Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  In the end, however, Mattie took the key and returned to Alicante, but in a less noticeable way by boat and rail. He slipped quietly into the town one evening, with a week in hand, and betook himself to an hotel. He had still fifteen hundred pesetas left and he was in no hurry to connect up with Fontana.

  “It strikes me,” he said to himself, “that Senor B. is giving me the baby to hold, and I should like to see what make of baby it is.”

  But Mattie had no luck. As he strolled under the palmettos in front of the Club and listened to the band on that very night, Fontana brushed past him and said in a low voice without turning his eyes in his direction:

  “Follow!”

  Reluctantly Mattie followed in his steps. On the dark side of a Square at the back of the esplanade away from the lights and the music, Fontana stopped and waited.

  “You have been quick, my friend, and I hope successful,” he said, as Mattie joined him.

  “Yes.”

  Fontana patted him on the back.

  “I knew, of course, that you had returned this evening, but I was afraid, since you were here a week before your time. It is encouraging to offer a little help and find oneself so justified. You will be glad to have finished with our small affair and to receive your reward. You shall receive it to-night.”

  Fontana was all joviality and goodwill, but he allowed Mattie no time for deliberation. He hurried on with his instructions. It was something which Mattie was to fetch, he understood. He did not want to know what it was. Heaven be thanked, he was not curious. All that he wanted was now and then to do a good turn for someone on the rocks. The point was, Mattie had fetched it and the good Juan Gomez was anxious to have it — was, indeed, at this moment waiting for it at his house in Elche — oh, a mere hop, skip and jump of thirty kilometres — an hour in a motor-car — and it was not yet eleven.

  “But I must go back to my hotel first to fetch—”

  Mattie began and was at once interrupted.

  “Yes, yes, no doubt. To fetch what you have to fetch! See how wonderfully everything agrees. Whilst you fetch what you have to fetch, I will get a car and send it here to this quiet Square. At one o’clock you will be back in your hotel, your little mission accomplished, and tomorrow you start life again a capitalist. Bravo!”

  Fontana shook Mattie warmly by the hand, gazed at him in delighted admiration, and added:

  “It will be best that the car should not go to the house. You have understood, of course, that Juan Gomez does not wish for the limelight, the old fox,” and with a chuckle he poked Mattie in the ribs. “You cannot mistake the house,” and he proceeded to give the same description of the house at Elche which Mattie had already heard at the Castle in the Atlas Mountains. Though in the one case the details had been given from a traditional knowledge with a real passion of desire; in the other merely as a means of leading a stranger straight to his goal.

  “But by the time I arrive there, Gomez will be in bed,” Mattie expostulated.

  Fontana laid his forefinger cunningly along the side of his nose.

  “He will be expecting you. I telephoned to him, as soon as I knew of your return;” and without waiting for any further objections, Fontana stepped out across the Square and disappeared into the mouth of a narrow street.

  Mattie was all for running home to his hotel and putting his head under the bedclothes. But fifteen thousand pesetas were fifteen thousand pesetas. Moreover, his elementary ideas of Law and Justice were based upon the Moorish system as he knew it. He saw no reason why, if he failed Gomez, Gomez should not pay the Governor something, get him clapped into prison and kept there. He went to his hotel and fetched the key. He was going to keep his word with Senor B. But he meant also to keep it with Senor X. That key must be returned bright and clean to the Kaid of Taugirt. It must be the instrument of no crime; it must help no dishonourable scheme.

  It was eleven o’clock when Mattie returned to the Square. Every house was dark, the roadway quite deserted. But the side-lamps of a motor-car were burning on the spot where he and Fontana had stood.

  “You are waiting for me? You know where to go?”

  “Elche,” said the driver.

