The Skeleton Key/Chapter 20
CHAPTER XX
THE BARON LAYS HIS CARDS ON THE TABLE
Sir Francis Orsden and the Baron Le Sage walked slowly up the kitchen garden together. It was a windless autumn morning, such serene and gracious weather as had prevailed now for some days, and the primroses under the wall were already putting forth a little precocious blossom or two, feeling for the Spring. There was a balm in the air and a softness in the soil which communicated themselves to the human fibre, reawakening it as it were to a sense of new life out of old distress. Such feelings men might have who have landed from perilous seas upon a smiling shore.
The two talked earnestly as they strolled, on a subject necessarily the most prominent in their minds. Said Le Sage:—
'Are we not a little apt to judge a man by his business—as that a lawyer must be unfeeling, a butcher cruel, a doctor humane, and a sweep dishonest? But it is not his profession which makes a man what he is, but the man who makes his profession what it appears in him. A lawyer does not appropriate trust funds because he is a lawyer, but because he is a gambler: so, a detective is not impeccable because he is a detective, but because he is an honest man. You wonder that he can be at the same time a detective and a desperate criminal. Well, I don't.'
'Ah! You've got a reason?'
'Just this. What is in that lawyer's mind when he steals? Imagination. It leaps the dark abyss to wing for the golden peaks beyond, where, easy restitution passed, it sees its dreams fulfilled. What was in Ridgway's mind when he planned his tremendous venture? Imagination again. It may be the angel or the devil of a piece, spur a Pegasus or ride a broomstick. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker may any of them have it, and still be the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker. The last thing of which a lawyer, as a lawyer, would be guilty, would be the bringing himself within the grasp of the law: the last thing of which a detective, as a detective, would be guilty would be the making himself a subject for detection. What induces either of them, then, to sin against the logic of his own profession? Imagination alone and always, the primary impulse to everything that is good and bad in the world. A man may be blessed with it, or he may be cursed; contain it in his being like the seed of beauty or the seed of dipsomania.'
'And Ridgway like the latter?'
'It would seem so. The man is by nature a romantic. I once got a glimpse of the truth in a conversation I had with him. What flashed upon me, in that momentary lifting of the veil, was a revelation of fierce vision, immense passion. It was like taking a stethoscope to a man's heart and surprising its secret.'
'A d-diseased heart, eh?'
'One may say so—diseased with Imagination, which is like an aneurism, often unsuspected and undetectable, until, put to some sudden strain, it bursts in blood.'
'You mean, in this case?'
'I mean that the murder was not premeditated; that is my sure conviction. It was the result of a sudden frenzied impulse finding the means ready to its hand. The man had plotted, but not that. Why should he, since it meant the ruin of his visions?'
'Ah! You forget, Baron'
'We will come to that. What I want to impress upon you at the outset is that Ridgway was at soul a gambler. Circumstance, accident, may have made him a detective: if it had made him a bishop it would have been all the same. That fire, that energy, kept under and banked down, would as surely have roared into flame the moment Fate drew out the damper. That moment came, and with it the vision. He saw in it certain hazards, leading to certain ruin or certain fortune; like a gambler he counted the cost and took the odds, since they seemed worth to him. What he failed to count on was a certain contingency which a less imaginative man than he might have foreseen—the possible treachery of a confederate.'
'And such a confederate.'
'Exactly. It was to sin most vilely against all his instinctive code; and worse—it was to stab him with a double-edged dagger.'
'I th-think I can pity him for that.'
'And so can I; and for this reason. Coolness is, or should be, the first quality of a gambler; gamblers, for that reason, do not easily fall in love. But when they do fall they fall hard, they fall headlong, they do not so much fall as plunge, as a gambler plunges, all heaven or all hell the stake. There is no doubt that Ridgway's passion for this girl was a true gambler's passion. To gain or lose her meant heaven or hell to him.'
'I can quite believe it, Baron. But, d-damn it! how much longer are you going to keep me on tenter-hooks?'
Le Sage laughed. They had been strolling, and pausing, and strolling again, until they had approached by degrees the upper boundary of the estate, where, amid great bushes of lavender and sweet marjoram, stood a substantial thatched summer-house, cosily convenient for the view. 'Let us go and sit in there,' he said, 'and I will unfold my tale without further preamble.'
As he spoke a figure dodging about among the raspberry canes came into view.
'Hullo!' cried Orsden: 'Bickerdike. What's he doing here?'
'I think I know,' said the Baron. He went over to the elaborately unconscious gentleman—who, pretending to see him for the first time, glanced up with a start and an expression of surprise which would not have deceived a town-idiot—and accosted him genially:—
'Looking for anything, Mr Bickerdike?'
'Just the chance of a late raspberry the birds may have left' was the answer.
'O! I wonder if I can provide any fruit as much to your taste. You haven't a half-hour to spare, I suppose?'
Mr Bickerdike came promptly out from among the canes.
'Certainly,' he said. 'I am quite at your service. What is it?'
'Only that I am under promise to Sir Francis to unfold for his delectation the story of a certain mystery, and the steps by which I came to arrive at its elucidation. It occurs to me—but, of course, if it would bore you'
Not at all. I am all eagerness to hear.'
'Well, it occurs to me that you have a leading title to the information, if you care to claim it, since it was in your company that I found my first clue to the riddle.'
'Was it, indeed, Baron? You excite me immensely. What was that?'
'Let us all go in here, and I will tell you.'
