The Big Book of Victorian Mysteries

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

  The captain’s manner to the doctor differed from his manner to the landlord. Leaving medical skill out of the question, he recognised that he had a gentleman and a man of some local position to deal with, and he modified his petulance accordingly. The landlord had already told the doctor the history of his arrival, so that it only remained to describe his sensations and the nature of his ailment. The latter, indeed, was more or less apparent; for the shivering was still sufficiently violent to shake the horse-hair sofa on which he lay.

  “The surgeon of my regiment used to give me some stuff that relieved this horrid trembling instantly,” said the captain; “but I never could get him to part with the prescription. However, I daresay, doctor, that you know of something equally efficacious.”

  “Yes, I flatter myself that I can improve matters in that direction,” was the reply. “My house is quite close, and I will run over and fetch you a draught. You are, of course, aware that the ague is of an intermittent character, recurring every other day till it subsides?”

  “I know it only too well,” replied Captain Hawke. “I shall be as fit as a fiddle to-morrow, probably only to relapse the next day into another of these attacks. I do not know how you are situated domestically, doctor; but I was wondering whether you could take me in, and look after me for a few days till I get over this bout. I am nervous about myself, and, without any disparagement to the hospitality of our friend here, I should feel happier under medical supervision.”

  Dr. Youle’s hungry mouth showed by its eager twitching that the prospect of a resident patient, even for a day or two, was by no means distasteful to him. “I shall be only too pleased to look after you,” he said. “I shall be much occupied to-morrow—rather unpleasantly employed as a witness at an inquest; but, as you say, you will most likely be feeling better then, and not so much in need of my services. If you really wish the arrangement, you had better have a closed fly and come over at once. I will run on ahead, and prepare a draught for you.”

  The landlord, not best pleased with the abstraction of his guest, went to order a carriage, and a quarter of an hour later Captain Hawke, with his luggage, was driven to the doctor’s residence—a prim, red-brick house in the middle of the sleepy High Street. Dr. Youle was waiting on the doorstep to receive his patient, and at once conducted him to a small back room on the ground floor, evidently the surgery.

  “Drink this,” he said, handing the invalid a glass of roaming liquid, “and then if you will sit quietly in the easy chair while I see about your things, I don’t doubt that I shall find you better. The effect is almost instantaneous.”

  But the doctor himself could hardly have foreseen with what rapidity his words were to be verified. He had no sooner closed the door than Captain Hawke sprang to his feet, all traces of shivering gone, and applied himself to the task of searching the room. One wall was fitted with shelves laden with bottles containing liquids, and these obtained the eccentric invalid’s first attention. Rapidly scanning the labels, he passed along the shelves apparently without satisfying his quest, for he came to the end without putting his hand to bottle or jar. Pausing for a moment to listen to the doctor’s voice in the distance directing the flyman with the luggage, he recommenced his search by examining a range of drawers that formed a back to the mixing dresser, and which, also systematically labelled, were found to contain dry drugs. Here again nothing held his attention, and he was turning away with vexed impatience on his face, when, at the very end of the row, and lower than the others, he espied a drawer ticketted “Miscellaneous.” Pulling it open, he saw that it was three parts filled with medicine corks, scarlet string, and sealing wax, all heaped together in such confusion that it was impossible to take in the details of the medley at a glance. Removing the string and sealing wax, the inquisitive captain ran his fingers lightly through the bulk of the corks, till they closed on some hard substance hidden from view. When he withdrew his hand it held a small package, which, after one flash of eager scrutiny, he transferred to his pocket.

  Even now, however, though he drew a long breath of relief, it seemed that the search was not yet complete; for, after carefully rearranging and closing the drawer, he tried the door of a corner cupboard, only to find it locked. He had just drawn a bunch of peculiar-looking keys from his pocket, when the voice of the doctor bidding the flyman a cheery “Good-day!” caused him to glide quietly back to the armchair. The next moment his host entered, rubbing his hands, and smiling professionally.

