The Victorian Mystery Megapack: 27 Classic Mystery Tales

by Charles Dickens

  “It will be so, if God pleases,” said Strickland, tugging off his boots. “It is in my mind, Bahadur Khan, that I have worked thee remorselessly for many days—ever since that time when thou first camest into my service. What time was that?”

  “Has the Heaven-born forgotten? It was when Imray Sahib went secretly to Europe without warning given; and I—even I—came into the honoured service of the protector of the poor.”

  “And Imray Sahib went to Europe?”

  “It is so said among those who were his servants.”

  “And thou wilt take service with him when he returns?”

  “Assuredly, Sahib. He was a good master, and cherished his dependants.”

  “That is true. I am very tired, but I go buck-shooting tomorrow. Give me the little sharp rifle that I use for black-buck; it is in the case yonder.”

  The man stooped over the case; handed barrels, stock, and fore-end to Strickland, who fitted all together, yawning dolefully. Then he reached down to the gun-case, took a solid-drawn cartridge, and slipped it into the breech of the 360 Express.

  “And Imray Sahib has gone to Europe secretly! That is very strange, Bahadur Khan, is it not?”

  “What do I know of the ways of the white man, Heaven-born?”

  “Very little, truly. But thou shalt know more anon. It has reached me that Imray Sahib has returned from his so long journeyings, and that even now he lies in the next room, waiting his servant.”

  “Sahib!”

  The lamplight slid along the barrels of the rifle as they levelled themselves at Bahadur Khan’s broad breast.

  “Go and look!” said Strickland. “Take a lamp. Thy master is tired, and he waits thee. Go!”

  The man picked up a lamp, and went into the dining-room, Strickland following, and almost pushing him with the muzzle of the rifle. He looked for a moment at the black depths behind the ceiling-cloth; at the writhing snake under foot; and last, a gray glaze settling on his face, at the thing under the tablecloth.

  “Hast thou seen?” said Strickland after a pause.

  “I have seen. I am clay in the white man’s hands. What does the Presence do?”

  “Hang thee within the month. What else?”

  “For killing him? Nay, Sahib, consider. Walking among us, his servants, he cast his eyes upon my child, who was four years old. Him he bewitched, and in ten days he died of the fever—my child!”

  “What said Imray Sahib?”

  “He said he was a handsome child, and patted him on the head; wherefore my child died. Wherefore I killed Imray Sahib in the twilight, when he had come back from office, and was sleeping. Wherefore I dragged him up into the roof-beams and made all fast behind him. The Heaven-born knows all things. I am the servant of the Heaven-born.”

  Strickland looked at me above the rifle, and said, in the vernacular, “Thou art witness to this saying? He has killed.”

  Bahadur Khan stood ashen gray in the light of the one lamp. The need for justification came upon him very swiftly. “I am trapped,” he said, “but the offence was that man’s. He cast an evil eye upon my child, and I killed and hid him. Only such as are served by devils,” he glared at Tietjens, couched stolidly before him, “only such could know what I did.”

  “It was clever. But thou shouldst have lashed him to the beam with a rope. Now, thou thyself wilt hang by a rope. Orderly!”

  A drowsy policeman answered Strickland’s call. He was followed by another, and Tietjens sat wondrous still.

  “Take him to the police-station,” said Strickland. “There is a case toward.”

  “Do I hang, then?” said Bahadur Khan, making no attempt to escape, and keeping his eyes on the ground.

  “If the sun shines or the water runs—yes!” said Strickland.

  Bahadur Khan stepped back one long pace, quivered, and stood still. The two policemen waited further orders.

  “Go!” said Strickland.

  “Nay; but I go very swiftly,” said Bahadur Khan. “Look! I am even now a dead man.”

  He lifted his foot, and to the little toe there clung the head of the half-killed snake, firm fixed in the agony of death.

  “I come of land-holding stock,” said Bahadur Khan, rocking where he stood. “It were a disgrace to me to go to the public scaffold: therefore I take this way. Be it remembered that the Sahib’s shirts are correctly enumerated, and that there is an extra piece of soap in his washbasin basin. My child was bewitched, and I slew the wizard. Why should you seek to slay me with the rope? My honour is saved, and—and—I die.”

