The First R. Austin Freeman Megapack: 27 Mystery Tales of Dr. Thorndyke & Others

by R. Austin Freeman

  A minute or two later we went our respective ways, Thorndyke towards Lombard Street and I to Fetter Lane, not unmindful of those coming events that were casting so agreeable a shadow before them.

  There was only one message awaiting me, and when Adolphus had delivered it (amidst mephitic fumes that rose from the basement, premonitory of fried plaice), I pocketed my stethoscope and betook myself to Gunpowder Alley, the aristocratic abode of my patient, joyfully threading the now familiar passages of Gough Square and Wine Office Court, and meditating pleasantly on the curious literary flavour that pervades these little-known regions. For the shade of the author of Rasselas still seems to haunt the scenes of his Titanic labours and his ponderous but homely and temperate rejoicings. Every court and alley whispers of books and of the making of books; forms of type, trundled noisily on trollies by ink-smeared boys, salute the wayfarer at odd corners; piles of strawboard, rolls or bales of paper, drums of printing-ink or roller-composition stand on the pavement outside dark entries; basement windows give glimpses into Hadean caverns tenanted by legions of printer’s devils; and the very air is charged with the hum of press and with odours of glue and paste and oil. The entire neighbourhood is given up to the printer and binder; and even my patient turned out to be a guillotine-knife grinder—a ferocious and revolutionary calling strangely at variance with his harmless appearance and meek bearing.

  I was in good time at my tryst, despite the hindrances of fried plaice and invalid guillotinists; but, early as I was, Miss Bellingham was already waiting in the garden—she had been filling a bowl with flowers—ready to sally forth.

  “It is quite like old times,” she said, as we turned into Fetter Lane, “to be going to the Museum together. It brings back the Tell el Amarna tablets and all your kindness and unselfish labour. I suppose we shall walk there today?”

  “Certainly,” I replied; “I am not going to share your society with the common mortals who ride in omnibuses. That would be sheer, sinful waste. Besides, it is more companionable to walk.”

  “Yes, it is; and the bustle of the streets makes one more appreciative of the quiet of the Museum. What are we going to look at when we get there?”

  “You must decide that,” I replied. “You know the collection much better than I do.”

  “Well, now,” she mused, “I wonder what you would like to see; or, in other words, what I should like you to see. The old English pottery is rather fascinating, especially the Fulham ware. I rather think I shall take you to see that.”

  She reflected awhile, and then, just as we reached the gate of Staple Inn, she stopped and looked thoughtfully down the Gray’s Inn Road.

  “You have taken a great interest in our ‘case,’ as Doctor Thorndyke calls it. Would you like to see the churchyard where Uncle John wished to be buried? It is a little out of our way, but we are not in a hurry, are we?”

  I, certainly, was not. Any deviation that might prolong our walk was welcome, and, as to the place—why, all places were alike to me if only she were by my side. Besides, the churchyard was really of some interest, since it was undoubtedly the “exciting cause” of the obnoxious paragraph two of the disputed will. I accordingly expressed a desire to make its acquaintance, and we crossed to the entrance to Gray’s Inn Road.

  “Do you ever try,” she asked, as we turned down the dingy thoroughfare, “to picture to yourself familiar places as they looked a couple of hundred years ago?”

  “Yes,” I answered, “and very difficult I find it. One has to manufacture the materials for reconstruction, and then the present aspect of the place will keep obtruding itself. But some places are easier to reconstitute than others.”

  “That is what I find,” said she. “Now Holborn, for example, is quite easy to reconstruct, though I daresay the imaginary form isn’t a bit like the original. But there are fragments left, like Staple Inn and the front of Gray’s Inn; and then one has seen prints of the old Middle Row and some of the taverns, so that one has some material with which to help out one’s imagination. But this road that we are walking in always baffles me. It looks so old and yet is, for the most part, so new that I find it impossible to make a satisfactory picture of its appearance, say, when Sir Roger de Coverley might have strolled in Gray’s Inn Walks, or farther back, when Francis Bacon had chambers in the Inn.”