  “Your mixture has done wonders, doctor,” the captain said. “I am another man already, and my experience tells me that I am safe for another forty-eight hours. By the way, I was so seedy when they hauled me out of the train that I don’t even know where I am. What place is this?”

  “This is Beechfield in Buckinghamshire, about an hour from town,” said the doctor. “An old-fashioned country centre, you know.”

  “Beechfield, by Jove!” exclaimed Captain Hawke, with an air of mingled surprise and pleasure. “Well, that is a curious coincidence, for an old friend of my father’s lives, or lived, somewhere about here, I believe—General Lascelles—do you know him?”

  “Yes, I know the General,” replied Dr. Youle, a little absently; then added, “He has a nice little place, called The Elms, a hundred yards or so beyond the top of the High Street.”

  “Well, I feel so much better that I will stroll out and see the General,” said Hawke. “I will take care to be back in time to have the pleasure of dining with you—at half-past seven, I think you said?”

  “Yes, that is the hour,” replied the doctor thoughtfully; “but are you sure you are wise in venturing out? Besides, you will find the General and his daughter in some distress. They are interested—”

  “All the more reason that I go and cheer them up. What is wrong with them?” snapped the patient.

  “They are interested in the inquest on poor young Furnival, which I told you was to be held to-morrow. It is possible that you may hear me spoken of in connection with the case, though their view of it ought to be identical with mine—that death was due to natural causes. I believe the whole thing is a cock-and-bull story, got up by an impudent young practitioner here to account for his losing his patient, as I knew he would from the first. The wonder is that the Home Office analysts should back him up in pretending to discern a poison about which hardly anything is known.”

  The captain had risen, his face wearing a look of infinite boredom. “My dear doctor,” he said, “you can’t expect me to concern myself with the matter; I’ve quite enough to do to worry about my own ailments. I only want to see the General to chat about old times, not about local inquests. Will you kindly show me your front door, and point out the direction I should take to reach The Elms?”

  Dr. Youle smiled, with perhaps a shade of relief at the invalid’s self-absorption, and led the way out of the room. The captain followed him into the passage for a few paces, then, with an exclamation about a forgotten handkerchief, darted back into the surgery, and, quick as lightning, undid the catch that fastened the window, being at his host’s heels again almost before the latter had noticed his absence. In another minute, duly instructed in the route, he started walking swiftly through the shadows of the early winter twilight towards the end of the town.

  But apparently the immediate desire to visit his “father’s old friend” had passed away. Taking the first by-way that ran at right angles to the High Street, he passed thence into a lane that brought him to the back of Dr. Youle’s house, where he disappeared among the foliage of the garden. It was a long three-quarters of an hour before he crept cautiously into the lane again, and even then The Elms was not his first destination. Not till he had paid two other rather lengthy visits—one of them to the Beechfield chemist—did he find himself ushered into the presence of General and Miss Lascelles. A distinguished-looking young man, dressed, like father and daughter, in deep mourning, was with them in the fir
e-lit library, and evinced an equal agitation on the entrance of Dr. Youle’s resident patient. The conversation, however, did not turn on bygone associations and mutual reminiscences. Miss Lascelles sprang forward with outstretched hands and glistening eyes—

  “Oh, Mr. Poignand!” she cried; “I can see that you have news for us—good news, too, I think?”

  “Yes,” was the reply; “I hold the real murderer of Leonard Furnival in the hollow of my hand, which means, of course, that the other absurd charge is demolished.”

  * * *

  —

  Dr. Youle, who was a bachelor, had ordered his cook to prepare a dainty little repast in honour of the guest, and as the dinner hour approached, and “the captain” had not returned, he began to get anxious about the fish. On the stroke of seven, however, the front door bell rang, and the laggard was admitted, looking so flushed and heated that, when they were seated in the cosy dining-room, the doctor ventured on a remonstrance.

