“That was most kind of you,” said he. “But why do you call me Sir Gervase?”
“The answer to that question,” interposed Mr. Brodribb, “explains the occasion of this visit. I have to inform you with deep regret that your brother, Sir Edward, died some weeks ago. If I had then known your whereabouts, I should, of course, have communicated with you, not only as his brother but as his heir.”
Pontifex looked at Mr. Brodribb in a queer, bewildered fashion and then seemed to fall into a sort of half-conscious dreamy state.
“Dear, dear,” he muttered, “so brother Edward is gone—and I am left. My old playmate gone and no word of farewell spoken.”
Suddenly he came out of his reverie and addressed Mr. Brodribb sharply. “But you spoke of me as his heir. How can that be? He had children.”
“He had one child,” said Mr. Brodribb, “a son. That son died some ten years ago. Consequently, the title and the settled estate devolve on you. I may say, have devolved, since there is no question as to the succession.”
Pontifex listened to him attentively, but with the same curiously bewildered air. He seemed thunderstruck. After a moment or two he dropped into his chair and sat slowly shaking his head and muttering. Presently he looked up at Mr. Brodribb, and said in a weak, shaky voice: “No, no, Mr. Brodribb. It is too late. This is not for me.”
I stood somewhat in the background, watching Pontifex with growing anxiety. Like him, I was astounded by Mr. Brodribb’s news. But in that matter I did not feel deeply concerned at the moment. My entire attention was concentrated on the change which had come over my father. It had begun in the very instant when our visitors had appeared in the open doorway. In spite of his cool, stiff bearing, I could see by his sudden change of colour, and the trembling of his hands, that he was intensely agitated. And now, Mr. Brodribb’s announcement had inflicted a further shock. It was evident to me that the sudden accession to rank and fortune, so far from giving him pleasure or satisfaction, was profoundly repugnant. And dear Mrs. Paul, with the kindest intentions, did but make matters worse and intensify the shock.
“It is not too late, cousin,” said she. “How can it be when there are years of prosperity and ease before you? Think, dear Sir Gervase, think of the bright future which begins from today. You will leave all this”—she glanced round the shabby room—“the poverty and ill-paid labour and the struggle for mere daily bread, and go to live in modest affluence in your own fine house with your park and woodlands around you and your servants to minister to your comfort. And you will come back to take your place among your own people in the station of life which properly belongs to you. Think, too, of this dear boy—Phillipa’s own boy, and so like her—who, in his turn, shall carry on the honourable traditions of our family. And think of her, who loved you and him and would have been so rejoiced to see you both come back to the inheritance of your fathers.”
Pontifex listened to her gravely, and, as she concluded, he looked at me with one of his rare, affectionate smiles.
“Yes, Constance,” he said weakly, “you are right. He is Phillipa’s own boy. Faithful and loving and good like his mother.”
Once more, he lapsed into reverie and I stood gazing at him in dismay with a growing terror at my heart. For a horrible pallor was spreading over his face and even his poor old nose had faded to a sickly mauve. I think my alarm began to be shared by the others, for an uneasy silence settled on the room. And even as we looked at him he seemed to shrink and subside limply into his chair with his chin upon his breast, and so sat for a few moments. Then he rose slowly to his feet, his face turned upward and his trembling hands thrust out before him as one groping in the dark. I heard him murmur, “Domine non sum dignus!” and sprang forward to catch him in my arms as he fell.
* * * *
How shall I write of that time of sorrow and desolation? Of the emptiness that came upon my little world now that my earliest and dearest companion—almost, as he had sometimes seemed, my child—was gone from me for ever? But need I write of it at all? My tale is told; the tale of the destiny that came to me, all unsuspected, in the egg-chest. My father’s death wrote Finis to one volume of my life. With that the old things passed away and all things became new. Jasper Gray was dead, and Sir Jasper Hardcastle had stepped into his shoes.
