Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “Never.”

  “Then you wouldn’t understand my system, even if I was to tell it you, and I wouldn’t do that for a thousand pounds. Lowndes has offered me more than that for it — wanted to form a syndicate to work it — offered me half profits; but not for Jeremiah! I’ll double the capital that’s put in, and I’ll pay it back with cent. per cent. interest, but I’ll rot before I do more. I told him so years ago, and I’ve never budged. I never told him or anybody else my system, and I never will. I may not live to work it now. I may never get another chance of the capital. But if I don’t benefit from it, nobody else ever shall; it’s my secret, and it’ll go with me to the worm. One comfort is that nobody else is likely to hit upon it — no other living mathematician has the brain!”

  Harry could not help looking up; and there sat Scrafton in his mother’s chair, his head thrown sublimely back, a grin of exultation amid the rank hair upon his face, and the light of drunken genius in his fiery blue eyes. There was something arrestive about the man; a certain vile distinction; a certain demoniac fascination, which diverted Harry’s attention in spite of himself. It was with an effort that he shook the creature from his brain, and asked how all this affected his poor father’s fate.

  “There is a weak point common to every system,” replied Scrafton, “and want of money was the one weak point of mine. Without capital it was no use.”

  “Well?”

  “With a thousand I’d have backed myself to bring it off; with five it was a moral certainty; with ten a dead certainty. Now do you see where your father came in?”

  “It was ten thousand pounds Lowndes got him!”

  “And twenty I’d have handed him, cent. per cent., on what he put in.”

  “Go on,” said Harry, hoarsely.

  Scrafton grinned until his yellow fangs gleamed through their snuffy screen; he took another pinch before complying. “It’s waste of breath,” said he, “for you must see for yourself what happened next. Lowndes knows I’ve been waiting all my life for a man with ten thousand pounds and the nerve to trust me, but he comes to make sure of me before going down to your father with the ten thousand and the dodge of making it twenty. I’m his man, of course; but your father won’t listen to it; as good as shows our friend the door, but keeps the money, and says he’ll pay it back himself, and then fail like an honest man. Back comes old Lowndes to Richmond, with his tail between his legs, on the Thursday night. Next day’s Good Friday, and your father spends it at home — thinking about it — thinking about it — saying good-bye to everything — making up his mind to fail next day. All right, I’ll stop if you like; he couldn’t do it, that’s all; and on the Saturday evening, just as I was going to ask Lowndes if the crash had come, and if we couldn’t run down together and try again before it did, who should I meet coming out of the gate but Lowndes and the man himself! He’d caved in of his own accord. I was the very man they wanted, and in five minutes we were all three on our way to the station. It was then after eight, I recollect, but we just caught a fast train to Waterloo, and from there we galloped to London Bridge, and jumped into the boat-train as she was moving out of the station at nine sharp.”

  “Which boat-train?” asked Harry suspiciously. It was his first chance of cross-examination. Up to this point every statement tallied with the statements of Fanny Lowndes, made now nearly four years ago, but unforgettable in the smallest detail. And for an instant he was back in the little room at Richmond, the bright fire within, the white fog without, and the face of his beloved red with shame and wet with agony. Good God, what a barrier it had been! Her father the murderer of his! He remembered that the thought had occurred to him, but only in his wild moments, never seriously. And she must have suspected — might even have known it — at the time!

  “What did you say?” said Harry, for, in the sudden tumult of his thoughts, Scrafton’s answer had been lost upon him.

  “It was the train for Newhaven, that runs in connection with the boat to Dieppe.”

  “What was your destination?” asked Harry, alert and suspicious once more.

  “Monte Carlo.”

  “That was no way to go.”

  “It was an unusual way; your father insisted upon it on that account; he was the less likely to be seen and recognised.”

  Harry started up, mixed some whisky and soda water for himself, and tossed it off at a gulp.

  “Now,” he said, “tell me the worst — tell me the end — and you shall finish the bottle.”

  “As you like,” said the other. “It isn’t the most hospitable way of treating a man; but as you like — especially as there’s very little to tell. I’ll tell you exactly what I saw and discovered; neither more nor less; for, first of all, you must understand that we were all three to travel separately. I went third in the train and second on the boat, but they took first-class tickets right through. They were not to look at me, nor I at them. At Newhaven I saw them, but turned my back. They were both very quiet, and I foresaw no trouble. Of foul play I never dreamt until Lowndes stole into the second saloon and touched me on the shoulder. Nobody saw him, for it was a nasty night, and all but me were sick and prostrate. But I was practising my little combination with a pencil and a bit of paper, and I tell you his face gave me a turn. He said it was sea-sickness; but I knew better even then.

  “I was to go aft and see Ringrose that minute. What was the matter? He was trying to back out — swearing he’d return by the next boat and face his creditors like a man. Would I go and reassure him of the absolute certainty of doubling his ten thousand? So I got up, and Lowndes led the way to the private cabin your father had taken for the night.