They entered the summer-house, and seated themselves on the semi-hexagonal bench which enclosed a stout rustic table.
'Now,' said Sir Francis, his eyes sparkling, 'out with it every bit, Baron, and give our hungering souls to feed.'
Le Sage took a pinch of snuff, laid the box handy, dusted his plump knees with his handkerchief, and, leaning back and loosely twining his fingers before him, began:—
'I have this, my friends, to say to you both before I start. What I have to tell, my story—and not the most creditable part of it—is fundamentally concerned with one about whom, it might be thought, my obligations as his guest should keep me silent. That would be quite true, were it not for a single consideration so vital as to constitute in itself a complete moral justification of my candour. In a few days, or weeks, the whole will be common property, and that figure subjected, I fear, to a Pharisaic criticism,, which will be none the more bitter for his friends having anticipated it and rallied about him. Moreover, he himself has bound me to no sort of silence in the matter, but, on the contrary, has rather intimated to me that he leaves to my discretion the choice and manner of his defence—or apologia. It may be admitted, perhaps, that he does not see these things quite from our point of view: he derives from another generation and another code of morals: but for what he is, or has been, he has paid a very severe penalty, and we must judge him now by what he has suffered rather than by what he has deserved.
'So much for this confidence; which, I beg you to consider, is still, though unenforced, a confidence, due to you, Sir Francis, through your coming matrimonial connexion with the family'—(Mr Bickerdike, with a start and a positive gape, which lifted his eyebrows, looked across at the young Baronet, who grinned and nodded)—'and to you, my friend, for your unshakable loyalty to a much-tried member of it. And with that I will quit grace and get to the joint.'
The Macuba came once more into action, the box was again laid aside, and the two settled down finally to listen.
'In the following narrative,' said M. le Baron, 'what was and remains conjectural it must be left to events to substantiate. I claim so much, though, for myself, I entertain no doubt as to the truth.'
'My story opens in the Café l'Univers in Paris, where we two, Mr Bickerdike, strangers to one another, were sitting one September afternoon precisely a year ago. We got into talk on the subject of a neighbour, an artist, and an object of interest to us both, who was busily engaged in sketching into a book pencil-memoranda of the more noticeable hats worn by passing ladies. He worked fast and cleverly, and was manifestly an adept at his craft. Presently, after having watched him for some time, I asked you if you had observed anything peculiar about his hands. You had not, it seemed, and no more was said. But there was a peculiarity, and it was this: when he lifted his right hand, as artists will do, to measure the perspective value of an object, it was always the second finger of the hand which he interposed before his eye. I watched him do it over and over again, and it was persistently the same. Why, I found myself asking myself? Was the trick due to some malformation of the first finger, or to some congenital impulse? Not to the first, I was presently able to convince myself. To the alternative proposition I was fated to receive an answer both affirmative and illuminating: but it was not to come just yet.
'You remember what followed. The stranger suddenly closed his book, rose, started to cross the road, and was promptly knocked down and run over by a passing cab. I hurried to his assistance, and found that he was pretty badly injured. He was lifted into the cab, and, accompanied by myself and a gendarme, was conveyed to the St Antoine Hospital, in which he remained for some weeks. Both there, and in his own apartments after his discharge, I visited him frequently, and was able to show him some small attentions, such as, in our relative positions, mere humanity demanded of me. He was poor, in his art an enthusiast, and very little sympathy was needed to win his general confidence. His name was John Ridgway.'
The two listeners glanced at one another, in a puzzled, questioning way; but neither would venture to interrupt, and the Baron continued:—
'He was John, and Ridgway—pronounced Reedsvay—but for the sake of a necessary distinction I will call him henceforth Jean.
'Jean lived with a friend, Caliste Ribault, in two rooms in the Rue Bourbon-le-Château, a little dull out-of-the-way street in the Latin Quarter. They both worked for a living on the Petit Courrier des Dames; but with Jean it was a weariness and a humiliation, and always he had before his eyes the prospect of ultimate manumission and recognition. He was an artist from his soul outwards to his finger-tips. But, alas! his immortality was destined to be of sooner arrival. He never properly overcame the effects of his accident, and last June he succumbed to them and left his friend alone.
'Now, in the course of our conversations, Jean had told me a strange story about himself—a story which I never knew at the time whether to credit, or to part credit, or to attribute entirely to the invention of an imaginative nature. Born ostensibly of humble parentage, he was in reality, he said, the legitimate son of an English officer of wealth and distinction, whose name he could claim, and whose heir he could prove himself to be, contingent on the production of certain documentary evidence which he knew to exist, but which, since it remained in the possession of the putative father, it was impossible to cite. This alleged evidence touched upon the question of a sham marriage, a clerical impostor officiating, which had turned out to be a true marriage; and the names of the contracting parties were recorded, with that of the clergyman in question as witness, on the fly-leaf of a little Roman Catholic vade-mecum, which had belonged to Jean's mother but of which her would-be wronger had secured possession, and which he retained to this day.