Yet must I not make my exit too abruptly. The world which I had left lived on, and the drama in which I had played my part still claimed me as a dramatis persona. I pass over the quiet funeral and the solemn procession to the great vault in the shadow of the flint-built tower of the village church at Bradstow; my translation to the house at Dorchester Square, where the white-headed footman (whose deceptive powder I now detected) shattered my nerves by addressing me as “Sir Jasper,” and where my cousin, Stella, openly worshipped me as her incomparable Galahad. It was all encompassed by an atmosphere of unreality through which I wandered as one in a dream.
More real was the scene at the Old Bailey—the grimly sordid old Sessions House that is now swept away—where I gave my evidence amidst a breathless silence and afterwards, as the representative of the deceased, sat with Mr. Brodribb at the solicitors’ table and listened to Dr. Thorndyke as, with deadly clarity, he set forth the crushing tale of incriminating facts. Quite unmoved, I remember, by any qualm of pity, I heard those five wretches frantically striving to cast the guilt on one another and each but hurrying himself to his own doom. Clearly, but still without a qualm, I recall the pusillanimous shrieks for mercy as the black-capped judge consigned the three murderers to the gallows; and the blubberings of Shemrofsky and the sullen protests of Trout as their terms of penal servitude were pronounced.
It was a memorable experience, and it affected me with a curious, impersonal interest. As I sat at the table, I found myself again and again reflecting on the irony of it all; on the singular futility of this crime. For it was the means of defeating, finally and completely, its original object. The wretched woman who, in her greed and impatience to possess, had planned and directed it, had extinguished her husband’s claim for ever. If she had but held her hand, poor Pontifex would have lived and died in his hiding-place, his very existence unsuspected, and she would in due course have become the Lady of Bradstow. It was the murder of my uncle Edward that brought my father into view.
The years have rolled away since these events befell. They have been prosperous years of sober happiness; as they must needs have been; for a man can hardly fail to achieve happiness who is a hero in his wife’s eyes. And such is my lot, though undeserved. To this day I am Stella’s incomparable Galahad.
Yet, though I would not under-value the gifts of Fortune, I am fain often to reflect on the inconsiderable part that mere material possessions play in the creation of human happiness. As I survey the fine old mansion, the shady park and the wide domain which is all my own, I find them good to look upon and to possess. But, nevertheless, there are times when I feel that I would gladly give much of them to look once more on dear old Ponty, sitting in his shabby dressing-gown, delicately tending the frizzling scallops. How little it cost to give us pleasure in those days! Mr. Weeks’s salary would have made us rich, and we could have had scallops every night. But perhaps the habitual scallop would not have had the same flavour.
WHEN ROGUES FALL OUT (1932)
CHAPTER I
The Backsliding of Mr. Didbury Toke
There is nothing so deceptive as a half-truth. The half that is true has a certain suggestive power that lends to the other half a plausibility and a credibility that it does not possess in its own right. This interesting psychological fact was realized, at least subconsciously, by Mr. Didbury Toke. For Mr. Toke was a collector of antique and other works of art, a connoisseur and a dealer. He really was. It was not a pose or a pretence. He was a bona fide collector, and a connoisseur who had that genuine love of fine and beautiful works that is the indispensable condition of real connoisseurship. But Mr. Toke was also a fence. And that was where the illusory element came in. Any person w
ho, not being a known collector and a recognized dealer, should have been seen, as he frequently was, in the company of definitely shady characters, would inevitably have attracted the attention of the guardians of the law. But everyone knows that the really enthusiastic collector must needs seek his quarry where it is most likely to be found; and there is no need to watch him, for no crook or fence would be so foolish as to sell doubtful merchandise to a collector who is going to expose it forthwith in his show-cases, or a dealer who is going to offer it in the open market. So Mr. Didbury Toke went about his lawful occasions unmolested and unsuspected, and, under the cover of them, did a little unlawful business if it happened to come his way.
It came his way pretty often in these latter days.
But this was a comparatively new development. For many years he had carried on his activities in the most scrupulously correct manner. And so he might have continued to the end, but for some exceptional circumstance. We are all, indeed, the creatures of circumstance. But circumstances are not entirely beyond human control. Their control is, however, largely proportionate to our control of ourselves. And that was where Mr. Toke had failed. At a critical moment he found himself unable to resist a sudden temptation. But let us have done with generalities and consider the circumstances in detail.