  “I imagine,” said I, “that part of the difficulty is in the mixed character of the neighbourhood. Here, on the one side, is old Gray’s Inn, not much changed since Bacon’s time—his chambers are still to be seen, I think, over the gateway; and there, on the Clerkenwell side, is a dense and rather squalid neighbourhood which has grown up over a region partly rural and wholly fugitive in character. Places like Bagnigge Wells and Hockley in the Hole would not have had many buildings that were likely to survive; and in the absence of surviving specimens the imagination hasn’t much to work from.”

  “I daresay you are right,” said she. “Certainly, the purlieus of old Clerkenwell present a very confused picture to me; whereas, in the case of an old street like, say, Great Ormond Street, one has only to sweep away the modern buildings and replace them with glorious old houses like the few that remain, dig up the roadway and pavements and lay down cobble-stones, plant a few wooden posts, hang up one or two oil-lamps, and the transformation is complete. And a very delightful transformation it is.”

  “Very delightful; which, by the way, is a melancholy thought. For we ought to be doing better work than our forefathers; whereas what we actually do is to pull down the old buildings, clap the doorways, porticoes, panelling, and mantels in our museums, and then run up something inexpensive and useful and deadly uninteresting in their place.”

  My companion looked at me and laughed softly. “For a naturally cheerful, and even gay young man,” said she, “you are most amazingly pessimistic. The mantle of Jeremiah—if he ever wore one—seems to have fallen on you, but without in the least impairing your good spirits excepting in regard to matters architectural.”

  “I have much to be thankful for,” said I. “Am I not taken to the Museum by a fair lady? And does she not stay me with mummy cases and comfort me with crockery?”

  “Pottery,” she corrected; and then, as we met a party of grave-looking women emerging from a side-street, she said: “I suppose those are lady medical students.”

  “Yes, on their way to the Royal Free Hospital. Note the gravity of their demeanour and contrast it with the levity of the male student.”

  “I was doing so,” she answered, “and wondering why professional women are usually so much more serious than men.”

  “Perhaps,” I suggested, “it is a matter of selection. A peculiar type of woman is attracted to the professions, whereas every man has to earn his living as a matter of course.”

  “Yes, I daresay that is the explanation. This is our turning.”

  We passed into Heathcote Street, at the end of which was an open gate giving entrance to one of those disused and metamorphosed burial-grounds that are to be met with in the older districts of London; in which the dispossessed dead are jostled into corners to make room for the living. Many of the headstones were still standing, and others, displaced to make room for asphalted walks and seats, were ranged around by the walls, exhibiting inscriptions made meaningless by their removal. It was a pleasant enough place on this summer afternoon, contrasted with the dingy street whence we had come, though its grass was faded and yellow and the twitter of the birds in the trees mingled with the hideous Board-school drawl of the children who played around the seats and the few remaining tombs.

  “So this is the last resting-place of the illustrious house of Bellingham,” said I.

  “Yes; and we are not the only distinguished people who repose in this place. The daughter of no less a person than Richard Cromwell is buried here; the tomb is still standing—but perhaps you have been here before, and know it.”

  “I don’t think I have ever been here before; and yet there is something about the place that s
eems familiar.” I looked around, cudgelling my brains for the key to the dimly reminiscent sensations that the place evoked; until, suddenly, I caught sight of a group of buildings away to the west, enclosed within a wall heightened by a wooden trellis.

  “Yes, of course!” I exclaimed. “I remember the place now. I have never been in this part before, but in that enclosure beyond which opens at the end of Henrietta Street, there used to be and may be still, for all I know, a school of anatomy, at which I attended in my first year; in fact, I did my first dissection there.”

  “There was a certain gruesome appropriateness in the position of the school,” remarked Miss Bellingham. “It would have been really convenient in the days of the resurrection men. Your material would have been delivered at your very door. Was it a large school?”

