The Big Book of Victorian Mysteries

by The Big Book of Victorian Mysteries (retail) (epub)

  I wrote therefore to them on returning to my office, dined in the city, and finally repaired to Euston. At ten minutes to nine o’clock the “Flying Scotsman” steamed from the station, bearing with it, among other matters, a first-class carriage of which I was the sole occupant after leaving Rugby. I had books and newspapers, bought from force of habit, but was not likely to read them, for my mind contained more than sufficient material to feed upon. Very much of a trying character occupied my brains as I sat and listened to my flying vehicle. Now it roared like thunder as we rushed over bridges, now screamed triumphantly as we whirled past silent, deserted stations. Anon we went with a crash through archways, and once, with gradually slackening speed and groaning breaks, shrieked with impatience at a danger signal that barred the way. I watched the oil in the bottom of the lamp above me dribble from side to side with every oscillation of the train, and the sight depressed me beyond measure. What irony of fate was this! Yesterday the London and North-Western Railway meant more than half my entire fortune; now the stoker who threw coals into the great fiery heart of the engine had more interest in the Company than I! Overcome with these gloomy thoughts, I drew around the lamp that lighted my carriage a sort of double silken shutter, and endeavoured to forget everything in sleep, if it were possible.

  Sleep is as a rule not only possible but necessary to me after ten o’clock in the evening, and I soon slumbered soundly in spite of my tribulation.

  Upon waking with a start I found I was no longer alone. The train was going at a tremendous pace; one of the circular curtains I had drawn about the lamp had been pulled up, leaving me in the shade, but lighting the other man who looked across from the further corner in which he was sitting, and smiled at my surprise.

  It was Joshua Beakbane.

  I never experienced greater agony than in that waking moment, and until the man spoke, thereby convincing me by the tones of his voice that he was no spirit my mental suffering passes possibility of description in words.

  “A fellow-traveller need not surprise you, sir,” he said. “I got in at Crewe, and you were sleeping so soundly that I did not wake you. I took the liberty of reading your evening paper, however, and also gave myself a little light.”

  He was alive, and had quite failed to recognize me. I thanked him in as gruff a voice as I could assume and looked at my watch. We had been gone from Crewe above half an hour, and should be due at Wigan, our next stopping-place, in about twenty minutes.

  Joshua Beakbane was a tall, heavily-built man, with a flat, broad face, and a mouth that hardly suggested his great strength of purpose. His heavy moustache was inclined to reddishness, and his restless eyes had also something of red in them. He was clad in a loud tweed, with ulster and hat of the same material. The man had, moreover, aged much since I last saw him about five years ago. Finding me indisposed to talk, he took a portmanteau from the hat-rail above him, unstrapped a railway rug, wound it about his lower limbs, and then fell to arranging such brushes, linen, and garments as the portmanteau contained.

  My benumbed senses were incapable of advancing any reason for what I saw. Why had this man seen fit to declare himself dead? What was his business in the North? Was it possible that he could be in league with the runaway clerk? Had I in reality seen him lurking in the house at Petersham?

  An explanation to some of these difficulties was almost immediately forthcoming—as villainous and shameful an explanation as ever unfortunate man stumbled upon. My enemy suddenly started violently, and glancing up, I found him staring with amazement and discomfort in his face at a paper that he held. Seeing me looking at him, he smothered his expression of astonishment and laughed.

  “An infernal clerk of mine,” he said, “has been using my business documents as he does my blotting-paper. He’ll pay for this to-morrow.”

  For a brief moment Joshua Beakbane held the paper to the light, and what had startled him immediately did no less for me: it was a certain pencil portrait of the man himself on the back of a London and North-Western railway share certificate.