  “I have been interested,” was the explanation, “very deeply interested, by what I heard at the Lascelles’ about this poisoning case—so much so that I was obliged to stay and hear it out. It seems that the stuff employed was tanghin, the poison which the natives of Madagascar use in their trials by ordeal. Have you ever seen a trial by ordeal, doctor?”

  It was the host’s turn now to be bored by the subject. He shook his head absently, and passed the sherry decanter.

  “It is an admirable institution for keeping down the population,” persisted the other. “Whenever a man is suspected of a crime, he has to eat half a dozen of these berries, on the supposition that if he is innocent they will do him no harm. Needless to say, the poison fails to discriminate between the stomachs of good and bad men, and the accused is always proved guilty. It must be a terrible thing to be proved guilty when you are innocent, Dr. Youle.”

  Some change of tone caused the doctor to look up and catch his guest’s eye. The two men stared steadily at each other for the space of ten seconds, then the doctor winced a little and said—

  “What have I to do with Madagascar poisons and innocent men? Tanghin is hardly known in this country, and cannot be procured at the wholesale druggists. I have never even seen it.”

  The sound of a bell ringing somewhere in the kitchen premises reached them, and Poignand pushed his chair back from the table as he replied—

  “Not even seen it, eh? Strange, then, that a supply of the berries, and a tincture distilled from them, should have been discovered in that corner cupboard in your surgery. Strange, too, that a box of the Zagury capsules, in which vehicle the poison was administered to Leonard Furnival, should have been found among your medicine corks, stamped with the rubber stamp of Hollings, the Beechfield chemist, though he swears he never supplied you with any capsules. Stranger still that Hollings should remember—now that it has been called to his mind—your apparently aimless lingering in his shop on the day before the death, and the fidgety movements now revealed as the legerdemain by which you substituted your poisoned packet for the one the chemist had lying ready on the counter against Mr. Harry Furnival’s call. It is no use, Dr. Youle; you would have been wiser to have destroyed such fatal evidences. Your wicked sacrifice of a valuable life, in order to prove your mistaken treatment right at the expense of your successful rival, is as clear as noonday. Ah! here is the inspector.”

  As he spoke, two or three men entered the room, and one of them—the detective who had been detailed to watch Harry Furnival—quietly effected the arrest. The wretched culprit, broken down completely by Mark Poignand’s unofficial “bluff,” blustered a little at first, but quickly weakened, and saved further trouble by a full admission, almost on the exact lines of the accusation. Knowing, by his previous observations, and from the question asked him by Harry, that Leonard Furnival was in the habit of taking the patent capsules, he had bought a box in London, and, after replacing the original contents with poison, had watched his chance to change the boxes. His motive was to injure, and put in the wrong, the rising young practitioner who had supplanted him, and whose toxicological knowledge, by a curious irony of fate, was the first link in the chain of detection. The tanghin berries he had procured from a firm of Madagascar merchants, by passing himself off as the representative of a well-known wholesale druggist, who, at the trial, disclaimed all knowledge of him and all dealings in the fatal drug.

  Poignand’s working out of the case was regarded as masterly; but he knew very well that unless he had started on the presupposition of Youle’s guilt, he should never have come upon the truth. When he got back to the office, he went straight through to the inner room, where the shrunken, red-turbaned figure was playing with the cobras by the fire.

  “Now tell me, how did you suspect the doctor?” asked Poignand, after outlining the events which had led to a successful issue.

  “Sahib,” said Kala Persad gravely, “what else was there of hatred, of injury, of revenge in the story the pretty Missee Mem Sahib told? Where there is a wound on the black heart of man, there is the place to look for crime.”

  Five Hundred Carats

  GEORGE GRIFFITH

  The author of nearly fifty books of science fiction, fantasy, adventure, mystery, verse, social melodrama, and nonfiction, George Chetwynd Griffith-Jones (1857–1905) was for a brief time in the 1890s one of England’s most popular novelists. That popularity did not extend to the United States, nor did it last beyond his death.