'So much Jean told me, omitting only the father's name, which he withheld, he queerly stated, from a feeling of jealous pride for the honour of that which was his own honour, but which was presently to be suggested to me in a very singular fashion. You may perhaps recall, Mr Bickerdike, how at dinner on the night of our first arrival here, our host, in answer to some observation of mine about a certain picture hanging on the wall, raised the second finger of his right hand before his eye to test an alleged misproportion in one of the figures of the composition. The action—though, of course, I was already familiar with Sir Calvin's injury—instantly arrested my attention. A vision of the Café l'Univers and of the busy hat-sketcher leapt irresistibly into my mind: I saw again the lifted second finger, and I saw, with astonishment, what, lacking that clue, had never yet so much as occurred or suggested itself to me—the existence of a subtle but definite family likeness between the two men. That sign-manual had solved the problem of paternity, and given some colour, at least, to my friend's romantic tale. Let me put it quite clearly. Before me sat, as I was convinced, the father of the man in Paris calling himself John Ridgway, but who claimed the right, on whatever disputable grounds, to call himself, if he would, John Kennett.
'Judge of my feelings. From that moment I was possessed of a piece of knowledge whose significance I could not then foresee, but which was already half consciously associating itself in my mind with that other curious discovery—that a well-known detective, who bore the very same name as my friend, was operating on a case somewhere in the neighbourhood.
'To return now to Jean's story, and my natural comments thereon. I asked him, assuming for the occasion the truth of his statement, if he had never made an endeavour to assert his rights, and if not why not. His answer did not strike me then as convincing, though I had full reason later to alter my opinion. To attempt and fail, he said, would be merely to disinter a long-buried scandal, and expose to renewed odium the character of a mother whom he fondly loved. Moreover, for himself he had no ambitions save such as centred in his art, to which he was wholly devoted, nor any nerve or desire to take that position in the world to which his birth entitled him. She had told him the story one day, on the occasion of one of his rare visits to England—where she lived—when she was lying very ill, thinking it right that he should know, and leaving it to him to decide for himself what action, in the event of her death, he should take or not take in the matter. She was, I understood, a woman of French origin, in modest circumstances, and many years the widow of a quartermaster-sergeant in the British army. From that necessitous household Jean himself had early broken away, to follow his bent in Paris, in which city he had remained, working and struggling for a livelihood, ever since the days of his adolescence. He was a man of twenty-eight when I knew him.
'There for the present I will leave Jean's story, turning from it to a subject of more immediate interest to you—namely, the murder of Ivy Mellor, and the methods by which I was enabled to bring the crime home to the actual delinquent. I can claim no particular credit for my part in the business. Destiny, acting blindly or providentially as you will, had woven about me, as a web is woven about a spider, a most extraordinary concatenation of coincidences, from whose central observation-point I was able, as it were, to command all strands of the design. My casual encounter with Mr Bickerdike in Paris; the discovery that he was there to meet Mr Kennett, the son of a gentleman already slightly known to me; the accident witnessed by us; my subsequent visits to the patient, and his confiding to me of his story; my second meeting with Mr Bickerdike in London, and the coincidence of our common invitation to Wildshott; the act which betrayed Jean's father to me, and seemed to confirm the truth of the man's story; the news that a second John Ridgway was at work in the neighbourhood—in all this, considered alone, there lay some grounds, perhaps, for wondering entertainment, but surely none for suspicion. It was only when the murder occurred that any thought of a connexion amongst the parts flashed inevitably into my mind; and since Fate had placed, if in any hands, in mine, what clues might exist to the truth, I was determined from that moment to pursue them to the end. The Key to it I found in a skeleton key.'
Again the Macuba came into requisition, and again the Baron savoured, over a refreshing pinch, the excitement of his hearers.
'A skeleton key,' he repeated. 'I discovered it before ever Sergeant John Ridgway had had a chance of looking for it, on the very spot where the poor thing's body had lain. It must have been jerked from her hand—she had probably just produced it from her pocket—by the shot which killed her, and had remained there undetected during and after her removal. I was fortunate in securing it only a few minutes before the Sergeant came down to examine the place of the crime.
'Now, what had Annie Evans to do with a skeleton key—she, a modest servant girl of irreproachable character, as the housekeeper had just informed us? I examined the key. It was of the usual burglarious pattern, seemed newly turned, had a slight flaw, or projection, on the barrel end, and was splashed with an ugly Bluebeard red. Had Annie, after all, been quite the impeccable person Mrs Bingley supposed? I wondered. I thought of the manner of her engagement, of her untraceable connexions, and I wondered. I wondered still at the Inquest, when, as it seemed, those same relations were still hopelessly to seek. I wondered no longer when, on the day following the inquiry, I came upon the Sergeant intently examining the ground about the scene of the crime. I came upon him unexpectedly, and surprised him. What was he looking for? He had already overhauled every detail of the girl's belongings. Had he missed something which he had expected to find among them? A skeleton key possibly. But how could he have known she possessed such a thing? Obviously, there was only one answer—because he himself had provided her with it. For what reason—he, John Ridgway? Naturally, my mind flew off at a tangent to the other John Ridgway, my Parisian Jean, and his extraordinary story. A reputedly sham marriage which nevertheless had turned out genuine; documents in proof, and their possessor my host? Was it conceivable that this John Ridgway was interested in the recovery of those documents, and had employed a female confederate to steal them for him?
'It was quite conceivable, and quite true, for that, as appeared by degrees, was actually the case. But why was this John Ridgway interested in the recovery of those papers? We shall see.
'In the meanwhile, to what conviction had my reflections led me? That the detective and the girl were in collusion for a certain purpose. But much was to be deduced from that conviction—that the girl was an impostor, that she had secured her situation very possibly by means of a false character written by herself or her confederate, that, quite certainly, her name was not Annie Evans at all. Hence the calculated impossibility of tracing out her connexions.