  Some there are who would have tackled this situation with ease and perhaps come well out of it; but to me, that am a small and shiftless being at my best, the position I now found myself in was quite intolerable. I would have given half my slender annual salary for a stiff glass of brandy-and-water. The recent discovery paralyzed me. I made no question that Joshua Beakbane had at least his share of the plunder with him in the portmanteau; but how to take advantage of the fact I could not imagine. Silence and pretended sleep were the first moves that suggested themselves. A look or word or hint that could suggest to the robber I remotely fathomed his secret, would doubtless mean for me a cut throat and no further interest in “The Flying Scotsman.”

  Wigan was passed and Preston not far distant when I bethought me of a plan that would, like enough, have occurred to any other in my position an hour earlier. I might possibly get a message on to the telegraph wires and have Joshua Beakbane stopped when he least expected such a thing. I wrote therefore on a leaf of my pocket-book, but did so in trembling, for should the man I was working to overthrow catch sight of the words, even though he might not guess who I really was, he would at least take me for a detective in disguise, and all must then be over.

  Thus I worded my telegram:—

  Prepare to make big arrest at Carlisle. Small man will wave hand from first-class compartment. Flying Scotsman.

  For me this was not bad. I doubled it up, put a sovereign in it, wrote on the outside—“Send this at all hazards,” and prepared to dispose of it as best I might at Preston.

  Then fresh terrors held me on every side. Would the robber by any unlucky chance be getting out at the next station? I made bold to ask him. He answered that Carlisle was his destination, and much relieved, I trusted that it might be so for some time.

  At Preston I scarcely waited for the train to stop before leaping to the platform—as luck would have it on the foot of a sleepy porter. He swore in the Lancashire dialect, and I pressed my message into his hand. I was already back in the carriage again when the fool—I can call him nothing less strong—came up to the window, held my communication under Joshua Beakbane’s eye, and inquired what he was to do with it.

  “It is a telegram to Glasgow,” I told him, with my knees knocking together. “It must go. There’s a sovereign inside for the man who sends it.”

  The dunder-headed fellow now grasped my meaning and withdrew, tolerably wide awake. Joshua Beakbane showed himself deeply interested in this business, and knowing what I did, it was clear to me from the searching questions he put that his suspicions were violently aroused.

  The lie to the railway-porter was, so far as my memory serves me, the only one I ever told in my life. Whether it was justified by circumstances I will not presume to decide. But to Joshua Beakbane I spoke the unvarnished truth concerning my trip northward. The pending trial at Glasgow had some element of interest in it; and my half-brother slowly lost the air of mistrust with which he had regarded me as I laid before him the documents relating to my mission.

  The journey between Preston and Carlisle occupied a trifle more than two hours, though to me it appeared unending. A thousand times I wondered if my message had yet flashed past us in the darkness, and reflected how, on reaching Carlisle, I might best preserve my own safety and yet advance the ends of justice.

  As we at last began to near the station Joshua Beakbane strapped his rug to his portmanteau, unlocked the carriage-door with a private key he now for the first time produced, and made other preparations for a speedy exit.

  Upon my side of the train he would have to alight, and now, on looking eagerly from the carriage-window, though still some distance outside the station, I believed I could see a group of dark-coated men under the gas-lamps we were approaching. Leaning out of the train I waved my hand frantically to them. The next moment I was dragged back f
rom inside.

  “What are you doing?” my companion demanded.

  “Signalling to friends,” I answered boldly, and there must have been some chord in my voice that awoke old memories and new suspicions, for Beakbane immediately looked out of the window, saw the police, and turned upon me like a tiger.

  “My God! I know you now,” he yelled. “So you venture it at last?—then you shall have it.” He hurled himself at me; his big white hands closed like an iron collar round my neck; his thumbs pressed into my throat. A red mist filled my eyes, my brains seemed bursting through my skull; I believed the train must have rushed right through the station, and that he and I were flying into the lonely night once more. Then I became dimly conscious of a great wilderness of faces from the past staring at me, and all was blank. What followed I afterwards learned when slowly coming back to life again in the waiting-room at Carlisle.