  Born in Plymouth, Devon, he received his college degree by attending evening classes. He worked for a few years as a merchant seaman, English teacher, and journalist in London, writing occasional freelance pieces, before taking a largely menial job with Pearson’s Weekly in 1890. When he began to write short stories, he moved to the staff of Pearson’s Magazine in 1896, where most of his work was published.

  He had produced an outline for his first novel, The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror (1893), which was an immediate success and is generally regarded as his best work. Though he lacked the talent of such other science fiction writers of the time as H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, his stories were inventive, influential, exciting potboilers featuring air battles, intragalaxy voyages, and socialist utopias similar to those of Wells.

  Griffith’s short story “The Great Crellin Comet” (1897) was the first fictional work to feature a ten-second countdown for a space launch.

  “Five Hundred Carats” featured Inspector Lipinzki, a singularly colorless detective who appeared in eight stories collected in Knaves of Diamonds, Being Tales of Mine and Veld (1899). Set in South Africa, they are mystery and crime stories centered around the diamond industry.

  “Five Hundred Carats” was originally published in the November 1897 issue of Pearson’s Magazine; it was first collected in Knaves of Diamonds, Being Tales of Mine and Veld (London, C. A. Pearson, 1899).

  FIVE HUNDRED CARATS

  George Griffith

  It was several months after the brilliant if somewhat mysterious recovery of the £15,000 parcel from the notorious but now vanished Seth Salter* that I had the pleasure, and I think I may fairly add the privilege, of making the acquaintance of Inspector Lipinzki.

  I can say without hesitation that in the course of wanderings which have led me over a considerable portion of the lands and seas of the world I have never met a more interesting man than he was. I say “was,” poor fellow, for he is now no longer anything but a memory of bitterness to the I.D.B.—but that is a yarn with another twist.

  There is no need for further explanation of the all too brief intimacy which followed our introduction, than the statement of the fact that the greatest South African detective of his day was after all a man as well as a detective, and hence not only justifiably proud of the many brilliant achievements which illustrated his career, but also by no means loth that some day the story of them should, with all due and proper precautions and reservations, be tol
d to a wider and possibly less prejudiced audience than the motley and migratory population of the Camp as it was in his day.

  I had not been five minutes in the cosy, tastily-furnished sanctum of his low, broad-roofed bungalow in New De Beers Road before I saw it was a museum as well as a study. Specimens of all sorts of queer apparatus employed by the I.D.B.’s for smuggling diamonds were scattered over the tables and mantelpiece.

  There were massive, handsomely-carved briar and meerschaum pipes which seemed to hold wonderfully little tobacco for their size; rough sticks of firewood ingeniously hollowed out, which must have been worth a good round sum in their time; hollow handles of travelling trunks; ladies’ boot heels of the fashion affected on a memorable occasion by Mrs. Michael Mosenstein; and novels, hymnbooks, church-services, and bibles, with cavities cut out of the centre of their leaves which had once held thousands of pounds’ worth of illicit stones on their unsuspected passage through the book-post.

  But none of these interested, or, indeed, puzzled me so much as did a couple of curiously assorted articles which lay under a little glass case on a wall bracket. One was an ordinary piece of heavy lead tubing, about three inches long and an inch in diameter, sealed by fusing at both ends, and having a little brass tap fused into one end. The other was a small ragged piece of dirty red sheet—india-rubber, very thin—in fact almost transparent—and, roughly speaking, four or five inches square.

  I was looking at these things, wondering what on earth could be the connection between them, and what manner of strange story might be connected with them, when the Inspector came in.

  “Good-evening. Glad to see you!” he said, in his quiet and almost gentle voice, and without a trace of foreign accent, as we shook hands. “Well, what do you think of my museum? I daresay you’ve guessed already that if some of these things could speak they could keep your readers entertained for some little time, eh?”