can more suitably complete the pattern of this story with the few words which passed between the two unlikely friends the next morning at the corner house and Hanaud’s departure for the Continent.
For the end of the holiday so often postponed had really come. At two o’clock in the afternoon, Hanaud was to take the train to Folkestone. Meanwhile, over his cigarette after breakfast, he looked backwards to the morning at the end of August when, with seagulls swooping over the river, he had driven with Ricardo across Battersea Bridge.
“Until you told me the story of Devisher’s rescue, I was ready to accept the theory of Horbury’s suicide. But that made a difference, eh? Here was a man, free as any stranger in London, with as black a score against Horbury as a man could have. Also he knew White Barn as Horbury’s home. Someone was at White Barn unexpectedly that night. Otherwise all the usual, natural fingerprints wouldn’t have been removed. Some one was too anxious. But, if Devisher had broken in and exacted his revenge, what was he doing in the house three and a half to four hours after he had committed his murder? And why did Olivia Horbury protect him?”
Ricardo nodded his head very wisely.
“So I began to wonder whether there was not, besides Devisher, someone else in the garden-room. And I was puzzled by that word ‘Sheriff’ written on the corner of the blotting-pad. Yes, I was very puzzled. Could there perhaps be something else which explained Mrs. Horbury’s silence, the lifting of the telephone receiver, the locked door, the Sheriff everything?”
“That afternoon Septimus Crottle swung into the picture,” said Ricardo.
“The name of Crottle brought Maltby to help us. Why was it that this man without money, without friends, Bryan Devisher, could not be found? Because, on Friday afternoon, the steamship Sheriff of the Dagger Line sailed with a last-minute passenger whom George Crottle had motored that morning to Southampton. The beautiful routine work, my friend, of the British police!”
Hanaud and Mr. Ricardo said good-bye a few hours later on the platform at Victoria Station, Mr. Ricardo all friendship and regret, Monsieur Hanaud a little lost, as though he had forgotten something important to remember. But, as the whistle blew and, the train started, his face cleared. He stood in the doorway of the coach, beaming.
“You are quite yourself, eh?” cried the anxious Ricardo.
Hanaud nodded. He had remembered. He laughed. He answered: “I am all Sir Garnet.”
THE END
Other Novels
Mason studied at Dulwich College, a boarding school for boys in South London.
A Romance of Wastdale (1895)
Mason wrote this, his first novel, following encouragement from Oscar Wilde to try his hand at a fiction project. Prior to this, Mason had been a moderately successful actor – his original choice of career on graduating from Oxford University, where he had been drawn to public speaking and amateur theatricals as a student. Mason’s biographer, Roger Lancelyn Green, called the story a ‘stark and soul searing tale of jealousy and revenge’. It was published by Elkin in 1895, while in 1921 it was turned into a film directed by Maurice Elvey and produced by Stoll Pictures, Britain’s largest studio of the silent era.
David Gordon’s return to Wastdale House after an absence of three years is a bittersweet one. For years, he and two friends, Austen and Hawke, have spent their Easter holidays at the house, so it is a familiar scene to him, but one now tinged with sorrow. Even though he is warmly welcomed by the householder, Mrs. Jackson, as he takes his refreshments in the house, memories of what had passed come vividly to his mind and even his forthcoming wedding, to be held in Keswick in a week’s time, is temporarily forgotten. Gordon had not been the only suitor for the lovely Kate Nugent — his friend, Austen Hawke, had also been in love with her three years before; the third friend, Arkwright, had died in a fluke accident when Hawke and Gordon were on a walking holiday together in Oberland.
Gordon’s love for Kate had been a transforming in
fluence in his life. He grew up an orphan, with material advantage, but no security and his somewhat esoteric view of life was rudely trampled by the intellectualism of Oxford when he was an undergraduate:
“The step between an intellectual scepticism and personal cynicism is an easy one for most men to take. Gordon strode over the intervening gaps unconsciously the moment he ceased to trust himself, since his own sensations had, of necessity, been the one standard by which he judged.”
