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THE STRANGE CASE OF
MORTIMER FENLEY
BY LOUIS TRACY
AUTHOR OF
THE WINGS OF THE MORNING,
NUMBER SEVENTEEN, ETC.
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Made in the United States of America
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
EDWARD J. CLODE
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE WATER NYMPHS 1
II. "WHO HATH DONE THIS THING?" 19
III. THE HOUNDS 39
IV. BREAKING COVER 59
V. A FAMILY GATHERING 79
VI. WHEREIN FURNEAUX SEEKS INSPIRATION 101
VII. SOME SIDE ISSUES 123
VIII. COINCIDENCES 145
IX. WHEREIN AN ARTIST BECOMES A MAN OF ACTION 166
X. FURNEAUX STATES SOME FACTS 189
XI. SOME PRELIMINARY SKIRMISHING 211
XII. WHEREIN SCOTLAND YARD IS DINED AND WINED 229
XIII. CLOSE QUARTERS 246
XIV. THE SPREADING OF THE NET 266
XV. SOME STAGE EFFECTS 286
XVI. THE CLOSE OF A TRAGEDY 305
XVII. THE SETTLEMENT 324
THE STRANGE CASE OF MORTIMER FENLEY
CHAPTER I
THE WATER NYMPHS
Does an evil deed cast a shadow in advance? Does premeditated crime
spread a baleful aura which affects certain highly-strung temperaments
just as the sensation of a wave of cold air rising from the spine to
the head may be a forewarning of epilepsy or hysteria? John Trenholme
had cause to think so one bright June morning in 1912, and he has
never ceased to believe it, though the events which made him an
outstanding figure in the "Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley," as the
murder of a prominent man in the City of London came to be known, have
long since been swept into oblivion by nearly five years of war. Even
the sun became a prime agent of the occult that morning. It found a
chink in a blind and threw a bar of vivid light across the face of a
young man lying asleep in the front bedroom of the "White Horse Inn"
at Roxton. It crept onward from a firm, well-molded chin to lips now
tight set, though not lacking signs that they would open readily in a
smile and perhaps reveal two rows of strong, white, even teeth.
Indeed, when that strip of sunshine touched and warmed them, the
smile came; so the sleeper was dreaming, and pleasantly.
But the earth stays not for men, no matter what their dreams. In a few
minutes the radiant line reached the sleeper's eyes, and he awoke.
Naturally, he stared straight at the disturber of his slumbers; and
being a mere man, who emulated not the ways of eagles, was routed at
the first glance.
More than that, he was thoroughly aroused, and sprang out of bed with
a celerity that would have given many another young man a headache
during the remainder of the day.
But John Trenholme, artist by profession, was somewhat of a
light-hearted vagabond by instinct; if the artist was ready to be
annoyed because of an imaginary loss of precious daylight, the
vagabond laughed cheerily when he blinked at a clock and learned that
the hour still lacked some minutes of half past five in the morning.
"By gad," he grinned, pulling up the blind, "I was scared stiff. I
thought the blessed alarm had missed fire, and that I had been lying
here like a hog during the best part of the finest day England has
seen this year."
Evidently he was still young enough to deal in superlatives, for there
had been other fine days that Summer; moreover, in likening himself to
a pig, he was ridiculously unfair to six feet of athletic symmetry in
which it would be difficult to detect any marked resemblance to the
animal whose name is a synonym for laziness.
On the way to the bathroom he stopped to listen for sounds of an
aroused household, but the inmates of the White Horse Inn were still
taking life easily.
"Eliza vows she can hear that alarm in her room," he communed. "Well,
suppose we assist nature, always a laudable thing in itself, and
peculiarly excellent when breakfast is thereby advanced a quarter of
an hour."
Eliza was the inn's stout and voluble cook-housekeeper, and her attic
lay directly above Trenholme's room. He went back for the clock, crept
swiftly upstairs, opened a door a few inches, and put the infernal
machine inside, close to the wall. He was splashing in the bath when a
harsh and penetrating din jarred through the house, and a slight
scream showed that Eliza had been duly "alarmed."
A few minutes later came a heavy thump on the bathroom door.
"All right, Mr. Trenholme!" cried an irate female voice. "You've been
up to your tricks, have you? It'll be my turn when I make your coffee;
I'll pepper an' salt it!"