'So far, then, so good. We come now to the frustrated business f the theft, and the crime which was its terrible consequence. It had inevitably occurred to me that the safe in Sir Calvin's study must be the repository, and known by the confederates to be the repository, of the papers in question; else, if of easier access, they had long ago been abstracted and used to serve their purpose. Probably, as it appeared to me, the girl's first business had been to secure an impression of the keyhole in wax, which she had despatched to Ridgway, receiving back from him in exchange the master-key. I seized an opportunity to examine the safe, and detected about the spot in question certain faint marks or scratches in the paint, which I had once before taken some curious stock of, and which I now perceived might well correspond with that little sharp projection I spoke of at the end of the key. I even once tried the key in the lock myself (that was on the night, Mr Bickerdike, when you stalked me)'—poor Vivian looked unutterably foolish—'but without detecting me in my second descent, which occurred after you had returned to your room) and found it easy to manipulate. Then the girl had already been secretly at work there, fumbling her job maybe? But why, in that case, had she not secured the plunder, given notice to leave, and at once cleared out? Because—as it was perfectly legitimate to infer from the evidence at the inquest—she had, in the meantime, fallen desperately in love with our young friend, and had refused to take any further part in a transaction designed to dispossess him of his name and inheritance.
'Now, that is to anticipate matters a little, perhaps; but grant my deduction sound as, indeed, it proved to be—and what followed? Necessarily, a breach between the two confederates of a very violent nature. To the detective it meant betrayal and the ruin of his plans. Would that consideration be enough in itself to goad him on to murder? With a man of Ridgway's character and trained cautiousness of disposition I did not think it probable. Assuming, then, that the murder were his act, what more overmastering motive could have driven him to it? What but jealousy, the one passion uncontrollable by even the most self-disciplining nature. He was himself passionately enamoured of his own beautiful decoy, and she had betrayed not only his interests but his love. The crime had been, in the expressive French phrase, and in the fullest sense, a crime passionel. I had it.
'To figure the course of events, even, was now no difficult task for the imagination. We will begin with Mrs Bingley's timely advertisement for a housemaid, upon which the confederates happened, and which gave them—perhaps suggested to them—the very opportunity they desired. Once the girl was established in the house, the two corresponded. We know that she received letters, though none could be found after her death. Of course not. She would have taken scrupulous care to destroy all such incriminating evidence, including the fraudulent "character." But they corresponded, and probably, on her part, very early in a tone which gave her accomplice to suspect, with growing uneasiness, that all was not right with her. Accident—it could have been nothing else—brought him down professionally and opportunely into this part of the country. He took the occasion to write and arrange for a secret personal interview with her—we had it from the housekeeper that a letter was received by Annie quite shortly before her death—and she answered appointing the Bishop's Walk for their place of meeting. Of that I have no doubt. She was there to keep her engagement with Ridgway, and not to waylay the other. His appearance on the scene was quite fortuitous, and, as it turned out, the most fateful contretemps that could have happened. He came, and we know from his own confession what passed between them, with what she upbraided him, and with what threatened. Ridgway had overheard it all. He had arrived at the place duly to his appointment, and, on his first entering the copse, had probably heard, or perhaps caught distant sight of, the other male figure coming his way, and had slipped into the thick undergrowth for concealment. His propinquity unsuspected by the girl, she had delivered herself in his hearing of her deadly secret, and he knew at last of her double treachery to him. The lover gone, he came out of his ambush, and damned her with the truth. Likely, even then, it was the presence of the gun, so adversely left to his hand, which compelled him to the deed. It was the act of a demented moment, unthinking and unpremeditated. It was not until reason had returned to him that the idea of the diabolical vengeance it might be in his power to wreak on the seducer began to form in his mind. To bring the murder home to him! What a frenzy of triumph in the very thought! It possessed him devilishly, and verily from that moment it was as if the man had bargained away his soul to the evil one. Everything appeared to favour him—the mood, the motive, the conduct of his hated rival; most of all the fact that to his own hands, by some extraordinary freak of opportunism, had been committed the control of the case. How near he came to success in his inhuman design needs no retelling.
'But meanwhile, there was the murder committed in that instant of madness. Probably he had not much hope at the time of escaping its consequences; probably, in his desperate state, with all his schemes gone to wreck, he did not much care. He had had his bloody revenge for an intolerable wrong, and the rest was indifference to him. He replaced the gun where it had stood, and left the spot. Possibly, as sanity returned to him, some instinct of self-preservation may have induced in him a certain mood of precaution. There is evidence to show, I think, that he lurked for a time in the woods before leaving them for the open hillside. But that he did leave them eventually to make his way up the hill, we have Henstridge's evidence to testify.
'Now, from the first I had never succeeded in convincing myself that that hypothetical figure on the hill was as wholly a figment of the imagination as most people seemed to consider it. The cap pulled over the eyes and the turned-up collar—what butler ever turned up his coat collar?—were strong presumptions in my mind that Mr Cleghorn had not been their wearer. Then the figure had been described as advancing hurriedly; yet it had taken twenty minutes or so to cover a distance of two hundred yards. You may object, possibly, that, in all your experience of Sergeant Ridgway, you have never seen him wear on his head other than a black plush Homburg hat. I answer that on the day of the murder he was wearing a cloth cap, easily, in the distance, to be mistaken for the cap worn by Mr Cleghorn. I know this, because, in the course of one of my drives about the country in the company of a very charming young lady, I had made a point of calling at the Sergeant's one-time lodgings at Antonferry—I had procured the address from Sir Calvin—where, at the cost of a little insinuative word-play, I was able to ascertain that the Sergeant had gone out, wearing a cloth cap, fairly early on the day of the murder, and that he had returned late, and seemingly in an exhausted condition, from a long walk. He had, and that hypothetical figure hurrying over the hill—at the moment with little concern for its safety—had been the figure of Sergeant Ridgway, tramping back to his lodgings in Antonferry after the murder. He had passed by the inn, making north by west, and had long turned the bend of the lonely road before Mr Cleghorn, mistaken by Henstridge for the same figure, had arrived at the Red Deer and turned in at the tap.'