In other words, his gentleness and charming innocence were gone and it took his total devotion to Kate to restore some of the old David Gordon. Indeed, it was a slavish devotion:
“…she became almost his religion…There was, in fact, an element of quaint extravagance in his devotion, such as one finds mirrored in the love-poems of the seventeenth century.”
However, there is time to while away before the wedding and Gordon resolves to renew his acquaintance with Austen Hawke, who is residing at the inn in nearby Yewbarrow. He receives a cool greeting from this once close friend and the whole conversation is an uncomfortable one; Gordon fancies he sees ‘antagonism’ and ‘malice’ in Hawke’s demeanour and facial expression, beneath a superficial civility. Fear and suspicion are present in Hawke too and his behaviour when they part is odd. What can be wrong with him? Gordon has a night of broken sleep, especially as Hawke has now revealed that he was, at the time of Arkwright’s death, in India – as was Kate Nugent. Gordon’s sleepless unease is deepened when he realises there has been an intruder in the farmhouse in the night. On investigating the outside of the building, he sees a woman in the distance, wrapped in a shawl, hiding her identity. He follows her to the inn where Hawke is staying; she goes inside and Gordon secretly looks through a window to see a scene that threatens to devastate him. The woman of mystery, out and about in the dead of night for some covert purpose, is his beloved Kate and she is having a heated conversation with his strange friend, Austen Hawke. She snatches a letter from Hawke’s hand and flings it into the open fire and he reacts with a violent gesture. After this devastating scene, Gordon’s emotions are in turmoil. Is Kate really true to him?
As a first novel, this is a strong start to an author’s career. It is not ground breaking, but the narrative is well structured, the characters are appealing and it hits the right tone for a romantic drama of its times. The use of Cumbria as the setting would have appealed to Victorians, as it was a favourite holiday destination. Had Mason not chosen to write in a different genre — sometimes murder mystery and other times, rattling adventure tales — he would have made a competent writer of dramas focussing largely on personal relationships.
Mason’s friend and supporter, Oscar Wilde in 1889
The first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
The first edition’s title page
CHAPTER I
“MRS. JACKSON!”
Mrs. Jackson was feeding her ducks at the beck behind the house. But the kitchen door stood open, and she not only heard her name, but recognised the voice which shouted it.
“It’s Mr. Gordon,” she said to the servant who was with her, and she bustled through the kitchen into the parlour, drying her hands with her apron as she went.
David Gordon stood by the window, looking dreamily out across the fields. He turned as she entered the room, and shook hands with her.
“I have given you a surprise,” he laughed.
“You have, indeed, Mr. Gordon. I never expected to see you again at Wastdale Head. You should have written you were coming.”
And she proceeded to light the fire.
“I didn’t know myself that I was coming until yesterday.”
“It is three years since you were here.”
“Three years,” Gordon repeated slowly. “Yes! I did not realise it until I caught sight of the farm-house again.”
“You will be wanting breakfast?”
“The sooner, the better. I have walked from Boot.”
“Already?”
“It didn’t seem really far;” and a smile broke over his face as he added —
“I heard my marriage bells ringing all the way across Burnmoor.”
Mrs. Jackson retired to the kitchen to prepare breakfast and to ponder over his remark. The result of her reflections was shown in the unusual strength of the tea and in an extra thickness of butter on the toast. She decked the table with an assortment of jams, and carefully closed the door which opened into the lane, although the April sunlight was pouring through it in a warm flood. It seemed as if Gordon had gained an additional value and herself an additional responsibility. She even took a cushion from the sofa and placed it on his chair, and then waited on him while he breakfasted, nodding and smiling a discreet but inquisitive sympathy.
On Gordon, however, her pantomime was lost. His thoughts no longer chimed to marriage bells. For Wastdale, and this farmhouse in particular, were associated in his mind with the recollection of two friends, of whom one was dead in reality, the other dead to him; and always vividly responsive to the impression of the moment, he had stepped back across the interval of the past three years, and now dwelled with a strange sense of loneliness amidst a throng of quickening memories.