The descent to Avernus is proverbially easy; and, in practice, it is usually somewhat gradual. But there are exceptions; and the case of Mr. Didbury Toke furnishes an example. For his start upon that famous decline was the result of an incident quite unforeseen and, to a certain extent, beyond his control. At any rate, the determining cause—or perhaps we should say the predisposing cause—was a convulsion of nature for which he certainly could not be held responsible; being, in fact, no less than a thunderstorm. Mr. Toke did not like thunderstorms. Few of us do; especially when they come on us in the open country, in which the only refuge visible is the illusory shelter offered by scattered hedgerow elms.
At the moment Mr. Toke was pursuing his way along the rather unfrequented road that led from the village in which his house was situated to the neighbouring market town of Packington. As he walked at an easy pace on the grass verge of the road, his thoughts were pleasantly occupied by reflections on a little windfall that he had recently picked up at a country auction; so much so that his immediate surroundings received but the vaguest attention. Suddenly, he was aroused from his meditations by a low rumble from the far distance behind him, and, turning sharply, became aware of an obvious inkiness of the sky, and, low down, an arched edge of blackness surmounting a pale area in which, even as he looked, jagged streaks of light shot up from the dim horizon.
Mr. Toke looked about him uneasily. He had passed no habitation, so far as he could remember, for the last mile; and Packington lay some two miles farther on. But, clearly, it was useless to think of turning back. His only chance of shelter, apart from the treacherous elms, was in some possible inn or cottage that might lurk unseen by the roadside ahead. Accordingly, he resumed his progress in that direction, mending his pace appreciably as his ears were smitten by a sound as if a Brobdingnagian tea-tray had been kicked by a Titanic foot.
Swiftly Mr. Toke padded along the solitary, inhospitable road while the leaves of the elm trees shivered audibly and elemental bangings from behind announced the approach of the storm. And then, just as the first big drops began to fall with an audible plop on the earth, a slight turn of the road revealed a cottage, hitherto hidden by a clump of trees. It was but a humble labourer’s dwelling, timber-built and roofed with thatch, but to Mr. Toke’s eagerly searching eyes it was more grateful than a baronial mansion. As a resounding crash from behind mingled with the hiss of a sudden deluge, he frantically unfastened the button of the gate and darted up the path to the small porch that sheltered the door. Nor did he come as a mere suppliant doubtful of his welcome; for, on the jamb of the door hung a small board bearing the single word “TEAS.” It was a laconic announcement; but brevity is the soul of wit; and to Mr. Toke it was as a charter of freedom conferring the right to enter unquestioned.
The door was opened in response to his rather urgent thumps by an elderly labourer, who looked first at Mr. Toke and then at the sky, as if he suspected the former of some responsibility for the unfavourable state of the weather. But he uttered no word; and, as the rain was playing freely on Mr. Toke’s back, that gentleman proceeded bluntly to state his wants.
“Can I have some tea?” asked Mr. Toke.
The man seemed surprised at the request. “Tea, you wants,” said he. He took another critical survey of the landscape, and then replied cautiously: “I’ll ask the’ old woman.”
As “the old woman” was plainly in view, sitting by the fire and obviously attentive to the conversation, the precaution seemed hardly necessary. In fact, she anticipated the question.
“Why, certainly, Tom; I can get the gentleman a cup of tea if he wants one.” She rose stiffly from her chair and cast an enquiring glance at the kettle which reposed in unpromising silence on the hob.
“You have a notice by your door that you supply teas,” Mr. Toke ventured to remark.
“Yes,” the master of the house admitted; “that there board was put up by my darter. She’s gone and got married, so we don’t do much in that line nowadays. Never did, in fact. Oo’s coming out ’ere for tea?”
Mr. Toke agreed that the road was not actually congested, and, meanwhile, under the guidance of his host, squeezed himself past an obstructive table towards a Windsor arm-chair which he distinguished with some difficulty in the pervading gloom. For, now that the door was closed, the room was almost in darkness, the small window, obscured by dirt and invading creepers, admitting only a fraction of the feeble light from the inky sky.
