Unravelled Knots

by Baroness Orczy

  Mr. Jacobs went straight to the police that self-same evening, and the next day Lady Polchester had a visit from Detective Purley, one of the ablest as he was one of the most tactful men on the staff. But indeed he had need of all his tact in face of the infuriated cinema star when that lady realised the object of his visit.

  “How dared they come and ask her such impertinent questions?” she stormed. “Did they imagine she had stolen the beastly picture which she would as soon throw on the dust heap as look at again? She, who could buy up all the pictures in any gallery and not feel the pinch…” and so on; and so on. The unfortunate Purley had a very unpleasant quarter of an hour, but after a while he succeeded in pacifying the irate lady and got her to listen calmly to what he had to say.

  He managed to make her understand that without casting the slightest aspersion upon her honourability or that of the late Charles B. Tupper, there was no getting away from the fact that the picture now hanging in the library of Holt Manor was the property of the Duc de Rochechouart from whose house in France it was stolen over two years before—to be quite accurate it was stolen on July 25th, 1919.

  “Then,” retorted the lady, by no means convinced or mollified, “I can prove you all to be liars, for the late Mr. Charles B. Tupper bought the old thing long before that. He had been on the continent in the spring of 1919 and landed in New York again on May 18th. He told me then that he had made some interesting purchases in Europe, amongst them there was a picture for which he had paid half a million dollars. I scolded him about it, us I thought he was throwing his money away on such stuff, but he said that he wanted to make use of the picture for some wonderful advertising scheme he had in his mind, so I said no more about it. But that is the picture you say was stolen from some duke or other in July, when I tell you that it had been shipped for New York a month at least before that.”

  Perhaps at this point Detective Purley failed to conceal altogether a slight look of incredulity, for Lady Polchester turned on him once more like a fury.

  “So you still think I stole the dirty old picture, do you?” she cried, using further language that is quite unprintable, “and you think that I am such a ninny and that I will give it up simply because you are trying to bully me. But I won’t, so there! I can prove the truth of every word I say, and I don’t care if I have to spend another million dollars to put your old duke in prison for talking such rot about me.”

  Once again Purley’s tact had to come into play, and after a while he succeeded in soothing the lady’s outraged feelings. With infinite patience he gradually got her to view the matter more calmly and above all not to look upon him as an enemy, but as a friend whose one desire was to throw light upon what certainly seemed an extraordinary mystery.

  “Very well, then,” she said, after a while, “I’ll tell you all I can. I don’t know when the picture was shipped from Europe but I do know that a case addressed to Mr. Charles B. Tupper and marked ‘valuable picture with great care’ was delivered at our house in New York on July 18th. I can’t mistake the date because Mr. Tupper was already very ill when the case arrived and he died two days later, that is on July 20th 1919. That you can ascertain easily enough, can’t you?” Lady Polchester added tartly. Then as Purley offered no comment she went on more quietly:

  “That’s all right, then. Now let me tell you that the case containing this picture was in my house two days before Mr. Tupper died, and that I never had it undone until a couple of months ago, here in this house. I had it shipped from New York, not along with all my things, but by itself; and there is the lawyer over there, Mr. George F. Topham, who can tell you all about the case. I was too upset what with Mr. Tupper’s illness and then his death, and the will and the whole bag of tricks to trouble much about it myself, but I told the lawyer that it contained a picture for which Mr. Tupper had paid half a million dollars, and it was put down for probate for that amount; the lawyer took charge of the old thing, and he can swear, and lots of people over in the States can swear that the case was never undone. And the shipping company can swear that it never was touched whilst it was in their charge. They delivered it here and their men opened the case for us and helped us to hang the picture.

  “And now,” concluded Lady Polchester, not because she had nothing more to say but presumably because she was out of breath, “now perhaps you’ll tell me how a picture which was over in New York on the 18th of July can have been stolen from France on the 25th; and if you can’t tell me that, then I’ll trouble you to clear out of my house, for I’ve no use for Nosey Parkers about the place.”

  The unfortunate Purley had certainly, by all accounts, rather a rough time of it with the lady. Nor could he arrive at any satisfactory arrangement with her. Needless to say that she absolutely refused to give up the picture unless she were forced to do so by law, and even then, she dared say, she could make it very unpleasant for some people.

  III

  The next event of any importance in this extraordinary case was the action brought by the Duc and Duchesse de Rochechouart here in England against Lady Polchester for illegal detention of their property.

  It very soon transpired that several witnesses had come over from the States in order to corroborate the lady’s assertions with regard to her rightful ownership of the picture, and the public was once more on the tiptoe of expectation.

  The case came on for hearing in March and only lasted two days. The picture was in court and was identified first by the Duc and the Duchesse de Rochechouart and then by two or three experts as the genuine work of Ingres: La Fiancée known throughout the entire art world as having been purchased by the Duc’s grandfather from the artist himself in 1850, and having been in the possession of the family uninterruptedly ever since. The Duc himself had last seen it in his own chateau at half-past four on the afternoon of July 25, 1919.