  Mattie got in. The car ran parallel with the coast until the salt-pans were reached, and at that point, just after it had turned inland, the engine stopped. Mattie sat on a pile of stones at the roadside, watching the pyramids of salt glimmering in the summer night and hoping that the damage was too important for the chauffeur to repair. But in twenty minutes the car was ready again, and it ran so smoothly over the last part of the journey, that Mattie suspected there never had been any damage at all. What if the accident were just a trick to delay him, so that he might reach the house on the river bank at a moment exactly prearranged? Mattie was in the mood to turn back at all costs when the car reached the outskirts of the village, swung to the left, and stopped before the mouth of a lane between hedges which ran downhill to the river bank.

  “It is here, man,” said the chauffeur.

  “You will wait for me,” said Mattie Driver.

  “Perfectly,” replied the chauffeur. He extinguished his lamps as Mattie entered the lane. A hundred yards on Mattie came upon the house, a solid block of a house flush with the lane and at the side towards the river massive old date-palms standing up behind high garden walls.

  There was not a light in any of the windows upon the lane, not a sound from any room. Mattie’s feet sank without noise into a carpet of deep sand. He seemed to have come to some derelict, forgotten mansion in a wilderness. Yet somewhere in the depths of it, the disturbing little Count of Torrevieja was waiting for him, a pile of notes under one hand, the other stretched out for the key.

  “Well, the sooner I get it all over the better,” said Mattie, and taking the key from his pocket in his right hand he slid his left over the surface of the door in search of the keyhole. The door was a massive barrier of walnut wood and bolts and bars and hung upon hinges which would stop a battering-ram. Yet, as Mattie touched it, it swung open smoothly and noiselessly. A child could have opened it; and it opened upon a cavern of blackness.

  Mattie drew back with a little gasp. He was now thoroughly frightened. Why was the house in darkness when he was expected? What trick was being played on him by that old spider of a Torrevieja? Why should he carry on in an affair so suspicious? Ah, there was an answer to that question — fifteen thousand pesetas.

  Mattie stepped cautiously across the threshold and, realizing that he might be visible against the glimmer of the open night to anyone watching within the hall, he drew the door close to behind him. Then he waited and he listened. The house was as still as a tomb.

  But at last far away he saw a single perpendicular thread of faint light, as though across a vast hall a door stood just ajar. But whether his eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness and the door had always stood ajar, or whether it had only just been silently opened, he could not tell. He moved very cautiously across the floor. He imagined himself to be in some old patio which had been roofed in during a later century and he held out his hands in front of him, lest he should clatter against a pillar. He touched one and then another and so came to the angle in which the door was placed. It opened inwards and at the corner of a room. The chink was so narrow that Mattie could see nothing through it but a strip of wall-panelling. He bent his head forward and listened. He heard nothing — not even a sound of breathing. The lighted room seemed as empty as this black cavern of a hall.

  Very carefully Mattie pushed the door. It yielded but with a tiny whine of the hinges which sent his heart fluttering into his mouth. But even then, no cry, no question was uttered, and there was no sound of any movement of alarm. The room then was empty. Mattie opened the door wide, with an eye upon the crack at the hinges, lest anyone should be concealed behind the panels. But that space was empty; so was the room itself — so far as he could see. But it was a bedroom with a great four-poster bed, round which the curtains were drawn as though someone sl
ept there — or as though someone watched there, holding his breath. Mattie’s eyes wandered to a long cheval-glass which stood opposite to him in a recess by the bed and became fixed in a stare. He shivered as he looked. It seemed to him that all the ice in the world was trickling down his spine and he felt his hair lift upon his head. He saw himself and behind him, to the left of the door, the dressing-table and upon the dressing-table the solitary candle which lit the room. It gleamed like a star in the depths of the mirror and threw its pale radiance down upon a litter of broken jewel-cases and fragments of jewels: here a chain from which a pendant had been wrenched, there a gold setting from which the stones had been roughly forced. There had been a robbery in the house that night. That was why he had found the door open. The thief had noiselessly escaped that way. Then — then — what lay hidden behind the curtains of the bed?

