‘And sometimes through the mirror blue the knights come riding two and two,’ Trent murmured.
‘I don’t know anything,’ the inspector said, ‘about riding through mirrors—a dangerous amusement, I should say. Well, Randolph’s idea was that if he wasn’t good enough for the English order of knighthood, he would show them that he could get recognition enough in other quarters. And so he did.’
Trent nodded; then looked hard at his companion, who returned his gaze with professional stolidity. ‘Well, what’s on your mind?’ he asked at length.
‘All this about Randolph’s deep interest in other people’s art collections reminds me,’ Trent said, ‘of a rather quaint experience I had a few years ago. In a way, it led up to that bit of a row I had with Randolph, as I told you, shortly before he was murdered. I was going to mention the subject of this row in any case, because it raises a question that may be of interest to you. It’s this. Did you ever hear of Randolph being—let me put it as delicately as possible—a bit of an old goat in his later years? My little trouble with him seemed to point to that; and isn’t it just possible that his apparently aimless persecution of Fairman, and Fairman’s very extreme method of resenting it, may have had behind them a quarrel of the same kind—a kind that Fairman wouldn’t want to say anything about?’
The inspector pursed up his mouth dubiously. ‘Hm! Cherchez la femme, eh?’ he said slowly. ‘Well, Randolph had been in the public eye, you know, for a good many years, and there was a lot of talk about him one way and another, but I never heard anything of what they call immoral mentioned about him; and you bet there would have been plenty, if there had ever been the slightest foundation for it, or even suspicion.’
‘I suppose there would,’ Trent agreed. ‘And yet I happen to know that he had been making himself objectionable to a certain woman of my acquaintance.’
‘How objectionable?’
‘I’ll tell you just as much as I know, and you will tell me, perhaps, that I jumped to a conclusion. I have an aunt who is a rather remarkable old lady, and she and my friend Miss Tanville-Tankerton, if you will allow me to call her so, are on very intimate terms. There’s about thirty years’ difference in age between them, and they’ve sort of adopted each other. Now she told my aunt that she had received from Randolph some notes which had very much distressed and upset her. I couldn’t think why they should, because she is in a way a public character, and she gets lots of letters from unknown asses who admire her, and she is not a fool—’
‘Are you talking about Miss Faviell?’ Mr Bligh asked.
‘How did you know?’
‘You didn’t wrap it up very much. I remember you telling me some time ago that she was an old friend of your wife’s and that you knew her very well; and now you mention a lady who is a popular favourite, and has a fan mail, and has the pleasure of your acquaintance. Not so difficult! A good job for you, too, I should say, being a friend of Miss Faviell’s. There has never been anyone like her in my time. And so,’ the inspector went on, with another swift sidelong glance at Trent, ‘she had been receiving letters that distressed her from old Randolph. I wonder what can have been in them.’
‘When you look sideways like that,’ Trent observed, ‘it means that you know something the other fellow doesn’t know. You did it before, when we were talking about Randolph’s missing relatives. I don’t care about them; they can miss as much as they like; but I am interested in this odd business of the letters Eunice Faviell received from Randolph. I can’t imagine how you could know anything about them, but perhaps you do, and it is something it wouldn’t be good for me to hear.’
‘I never even heard about them until this minute,’ Mr Bligh said. ‘As for me and my looks, don’t you get fancying things. What was in the letters?’
‘She wouldn’t tell my aunt what was in them.’
Mr Bligh grunted several grunts, each grunt eloquent of a profundity of experience. ‘Just so,’ he remarked. ‘So your aunt suspected the worst. Very natural.’
‘I thought so. And when the old lady told me of this in confidence, asked me if I could do anything about it, I said to her: “Watch me!” or words to that effect. Because, you see, I happened to know something that I could use to choke him off that or any other game. So I saw him, and I did use it.’