  A well-known peculiarity about the masterpiece was that it had originally been painted on a somewhat larger canvas, and that the artist himself, at the request of the original purchaser, had it cut smaller and re-strained on a smaller stretcher; this alteration was, of course, distinctly visible on the picture. The frame was new; it was admittedly purchased by Lady Polchester recently. When the picture came into her possession it was unframed.

  On that lady’s behalf on the other hand there was a formidable array of witnesses, foremost amongst these being Mr. Anthony Kleeberger, who was the late Charles B. Tupper’s secretary and manager. He was the first to throw some light on the original transaction whereby La Fiancée first came into his employer’s possession.

  “Mr. Tupper,” he explained, “was the inventor of a new process of colour photography which he desired to test and then to advertise all over the world by means of reproduction from some world-famous masterpiece, and when during the spring of 1919 I accompanied him to Europe, one of the objects which he had in mind was the purchase of a picture suitable for his purpose. It pretty soon was known all over the art world of the continent what we were after and that Mr. Tupper was prepared to pay a big price for his choice. You would be surprised if I were to tell you of some of the offers we had in Vienna, in London, even in Rome.

  “At last, when we were staying in Paris, Mr. Tupper came to me one day and told me he had at last found the very picture he wanted. He had gone to the studio of a picture restorer who had written to him and offered him a genuine Ingres. He had seen the picture and liked it, and had agreed to give the owner half a million dollars for it. I thought this a terrific price and frankly I was a little doubtful whether my employer had a sufficient knowledge of art to enter into a transaction of this sort. I feared that he might be badly had, and buying some spurious imitation rather than a masterpiece. But Mr. Tupper was always a queer man in business. Once he had made up his mind there was no arguing with him. ‘I like the picture,’ was all that he ever said to me in response to some timid suggestion on my part that he should seek expert advice, ‘and I have agreed to buy it for half a million dollars, simply because the
fellow would not part with it for less. I believe it to be genuine. But if it is not I don’t care. It will answer my purpose and there it is.’

  “He then gave me instructions to see about the packing and forwarding of the picture and this I did. I must say that I had terrible misgivings about the whole affair. I certainly thought the picture magnificent, but of course I am no judge. It had a worthless frame round it which I discarded in order to facilitate the packing. The picture restorer’s studio was up a back street in the Montmartre quarter. He and his wife saw to the packing themselves; I never saw anybody else in the place. I arranged for the forwarding of the case, for the insurance and so on, and I myself handed over to the vendor, whose name was given to me as Matthieu Vignard, five hundred thousand dollar bills in the name and on account of my employer, Mr. Charles B. Tupper. Of course I presumed that the snuffy old man and his blousy wife were acting for some personage who desired to remain unknown, and as time went on and there was no talk in the art world or in the newspapers then about any great masterpiece being stolen, I soon forgot my misgivings, and a couple of months later I set out on Mr. Tupper’s business for Central America where I remained for close on two years.

  “Half the time during those years I was up country in Costa Rica, Venezuela and so on where newspapers are scarce, and when the hue and cry was after a picture stolen from the house of the Duc de Rochechouart, I knew nothing about it. But this picture now in court is certainly the one which Mr. Tupper bought in Paris at the end of June 1919, and which I myself saw packed and nailed down in its case and forwarded to New York where it arrived two days before Mr. Tupper’s death.”

  That was the substance of Mr. Kleeberger’s evidence, by far the most important heard on the first day of the action. After that the testimony of other witnesses went to confirm the whole story. There was the well-known New York solicitor, Mr. George F. Topham, who took charge of the picture after the death of his client, Mr. Tupper, and the managing director of the Nebraska Safe Deposit Company where it was stored until Lady Polchester sent for it. There were the managers of the shipping companies who forwarded the picture from Paris to New York in June-July 1919, and from New York to Holt Manor in the following year, and there were the removal men and servants who saw the picture unpacked and hung in the library at the Manor.

  It took two days to go through all that evidence, but it was never either conflicting or doubtful. Yet the one supreme, mysterious contradiction remained, namely, that the picture now in court, the wonderful Ingres masterpiece, was bought by Mr. Tupper in Paris in June 1919, and then and there shipped over by him to New York, and that, nevertheless, it was stated never to have left the Duc de Rochechouart’s possession from the day when his grandfather bought it more than seventy years ago until that memorable twenty-fifth of July, 1919, when it was stolen on the very day it was about to pass into the possession of Mr. Aaron Jacobs. One felt one’s head reeling when one thought out this amazing puzzle, and the decision of the learned judge was awaited with palpitating curiosity.

  But after the second day of the action, just before it was adjourned, counsel on both sides were able to announce that their respective clients had come to an exceedingly satisfactory arrangement. All aspersions as to the honourability of the late Charles B. Tupper or of Lady Polchester would be publicly withdrawn and a notice to that effect would appear in all the leading newspapers of London, Paris and New York; and Lady Polchester would now remain in undisputed possession of the Ingres masterpiece, having paid its rightful owner the Duc de Rochechouart the sum of one hundred and twenty thousand pounds for it.