  Upon the police rushing to the carriage, Beakbane dashed me violently from him and jumped through that door of the compartment which was furthest from his pursuers. This he had just time to lock after him before he vanished into the darkness. But for the intervention of Providence, in the delay he thus caused the man might have escaped, at least for that night. He successfully threaded his way through a wilderness of motionless trucks and other rolling-stock. He then made for an engine-house, and having once passed it, would have climbed down a bank and so gained temporary safety. But at the moment he ran across the mouth of this shed an engine was moving from it, and before he could alter his course the locomotive knocked him down, pinned him to the rails, and slowly crushed over him. It was done in a moment, and his cry brought the police, who, at the moment of the accident, were wandering through the station in fruitless search. A doctor was now with Joshua Beakbane, but no human skill could even prolong life for the unfortunate man, and he lay dying as I staggered to my feet and entered the adjacent room where they had arranged a couch for him on the ground. He was unconscious as I took the big white hand that but a few minutes before had been choking the life out of me; and soon afterwards, with an awful expression of pain, he expired.

  As may be supposed I needed much care myself, after this frightful ordeal, and it was not until the following day at noon that my senses once more began to thoroughly define themselves. Then, upon an inquiry into the papers and property of the dead man, I found that all the missing sources of my fortune, with no exception, had been in his possession. Sorrell was thus to my mind proved innocent, and I shrewdly suspected that the unhappy young fellow had fallen a victim to this wretched soul, who was now himself dead.

  I was fortunately able to proceed to Glasgow in the nick of time, to attend to my employer’s business there. Upon returning to London, my arrival in Mr. Plenderleath’s office with the missing fortune created no less astonishment in his mind than that which filled my own, when I learned how young Sorrell had been found alive and was fast recovering from his injuries. Let me break off here one moment to say that if I appear to have treated my half-brother’s appalling death with cynical brevity, it is through no lack of feeling in the matter, but rather through lack of space.

  At six o’clock in the morning, and about an hour after the time that Joshua Beakbane breathed his last, he then having fasted about three-and-thirty hours, Walter Sorrell was found gagged and tied, hand and foot, to the wall of a mean building, situate in a meadow not far distant from Oak Lodge. With his most unpleasing experiences I conclude my narrative.

  After Mrs. Prescott’s departure on the night of the robbery, he had read for about ten minutes, when, suddenly glancing up from his book, he saw, standing staring in at the window, the identical man whose portrait I had drawn for him. Starting up, convinced that what he had seen was no spirit, he unfastened the window and leapt into the garden only to find nothing. Returning, he had hastily left the drawing-room to get his stick, hat, and coat. He was scarcely a moment gone, and, on coming back, found Joshua Beakbane already with the bag and its contents in his hands. Sorrell rushed across the room to stay the other’s escape; but too late—he had already rushed through the window. Grasping his heavy stick, the young man followed, succeeded in keeping the robber in sight, and finally closed with him, both falling violently into a bush of rhododendrons. Here an accomplice came to Beakbane’s aid, and between them they soon had Sorrell senseless and a prisoner. He remembered nothing further, till coming to himself in the fowl-house, where he was ultimately found. His antagonists evidently carried him between them to this obscure hiding-place; and there he had soon starved but for his fortunate discovery.

  The said accomplice has never been found; it wants neither him, however, nor yet that other ally who sent the telegram from Newmarket, to tell us how Joshua Beakbane plotted to steal my fortune, three-fourths of which for the asking should have been his.

  I regained my health more quickly than might be supposed, and young Sorrell was even a shorter time recovering from his starvation and bruises. I gave the worthy lad a thousand pounds, and much good may it do him.

  The portrait of Joshua Beakbane, on the back of that London and North-Western railway share certificate, is still in my possession, and hangs where all may see it in the library of my new habitation. I now live far away on the coast of Cornwall where the great waves roll in, straight from the heart of the Atlantic, where the common folk of the district make some stir when I pass them by, and where echoes from mighty London reverberate but peacefully in newspapers that are often a week old before I see them.