  “The attendance varied according to the time of the year. Sometimes I worked there quite alone. I used to let myself in with a key and hoist my subject out of a sort of sepulchral tank by means of a chain tackle. It was a ghoulish business. You have no idea how awful the body used to look, to my unaccustomed eyes, as it rose slowly out of the tank. It was like the resurrection scenes that you see on some old tombstones, where the deceased is shown rising out of his coffin while the skeleton, Death, falls vanquished with his dart shattered and his crown toppling off.

  “I remember, too, that the demonstrator used to wear a blue apron, which created a sort of impression of a cannibal butcher’s shop. But I am afraid I am shocking you.”

  “No, you are not. Every profession has its unpresentable aspects, which ought not to be seen by outsiders. Think of a sculptor’s studio and of the sculptor himself when he is modelling a large figure or group in the clay. He might be a bricklayer or a road-sweeper if you judge by his appearance. This is the tomb I was telling you about.”

  We halted before the plain coffer of stone, weathered and wasted by age, but yet kept in decent repair by some pious hands, and read the inscription, setting forth with modest pride, that here reposed Anna, sixth daughter of Richard Cromwell, “The Protector.” It was a simple monument and commonplace enough, with the crude severity of the ascetic age to which it belonged. But still, it carried the mind back to those stirring times when the leafy shades of Gray’s Inn Lane must have resounded with the clank of weapons and the tramp of armed men; when this bald recreation-ground was a rustic churchyard, standing amidst green fields and hedgerows, and countrymen leading their pack-horses into London through the Lane would stop to look in over the wooden gate.

  Miss Bellingham looked at me critically as I stood thus reflecting, and presently remarked, “I think you and I have a good many mental habits in common.”

  I looked up inquiringly, and she continued: “I notice that an old tombstone seems to set you meditating. So it does me. When I look at an ancient monument, and especially an old headstone, I find myself almost unconsciously retracing the years to the date that is written on the stone. Why do you think that is? Why should a monument be so stimulating to the imagination? And why should a common headstone be more so than any other?”

  “I suppose it is,” I answered reflectively, “that a churchyard monument is a peculiarly personal thing and appertains in a peculiar way to a particular time. And the circumstance that it has stood untouched by the passing years while everything around has changed, helps the imagination to span the interval. And the common headstone, the memorial of some dead and gone farmer or labourer who lived and died in the village hard by, is still more intimate and suggestive. The rustic, childish sculpture of the village mason and the artless doggerel of the village schoolmaster, bring back the time and place and the conditions of life much more vividly than the more scholarly inscriptions and the more artistic enrichments of monuments of greater pretensions. But where are your own family tombstones?”

  “They are over in that farther corner. There is an intelligent, but inopportune, person apparently copying the epitaphs. I wish he would go away. I want to show them to you.”

  I now noticed, for the first time, an individual engaged, notebook in hand, in making a careful survey of a group of old headstones. Evidently he was making a copy of the inscriptions, for not only was he poring attentively over the writing on the face of the stone, but now and again he helped out his vision by running his fingers over the worn lettering.

  “That is my grandfather’s tombstone that he is copying now,” said Miss Bellingham; and even as she spoke, the man turned and directed a searching glance at us with a pair of keen, spectacled eyes.

  Simultaneously we uttered an exclamation of surprise; for the investigator was Mr. Jellicoe.

  CHAPTER XVI

  “O! ARTEMIDORUS, FAREWELL!”

  Whether or not Mr. Jellicoe was surprised to see us, it is impossible to say. His countenance (which served the ordinary purposes of a face, inasmuch as it contained the principal organs of special sense, with the inlets to the alimentary and respiratory tracts) was, as an apparatus for the expression of the emotions, a total failure. To a thought-reader it would have been about as helpful as the face carved upon the handle of an umbrella; a comparison suggested, perhaps, by a certain resemblance to such an object. He advanced, holding his open notebook and pencil, and having saluted us with a stiff bow and an old-fashioned flourish of his hat, shook hands rheumatically and waited for us to speak.

  “This is an unexpected pleasure, Mr. Jellicoe,” said Miss Bellingham.

  “It is very good of you to say so,” he replied.