  At the end of an hour he died, as they die who are bitten by the little brown karait, and the policemen bore him and the thing under the tablecloth to their appointed places. All were needed to make clear the disappearance of Imray.

  “This,” said Strickland, very calmly, as he climbed into bed, “is called the nineteenth century. Did you hear what that man said?”

  “I heard,” I answered. “Imray made a mistake.”

  “Simply and solely through not knowing the nature of the Oriental, and the coincidence of a little seasonal fever. Bahadur Khan had been with him for four years.”

  I shuddered. My own servant had been with me for exactly that length of time. When I went over to my own room I found my man waiting, impassive as the copper head on a penny, to pull off my boots.

  “What has befallen Bahadur Khan?” said I.

  “He was bitten by a snake and died. The rest the Sahib knows,” was the answer.

  “And how much of this matter hast thou known?”

  “As much as might be gathered from One coming in in the twilight to seek satisfaction. Gently, Sahib. Let me pull off those boots.”

  I had just settled to the sleep of exhaustion when I heard Strickland shouting from his side of the house—

  “Tietjens has come back to her place!”

  And so she had. The great deerhound was couched statelily on her own bedstead on her own blanket, while, in the next room, the idle, empty, ceiling-cloth waggled as it trailed on the table.

  THE GREAT RUBY ROBBERY, by Grant Allen

  I

  Persis Remanet was an American heiress. As she justly remarked, this was a commonplace profession for a young woman nowadays; for almost everybody of late years has been an American and an heiress. A poor Californian, indeed, would be a charming novelty in London society. But London society, so far, has had to go without one.

  Persis Remanet was on her way back from the Wilcoxes’ ball. She was stopping, of course, with Sir Everard and Lady Maclure at their house at Hampstead. I say “of course” advisedly; because if you or I go to see New York, we have to put up at our own expense (five dollars a day, without wine or extras) at the Windsor or the Fifth Avenue; but when the pretty American comes to London (and every American girl is ex officio pretty, in Europe at least; I suppose they keep their ugly ones at home for domestic consumption) she is invariably the guest either of a dowager duchess or of a Royal Academician, like Sir Everard, of the first distinction. Yankees visit Europe, in fact, to see, among other things, our art and our old nobility; and by dint of native persistence they get into places that you and I could never succeed in penetrating, unless we devoted all the energies of a long and blameless life to securing an invitation.

  Persis hadn’t been to the Wilcoxes with Lady Maclure, however. The Maclures were too really great to know such people as the Wilcoxes, who were something tremendous in the City, but didn’t buy pictures; and Academicians, you know, don’t care to cultivate City people—unless they’re customers. (“Patrons,” the Academicians more usually call them; but I prefer the simple business word myself, as being a deal less patronizing.) So Persis had accepted an invitation from Mrs. Duncan Harrison, the wife of the well-known member for the Hackness Division of Elmetshire, to take a seat in her carriage to and from the Wilcoxes. Mrs. Harrison knew the habits and manners of American heiresses too well to offer to chaperon Persis; and indeed, Persis, as a free-born American citizen, was quite
as well able to take care of herself, the wide world over, as any three ordinary married Englishwomen.

  Now, Mrs. Harrison had a brother, an Irish baronet, Sir Justin O’Byrne, late of the Eighth Hussars, who had been with them to the Wilcoxes, and who accompanied them home to Hampstead on the back seat of the carriage. Sir Justin was one of those charming, ineffective, elusive Irishmen whom everybody likes and everybody disapproves of. He had been everywhere, and done everything—except to earn an honest livelihood. The total absence of rents during the sixties and seventies had never prevented his father, old Sir Terence O’Byrne, who sat so long for Connemara in the unreformed Parliament, from sending his son Justin in state to Eton, and afterwards to a fashionable college at Oxford. “He gave me the education of a gentleman,” Sir Justin was wont regretfully to observe “but he omitted to give me also the income to keep it up with.”

