On Mrs. Mallett’s arrival at her house Mrs. Rudd’s servant was at once despatched with reassuring news, and Hewitt once more addressed himself to the question of the burglary. “First, Mrs. Mallett,” he said, “did you ever conceal anything—anything at all, mind—in the frame of an engraving?”
“No, never.”
“Were any of your engravings framed before you had them?”
“Not one that I can remember. They were mostly uncle Joseph’s, and he kept them with a lot of others in drawers. He was rather a collector, you know.”
“Very well. Now come up to the attic. Something has been opened there that was not touched at the first attempt.”
“See now,” said Hewitt, when the attic was reached, “here is a box full of papers. Do you know everything that was in it?”
“No, I don’t,” Mrs. Mallett replied. “There were a lot of my uncle’s manuscript plays. Here you see ‘The Dead Bridegroom, or the Drum of Fortune,’ and so on; and there were a lot of autographs. I took no interest in them, although some were rather valuable, I believe.”
“Now bring your recollection to bear as strongly as you can,” Hewitt said. “Do you ever remember seeing in this box a paper bearing nothing whatever upon it but a wax seal?”
“Oh yes, I remember that well enough. I’ve noticed it each time I’ve turned the box over—which is very seldom. It was a plain slip of vellum paper with a red seal, cracked and rather worn—some celebrated person’s seal, I suppose. What about it?”
Hewitt was turning the papers over one at a time. “It doesn’t seem to be here now,” he said. “Do you see it?”
“No,” Mrs. Mallett returned, examining the papers herself, “it isn’t. It appears to be the only thing missing. But why should they take it?”
“I think we are at the bottom of all this mystery now,” Hewitt answered quietly. “It is the Seal of the Woman.”
“The what? I don’t understand.”
“The fact is, Mrs. Mallett, that these people have never wanted your uncle Joseph’s snuff-box at all, but that seal.”
“Not wanted the snuff-box? Nonsense! Why, didn’t I tell you Penner asked for it—wanted to buy it?”
“Yes, you did, but so far as I can remember you never spoke of a single instance of Penner mentioning the snuff-box by name. He spoke of a sacred relic, and you, of course, very naturally assumed he spoke of the box. None of the anonymous letters mentioned the box, you know, and once or twice they actually did mention a seal, though usually the thing was spoken of in a roundabout and figurative way. All along, these people—Reuben Penner and the others—have been after the seal, and you have been defending the snuff-box.”
“But why the seal?”
“Did you never hear of Joanna Southcott?”
“Oh yes, of course; she was an ignorant visionary who set up as prophetess eighty or ninety years ago or more.”
“Joanna Southcott gave herself out as a prophetess in 1790. She was to be the mother of the Messiah, she said, and she was the woman driven into the wilderness, as foretold in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation. She died at the end of 1814, when her followers numbered more than 100,000, all fanatic believers. She had made rather a good thing in her lifetime by the sale of seals, each of which was to secure the eternal salvation of the holder. At her death, of course, many of the believers fell away, but others held on as faithfully as ever, asserting that ‘the holy Joanna’ would rise again and fulfil all the prophecies. These poor people dwindled in numbers gradually, and although they attempted to bring up their children in their own faith, the whole belief has been practically extinct for years now. You will remember that you told me of Penner’s mother being a superstitious fanatic of some sort, and that your uncle Joseph had checked her extravagances. The thing seems pretty plain now. Your uncle Joseph possessed himself of Joanna Southcott’s seal by way of removing from poor old Mrs. Penner an object of a sort of idolatry, and kept it as a curiosity. Reuben Penner grew up strong in his mother’s delusions, and to him and the few believers he had gathered round him at his Tabernacle, the seal was an object worth risking anything to get. First he tried to convert you to his belief. Then he tried to buy it; after that, he and his friends tried anonymous letters, and at last, grown desperate, they resorted to watching you, burglary and kidnapping. Their first night’s raid was unsuccessful, so last night they tried kidnapping you by the aid of a cabman. When they had got you, and you had at last given them to understand that it was your uncle Joseph’s snuff-box you were defending, they tried the house again, and this time were successful. I guessed they had succeeded then, from a simple circumstance. They had begun to cut out the backs of framed engravings for purposes of search, but only some of the engravings were so treated. That meant either that the article wanted was found behind one of them, or that the intruders broke off in their picture-examination to search somewhere else, and were then successful, and so under no necessity of opening the other engravings. You assured me that nothing could have been concealed in any of the engravings, so I at once assumed that they had found what they were after in the only place wherein they had not searched the night before—the attic—and probably among the papers in the trunk.”