The Baron paused for refreshment, while Sir Francis applauded softly, his whole face beaming delight and approval.
'Have I convinced you so far,' continued the narrator, 'of the efficiency of the toils in which I was manœuvring to entangle my "suspect"? Very well: here was another little pièce de conviction. In spying about the scene of the crime I had picked up, in addition to the skeleton key—a button. It was a common horn coat-button, and was lying on the spot whence the gun had been fired—jerked off, probably, by the recoil. Now the Sergeant's overcoat was one of those light covert coats which button under an overlapping hem. I took occasion to examine it one day, when, occupied with Sir Calvin, he had left it in the hall: It had been fitted, I observed, with a set of brand-new buttons, which nevertheless did not correspond with the little buttons on the cuffs. Those exactly matched the button I had found, while the others were of a distinctly different pattern. Obviously he had discovered his loss, had failed again to make it good, and so, for precaution's sake, had renewed the entire set. It was an unpardonable oversight in such a man to have forgotten the sleeves. I made the button over to him—or could it be an exact duplicate of it which I had procured?—telling him in all innocence where I had found it. He took the little blow very well, without a wince, but I could see how it disturbed him. He never suspected me, I think, of more than an amiable curiosity. I have often wondered why.'
'Because he wasn't a fool,' interposed Mr Bickerdike, with a slight groan. Le Sage laughed.
'Or because I am more of a knave than I appear,' said he. 'So let bygones be bygones.' He helped himself to a weighty pinch of rappee, and put down the box with a grave expression. 'I come now,' he said, 'to the supreme crux of all—the apparently damning evidence as to when the fatal shot was fired. If it were fired somewhere about three o'clock, at the time stated by two witnesses, then Hugo Kennett, and none but Hugo Kennett, must be, despite all specious arguments to the contrary, the actual murderer. But it was not fired at three o'clock, as I believe I shall find reason to convince you: it was fired a good twenty or twenty-five minutes later; and this is my justification for saying so. You will remember that, at the magisterial inquiry, the witness Daniel Groome, revising his former evidence, stated that he had heard the clock in his master's study strike the quarter past three—he, by then, having gone round to the back of the house—thereby proving that the report of the gun, which had reached him while he was still at the front, must have occurred during the first quarter of the hour. Now I have taken the pains, since my return, to question Daniel Groome very closely on this matter, and with what result? You will be surprised to hear. The stable clock, to which Daniel is accustomed to listen, strikes the quarters—one for the first, two for the second, and so on. The study clock, to which Daniel is not accustomed to listen, strikes the half-hour only—a single stroke. But the single stroke represented to Daniel the quarter past, and therefore he concluded, when he heard that single stroke sound from his master's study, that it was recording the first quarter, instead of, as it actually was, the second. And on this ingenuous evidence—not realizing in the least what he was doing—was that simple man prepared to tighten the noose about his young master's neck.
'But, if Daniel Groome was wrong, it followed of necessity that Henstridge must be wrong also—as of course he was. He had been simply got at by the detective, and officially bullied and threatened into stating what was wanted of him. As a matter of fact, he had bad no idea of what the time was at all, but had taken any suggestion offered him. The fellow is a blackguard and a coward, and would swear any man's life away for thirty pieces of silver. I did a little persuasion with him on my own account—again during one of those refreshing drives, Sir Francis—and, taking a leaf out of Ridgway's book, had little difficulty in bringing him to his knees. He was abject when I had finished with him. (Parenthetically, I may suggest here—what I am convinced was the case—that our murdering friend had also "got at" Mr Fyler, but in another sense. He had persuaded, I mean, that astute lawyer into believing that there really was nothing worth considering in that hypothetical figure, which we may name the fourth dimension; and that was why, I take it, the point was not taken up again by Counsel before the magistrates.)
'Very well, now: we have got so far as to convict Sergeant Ridgway of murder, following on a plot to disinherit, with the help of a confederate, the very man whom he schemed to charge with the crime. So we arrive necessarily at the question, who was this Annie Evans, whom he had chosen for his accomplice in the business, and whom he had ended by so foully doing to death? To get at the whole truth of the story, it was essential that the mystery of their connexion should be traced to its source.
'To any one, not possessed of the clues which Fortune had placed in my hands, it must have appeared nothing less than astonishing that, with all the wide publicity given to the case, the victim should have remained virtually unidentified and unclaimed. She was beautiful, she was in domestic service—two facts, one might have thought, favourable to an easy solution of the riddle. Still her origin remained a mystery, and so remains, to all but the few instructed, to this day.