  Nevertheless, society felt O’Byrne was the sort of man who must be kept afloat somehow and it kept him afloat accordingly in those mysterious ways that only society understands, and that you and I, who are not society, could never get to the bottom of if we tried for a century. Sir Justin himself had essayed Parliament, too, where he sat for a while behind the great Parnell without for a moment forfeiting society’s regard even in those early days when it was held as a prime article of faith by the world that no gentleman could possibly call himself a Home-Ruler. Twas only one of O’Byrne s wild Irish tricks, society said, complacently with that singular indulgence it always extends to its special favourites, and which is, in fact, the correlative of that unsparing cruelty it shows in turn to those who happen to offend against its unwritten precepts. If Sir Justin had blown up a Czar or two in a fit of political exuberance, society would only have regarded the escapade as “one of O’Byrne’s eccentricities.” He had also held a commission for a while in a calvary regiment, which he left, it was understood, owing to a difference of opinion about a lady with the colonel; and he was now a gentleman of at-large on London society, supposed by those who know more about everyone than one knows about oneself, to be on the look-out for a nice girl with a little money.

  Sir Justin had paid Persis a great deal of attention that particular evening; in point of fact, he had paid her a great deal of attention from the very first whenever he met her; and on the way home from the dance he had kept his eyes fixed on Persis’s face to an extent that was almost embarrassing. The pretty Californian leaned back in her place in the carriage and surveyed him languidly. She was looking her level best that night in her pale pink dress, with the famous Remanet rubies in a cascade of red light setting off that snowy neck of hers. ’Twas a neck for a neck for a painter. Sir Justin let his eyes fall regretfully more than once on the glittering rubies. He liked and admired Persis, oh! quite immensely. Your society man who has been through seven or eight London seasons could hardly be expected to go quite so far as falling in love with any woman; his habit is rather to look about him critically among all the nice girls trotted out by their mammas for his lordly inspection, and to reflect with a faint smile that this, that, or the other one might perhaps really suit him—if it were not for—and there comes in the inevitable But of all human commendation. Still, Sir Justin admitted with a sigh to himself that he liked Persis ever so much; she was so fresh and original! and she talked so cleverly! As for Persis, she would have given her eyes (like every other American girl) to be made “my lady”; and she had seen no man yet, with that auxiliary title in his gift, whom she liked half so well as this delightful wild Irishman.

  At the Maclures’ door the carriage stopped. Sir Justin jumped out and gave his hand to Persis. You know the house well, of course; Sir Everard Maclure’s; it’s one of those large new artistic mansions, in red brick and old oak, on the top of the hill; and it stands a little way back from the road, discreetly retired, with a big wooden porch, very convenient for leave-taking. Sir Justin ran up the steps with Persis to ring the bell for her; he had too much of the irrepressible Irish blood in his veins to leave that pleasant task to his sister’s footman. But he didn’t ring it at once; at the risk of keeping Mrs. Harrison waiting outside for nothing, he stopped and talked a minute or so with the pretty American. “You looked charming tonight, Miss Remanet,” he said, as she threw back her light opera wrap for a moment in the porch and displayed a single flash of that snowy neck with the famous rubies; “those stones become you so.

  Persis looked at him and smiled. “You think so?” she said, a little tremulous, for even your American heiress, after all, is a woman. “Well, I’m glad you do. But it’s good-bye tonight, Sir Justin, for I go next week to Paris.”

  Even in the gloom of the porch, just lighted by an artistic red and blue lantern in wrought iron, she could see a shade of disappointment pass quickly over his handsome face as he answered, with a little gulp, “No! you don t mean that? Oh, Miss Remanet, I’m so sorry!” Then he paused and drew back: “And yet.…after all,” he continued, “perhaps—,” and there he checked himself.

  Persis looked up at him hastily. “Yet, after all, what?” she asked, with evident interest.

  The young man drew an almost inaudible sigh. “Yet, after all—nothing,” he answered, evasively.

  “That might do for an Englishwoman,” Persis put in, with American frankness, “but it won’t do for me. You must tell me what you mean by it.” For she reflected sagely that the happiness of two lives might depend upon those two minutes; and how foolish to throw away the chance of a man you really like (with a my-ladyship to boot), all for the sake of a pure convention!

  Sir Justin leaned against the woodwork of that retiring porch. She was a beautiful girl. He had hot Irish blood.… Well, yes; just for once—he would say the plain truth to her.