  Mattie was drawn across the room as a needle is drawn by a magnet. He pulled one of the curtains aside and dropped it again, and stood holding his breath. There was someone there — in the bed — asleep. Yes — no doubt asleep. Yet Mattie looked again towards the dressing-table. All that violence, that destruction, must have been accompanied by noise. Mattie pushed the curtain aside again. The bedclothes were drawn over the sleeper’s head and there was no stir, no rise and fall, as there must be, however slight, if the sleeper breathed at all. Whoever lay in that bed was dead. Mattie approached the head of the bed and his eyes once more encountered the mirror. They met in the mirror another pair of eyes. The Count of Torrevieja, late Juan Gomez, merchant of Cordoba, was standing in the doorway, his eyes bright and sharp as a bird’s, a smile of satisfaction upon his lips, a glittering sword in his hand. As Mattie turned, the Count raised his voice in a scream.

  “Murder! Help! Romero, Felipe, hurry!” and as he screamed he sprang towards Mattie.

  Mattie had no weapon, but as the point of that glittering sword darted towards his breast, he swung the curtain of the bed and caught it in the folds. Already in the room above a clamour arose, there was a rushing of feet. Before Torrevieja could disengage his sword, Mattie’s hand was in and out of his pocket. It held now the heavy key and with it he struck twice at Torrevieja’s head; at the second blow the Spaniard fell.

  Mattie leaped across him as he lay. Candles gleamed upon the stairway as he raced across the hall. He had no thought of the pillars now. He reached the door. Once more it swung inwards without noise. In a second he was outside. He drew the door to as the shouts and the stamping of feet resounded through the hall. He had a moment whilst the servants rushed into the bedroom — more than a moment perhaps — yes, more than a moment. For they would wait until the old man recovered his senses and could give his orders. Mattie fitted the key into the lock and locked the door. Then he took the key out again and ran. For a while the house was still. Then the cries, the shouts, broke out again, and lights leaped from window to window as though the whole great building was in flames. Mattie reached the mouth of the lane. His motor-car had gone.

  In a few minutes that door would be opened; Torrevieja’s men would spread over the country; the whole district would be raised in pursuit of him, the ruined adventurer from Morocco, who had stolen from his friend the Kaid of Taugirt the key of Torrevieja’s palace at Elche and had crossed into Spain to rob and murder!

  Mattie ran and ran.

  Months afterwards a haggard bearded man dragged himself up to the Kasbah of Taugirt and was admitted to the presence of the Kaid. From his ragged clothing he drew a bright and shining key.

  “There is, however, some rust upon it,” said Mattie. “It is the blood of the worst scoundrel I ever met. I would that I had hit harder and killed!”

  “Mattee, explain this to me,” said the Kaid, as he hung once more the key upon its nail in the patio. Mattie Driver told his story and at the end he produced a cutting from a Spanish newspaper.

  “It Is now certain that the murder and attempted robbery of the Condesa de Torrevieja must be classed amongst the unsolved mysteries of crime. It is thought that the murderer must have hidden himself in the house during the day; but the police have no clue to his identity and the fact that he had not the time to take any of the Condesa’s jewellery with him makes his discovery now almost impossible. The Count of Torrevieja, who was prostrated by grief, intends to travel for a year. He, of course, inherited all the great wealth of his Argentine wife.”

  Mattie read the extract to Sid Mohammed-el-Hati and resumed:

  “Torrevieja meant, of course, to kill me there and then with his sword. If his men had taken me prisoner, I should not have been in any better case. For who would have believed my story? Fontana would have denied it, you may be sure, the driver of the car too, if he had been found. I was caught in the room with the key of the house in my pocket, and the Countess’s jewels in a bag and the Countess murdered in her bed. But since I got away, the Count will not speak of that key. He has all he wants, you see. If I were sought out and brought to trial, and told my story, it would not save me, no, but here and there his enemies might begin to talk, there would come a shadow over his name. So he leaves me alone. But I wish that I had struck harder with your key.”

  The Kaid looked up at his key.

  “Mattee, we are in God’s hands,” said he.