"Why, what's the matter, Eliza?" he shouted.
"Matter! Frightenin' a body like that! I thought a lot o' suffrigettes
were smashin' the windows of the snug."
Eliza was still touchy when Trenholme ventured to peep into the
kitchen.
"I don't know how you dare show your face," she cried wrathfully. "The
impidence of men nowadays! Just fancy you comin' an' openin' my door!"
"But, _cherie_, what have I done?" he inquired, his brown eyes wide
with astonishment.
"I'm not your cherry, nor your peach, neither. Who put that clock in
my room?"
"What clock, _ma belle_?"
Eliza picked up an egg, and bent so fiery a glance on the intruder
that he dodged out of sight for a second.
"Listen, _carissima_," he pleaded, peering round the jamb of the door
again. "If the alarm found its way upstairs I must have been walking
in my sleep. While you were dreaming of suffragettes I may have been
dreaming of you."
"Stop there a bit longer, chatterin' and callin' me names, an' your
bacon will be frizzled to a cinder," she retorted.
"But I really hoped to save you some trouble by carrying in the
breakfast tray myself. I hate to see a jolly, good-tempered woman of
your splendid physique working yourself to a shadow."
* * * * *
Eliza squared her elbows as a preliminary to another outburst, when
the stairs creaked. Mary, the "help," was arriving hurriedly, in curl
papers.
"Oh, _you_'ve condescended to get up, have you?" was the greeting Mary
received.
"Why, it's on'y ten minutes to six!" cried the astonished girl, gazing
at a grandfather's clock as if it were bewitched.
"You've never had such a shock since you were born," went on the
sarcastic Eliza. "But don't thank _me_, my girl. Thank Mr. Trenholme,
the gentleman stannin' there grinnin' like a Cheshire cat. Talk to him
nicely, an' p'raps he'll paint your picter, an' then your special
butcher boy will see how beautiful you reelly are."
"Jim don't need tellin' anything about that," said the girl, smiling,
for Eliza's bark was notoriously worse than her bite.
"Jim!" came the snorting comment. "The first man who ever axed me to
marry him was called Jim, an' when, like a wise woman, I said 'No,' he
went away an' 'listed in the Royal Artillery an' lost his leg in a
war--that's what Jim did."
"What a piece of luck you didn't accept him!" put on Trenholme.
"An' why, I'd like to know?"
"Because he began by losing his head over you. If a leg was missing,
too, there wasn't much of Jim left, was there?"
Mary giggled, and Eliza seized the egg again; so Trenholme ran to his
sitting-room. Within half an hour he was passing through the High
Street, bidding an affable "Good morning" to such early risers as he
met, and evidently well content with himself and the world in general.
His artist's kit revealed his profession even to the uncritical eye,
but no student of men could have failed to guess his bent were he
habited in the garb of a costermonger. The painter and the poet are
the last of the Bohemians, and John Trenholme was a Bohemian to the
tips of his fingers.
He carried himself like a cavalier, but the divine flame of art
kindled in his eye. He had learned how to paint in Julien's studio,
and that same school had taught him to despise convention. He looked
on nature as a series of exquisite pictures, and regarded men and
women in the mass as creatures that occasionally fitted into the
landscape. He was heart whole and fancy free. At twenty-five he had
already exhibited three times in the Salon, and was spoken of by the
critics as a painter of much promise, which is the critical method of
waiting to see how the cat jumps when an artist of genius and
originality arrests attention.
He had peculiarly luminous brown eyes set well apart in a face which
won the prompt confidence of women, children and dogs. He was
splendidly built for an out-door life, and moved with a long, supple
stride, a gait which people mistook for lounging until they walked
with him, and found that the pace was something over four miles an
hour. Add to these personal traits the fact that he had dwelt in
Roxton exactly two days and a half, and was already on speaking terms
with most of the inhabitants, and you have a fair notion of John
Trenholme's appearance and ways.
There remains but to add that he was commissioned by a magazine to
visit this old-world Hertfordshire village and depict some of its
beauties before a projected railway introduced the jerry-builder and a
sewerage scheme, and his presence in the White Horse Inn is explained.