  “Miss Remanet,” he began, leaning forward, and bringing his face close to hers, “Miss Remanet—Persis—shall I tell you the reason why? Because I like you so much. I almost think I love you!”

  Persis felt the blood quiver in her tingling cheeks. How handsome he was—and a baronet!

  “And yet you’re not altogether sorry,” she said, reproachfully, “that I’m going to Paris!”

  “No, not altogether sorry,” he answered, sticking to it; “and I’ll tell you why, too, Miss Remanet. I like you very much, and I think you like me. For a week or two, I’ve been saying to myself, ‘I really believe I must ask her to marry me.’ The temptation’s been so strong I could hardly resist it.”

  “And why do you want to resist it?” Persis asked, all tremulous.

  Sir Justin hesitated a second; then with a perfectly natural and instinctive movement (though only a gentleman would have ventured to make it) he lifted his hand and just touched with the tips of his fingers the ruby pendants on her necklet. “This is why,” he answered simply, and with manly frankness. “Persis, you’re so rich! I never dare ask you.”

  “Perhaps you don’t know what my answer would be,” Persis murmured very low, just to preserve her own dignity.

  “Oh yes, I think I do,” the young man replied, gazing deeply into her dark eyes. “It isn’t that; if it were only that, I wouldn’t so much mind it. But I think you’d take me.” There was moisture in her eye. He went on more boldly: “I know you’d take me, Persis, and that’s why I don’t ask you. You’re a great deal too rich, and these make it impossible.”

  “Sir Justin,” Persis answered, removing his hand gently, but with the moisture growing thicker, for she really liked him, “it’s most unkind of you to say so; either you oughtn’t to have told me at all, or else—if you did—” She stopped short. Womanly shame overcame her.

  The man leaned forward and spoke earnestly. “Oh, don’t say that!” he cried, from his heart. “I couldn’t bear to offend you. But I couldn’t bear, either, to let you go away—well—without having ever told you. In that case you might have thought I didn’t care at all for you, and was only flirting with you. But, Persis, I’ve cared a great deal for you—a great, great deal—and had hard work many times to prevent
myself from asking you. And I’ll tell you the plain reason why I haven’t asked you. I’m a man about town, not much good, I’m afraid, for anybody or anything; and everybody says I’m on the look-out for an heiress—which happens not to be true; and if I married you, everybody’d say, ‘Ah, there! I told you so!’ Now, I wouldn’t mind that for myself; I’m a man, and I could snap my fingers at them; but I’d mind it for you, Persis, for I’m enough in love with you to be very, very jealous, indeed, for your honour. I couldn’t bear to think people should say, ‘There’s that pretty American girl, Persis Remanet that was, you know; she’s thrown herself away upon that good-for-nothing Irishman, Justin O’Byrne, a regular fortune-hunter, who’s married her for her money.’ So for your sake, Persis, I’d rather not ask you; I’d rather leave you for some better man to marry.”

  “But I wouldn’t,” Persis cried aloud. “Oh, Sir Justin, you must believe me. You must remember—”

  At that precise point, Mrs. Harrison put her head out of the carriage window and called out rather loudly—

  “Why, Justin, what’s keeping you? The horses’ll catch their deaths of cold; and they were clipped this morning. Come back at once, my dear boy. Besides, you know, les convenances!”

  “All right, Nora,” her brother answered; “I won’t be a minute. We can’t get them to answer this precious bell. I believe it don’t ring! But I’ll try again, anyhow.” And half forgetting that his own words weren’t strictly true, for he hadn’t yet tried, he pressed the knob with a vengeance.

  “Is that your room with the light burning, Miss Remanet?” he went on, in a fairly loud official voice, as the servant came to answer. “The one with the balcony, I mean? Quite Venetian, isn’t it? Reminds one of Romeo and Juliet. But most convenient for a burglar, too! Such nice low rails! Mind you take good care of the Remanet rubies!”

  “I don’t want to take care of them,” Persis answered, wiping her dim eyes hastily with her lace pocket-handkerchief, “if they make you feel as you say, Sir Justin. I don’t mind if they go. Let the burglar take them!”