The woman, however, got the upper hand in Mrs. Jackson, and she suggested, tentatively —
“Then maybe, Mr. Gordon, you are going to be married?”
“You can omit the ‘maybe,’” he laughed.
“Well, I should never have thought it!” she exclaimed.
“Time brings in his revenges,” said he.
“The way you three gentlemen used to rail at women! Well, there!”
“But, then, they weren’t women. They were Aunt Sallies of our own contriving — mere pasteboard. We were young and we didn’t know.”
Mrs. Jackson inquired the date and place of the ceremony. At Keswick, she was told, and in a week’s time. She floated out garrulous on a tide of sentiment. She hoped that Mr. Gordon’s two friends would follow his example and find out their mistake, not noticing the shadow which her words brought to her lodger’s face. She dropped the name of Hawke and the shadow deepened.
“I rather fancy,” he said abruptly, “that Mr. Hawke found out the mistake at exactly the same time as I did myself.”
Mrs. Jackson was a quick woman, and she took his meaning from the inflection of his voice.
“He was your rival!”
“I have not seen much of him lately.”
She thought for a moment and said, “Then it’s just as well he’s staying at the Inn.”
Gordon sprang to his feet.
“At the Inn?” he exclaimed.
“Yes,” she answered. “He still comes to climb at Wastdale every Easter. But he has always stayed at the Inn, since you and Mr. Arkwright have stopped away.”
Gordon stood drumming with his fingers on the table-cloth. A sudden impulse of a sentimental kind had persuaded him to spend his last week of bachelorhood alone in the familiar privacy of this spot, and he had obeyed it on the instant, thoughtlessly it now appeared to him. He might have foreseen the likelihood of Hawke’s presence. After all, however, it could not matter. It would be, perhaps, a little awkward if they met, though, indeed, it need not be even that. Their actual rivalry had ended with the announcement of his engagement two years ago. Hawke could gain no end by sustaining the feud. There was, in truth, no reason why they should not shake hands over the matter. So he argued to himself, desire pointing the argument and stifling certain uneasy reflections as to the tenacity of Hawke’s nature.
He sat down to resume his breakfast. The third member of the trio which for years had made the farmhouse the resort during Easter vacations claimed Mrs. Jackson’s attention.
“And Mr. Ark
wright?” she asked.
“He’s dead,” Gordon replied after a pause. “He died last year in Switzerland. It was an accident. I was with him at the time.”
He spoke with spasmodic jerks and ended with something like a sigh of relief. But if Mrs. Jackson loved marriages, she hankered after violent deaths, and so, while she expressed unbounded pity, she insisted upon details. Gordon submitted reluctantly.
“It happened in the Oberland,” he said, and Mrs. Jackson took a chair. “We were coming down a mountain towards the evening — Arkwright, myself, and a guide. We chanced to be late. The descent was new to us, and knowing that we should not get off the snow before dark we looked out for a spot to camp on. We came to a little plateau of rock just as the night was falling, and determined to remain there. The guide had a bottle of wine left out of our provisions. We had kept it back purposely.”
Gordon paused for a moment and then went on again with a certain deliberateness of speech as though the episode fascinated him in the telling of it.
“Arkwright volunteered to draw the cork. The neck of the bottle burst and cut into his arm. It severed the main artery just above the wrist. I sent the guide down to the valley, but, of course, no help came until the morning. He was dead then.”
“And you stayed with him all the time?”
“Yes!” said Gordon, and he rose from the table.
Mrs. Jackson, however, failed to take the hint. She wanted a description of his feelings during that night of watching, and she persisted until she had obtained it.
“I wonder you can bear to speak about it at all!” she said almost reproachfully when he had finished.
Left to himself, Gordon became the prey of a singular depression. The sensation of horror which the recital of the incident revived in him was intensified, not merely by its sombre contrast with the former liveliness of his thoughts, but by the actual surroundings amongst which he stood. The room itself was so suggestive of reminiscences that it seemed instinct with the presence of his dead friend. For the fact that he had but lately entered it after a lapse of years gave a fresh vividness to his memories. It was as if the dust had been suddenly swept from them by a rough hand.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 178