He had sketched the straggling High Street, the green, the inn itself,
boasting a license six hundred years old, the undulating common, the
church with its lych gate, the ivy-clad ruin known as "The Castle,"
with its square Norman keep still frowning at an English countryside,
and there was left only an Elizabethan mansion, curiously misnamed
"The Towers," to be transferred to his portfolio. Here, oddly enough,
he had been rebuffed. A note to the owner, Mortimer Fenley, banker and
super City man, asking permission to enter the park of an afternoon,
had met with a curt refusal.
Trenholme, of course, was surprised, since he was paying the man a
rare compliment; he had expressed in the inn his full and free opinion
concerning all money grubbers, and the Fenley species thereof in
particular; whereupon the stout Eliza, who classed the Fenley family
as "rubbish," informed him that there was a right of way through the
park, and that from a certain point near a lake he could sketch the
grand old manor house to his heart's content, let the Fenleys and
their keepers scowl as they chose.
The village barber, too, bore out Eliza's statement.
"A rare old row there was in Roxton twenty year ago, when Fenley fust
kem here, an' tried to close the path," said the barber. "But we beat
him, we did, an' well he knows it. Not many folk use it nowadays,
'coss the artful ole dodger opened a new road to the station; but some
of us makes a point of strollin' that way on a Sunday afternoon, just
to look at the pheasants an' rabbits, an' it's a treat to see the head
keeper's face when we go through the lodge gates at the Easton end,
for that is the line the path takes."
Here followed a detailed description, for the Roxton barber, like
every other barber, could chatter like a magpie; it was in this wise
that Trenholme was able to defy the laws forbidding trespass, and
score off the seemingly uncivil owner of a historical dwelling.
He little imagined, that glorious June morning, that he was entering
on a road of strange adventure. He had chosen an early hour purposely.
Not only were the lights and shadows perfect for water color, but it
was highly probable that he would be able to come and go without
attracting attention. He had no wish to annoy Fenley, or quarrel with
the man's myrmidons. Indeed, he would not have visited the estate at
all if the magazine editor had not specially stipulated for a
full-page drawing of the house.
Now, all would have been well had the barber's directions proved as
bald in spirit as they were in letter.
"After passin' 'The Waggoner's Rest,' you'll come to a pair of iron
gates on the right," he had said. "On one side there's a swing gate.
Go through, an' make straight for a clump of cedars on top of a little
hill. There mayn't be much of a path, but that's it. It's reelly a
short cut to the Easton gate on the London road."
Yet who could guess what a snare for an artist's feet lay in those few
words? How could Trenholme realize that "a pair of iron gates" would
prove to be an almost perfect example of Christopher Wren's genius as
a designer of wrought iron? Trenholme's eyes sparkled when he beheld
this prize, with its acanthus leaves and roses beaten out with
wonderful freedom and beauty of curve. A careful drawing was the
result. Another result, uncounted by him, but of singular importance
in its outcome was the delay of forty minutes thus entailed.
He crossed an undulating park, and had no difficulty in tracing an
almost disused path in certain grass-grown furrows leading past the
group of cedars. On reaching this point he obtained a fair view of the
mansion; but the sun was directly behind him, as the house faced
southeast, and he decided to encroach some few yards on private
property. A brier-laden slope fell from the other side of the trees to
a delightful-looking lake fed by a tiny cascade on the east side. An
ideal spot, he thought.
This, then, was the stage setting: Trenholme, screened by black cedars
and luxuriant brushwood, was seated about fifty feet above the level
of the lake and some forty yards from its nearest sedges. The lake
itself, largely artificial, lay at the foot of the waterfall, which
gurgled and splashed down a miniature precipice of moss-covered
bowlders. Here and there a rock, a copper beech, a silver larch, or a
few flowering shrubs cast strong shadows on the dark, pellucid mirror
beneath. On a cunningly contrived promontory of brown rock stood a
white marble statue of Venus Aphrodite, and the ripples from the
cascade seemed to endow with life the shimmering reflection of the
goddess.
Beyond the lake a smooth lawn, dotted with fine old oaks and
chestnuts, rose gently for a quarter of a mile to the Italian gardens
in front of the house. To the left, the park was bounded by woods. To
the right was another wood, partly concealing a series of ravines and
disused quarries. Altogether a charming setting for an Elizabethan
manor, pastoral, peaceful, quite English, and seeming on that placid
June morning so remote from the crowded mart that it was hard to
believe the nearest milestone, with its "London, 30 miles."