The inspector, to all appearance quite unmoved, regarded him benevolently. ‘You’re a very fair blackmailer for your age, I must say,’ he observed. ‘But if I may ask, what did the old chap say?’
Trent frowned with a shade of annoyance. ‘All that he said,’ he admitted, ‘goes to justify those admirably produced grunts of yours. He denied indignantly that he had ever had any evil designs on the lady, and said he had only wanted to do her a kindness. Also, that what he had written to her was none of my damned business. So all I could say was, of course, that if there was any more of his worrying her, I would tell the world the story of the Tiara of Megabyzus.’
‘Of course,’ the inspector agreed. ‘No gentleman could say less. And what in suffering cats is the story of the Tiara of Megabyzus?’
‘It’s one,’ Trent said, ‘which, as you have not already heard it, I will now proceed to relate.’
He then recounted the experience which is described in the following chapter.
CHAPTER IX
THE TIARA OF MEGABYZUS
IT happened in the course of a long tramp in France with which Trent was refreshing his spirit after a long spell of work extending through a breathless London summer. It was now mid-September, and for a fortnight he had carried his knapsack through Lorraine and Burgundy, keeping up our national reputation for lunacy by marching long distances without being compelled to do so, avoiding cities, and halting for food and sleep at small country inns where an Englishman was as unfamiliar a sight as a crocodile.
Trent did not mind being the object of a curiosity that was always friendly; and when his entertainers politely hinted, as they sometimes did, that his way of taking his pleasure was beyond all understanding, he would try to explain the method that was in his madness. He was storing up health in abundance. He delighted in the beauty of the land, which, as commonly happens, had escaped the notice of its inhabitants. Moreover, most of the inns where he stayed were adapted to the needs of the French commercial traveller; a being who is by no means easy to please in the matter of creature comforts, and at the same time prefers, like most of his nation, to get value for money. Everywhere there was excellent cooking, drinkable wine, and clean accommodation; good living at about one-third of the cost of bad living in England—a point which Trent would refrain from making, in defence of his sanity, until after he had received his bill.
The harvest of the grapes had begun, and Trent, as a wayfarer through the Côte d’Or, had more than once been allowed to assist in those beautifully simple preliminary processes, carried out at the side of the vineyard itself, which have their result in the noblest wines known to our civilization. He had stood with others round the open tub, rammer in hand, and taken his part in squashing down the sweet-smelling mixture of grapes, stalks, dust, spiders, ‘et tout le bazar’—as one of his vigneron friends had crisply put it—with which the great vessel had just been half-filled by the gatherers.
Now he was marching into higher altitudes and a keener air. It was the Jura. As he passed through its crowded folds of mountain land, two sounds were never out of his ears; the dull tinkling of the bells borne by the collared cattle, and the noise of the waterfalls. Trent knew his France, its people, their manners and language, very well; but this corner of the country was new to him. Wild of aspect as it was, he found that it was run upon business lines. The more dense grew the cow-population of the countryside, the more difficult it became to get the midday glass of milk that Trent considered to be due to him in the midst of a pastoral landscape. It had all been carted off, still warm, to the local cheese-and-butter factory.
So he came at length to Lons, the chief town of the Department, and decided in favour
of a break of routine, and a few days’ stay in that small capital among the mountains; for it was the ideal centre for expeditions into a new and fascinating kind of country. Like the habitat of the Snark, it ‘consisted of chasms and crags’ very largely, clothed with dark forests and filled with the music of cascades. Trent found the capital itself, however, when he explored it that afternoon, to be very much the type of such centres throughout the land of France. It possessed its Hôtel de Ville, Palais de Justice, Museum, Theatre, and main street flanked by arcades. In the middle of the Place de la Liberté was a fine statue of a general in a commanding attitude, who had been born in Lons. Trent was unable to recall the exploits, or even the name, of General Lecourbe; but it was evident that he had been one of the Napoleonic galaxy, and no part of France easily forgets a soldier of the Empire whom it can call a son. In the Promenade de la Chevalerie was a yet finer statue, in a yet more commanding attitude, of Rouget de Lisle, who had been born near Lons, represented in the act of declaiming the Marseillaise.