'But that very mystery which, to those wanting the master-key, appeared so insolvable, was to me who possessed the key, illuminating. That the girl was in domestic service at the time of her death was no proof that she had ever been in domestic service before. It would be much more in accord with my conception of the astute and far-seeing detective to suppose that he had anticipated that danger of recognition by assigning to his confederate a part through which it would be impracticable, should difficulties arise, to trace her. She had not been in service before, in fact. The business of the photograph confirmed me in that view. You will remember that travesty of Annie's likeness which appeared, enlarged and reproduced from a snap-shot, in the official prints? It was completely unrecognizable, and was intended by Ridgway to be unrecognizable. He knew that no other recent photograph of her existed at all, and for the very good reason that she had not for some time been in a position to be photographed. You will understand why in a moment. It was of paramount importance to him, both first and last, that his accomplice should be and remain unidentifiable. Essential to that condition were her innocence of former service, the absence of any photographic record, and the employment of a false name.
'It was of no use, consequently, my thinking of running Annie Evans, so called, to earth: I must look for her under another title. How was I to ascertain that title?
'It was here again that chance, or Providence, came—I will not say in a totally unforeseen way, but at least in a most obliging way—to my assistance. It occurred to me that at this stage of the proceedings it would be well for me to pay a visit to my Parisian John Ridgway, and endeavour to extract from him, if he could be persuaded to part with them, the fullest details possible of the story with whose outline he had already acquainted me. Something, it might be much, I felt, had remained untold which, if revealed, would possibly throw such. a light upon the obscure places of my quest as would enable me from that moment to present my case without a flaw. I went—to Paris, Mr Bickerdike; not to London, as you supposed—only to learn from Jean's bosom friend—that Caliste Ribault, of whom I have already spoken—that his loved comrade had departed this life in June of this year. That was a blow, I confess: my hopes seemed baffled, my journey in vain. Yet it was so far from being the case that not the artist's living lips could have more shouted the truth into my soul than did the evidence of his dead hand. I will tell you how:—
'One day, shortly before Jean's death, Caliste informed me, there had come to visit him a step-brother, an Englishman, of whom he, Caliste, had never before heard nor Jean spoken. This step-brother bore the same Christian and surname as Jean, and he had come accompanied by a girl of such beauty that the dying man could not dismiss the thought of her face from his mind until he had made from memory a coloured drawing of it on the white-washed wall, writing her name beneath. Now, his step-brother being dead, John Ridgway had come once more to arrange about the funeral and the disposition of the deceased's effects, and, perceiving the face on the wall, had been very angry—so angry, that he had immediately seized a cloth and completely effaced the drawing, so that not a vestige of it remained. Why, you ask? You will understand later.
'Thus again Fortune seemed to laugh at me; but it was laughter like that of a mother who dangles over the mouth of her child a cherry—to be his in a moment. And sure enough in such a moment Caliste informed me that, though the picture was destroyed, a copy of it remained in the shape of a photograph which he himself had taken of the original. He showed me the photograph; and the face I saw was the face of Annie Evans, but Ivy Mellor was the name written underneath.
'I had found out what I wanted—and more. I had discovered that the two John Ridgways were step-brothers, and light and still light broadened on the path before me. I got Ribault to part with the photograph to me, cautioning him to say nothing about his possessing the negative to any one, and with my prize I came on the following day to London. Thereafter my task was an easy one. Possessing that face and that name, and associating both with the name of a famous Scotland Yard detective, I had only to place the matter in the hands of a very clever and trustworthy private inquiry agent of my acquaintance to find out all that I needed. His investigations—with the details of which I need not trouble you—yielded the following information:—
'Ivy Mellor had been not many months discharged from a reformatory, to which she had been committed for three years for procuring a situation as nursery governess with a forged character, and obtaining goods by false pretences. She was the illegitimate daughter of an actress now dead, and was possessed herself of some decided histrionic ability. Upon her discharge, Ridgway had somehow got hold of her, or had been got hold of by her, with the result that he had fallen a complete slave to her attractions. It was probably she who had been his evil genius from the first; probably she who had planned and perpetrated the "written character" which had procured her an entrée to Wildshott. He promised her great things in the event of success, and, in view of those great things, she held him at arms' length; there were to be no questionable relations between them. The man was hopelessly infatuated; he used to visit her under an assumed name; probably "kept her," in the unequivocal sense. I am giving here not only the agent's report, but some of my own conclusions drawn therefrom. Summarized, they showed my case complete, so far as effect was concerned. I had only now to penetrate to the cause. It could be fathomed, I believed, but fathomed in one direction alone. I determined to go boldly to the fountain-head, and challenge there a decision. In Sir Calvin's hands lay the final verdict. I could hardly doubt what it would be, or that for the sake of the whole truth he would yield at last to daylight the guarded secret of a long-past episode. I judged him rightly, and I need say no more. He told me the story, produced for my examination the written evidence, and left me to deal with the matter as I would.
'But one remark more I have to make before running, as briefly as I can, through the main points of the narrative unfolded to me. While in Paris I had procured from my very good friend, M. Despard, the head of the secret police, an introduction to our own First Commissioner. I saw the latter, confided to his interested, and rather horrified, ears the whole truth of the case, so far as I had then conceived and mastered it, and arranged with him the little trap which was to entice John Ridgway into our midst again—conditional always on my procuring that supplementary evidence which was to prove his guilt beyond any possibility of doubt. The rest you know.