  So both parties we may take it were completely satisfied; at one time it had looked as if the unfortunate duke would be done both out of his picture and out of the money, and another as if Lady Polchester would be so defrauded. But now all was well and the learned judge declared himself pleased with the agreement. Not so the public who were left to face a mystery which every one felt would never now be cleared up.

  I for one felt completely at sea, so much so indeed that my thoughts instinctively flew to the curious creature in the blameless teashop who I felt sure would have a theory of his own which would account for what was puzzling us all.

  And a day or two later I saw him, weaving a fantastic design of knots in a piece of string. He knew that I wished to hear his explanation of the mystery of the Ingres masterpiece, but he kept me on tenterhooks for some time, wearing out my patience with his sharp, sarcastic comments.

  “Do you admit,” he asked me at one time, with his exasperating chuckle, “that the Ingres masterpiece could have been in two places at one and the same time?”

  “No, of course,” I replied, “I do not admit such nonsense.”

  “Very well then,” he resumed, “what is the logical conclusion?”

  “That there were two pictures,” I said coldly.

  “Of course there were two pictures. And as the great Mr. Ingres did not presumably paint his masterpiece in duplicate, we must take it that one picture was the original and the other the copy.”

  Now it was my turn to grow sarcastic and I retorted drily:

  “Having done that, we are no nearer a solution of the mystery than we were before.”

  “Are we not?” he rejoined with a cackle like an old hen. “Now it seems to me that when we have admitted that one of the pictures was a copy of the other, and when we know that the picture which Mr. Charles B. Tupper bought was the original, because that was the one that was produced in court, we must come to the conclusion that the one which was stolen from the chateau in France could only have been the copy.”

  “Why yes,” I admitted, “but then again we have been told that the grandfather of the present Duc de Rochechouart bought the picture from the artist himself, and that it has been in the uninterrupted possession of his family ever since.”

  “And I am willing to admit that the picture was in the uninterrupted possession of the Duc de Rochechouart until the present holder of the title or someone who had access to it in the same way as himself sold it to Mr. Charles B. Tupper in June 1919.”

  “But you don’t mean—”

  “Surely,” the funny creature went on with his dry cackle, “it was not such a very difficult little bit of dishonesty to perpetrate, seeing that Mme la Duchesse was such an accomplished artist. Can you not imagine the lady being like many of us, very short of money, and then hearing of Mr. Charles B. Tupper, the American businessman who was searching Europe through for a world famous masterpiece; can you not see her during one of her husband’s pleasure trips to Paris or elsewhere setting to work to make an exact replica of La Fiancée. We know that it always hung in her studio until the day when it was moved to the dining-hall. Think how easy it was for her to substitute her own copy for the original. The only difficulty would be the conveying of the picture to Paris, but an artist knows how to take a canvas off its stretcher, to roll it up and re-strain it.

  “Here I think that she must have had a confederate, probably some down-at-heel friend of her past artistic days, a man whom she paid lavishly both for his help and his silence. Who that man was I suppose we shall never know. The so-called Matthew Vignard and his ‘blousy-wife,’ as Mr. Kleeberger picturesquely described her, have completely disappeared; no trace of them was ever found. They hired a studio at Montmartre for one month, paid the concierge the rent in advance, and at the end of that time they decamped and have never been heard of since, but unless I am much mistaken, they must at the present moment be carrying on a very lucrative little blackmailing business, because it must have been Vignard who conveyed the picture to Paris in the same way as we know it was he who first approached Charles B. Tupper and ultimately sold him the picture.”

  “But surely,” I objected, for the funny creature had paused a moment, and I could not deny that his arguments were sound, “surely it would have been more practical to have sold the copy—which we suppose must have been perfect—to Mr. Tupper who was a layman and an outsider, and
to have kept the original in the chateau, as the Duke was even then negotiating for its sale, and most of the art dealers were coming to have a look at it.”

  He did not reply immediately but remained for a while deeply absorbed in the contemplation of his beloved bit of string.

  “That,” he admitted with complacent condescension, “would be a sound argument if we admit at once that the Duchesse knew for a certainty that her husband intended to sell La Fiancée. But my contention is that at the time that she sold the picture to Mr. Tupper she had no idea that the Duc had any such intentions. No doubt when she knew this for a fact, she must have been beside herself with horror; no doubt also that she had a hard fight with her own terror before she made a clean breast of her misdeed to her husband. Apparently she did not do this until the very last moment, until the day when the picture was actually taken out of her studio and placed upon an easel in the dining-hall for closer inspection. Then discovery was imminent and we must suppose that she made full confession.

  “The Duc, like a gallant gentleman, at once set his wits thinking how best to save his wife’s reputation without endangering his own. To have admitted to Mr Aaron Jacobs and to the other experts and art dealers who had come to see the masterpiece that a Duc de Rochechouart was trying to sell a spurious imitation whilst having already disposed of the original was, of course, unthinkable; and thus the idea presented itself to their Graces that the copy must be made to disappear effectually. A favourable circumstance for the success of this scheme was the garden fête which was to take place that afternoon, when the house would be full of guests, of strangers and of servants, when surveillance would be slack and the comings and goings of the master of the house would easily pass unperceived.