Had Trenholme glanced at his watch he would have discovered that the
hour was now half past seven, or nearly an hour later than he had
planned. But Art, which is long-lived, recks little of Time, an
evanescent thing. He was enthusiastic over his subject. He would make
not one sketch, but two. That lake, like the gates, was worthy of
immortality. Of course, the house must come first. He unpacked a
canvas hold-all, and soon was busy.
He worked with the speed and assured confidence of a master. By years
of patient industry he had wrested from Nature the secrets of her
tints and tone values. Quickly there grew into being an exquisitely
bright and well balanced drawing, impressionist, but true; a harmony
of color and atmosphere. Leaving subtleties to the quiet thought of
the studio, he turned to the lake. Here the lights and shadows were
bolder. They demanded the accurate appraisement of the half closed
eye. He was so absorbed in his task that he was blithely unconscious
of the approach of a girl from the house, and his first glimpse of
her was forthcoming when she crossed the last spread of velvet sward
which separated a cluster of rhododendrons in the middle distance from
the farther edge of the lake.
It was not altogether surprising that he had not seen her earlier. She
wore a green coat and skirt and a most curiously shaped hat of the
same hue, so that her colors blended with the landscape. Moreover, she
was walking rapidly, and had covered the intervening quarter of a mile
in four minutes or less.
He thought at first that she was heading straight for his lofty perch,
and was perhaps bent on questioning his right to be there at all. But
he was promptly undeceived. Her mind was set on one object, and her
eyes did not travel beyond it. She no more suspected that an artist
was lurking in the shade of the cedars than she did that the man in
the moon was gazing blandly at her above their close-packed foliage.
She came on with rapid, graceful strides, stood for a moment by the
side of the Venus, and then, while Trenholme literally gasped for
breath, shed coat, skirt and shoes, revealing a slim form clad in a
dark blue bathing costume, and dived into the lake.
Trenholme had never felt more surprised. The change of costume was so
unexpected, the girl's complete ignorance of his presence so obvious,
that he regarded himself as a confessed intruder, somewhat akin to
Peeping Tom of Coventry. He was utterly at a loss how to act. If he
stood up and essayed a hurried retreat, the girl might be frightened,
and would unquestionably be annoyed. It was impossible to creep away
unseen. He was well below the crest of the slope crowned by the trees,
and the nymph now disporting in the lake could hardly fail to discover
him, no matter how deftly he crouched and twisted.
At this crisis, the artistic instinct triumphed. He became aware that
the one element lacking hitherto, the element that lent magic to the
beauty of the lake and its vivid environment of color, was the touch
of life brought by the swimmer. He caught the flash of her limbs as
they moved rhythmically through the dark, clear water, and it seemed
almost as if the gods had striven to be kind in sending this naiad to
complete a perfect setting. With stealthy hands he drew forth a small
canvas. Oil, not mild water color, was the fitting medium to portray
this Eden. Shrinking back under cover of a leafy brier, he began a
third sketch in which the dominant note was the contrast between the
living woman and the marble Venus.
For fifteen minutes the girl disported herself like a dolphin.
Evidently she was a practiced swimmer, and had at her command all the
resources of the art. At last she climbed out, and stood dripping on
the sun-laved rock beside the statue. Trenholme had foreseen this
attitude--had, in fact, painted with feverish energy in anticipation
of it. The comparison was too striking to be missed by an artist. Were
it not for the tightly clinging garments, the pair would have provided
a charming representation of Galatea in stone and Galatea after
Pygmalion's frenzy had warmed her into life.
Trenholme was absolutely deaf now to any consideration save that of
artistic endeavor. With a swift accuracy that was nearly marvelous he
put on the canvas the sheen of faultless limbs and slender neck. He
even secured the spun-gold glint of hair tightly coifed under a
bathing cap--a species of head-dress which had puzzled him at the
first glance--and there was more than a suggestion of a veritable
portrait of the regular, lively and delicately beautiful features
which belonged to a type differing in every essential from the cold,
classic loveliness of the statue, yet vastly more appealing in its
sheer femininity.
Then the spell was broken. The girl slipped on her shoes, dressed
herself in a few seconds, and was hurrying back to the house, almost
before Trenholme dared to breathe normally.
"Well," he muttered, watching the swaying of the green skirt as its
owner traversed the park, "this is something like an adventure! By
Jove, I've been lucky this morning! I've got my picture for next
year's Salon!"