  “And a wicked night it was! I recollect holding on for dear life as we made our way aft along the gallery where the private berths were. On one side the rail hung over the sea, on the other a line of doors and portholes hung over us, and underneath you had a wet deck at an angle that felt like forty-five. It was very dark, just light enough to see that we had the lee-side down there to ourselves. And when Lowndes opened one of the doors and climbed into one of the cabins he nearly fell out again on top of me. Or so he pretended. The cabin was empty. I pushed him in and shut the door, and stood with my back to it. Your father had vanished; yet there were his ulster and his travelling cap on the settee; and Lowndes’s teeth were chattering in his head.

  “‘He’s jumped overboard!’ says he.

  “‘You pushed him over,’ says I. ‘You may as well make a clean breast of it, for I see it in your face.’

  “In another minute he had confessed the whole thing. Your father had been leaning over that rail, feeling fit to die, and swearing he was going back by the next boat. In a fit of passion Lowndes had tipped him over the side, and in the black darkness, and the noise of the wind and the engines, he had gone down without a cry. That was the end of Henry Ringrose. He was drowned in the Channel in the small hours of Easter Day, four years and a half ago. Instead of a runaway swindler he was a murdered man — and now you know who murdered him!”

  Harry never spoke. His face was still in his hands.

  Scrafton opened his snuff-box and took an impatient pinch.

  “I tell you that your father is a murdered man,” he cried, “and Gordon Lowndes is his murderer!”

  Harry looked up with a curious smile.

  “It’s a lie,” said he. “He wrote to my mother from Dieppe.”

  “Show me the letter.”

  “I can’t; and wouldn’t if I could.”

  “It was a forgery.”

  “But I have seen it.”

  “I can’t help that.”

  “I thought it might be a forgery until I came to examine it,” admitted Harry.

  “It was one. You can only have examined the first page.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was genuine; the next was not. The letter was written on both sides of half a sheet, and the other half torn off. If you could get hold of it I would show you in a minute.”
/>   “You shall show me!” cried Harry Ringrose. “If you prove what you say — —”

  He checked himself with a gesture of misery and bewilderment. What was he to do if the man proved what he said? What would it be his duty to do?

  He knew where his mother kept the letters she most prized, the ones that he had himself written her from Africa, and this last letter from her husband. He went into her room and broke open her desk without compunction. It was no time for nice scruples on so vital a point. And yet when he returned to the other room, and found Scrafton smacking his lips over the tumbler that he had filled and almost drained in those few moments, it seemed a sacrilege to let such eyes see such a letter. Instinctively he drew back from those outstretched unclean talons; but Scrafton only burst into hoarse laughter.

  “Don’t I tell you it’s more than half a forgery?” cried he. “Oh, keep it yourself, by all manner of means. I’ve seen it before, thank you. But it’s waste of time looking at the front page; that’s genuine, I tell you; turn over and try the other.”

  “I believe that’s genuine too.”

  “Then you’d believe anything. Why, it’s written in different ink, to begin with. Hold it to the light and you’ll see.”

  Harry did so; and the ink on both sides looked black at first sight; but closer inspection revealed a subtle difference.

  “It was begun in blue-black ink,” gasped Harry, “and finished in some other kind.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But the pen seems to have been the same.”

  “It was the gold pen your father used to carry about with him in his waistcoat pocket. But it seems he felt hot when he returned to the berth, after writing this letter in the saloon, for I found his waistcoat hanging on one of the hooks, and the pen was in the pocket.”

  “You say ‘after writing this letter.’”

  “I meant the first page of it. The second is a forgery. Look again at both, and you will see that whereas there is a kind of regular irregularity about the first page, due to the motion of the boat, the irregularity of the second is a sham. It was the most difficult part to imitate.”

  Harry could see that it was so; but at these last words he looked up suddenly from the letter.

  “You speak as though you had committed the forgery yourself,” said he.

  “I did,” was the calm reply. “Lowndes couldn’t have used his pen like that to save his life. Don’t excite yourself, young fellow. I make no secret that I was his accessory after the fact. I am going to confess that in open court, and I don’t much care what they do with me — so long as they hang the dog who refused to give me a sixpence this evening.”

  He glared horribly out of his now bloodshot eyes, and took snuff with a truculent snap of his filthy fingers.

  “So that’s what brings you to me?” said Harry Ringrose. “You would have done better to take your confession straight to the police; but since you are here you had better go on if you want to convince me. You say my father went overboard in mid-Channel. How was it he was afterwards seen in Dieppe?”

  Scrafton leant forward with his demon’s grin.

  “He wasn’t,” said he. “I was seen in his ulster, with his comforter round my beard, and his travelling cap over my eyes. It was I who walked into thin air, as the papers said, from the café in Dieppe. And it was in the café the second page of the letter was written, as you see it now. As your father wrote it, the letter finished on the fourth page, the two in between being left blank. I finished it on the second page, and then tore off the fourth. I have it here.”

  And he produced the greasy pocket-book which he had used as a score-book in Bushey Park.

  “Let me see it,” whispered Harry.