“Seems as if we was going to have a bit of rain,” the host remarked, by way of making conversation. Mr. Toke agreed that there was a suggestion of moisture in the air, and ventured to express the hope that it would do the country good.
“Ay,” said his host, “a bit of rain is allers useful at this time o’ year. In reason, mind yer. Yer don’t want it a-comin’ down like brickbats, a-flattenin’ down the crops. A nice, soft, steady rain is what ye wants for the land. Keeps it miste, d’ye see.”
Mr. Toke assimilated this lucid explanation as he watched the old woman coaxing the unresponsive kettle with sticks of firewood. By degrees, his eyes were becoming accustomed to the obscurity. Already, he had converted the sound of harsh, metallic ticking into the visual impression of a drum clock, perched on the mantelshelf, and now let his glance wander questingly round the dim interior, it was not an idle glance. By no means. Not, it is true, that he was ordinarily much concerned with the simple domestic antique. But all is fish that comes to a collector’s net; and experience had taught him that if “Honesty lives in a poor house, like your fair pearl in your foul oyster,” so was it occasionally with the treasures that the past has bequeathed to the present. So Mr. Toke had made it a rule of life to “keep his weather eyelid lifting” even in the most unlikely surroundings.
“Main lucky for you, it is,” remarked his host, as a resounding crash shook the door and made the window-frames rattle, “that you struck this house in time. There ain’t another this side of The Rose and Crown, and that’s a good mile and a half further on down the road. You’d a-caught it proper if you’d a-been out in it now.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Mr. Toke. “Holy water in a dry house is better than this rain-water out of doors.”
His host did not, apparently, recognize the quotation, for he looked at him suspiciously, and replied in a somewhat surly tone:
“There ain’t no holy water in this house. We’re Baptisses, we are.”
“Ha,” said Mr. Toke; “I was merely repeating an old saying. And there is some truth in it, you know.”
“So there may be,” was the grudging reply. “I don’t hold with none of them there superstitions. Lord! Look at that!”
“That” was a blinding flash that flooded the room
with violet light, and was instantly followed by a shattering crash directly overhead, as if some aerial three-decker had fired a broadside straight down the chimney. The instantaneous flash, followed by what seemed to the dazzled eye a period of total darkness, left Mr. Toke with a strangely vivid impression of the cottage interior, in which all its details were clearly visible: the seated figure of his host, the old woman, standing by the fire, the tea-pot poised in her hand, the little dresser with its modest crockery set out in an orderly array, and one or two pictures on the wall. But all these things lay, as it were, on the margin of his field of vision, seen, indeed, but only half-consciously perceived. For it happened that, at the moment of the flash, Mr. Toke’s eyes had been fixed upon a dim square patch of paleness that was just barely discernible in the darkest corner of the room, and he had been speculating on the nature of the object to which it appertained. The flash solved that problem. The pale, square patch was the dial of a long-case clock. Anyone could have seen that much. But Mr. Toke saw a good deal more. It is true that the object was seen only for an infinitesimal fraction of a second (plus a further sixteenth of a second for what the physiologists call “the persistence of visual impressions”), and that in that instant of time it had revealed little more than a dark silhouette. But a silhouette may be highly significant. It was to Mr. Toke. The square-headed hood, flanked by twisted pillars, the slender body, the low plinth, taken together, suggested a date before the time of good Queen Anne. There were, indeed, two hands—pointing to an impossible hour and clearly indicating that the clock was not a “going concern”—but there was nothing incongruous in this, for two-handed clocks and even eight-day movements, were made before the dawn of the eighteenth century.
But what really did worry Mr. Toke was the appearance of the dial. It was obviously white. Now the seventeenth-century clock-maker had a soul above a painted dial. If this dial was painted, as it appeared to be, there were two possibilities; either the old dial had been barbarously covered with paint, or, at some time, the clock had fallen into the hands of a Philistine and had its original movement replaced by a new one.
The Third R. Austin Freeman Megapack Page 108