It was, Trent reflected, a general rule that the more eventless and humdrum the French provincial centre, the more flamboyant and exciting its statues were likely to be. He wished that the same principle of compensation could have been observed in the planning of English country towns; but reminded himself that it would be difficult to raise exciting statues to the memory of men who, however incontestably great, had not usually been very exciting characters. It was while these frivolities floated through his mind, as he stood contemplating the upflung right arm and impressive top-boots of Rouget de Lisle, that the capital of the Jura suddenly began to belie the reputation already attached to it by Trent as a place where nothing, excepting famous Frenchmen, ever happened.
The head of a column of marching infantry—of the 5th battalion of Chasseurs—turned into the Promenade, on the way to their quarters at the edge of the town. They looked workmanlike and formidable, though a little neglectful of their personal appearance. As they came on, dogs barked, pigeons fluttered up from the roadway, carts drew aside with drivers shouting inexcusable epithets at their horses, and the attention of some workmen at the top of a high building was momentarily distracted from their task.
It was before this building that Trent was standing. At the time of the enlivening appearance of the military, he had been watching the hoisting of bricks to the roof, by means of a pulley, from a dray beside the kerb. Now he was appreciating, with the eye of a painter, the intensely Gallic aspect of a plump gentleman with a fuzzy, forked beard, tinted eyeglasses, and a general appearance of vivacity combined with dignity, who had halted a few yards away at the first sound of the rhythmic marching of the troops.
As the column approached, the idle squeaking of the workmen’s pulley overhead was suddenly changed to a strident scream of friction. Trent, glancing upward, had barely time to make one jump at the plump gentleman, thrust him violently backwards, and leap aside himself, before a great round basket full of bricks, with a length of chain attached to it, hurtled to the ground on the spot where the plump gentleman had been standing.
The plump gentleman, after a moment’s whirling fandango on the pavement, came to rest in a sitting position against the wall of the building; and the young men in the ranks, it is regrettable to have to say, laughed very heartily at the incident as they swung by.
In spite of the shock which he had received, the plump gentleman took in the situation instantaneously. He bounded up like a football, and rushing at Trent, seized his hands and wrung them. ‘Intrépide!’ he panted. ‘You have saved my life at the risk of your own! Those cursed animals above there all but killed the two of us!’
The plump gentleman then replaced his tinted glasses, which were swinging from his right ear at the end of a little chain, and turned to the pressing business of hurling denunciations, prefaced by the term ‘Assassins!,’ at the cursed animals on the roof. They in their turn could be seen to shrug copiously, with apologetic and explanatory gestures. A considerable crowd had already gathered, discussing the affair in loud voices; and then two policemen, cleaving the throng from opposite directions with shouts of ‘Allô! Allô!,’ proceeded to take the names and addresses of all concerned. There was, in short, a scene.
When order had been restored, Trent’s new friend passed an arm affectionately through his, and led the way to a neighbouring restaurant, the Plat d’Argent. In the forepart of this establishment a number of citizens had already entered on a prolonged preface to the evening meal with apéritifs and conversation; for it was by this time nearly six o’clock. Trent was delighted with the cordiality of the plump gentleman who, the moment they were installed behind the marble-topped table on the red plush settee, produced a formidable visiting-card with a self-introductory bow. ‘The man who owes you his life,’ he observed, touching himself on the chest with the fingertips of both hands, then slightly extending them palms upwards.
It appeared that the name of the man in question was M. Calixte Dupont, and that he resided at the Villa du Puits in the Rue des Hirondelles. Trent, with an apology, inscribed his own name and address on the back of the card; whereupon M. Dupont presented him with another. He read off aloud what Trent had written very much as an Englishman would have read it. ‘Aha!’ he exclaimed, beaming with satisfaction, ‘I can read English, even speak English if I must. I have lived and worked two years in your colossal London. But you, my friend, you speak our tongue with such a facility! No English for me, if you permit.’