  “Will you give me your word to return it instantly?”

  “My word of honour.”

  The page of writing that was now put into Harry’s trembling hands is printed underneath the genuine beginning of his father’s letter, and above the forgery.

  “S.S. Seine,

  “Easter Morning,

  “188 —

  “My dearest Wife,

  “Half frantic with remorse, degradation, sorrow, and shame, I sit down to write you the last letter you may ever receive from your unhappy husband.

  “When I said good-bye to you this morning I could not tell you that it might be good-bye for ever. I told you I was going up to town on business. How could I tell you that the business was to take my passage for the Continent? Yet it was nothing else, and I write this midway between Newhaven and Dieppe, where I shall post it.

  “My wife, I could not bear to give back the ten thousand pounds that was only half enough to save us. I am going where I hope to

  (genuine)

  double it in a night. A man is going with me who has an infallible system; also another man who swears by the first man, and whom I myself can trust. I know that it is a mad as well as a wicked thing to do. I am going to gamble with other men’s money — to play for my home and for my life. Yes; if I lose, my end will be the end of many another dishonest fool at Monte Carlo. You will never see me again.

  “I am altogether beside myself. I am not mad, but I am near to madness. I do not think I should have done such a wild thing in my sane senses — and yet these men are so sure! Forgive me whether I win or lose, whether I live or die, and let our boy profit by my example and my end. I can say no more. My brain is on fire. I may or may not post this. But I was obliged to tell you. God bless you! God bless you!

  “Your distracted husband.”

  (forgery)

  “be forgotten altogether, going with other men’s money! I know that it is a mad as well as a wicked thing to do. I do not think I should have done such a wild thing in my sane senses, but I am altogether beside myself. I am not mad, but I am near to madness.

  “Good-bye for ever. You will never see me again. Forgive me whether I live or die; and let our boy profit by my example and my end. I can say no more. My brain is on fire. God bless you! God bless you!

  “Your distracted husband.”

  The devilish ingenuity of the fraud was not lost upon the reader. Hardly a word, hardly a phrase was used in the forgery for which there was not a definite model in the original, and the imitation was no less miraculous as a whole than when taken word by word. The very incoherence of the letter was one of its most convincing features; the way in which it began by saying it might be “good-bye for ever,” and ended by confessing that it was, was just the way a maddened man might choose for breaking the news of his terrible intention.

  Judged impartially, side by side, the genuine page looked no more genuine than the other.

  The clock struck two: the younger man raised his face from a long reverie, and there were the terrible eyes of Scrafton still upon him. He was equally at a loss what to think, what to believe, what to do; but all at once his eyes fell upon the “copy” on his desk; it must go by the three o’clock post, or it would be too late for the next issue.

  Mechanically he began folding up his various contributions — punning paragraphs — four-line quips — a set of verses that he had completed. The other set, upon which he had been engaged on Scrafton’s entry, he tossed aside, but all that was ready he put into a long envelope, which he addressed, weighed, and stamped as though nobody had been there. Scrafton watched him with his grinning eyes, but leapt up and overtook Harry as he was leaving the room.

  “You’re not going out, are you?”

  “Yes, to the post.”

  “What, like that?”

  “Not a soul will be about, and there’s a pillar just under the windows.”

  “What is it you want to post?”

  “Nonsense for a comic paper.”

  Harry held up his envelope. The other read the address, and it quenched the suspicion in his fiery eyes, but opened them very wide.

  “So you can think of your comic paper after this!”

  “I must think of something, or I shall go mad.”

  “Well,
where’s another bottle of whisky before you go?”

  Harry fetched one from the dining-room, and in another moment he was on the stairs, with an overcoat over his pyjamas, and the latch-key in his hand. His brain was in a whirl. He had no idea what to do when he returned, what steps to take, and no clear sight of his duty by his dead father. If he was dead, there was an end. But how could he believe the word of that ghoul upstairs? And yet, was there anything to be gained by his returning with the police? For the very idea had occurred to Harry, of which Scrafton had at first suspected and then acquitted him.

  He could see his way no farther than the posting of his “copy”; that little commonplace necessity had come as a timely godsend to him; he only wished the pillar was a mile instead of a yard away.

  As he emerged from the mansions a couple of men retired farther into the shadow of the opposite houses; as he turned from the pillar-box one of these men was crossing the road towards him, having recognised Harry; and it was the very man of whom he was thinking — of whom he was trying to think as his own father’s murderer.

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  A MASTERSTROKE.

  “Well, Ringrose!”

  Gordon Lowndes did not look a day older since Harry had seen him last. He wore a light cape over his evening dress, a crush-hat on his head, and behind and below the same gold-rimmed glasses there twinkled and trembled the shrewd eyes and the singular sharp-pointed nose. The eyes were as full of friendship as in the earliest days of the intimacy that had come to a violent end nearly four years ago. And they had lost the old furtive look which had inspired vague suspicion from the first; nothing could have been franker or kindlier than their glance; but Harry recoiled with a ghastly face.