'We come now to the final chapter, which, like the postscript to a lady's letter, contains, in Hazlitt's phrase, the pith of the whole. In relating it I choose my own words, and must not be understood to aim at reproducing the actual terms in which it was revealed to me by Sir Calvin. I wish to give a mere brief or abstract of a painful story, and I wish, moreover, to warn you once more that certain reflections and conclusions of mine, not affecting the main body of the narrative, were and are conjectural, and must so remain unless and until the accused himself shall confirm their accuracy; and that, in my soul I anticipate, will be the case. Here, then, is the story:—
'In the early part of the year 1882, Sir Calvin Kennett, then a young cavalry officer of twenty-six, unmarried, and only latterly succeeded to his inheritance, was living in Cairo, attached as military representative to the British legation there. While in that situation he made the acquaintance of a very beautiful young Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle Desilles, the daughter of a tobacconist in a modest way of business, between whom and himself a mutual attachment sprang up, pure and sincere on her part, passionate and unscrupulous on his. Madly enamoured, yet hopeless of prevailing against the virtue of the lady, young Kennett had recourse to the vile and dishonourable strategem of a sham marriage, which he effected through the instrumentality of a worthless acquaintance, one Barry Skelton, who had come abroad in connexion with some Oxford Missionary Society, and who, though not yet in Holy Orders, was supposed to be qualifying himself for the priesthood. With the aid of this scamp the cruel fraud was perpetrated, and Mademoiselle Desilles became the wife, as she supposed, of Sir Calvin. The union, for reasons seeming sufficient as urged by the pseudo-husband, was kept a present secret—even from the girl's father, whose death about this time greatly facilitated the success of the imposture. In July of that year occurred the definite revolt of Arabi Pasha, and the landing at Alexandria of a considerable British force; and Sir Calvin was called upon to rejoin his regiment in view of the operations pending. He went, leaving his wife, as I will call her, in the distant way to become a mother. In a skirmish near Mahmoudieh he lost the first finger of his right hand—a casualty not without its bearing on subsequent events. He was present at Tel-el-Kebir in mid-September, and again, two days later, at the entry of the British troops into Cairo, when he took the occasion—his passion in the interval having burned itself out, as such mere animal transports will—to break the truth to Mademoiselle Desilles of the fraud he had practised on her. I make it no part of my business to comment on his behaviour, then or previously, or to imagine the spirit in which his revelation was received by his unfortunate victim. No doubt each of you can supply the probable text for himself, as his sympathy or his indignation may dictate. It is enough to state the compromise by way of which the deceiver could find the heart to propose to condone his offence. This was no other than that, in order to save her credit and that of her unborn infant, a marriage should be instantly contrived between his unhappy dupe and a certain Quartermaster-Sergeant George Ridgway—a widower with a single young child, a boy—who had been in the secret, yet who, strangely enough, had no more inherent vice in him than was consistent with good nature, a weakness for beauty in distress, and a conscience of the easiest capacity in the matter of hush-money. This man was no doubt a personable fellow; the woman's situation very certainly desperate and deplorable. Anyhow, following whatever distressful scenes, she was brought to consent, the two were married, and shortly afterwards the child was born in London, whither the couple had removed in the interval.
'I am quite prepared to believe that George Ridgway made his wife a good husband during the few years which remained to them in company, for he did not very long survive his marriage. Moreover, Sir Calvin's liberality had placed the two in such comfortable circumstances that no excuse for discontent existed. The Quartermaster-Sergeant adhered honourably to his part of the bargain, and it was not until long after his death that the question arose in the widow's mind as to whether or not she was justified in continuing to mislead her son in the matter of his origin. Of that in a moment.
'In the meantime the two children, step-brothers in fact, were brought up together, and considered themselves as half brothers. They were both christened John—the younger through some unconquerable perversity of the mother in insisting on calling him after her seducer's second name—an anomaly which, however open to curious comment at first, was soon no doubt lost sight of in the inevitable nicknames which affection would come to bestow on the pair. Still, for the purposes of distinction, I will continue to call the one John and the other Jean. Jean was popularly regarded as the Ridgways' child, though in truth no child was born of their union.
'John, though the elder by some three years, was frequently, as time went on, mistaken, by those who did not know, for the younger of the two boys—an error also not without its bearing on subsequent events. Jean from the outset betrayed, if it could have been guessed, an unmistakable sign of his origin in the use of his second for his digit finger—an inherited trick due to the shock caused to his mother by the sight of Sir Calvin's mutilation, associated as it had been with all the agony and despair of that time. He was a dreamy boy, and early developed artistic proclivities. I have no means or intention of tracing the career of either of the children up to and beyond manhood. At some period, as we know, Jean went to Paris; at some period John joined the Metropolitan Police force, with subsequent promotion to a valued position in the Criminal Investigation Department. I pass from these ascertained facts to an estimate of the circumstances which first engendered in the latter's mind a thought of the daring project which has ended by bringing him to his present situation.
'Now I have already told you how Jean, on the occasion of a visit to England, had been at last made acquainted by his mother with the true story of his paternity. She told it him, being herself under the fear of death at the time; and there is no doubt that the poor woman still believed perfectly honestly in the legality of her first marriage, not only before heaven, but on the practical testimony of the little Catholic vade-mecum in which the names of the contracting parties, with their clerical witness, had been inscribed. She believed, moreover, on the strength of some muddled innuendo gathered from the Quartermaster-Sergeant, that the creature Barry Skelton had deceived, as much as she herself had been deceived by, Sir Calvin, and that he had actually been an ordained priest at the time of the marriage. It was not true, I think, the ordination having occurred subsequently, as the General took pains to make known to her; for she wrote to him on the subject of the vade-mecum, begging him to return it to her hands, whence he had appropriated it when he deserted her. Why, you may ask, had he, after securing possession of, persisted in retaining through all these years that damning witness to his guilt? For the very same reason of the evidence it contained, which to her stood for proof, to him for disproof, of the legality of the marriage. Wherefore he could not make up his mind to destroy it. But he thought it well to pay a visit to his correspondent, to assure her that she was completely mistaken in her surmise, and that the continuance of his support depended upon the utter future abandonment by her of any such attempts on his forbearance.