“But then if they found it there why didn’t they return and let me go?”
“Because you would have found where they had brought you. They probably intended to keep you there till the dark of the next evening, and then take you away in a cab again and leave you some distance off. To prevent my following and possibly finding you they left here on your looking-glass this note” (Hewitt produced it) “threatening all sorts of vague consequences if you were not left to them. They knew you had come to me, of course, having followed you to my office. And now Penner feels himself anything but safe. He has relinquished his greengrocery and dispensed his stock in charity, and probably, having got the seal he has taken himself off. Not so much perhaps from fear of punishment as for fear the seal may be taken from him, and with it the salvation his odd belief teaches him it will confer.”
Mrs. Mallett sat silently for a little while and then said in a rather softened voice, “Mr. Hewitt, I am not what is called a woman of sentiment, as you may have observed, and I have been most shamefully treated over this wretched seal. But if all you tell me has been actually what has happened I have a sort of perverse inclination to forgive the man in spite of myself. The thing probably had been his mother’s—or at any rate he believed so—and his giving up his little all to attain the object of his ridiculous faith, and distributing his goods among the poor people and all that—really it’s worthy of an old martyr, if only it were done in the cause of a faith a little less stupid—though of course he thinks his is the only religion, as others do of theirs. But then”—Mrs. Mallett stiffened again—“there’s not much to prove your theories, is there?”
Hewitt smiled. “Perhaps not,” he said, “except that, to my mind at any rate, everything points to my explanation being the only possible one. The thing presented itself to you, from the beginning, as an attempt on the snuff-box you value so highly, and the possibility of the seal being the object aimed at never entered your mind. I saw it whole from the outside, and on thinking the thing over after our first interview I remembered Joanna Southcott. I think I am right.”
“Well, if you are, as I said, I half believe I shall forgive the man. We will advertise if you like, telling him he has nothing to fear if he can give an explanation of his conduct consistent with what he calls his religious belief, absurd as it may be.”
That night fell darker and foggier than the last. The advertisement went into the daily papers, but Reuben Penner never saw it. Late the next day a bargeman passing Old Swan Pier struck some large object with his boat-hook and brought it to the surface. It was the body of a drowned man, and it was afterwards identified as that of Reuben Penner, late greengrocer, of Hammersmith. How he came into the water there was nothing to show. There was no money nor any valuables found on t
he body, and there was a story of a large, heavy-faced man who had given a poor woman—a perfect stranger—a watch and chain and a handful of money down near Tower Hill on that foggy evening. But this again was only a story, not definitely authenticated. What was certain was that, tied securely round the dead man’s neck with a cord, and gripped and crumpled tightly in his right hand, was a soddened piece of vellum paper, blank, but carrying an old red seal, of which the device was almost entirely rubbed and cracked away. Nobody at the inquest quite understood this.
Note on Sources
The stories in this collection have been taken from the following sources:
“The Lenton Croft Robberies” and “The Case of the Dixon Torpedo” appeared in The Strand Magazine, Volume VII (January-June, 1894). “The Stanway Cameo Mystery” appeared in The Strand Magazine, Volume VIII (July-December, 1894).
“The Nicobar Bullion Case,” “The Holford Will Case” and “The Case of the Missing Hand” were published in The Windsor Magazine, Volume I (January-June, 1895). “The Case of Mr. Geldard’s Elopement,” “The Case of the ‘Flitterbat Lancers’ ” and “The Case of the Ward Lane Tabernacle” appeared in The Windsor Magazine, Volume III (January-June, 1896).
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The Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories Page 28