M. Dupont proceeded, after consulting Trent, to order two glasses of export-cassis and a packet of Maryland cigarettes. ‘You dine here with me,’ he insisted, ‘at seven o’clock. One eats better nowhere in Lons, and I come here every Sunday. It would be a pity if the saver of my life could not swallow a morsel at my expense.’
In answer to his host’s inquiries, Trent explained the reason of his presence in Lons. ‘You are travelling on foot!’ cried M. Dupont. ‘That is England!’ Trent remarked that it was, perhaps, even more characteristic of Germany as he had known it. ‘It is quite possible,’ M. Dupont said with an air of detachment. ‘The Germans do not possess much interest for me.’ What did interest him was to hear of Trent’s wanderings through France on this and earlier occasions, and to know that he was familiar with the region where M. Dupont had done his military service.
When Trent revealed that he was an artist by calling, M. Dupont’s pleasure in his company was redoubled. He also, he declared, was an artist. Who had a better right to the name than a designer and artificer in a craft more ancient even than the painter’s—that of the jeweller? Jewellers of the first order, said M. Dupont—modestly leaving it to be implied that he was in that class—had something in common with the architects of past time; their work remained for the admiration and delight of mankind, but those works were without signature, the name of the artist was unknown. M. Dupont could not estimate, he said, the number of his own masterpieces in their kind that were now in the possession of rich people everywhere. For the world of the jeweller, he remarked, had no frontiers.
By this time, the hour named by M. Dupont for dinner was close at hand, and he led his guest into the spacious room set apart for more serious refreshment. Trent begged his host to do him the kindness of choosing both the food and the wine; and M. Dupont, not unwilling to prove his quality as a gourmet, did so. The dinner was excellent. The wine—Château Châlon, followed by an admirable Vin d’Arbois—was equal to it. As it proceeded, M. Dupont became more and more communicative. He spoke with animation of the jeweller’s craft, and Trent, who liked nothing more than listening to other people’s ‘shop,’ kept the flow going with question and comment.
It was when the stage of coffee and brandy had been reached that M. Dupont began to show signs of having something deeper to disclose, as well as of having enjoyed the lion’s share of three bottles of wine. He looked carefully round, drew himself a little closer to his guest, and raised a forefinger with a glance of profound significance.
The res
taurant was well-filled, and the conversation of those present was conducted in a key that favoured the imparting of confidences.
M. Dupont began by hinting that his present state of comfortable retirement in the place of his birth was not entirely due to his own thriftiness. He had always made his economies, he admitted—and Trent recognized that this was the utmost length to which a Frenchman could bring himself to go in speaking of his private means—but there was another source of income. It was due to the amiable generosity—here M. Dupont looked sideways at his guest with raised eyebrows—of one of Trent’s own countrymen. On Trent confessing to a discreet interest in this statement, M. Dupont plunged into his story.
Some six years before, when he was at the height of his reputation as a craftsman, he had been approached privately by a certain archæologist, who had the reputation of being eccentric as well as wealthy. This client required, and was willing to pay well for, an original piece in the style of the earliest known examples of ancient Persian jewellery. It was, M. Dupont pointed out, a task for an artist par excellence. Any capable artificer, supplied with the very costly materials needed, could make a passable copy of some existing piece of the period. What was asked of M. Dupont’s talent was something of entirely new design, in which the style, the very spirit, of that period of ornamental art had been captured. He had consulted long with his new client, and had spent many hours with him in examining the best examples, before the decision was made that the work should take the form of a tiara. One had designed then, and effectively created, a tiara—a beautiful and sumptuous piece, despite its archaic quality. For what purpose it was wanted M. Dupont was not told, nor was it for him to inquire. He was well enough paid.
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