  “And quite a coincidence—that we should all happen to come here on the same day.”

  “A coincidence, certainly,” he admitted; “and if we had all happened not to come—which must have occurred frequently—that also would have been a coincidence.”

  “I suppose it would,” said she, “but I hope we are not interrupting you.”

  “Thank you, no. I had just finished when I had the pleasure of perceiving you.”

  “You were making some notes in reference to the case, I imagine,” said I. It was an impertinent question, put with malice aforethought for the mere pleasure of hearing him evade it.

  “The case?” he repeated. “You are referring, perhaps, to Stevens versus the Parish Council?”

  “I think Doctor Berkeley was referring to the case of my uncle’s will,” Miss Bellingham said quite gravely, though with a suspicious dimpling about the corners of her mouth.

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Jellicoe. “There is a case, is there; a suit?”

  “I mean the proceedings instituted by Mr. Hurst.”

  “Oh, but that was merely an application to the Court, and is, moreover, finished and done with. At least, so I understand. I speak, of course, subject to correction; I am not acting for Mr. Hurst, you will be pleased to remember. As a matter of fact,” he continued, after a brief pause, “I was just refreshing my memory as to the wording of the inscriptions on these stones, especially that of your grandfather, Francis Bellingham. It has occurred to me that if it should appear by the finding of the coroner’s jury that your uncle is deceased, it would be proper and decorous that some memorial should be placed here. But, as the burial-ground is closed, there might be some difficulty about erecting a new monument, whereas there would probably be none in adding an inscription to one already existing. Hence these investigations. For if the inscription on your grandfather’s stone had set forth that ‘here rests the body of Francis Bellingham,’ it would have been manifestly improper to add ‘also that of John Bellingham, son of the above.’ Fortunately the inscription was more discreetly drafted, merely recording the fact that this monument is ‘sacred to the memory of the said Francis,’ and not committing itself as to the whereabouts of the remains. But perhaps I am interrupting you?”

  “No, not at all,” replied Miss Bellingham (which was grossly untrue; he was interrupting me most intolerably); “we were going to the British Museum and just looked in here on our way.”

  “Ha,” said Mr. Jellicoe, “now, I happen to be going to
the Museum too, to see Doctor Norbury. I suppose that is another coincidence?”

  “Certainly it is,” Miss Bellingham replied; and then she asked: “Shall we walk there together?” and the old curmudgeon actually said “yes”—confound him!

  We returned to the Gray’s Inn Road, where, as there was now room for us to walk abreast, I proceeded to indemnify myself for the lawyer’s unwelcome company by leading the conversation back to the subject of the missing man.

  “Was there anything, Mr. Jellicoe, in Mr. John Bellingham’s state of health that would make it probable that he might die suddenly?”

  The lawyer looked at me suspiciously for a few moments and then remarked:

  “You seem to be greatly interested in John Bellingham and his affairs.”

  “I am. My friends are deeply concerned in them, and the case itself is of more than common interest from a professional point of view.”

  “And what is the bearing of this particular question?”

  “Surely it is obvious,” said I. “If a missing man is known to have suffered from some affection, such as heart disease, aneurism, or arterial degeneration, likely to produce sudden death, that fact will surely be highly material to the question as to whether he is probably dead or alive.”

  “No doubt you are right,” said Mr. Jellicoe. “I have little knowledge of medical affairs, but doubtless you are right. As to the question itself, I am Mr. Bellingham’s lawyer, not his doctor. His health is a matter that lies outside my jurisdiction. But you heard my evidence in Court, to the effect that the testator appeared, to my untutored observation, to be a healthy man. I can say no more now.”

  “If the question is of any importance,” said Miss Bellingham, “I wonder they did not call his doctor and settle it definitely. My own impression is that he was—or is—rather a strong and sound man. He certainly recovered very quickly and completely after his accident.”

  “What accident was that?” I asked.

  “Oh, hasn’t my father told you? It occurred while he was staying with us. He slipped from a high kerb and broke one of the bones of the left ankle—somebody’s fracture—”