The Copper Box/Chapter 8
VIII
One Minute Past Midnight
WE followed Parslewe’s messenger across the platform to the hotel in a state of mute obedience, being, as Madrasia remarked afterwards, resigned by that time to anything that Parslewe did or commanded. But I think hunger had something to do with our meekness; we had breakfasted early, and had had nothing since, and as far as I was concerned the thought of this hotel and its excellent fare—already known to me—was by no means unwelcome. I turned instinctively towards the coffee-room as we entered, al ready anticipating its pleasures more than my meeting with Parslewe. But our guide steered us away from it; he took us upstairs, along corridors, down passages, finally opened a door. And there was a private sitting-room, and a table laid for lunch, and on the hearth, warming his coat-tails at a blazing fire, his saturnine countenance wearing a more cynical grin than ever, Parslewe.
He greeted us as coolly and unconcernedly as if we were in his own parlour at Kelpieshaw and had just come down to breakfast; indeed, he scarcely did more than give us a careless good morning, his chief concern just then seemed to be to catch the porter’s attention before he closed the door on us.
“Hi, you!” he called. “Just tell that waiter to bring up lunch, will you?—there’s a good fellow! Well,” he went on, regarding us speculatively as the man went off. “I suppose you’re hungry, eh?”
“Very!” said I.
“Famishing!” declared Madrasia.
He inspected her critically, rubbed his chin, and pointed to a side table.
“Take your things off and throw ’em on there, my dear,” he said. “You can take ’em to your own room afterwards.”
Madrasia, in the act of divesting herself, turned on him.
“Room?” she exclaimed.
“Number 186, yours,” he answered, calmly. “Yours, Craye, is 95—next mine. Don’t forget the numbers—however, if you do, they’ll tell you at the office. They’re booked in your respective names.”
“Do you mean that we’ve got to stay the night here?” demanded Madrasia.
“Precisely,” replied Parslewe, in his most laconic manner. “Two, maybe.”
“I haven’t come prepared to stay any nights,” said Madrasia. “I haven’t brought even a toothbrush!”
“Buy one!” he retorted. “Excellent shops in the place, my dear.”
Madrasia stared at him harder than ever.
“You’re developing a very extraordinary habit of ordering people about, Jimmie!” she exclaimed at last. “Why all this insistence?”
“Needs must where the devil drives!” he answered with a cynical laugh.
“Are you the devil?” she asked.
“I don’t know exactly what I am, my dear, since night before last,” he replied, with a relapse into mildness. “But I’m hoping to know before long. And in the meantime, let’s be comfortable—here’s food and drink.”
Two waiters came in with hot dishes; we sat down. I don’t know if Parslewe had expected us to be unusually hungry, but he had certainly taken pains to order a delightful lunch and to prove to us that he had a very nice and critical taste in champagne. And all the time we were lunching he kept the waiters in the room, artfully, I thought, lest Madrasia should open out on the subject uppermost in our thoughts; true, he talked freely himself, but it was all about a play that he had seen at the Theatre Royal on the previous evening, and of which he was enthusiastically full.
“But you shall see it yourself to-night,” he wound up. “I’ve booked two seats—Craye shall take you.”
“And—you?” asked Madrasia. “Won’t it bear seeing twice in succession?”
“I’ve some business,” he answered. “I shall be out when you return; we’ll compare notes in the morning.”
I saw that Madrasia was dying to ask him what his business was, but the waiters were still in the room. It was not until they had served us with coffee and gone away for good that Parslewe came to what we certainly regarded as business. Giving me a cigar and lighting one himself, he turned his chair towards the hearth, settled in an easy position with one elbow on the table, and flung us a glance over his shoulder.
“Now, then!” he said. “What’s gone on up yonder since I left? And as you can’t both speak at once, settle between yourselves which is going to be spokesman. But first—where is that box?”
Madrasia, the morning being cold, had come in furs; amongst them a big muff, in the pocket of which she had carried the copper box. She rose, extracted it from its hiding-place, and laid it on the table at Parslewe’s side; then she pointed a finger at me.
“Let him tell,” she said. “I’ll correct him where he’s wrong.”
“Go ahead, Craye,” commanded Parslewe. “Detail!”
I told him of everything that had happened at Kelpieshaw since his own mysterious disappearance, watching him carefully and even narrowly as I talked. He listened silently and impassively; only once did he interrupt me, and that was to ask for a more particular description of Mr. Augustus Weech. He seemed to reflect a good deal when he got that, but he let me go on to the end without further questioning, and received the message from Murthwaite just as phlegmatically as he had taken in everything else. In point of absolute inscrutability and imperviousness Parslewe in that particular mood of his could have given points to the Sphinx.
“And that’s all,” I concluded. “All!”
“All!” repeated Madrasia. “Except that I reiterate precisely what Murthwaite said—you’ve got to go back to Wooler and see him and tell him all about it and enable him to keep his word to Sir Charles Sperrigoe. And that’s that!”