  The Mystery of a Handsome Cad

  MOLL. BOURNE

  What appears to be the staggering success of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) by Fergus Hume (1859–1932) was unprecedented when it was first published in Melbourne by Kemp & Boyce. Its first printing of five thousand copies in October sold out immediately, prompting a second printing of ten thousand copies in November, a third printing of an additional ten thousand copies in December, and a fourth of ten thousand printing copies early in 1887.

  Questions have to be posed about these announced sales figures, as only four copies of this first edition are known to exist out of the thirty-five thousand copies through four printings that were reported. When the author sold all publishing rights to a small group of British investors for fifty pounds sterling, the consortium created the Hansom Cab Publishing Company and produced the first British edition of twenty-five thousand copies in July 1887. The publisher then issued an additional twenty-five thousand copies per month for twelve consecutive months, ending with a print run of fifteen thousand copies in August 1888. These enormous print runs were proudly printed on the title page of each subsequent printing. Whether they reflect actual numbers of copies sold or were a form of promotion remains questionable, as the books (regardless of which printing) are scarce enough to be eagerly sought by rare book collectors.

  Just as the popularity of Sherlock Holmes immediately spurred writers to produce parodies of the great detective, it probably was inevitable that the same would occur with Hume’s bestseller. Sure enough, it didn’t take long for The Mystery of a Wheelbarrow (1888), attributed to a W. Humer Ferguson, to make its appearance and be adapted for the stage in the same year by Arthur Law. Also in 1888, the author bylined Moll. Bourne had her extremely humorous story, “The Mystery of a Handsome Cad,” published. Scrupulous research has failed to turn up even the slightest bit of information about her—even Moll.’s gender is pure conjecture, as it seems possible that the first name may be a shortened version of Molly or Mollie.

  “The Mystery of a Handsome Cad” was originally published in Up the Ladder; or, A House of Thirteen Storeys; the Christmas 1888 issue of Time (London).

  THE MYSTERY OF A HANDSOME CAD

  Moll. Bourne

  CHAPTER I

  On the morning of the 14th of July, Gerald Annesley was lounging in an easy chair in his luxurious chamber at Melbourne, carelessly scanning the daily papers (all of which he e
dited), while he awaited with impatience the hour when he might repair for a morning greeting to the girl who had last taken violent possession of his heart.

  The only surviving scion of a fine old Irish stock, Gerald Annesley had started in life with a very ancestral castle now crumbling to decay, a family banshee, which had sunk to being let out for the shooting season by Whitely, and a letter of introduction to Mr. Ralph Nettleby, the millionaire of Melbourne. Following the impulse of his impetuous Irish blood, Gerald Annesley, proud and impoverished as the ill-fated race from which he was believed to have sprung, left his banshee behind him in Ireland and emigrated to Australia with his letter of introduction. In a few weeks, by dint of that hereditary perseverance which bids the Milesian neither beg nor borrow, he found he had accumulated a large independence, and straightway resolved to return to his castle, and restore the shattered fortunes of his race.

  But Cupid had laid his snares for this high-spirited young Irishman, and he fell over head and ears in love, captive to the blue eyes (like pools of love wherein a man might drown himself), and fair, girlish grace of May Nettleby, the devoted and only daughter of the millionaire who had begun life with a rusty nail and closed it with a rusty temper. Many were the suitors who had been enslaved by her maiden charms, but they had hitherto wooed, from the pedantic rules of an etiquette-book, in vain, and May, as the last departed, laughed to think all men double, and vowed to remain single for ever, till this impetuous Irish lover appeared on the scene, and besieged her heart without Warne’s etiquette-book. Yielding to the impulses of his hot Irish blood, one moonlight night Gerald whispered his secret in the ear of his charmer, and she—well, history repeats itself! After trifling with him for a while, with womanly coquettishness, May confessed one day, with blushes mantling her cheeks, and a stormy smile in her frank blue eyes—that she loved him!