'Still thinking for her boy, the fond soul was not convinced. So little was she convinced that, when her death came actually to be imminent, she called John to her side and confided to him the whole story, begging him to look after his step-brother's interests, and to vindicate, if possible, his true claim to the name and estates of Kennett, something about which, she told him, Jean already knew. And John promised she was not his mother, remember; he may have been, for all we are aware to the contrary, a cold and undutiful stepson. But he promised, we know; for he went after her death to Paris, to visit the other, to acquaint him of his mother's end, and to discuss with him the strange story she had committed to his keeping: he went accompanied by a beautiful young creature of his acquaintance—whom he had brought with him probably for no other reason than her pleasure and his own infatuation—only to find Jean himself at the point of death.
'Was it then for the first time that a daring idea began to germinate in his mind? I think so. Whether spontaneously, or at his companion's instance, I believe the conception of the plot dated from that moment. Jean dead, what was to prevent him, John, from personating his step-brother, from claiming himself to be Sir Calvin's son, from profiting by the evidence which was said to prove that son's legitimacy? As to that he had only Mrs Ridgway's word, but it had been uttered with such solemnity and conviction, by a dying woman, as to leave little doubt of its truth. At worst the thing would be a gamble; but there was that in the very romantic hazard of it to appeal to his imagination: at best it would be prosperity beyond his dreams. And what were the odds? To consider them was to find them already curiously in his favour. The similarity of their names; the fact that he himself had always been regarded as the younger; the early death of the Quartermaster-Sergeant, and the consequent long removal of the one most damaging witness to the truth; Jean's prolonged absence from home in a foreign city; his own more apparent devotion to the woman to be claimed as his mother—he could find nothing in it all inimical to the success of the plot. Only the first essential would be to obtain possession of the vade-mecum. There was full reason to believe, from what Sir Calvin had told Mrs Ridgway, that the book to this day was jealously retained by him, for the reason stated, in his secure keeping. How to recover it?
'So the conspiracy was hatched. Ivy Mellor was to be the means, the condition of her success the bestowal of her spotless hand upon the rightful heir of Wildshott—a splendid dream, a transpontine melodrama. But John saw at once that a first condition of its success lay in a scrupulous obliteration of all clues pointing to the identity of his confederate: hence his anger on discovering the portrait, and the immediate measures taken by him to wipe it out of existence.
'Well, we know the rest—how the beautiful accomplice betrayed her trust; how she developed a passion for the very man whom she was scheming to disinherit; how, to be sure, she came to recognize that she could much more fully and satisfactorily realize her own ambitions by baulking than by furthering the designs of her fellow-plotter. To be the wife of the problematic heir of Wildshott might be a good thing; to be the wife of the heir of Wildshott in esse, a gentleman, a soldier and an Antinous, was certainly a better. So, having surrendered to love, she played for the greater stake—and she lost. We can pity her: she was frankly an adventuress. We could pity him, were it not for the thought of that inhuman revenge. Yet he had provocation perhaps beyond a gambler's endurance. To find the very woman, for worship of whom he had been scheming away his position, his reputation, his soul of truth and honour, not only turned traitor to his best interests, but faithless in the worst sense, and for his rival's sake, to her pledge to him—well, one must pause before utterly condemning. And after all it was only a moment's madness served by opportunity. Yes, I can pity him. I have a notion, too, that she told him what was not the truth—that she had already destroyed for her love's sake the evidence of the prayer-book. If she had—it was the last touch. Yes, I can pity him.
'Gentlemen, that is the story.'
M. le Baron ceased speaking, and for a time a silence held among them all. Then presently Mr Bickerdike asked:—
'There is only one thing, Baron, which remains to puzzle me a little. Was not Ridgway's employment in the case originally agreed to by Sir Calvin in response to a suggestion of yours?'
'That is quite true.'
'Was Sir Calvin himself, then, never moved to any sort of emotion or curiosity over the association which the detective's name would naturally awaken in his mind?'
'Emotion?—I think not. It would hardly describe a psychology so little superstitious as that of the General. The similarity of the names would have struck him as no more than an inconsiderable coincidence. With all his practical qualities, imagination is the last thing he would care to be accused of. But curiosity?—well, perhaps to a certain extent—though neither deep-seated nor lasting. You have to remember that from first to last, I suppose, he never knew, or troubled to know, what the Sergeant's Christian name was; and even had he learned it, it would have conveyed nothing to him, as he knew no better; nor again, probably, had ever troubled to know, by what name his own disowned son was called. And very certainly he had never condescended to note the name of the Quartermaster-Sergeant's individual offspring.'
'I see. And had you yourself, in suggesting the Sergeant for the case, any arrière pensée at that time, connecting?'
'I had merely a curiosity, my friend, to observe the owner of a name—really ipsissima verba to me—so oddly associated in my mind with the teller of a certain fantastic story in Paris.'
'Then you did not know—but of course you didn't.' He turned to the Baronet: 'I congratulate you with all my heart, Orsden.'
'Thanks, old fellow,' said Sir Francis. 'It's all due to him there. I'll give his health, in B-Bob Cratchit's words. Here's to M. le Baron, "the Founder of the Feast"!'