Parslewe’s thin lips resolved themselves into that straight, rigid line which I had already come to know as well as I knew my own reflection in a mirror. When he relaxed them it was to indulge in one of his sardonic laughs, which died away into a cynical chuckle and ended in one of his angelic smiles, cast, of course, in his ward’s direction.
“Oh, that’s that, is it, my dear?” he said, sweetly. “Well, then, it isn’t! I’m not going to traipse back to Wooler—till I please! I’m not going to suit the convenience of either Charlie Sperrigoe or Jackie Murthwaite—till I please! I reckon I know my own business as well as the next man, and I shall just carry it out—as I please! And if you want me to indulge in modern slang—that’s that!”
“And it all means that you know a great deal more than you’ve let out!” exclaimed Madrasia.
He treated us to another of his sardonic bursts of laughter at that.
“I’m not aware that I’ve let out anything at all, my dear, so far!” he retorted. “And I’ve no intention of doing so until”
“Until you please!” said Madrasia. “Precisely! More mystery! Really, Jimmie, for a respectable elderly gentleman”
He laughed again, throwing up his head as if he enjoyed being scolded, rose from his chair, and, standing on the hearth with his hands in his pockets, looked from one to the other of us as if he enjoyed seeing us wonder. Suddenly he drew one hand out, full of money. There was gold in those days!—plenty of it—and Parslewe had a fist full. He held it out to Madrasia.
“Go and buy a toothbrush!” he said. “You know the town—go and do a bit of shopping. Better get all you want—didn’t I say we might be two nights? Go and amuse yourself, my dear, and leave mysteries alone. There are no mysteries—to me, anyway.” He thrust the money into her hands, stood smilingly by while she put on her furs, and when she had gone, turned to me with a laugh.
“Trust a woman for making the most of a mystery, Craye!” he said. “If there isn’t one she’ll invent one.”
“Is there no mystery in this matter, then?” I asked. “It seems to me that there’s a pretty handsome one. But evidently not to you—you’re in the inside of things, you see, Mr. Parslewe.”
“Aye, well,” he answered. “I dare say I see the game from another angle. However, I’m not quite so thickheaded as not to realise that what’s pretty plain to me mayn’t be at all plain to other folk, and I’m going to let you into a bit of my confidence. Come downstairs to the smoking-room, and we’ll have these windows opened—this room’s got a bit stuffy.”
He rang the bell and gave some orders about ventilating the room and about having some light supper laid there for eleven o’clock that evening (in readiness, he said in an aside to me, for our return from the play), and then led me down to a quiet corner of the smoking-room. And there, having first lighted another cigar, he proceeded to divest the copper box of the neat wrappings in which Madrasia had carried it from Kelpieshaw. He set it on the little table before us, and we both stared at it. He, in particular, stared at it so hard that I began to think the mere sight of the thing was hypnotising him. Suddenly he started, and began to fumble in his waistcoat pocket.
“Aye,” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “I shouldn’t wonder if it is so!”
With that he pulled out of his waistcoat pocket a tiny foot-rule, ivory, in folding sections, and, opening the copper box, measured its interior depth. Then he measured the exterior depth, and turned to me with one of his dangerously sweet smiles.
“The devil!” he exclaimed. “Craye!—there’s a false bottom to this box! I’ve been suspecting that for the last half-hour, and by all that is, it’s true!”
I was beginning to get excited, and I stared at the box as hard as he had done.
“You make that out by measurement?” I asked.
“Precisely! There’s a difference of a quarter of an inch between the interior and exterior depths,” he replied. “That means there’s the very slightest of cavities, but ample to conceal—what?”
“Nothing much, I should think,” said I.
“No; but I’ve heard of very important and fateful things going into small compass,” he remarked. “Anyway, there it is! You can’t get away from the measurements. There’s a space—there! And there’ll be some trick of opening the thing from the bottom—probably connected with these feet.”
He pointed to the four circular knobs on which the copper box rested, but made no attempt to touch them; his thoughts seemed to be otherwhere. And after thinking a little, he suddenly turned to me confidentially.
“I told you I’d tell you something,” he said. “You’re a dependable chap, Craye—I showed that by leaving the girl in your charge. She likes you, too, and I suppose you two young people will fall in love with each other if you haven’t done so already, and if you have, my lad—all right! You’ll make a big name in your art—but never mind that; I’ll tell you a bit about this box. Not how it came into my possession; the time for that is not yet. But when I did get it it was locked, and I had no key to it, and never bothered to get one found or made. When it got a wee bit damaged, I took it to Bickerdale, here in this town, and asked him to put it right. He was a bit wary of dealing with it, but said he knew a man who would, so I left it with him, and, incidentally, asked him, while they were about it, to have it unlocked. And now, Craye, now I think that while it was in Bickerdale’s hands, or in the other man’s hands, something was abstracted from that box—something that I never knew was in it. Abstracted then—unless”
He paused, making a queer, speculating grimace.
“Unless—what?” I asked.