  TASMANIAN JIM’S SPECIALITIES

  AUDREY LANE DECIDED to become a vamp at half-past ten on the night of the first Sunday in August. The decision, surprising in an efficient secretary of an earnest Member of Parliament, can be traced back to an unwise prayer uttered a fortnight before.

  Roddy Garrow had said, “God bless you, Miss,” as he tripped down the staircase. That was all. But the perfunctory and professional tone of Roddy’s voice, as much as the cant phrase itself, betrayed him. For half an hour Roddy had been draping himself in the murky dignity of a great criminal. A moment’s relaxation when the costume was complete had stripped him bare. He was shown to be just a cadger.

  “God bless you. Miss,” said Roddy, and the girl wearing the eyeshade and the heavily rimmed spectacles and the holland sleeves upon her arms slammed the door of the flat with a quite startling violence. Roddy stopped and looked upwards uneasily, and with the hand which did not hold the parcel, he tilted his hat on one side and scratched his head. His story and the honest manliness with which he told it were his stock-in-trade, his special contribution to a very simple piece of roguery which in spite of its simplicity seldom failed.

  “It’s my business to get the necessary money,” Roddy reflected, “and if there’s anything wrong with the way I get it I’ve got to know about it.”

  But the story held together. It was big. It was moving. A boy in a circus; manager of the western circuit at the age of twenty-four; a bet on a horse-race and a win; other bets and losses; the profits of a season used in a desperate plunge; a bit of forgery — the big crime. The big punishment followed. None of your trumpery little sentences in the squalid court of a magistrate, but the Assizes; trumpeters, sheriffs, and a red Judge. Five years’ penal servitude; freedom at the age of twenty-nine, but freedom destitute. A relapse into peddling trickeries, and at last the chance to stand upright. His little wife — had he said “little”? — he hoped not — no! — his wife had stood by him all through. She was a waitress at Dreamland, a kind of permanent fair in Margate, and if he could only meet some generous person who would give him an old dress-suit and lend him his railway money to Margate and a pound or two to pay off his lodging, she could find a place for him too. He would be free of Tasmanian Jim and his little squad of sneak-thieves. He would be able to run straight.

  It was a good story Roddy assured himself. He had told it well too, without a whine or a break of the voice over the fidelity of his wife. He had three pounds of the girl’s salary in his pocket, and wrapped in a brown-paper parcel an old dress-suit which she had commandeered from her employer’s wardrobe. Yet at the end she had slammed the door on him. His uneasiness remained with him. He pawned the dress-suit in the Marylebone Lane for eig
ht shillings, he extracted twenty-five pounds from a soft-hearted lady and smaller sums from others. He had a quite successful day. Yet he was troubled.

  “I don’t get it,” he said to himself.

  But he was to get it later on and in the neck. For he left behind the slammed door a highly resourceful young woman in a state of extreme exasperation. Audrey Lane never suffered fools gladly and when she had behaved like one herself, her indignation was unbounded. She flew out into the hall the moment she heard her employer’s latchkey in the lock.

  “Mr. Giscombe,” she cried breathlessly, “I have given an old dress-suit of yours to a thief and you must stop it out of my salary.”

  “I can do better than that,” Mr. Giscombe returned. “I’ll take it out in overtime for the Brighton Conference. I have been chosen to propose a motion for the reform of our penal system.”

  “I can certainly help you there,” said Miss Lane viciously. “We’ll stiffen it up a bit.”

  The Annual Conference of Political Associations was going to be an affair of crowded hours. Mr. Giscombe was booked for meetings, speeches, receptions, and dinners. Thus the fortnight of preparation was heavy and Miss Lane worked overtime. But at Brighton she had her reward. Mr. Giscombe lunched with her on the Sunday in the big hotel on the sea-front.

  “There will be nothing for you to look after but the routine letters,” he said. “So you must take a holiday which you thoroughly deserve. You will probably find a girl friend amongst the other secretaries. So—”

  He handed her a couple of envelopes with a smile.