He leaned nearer to my shoulder, dropping his voice, though there was no one at all near us.
“Unless it was abstracted at Kelpieshaw yesterday, by that chap Weech!” he replied. “Weech? Augustus? What a name!”
“Weech!” I exclaimed. “By him! Impossible!”
“And why impossible, my lad?” he asked. “No impossibility about it! Didn’t you tell me just now, upstairs, while you were giving your account of all that had transpired, that you and Madrasia went up to my library to compare the titles of the books in The Times advertisement with certain volumes on my shelves, leaving Master Augustus Weech alone—with the copper box in front of him? Of course!”
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “I certainly never thought of that!”
“No doubt,” he remarked coolly. “But I did. However, now we come to another matter, though connected with the main one. I have business to-night which, I hope, will illuminate me as to if anything was in the box or has been abstracted from it since—by Weeds—and I want you to do two or three things for me, chiefly in the way of looking after Madrasia. We’ll dine early, to begin with. Then you can take her to the play—here are the tickets while I remember them. When you come back, you’ll find a bit of supper in that private sitting-room. Before you go, I shall tell Madrasia that I may be very late in coming in, so after supper she’ll go to bed. Now comes in a job for you! I want you to wait up, in that sitting-room, until twelve o’clock—midnight. If I’m not in by exactly twelve”—here he paused and produced a sealed envelope which he placed in my hand—“put on your overcoat, and take that round, yourself, to the police station—it’s not far off—ask to see a responsible person, and hand it to him. Do you understand?”
“Every word!” said I. “But—police? Do you anticipate danger?”
“Not so much danger as difficulty, though I won’t deny that there may be danger,” he answered. “But do what I say. You’ll find an inspector on night duty—he’ll know my name when he reads my note, because I’m a county magistrate. If he asks you a question or two, answer. And, if you like, go with him if he goes himself, or with whoever he sends. Is it all clear?—midnight?”
“It’s all clear,” I replied, putting the sealed envelope in my pocket. “And I’ll carry it out. But I hope you’re not running into personal danger, Mr. Parslewe!”
His lips tightened, and he looked away, as if to intimate that that was a matter he wouldn’t discuss, and presently he began to talk about something of a totally different nature. I wanted to ask him what I should do supposing anything did happen to him, but I dared not; I saw well enough that he had done with things for the time being, and that there was nothing to be done but to carry out his instructions.
We dined quietly downstairs at half-past six; when, nearly an hour later, Madrasia and I drove off to the theatre, we left Parslewe calmly chatting to an old gentleman in the lounge. He waved his cigar to us as we passed, then called Madrasia back.
“You go to bed when you get in, child,” he said. “At least, when you’ve had some supper. Don’t wait for me; I mayn’t he in till the early hours.”
Then he waved her off, and we went away, Madrasia mildly excited at the thought of the play, and I feeling uncommonly anxious and depressed. For the possibilities of the situation which might arise at midnight were not pleasant to contemplate, and the more I thought about them the less I liked them. It was useless to deny that Parslewe was a strange, even an eccentric man, who would do things in his own fashion, and I was sufficiently learned in the ways of the world, young as I was, to know that such men run into danger. Where was he going that night, and to do—what? Evidently on some mission which might need police interference. And supposing that interference came along too late? What was I to do then? When all was said and done, and in spite of what he had said about myself and Madrasia in his easygoing fashion, I was almost a stranger to him and to her, and I foresaw complications if anything serious happened to him. I did not particularly love Parslewe that evening; I thought he might have given me more of his confidence. But there it was! and there was Madrasia. And Madrasia seemed to have been restored to a more serene state of mind by this rejoining of her guardian; evidently she possessed a sound belief in Parslewe’s powers.
“Did he tell you anything this afternoon when I was out shopping?” she inquired suddenly as we rode up Grey Street. “I’m sure you must have talked.”
“Well,” I answered. “A little. He thinks the copper box has a false bottom, a narrow cavity, in it, and that something has been concealed there, and stolen from it. Possibly by our friend Weech.”
“Weech!” she exclaimed. “When?”
“When we left him alone with the box while we went up to the library,” I replied. “Of course, that’s possible—if Weech knew the secret.”
This seemed to fill her with new ideas.
“I wonder!” she said, musingly. “And is—is that what he’s after, here, in Newcastle?”
“Something of the sort,” I assented. “At least, I gather so. You know what he is—better than I do.”
She sat for a time in silence—in fact, till the cab drew up at the theatre. Then she spoke.
“There’s one thing about Jimmie,” she remarked, reassuringly, “nobody will get the better of him! So let him work things out.”
I did not tell her that there was no question of choice on my part. We saw the play which Parslewe had commended so highly; we went back to the hotel; we had supper together; then Madrasia went off to her room. And it was then twenty minutes to twelve, and I sat out every one of them, waiting, watching the door, listening for a step in the corridor without. But Parslewe did not come.
And at one minute past twelve I seized my overcoat and cap and left the room.