He had got far more, if only he were gifted to peer into the future;
but that is a privilege denied to men, even to artists. Soon, when he
was calmer, and the embryo sketch had assumed its requisite color
notes for subsequent elaboration, he smiled a trifle dubiously.
"If that girl's temperament is as attractive as her looks I'd throw
over the Salon for the sake of meeting her," he mused. "But that's
frankly impossible, I suppose. At the best, she would not forgive me
if she knew I had watched her in this thievish way. I could never
explain it, never! She wouldn't even listen. Well, it's better to have
dreamed and lost than never to have dreamed at all."
And yet he dreamed. His eyes followed the fair unknown while she
entered the garden through a gateway of dense yews, and sped lightly
up the steps of a terrace adorned with other statues in marble and
bronze. No doorway broke the pleasing uniformity of the south front,
but she disappeared through an open window, swinging herself lightly
over the low sill. He went with her in imagination. Now she was
crossing a pretty drawing-room, now running upstairs to her room, now
dressing, possibly in white muslin, which, if Trenholme had the
choosing of it, would be powdered with tiny _fleurs de lys_, now
arranging her hair with keen eye for effect, and now tripping down
again in obedience to a gong summoning the household to breakfast.
He sighed.
"If I had the luck of a decent French poodle, this plutocrat Fenley
would eke have invited me to lunch," he grumbled.
Then his eyes sought the sketch, and he forgot the girl in her
counterfeit. By Jove, this _would_ be a picture! "The Water Nymphs."
But he must change the composition a little--losing none of its
character; only altering its accessories to such an extent that none
would recognize the exact setting.
"Luck!" he chortled, with mercurial rise of spirits. "I'm the luckiest
dog in England today. Happy chance has beaten all the tricks of the
studio. O ye goddesses, inspire me to heights worthy of you!"
His visions were rudely dispelled by a gunshot, sharp, insistent,
a tocsin of death in that sylvan solitude. A host of rooks arose
from some tall elms near the house; a couple of cock pheasants flew
with startled chuckling out of the wood on the right; the white
tails of rabbits previously unseen revealed their owners' whereabouts
as they scampered to cover. But Trenholme was sportsman enough to
realize that the weapon fired was a rifle; no toy, but of high velocity,
and he wondered how any one dared risk its dangerous use in such a
locality. He fixed the sound definitely as coming from the wood to
the right--the cover quitted so hurriedly by the pheasants--and
instinctively his glance turned to the house, in the half formed
thought that some one there might hear the shot, and look out.
The ground floor window by which the girl had entered still remained
open, but now another window, the most easterly one on the first
floor, had been raised slightly. The light was peculiarly strong and
the air so clear that even at the distance he fancied he could
distinguish some one gesticulating, or so it seemed, behind the glass.
This went on for a minute or more. Then the window was closed. At the
same time he noticed a sparkling of glass and brasswork behind the
clipped yew hedge which extended beyond the east wing. After some
puzzling, he made out that a motor car was waiting there.
That was all. The clamor of the rooks soon subsided. A couple of
rabbits skipped from the bushes to resume an interrupted meal on
tender grass shoots. A robin trilled a roundelay from some neighboring
branch. Trenholme looked at his watch. Half past nine! Why, he must
have been mooning there a good half hour!
He gathered his traps, and as the result of seeing the automobile,
which had not moved yet, determined to forego his earlier project of
walking out of the park by the Easton gate.
He had just emerged from the trees when a gruff voice hailed him.
"Hi!" it cried. "Who're you, an' what are you doin' here!"
A man, carrying a shotgun and accompanied by a dog, strode up with
determined air.
Trenholme explained civilly, since the keeper was clearly within
his rights. Moreover, the stranger was so patently a gentleman
that Velveteens adopted a less imperative tone.
"Did you hear a shot fired somewhere?" he asked.
"Yes. Among those trees." And Trenholme pointed. "It was a rifle,
too," he added, with an eye at the twelve-bore.
"So _I_ thought," agreed the keeper.
"Rather risky, isn't it, firing bullets in a place like this?"
"I just want to find out who the ijiot is that did it. Excuse me, sir,
I must be off." And man and dog hurried away.
And Trenholme, not knowing that death had answered the shot, took
his own departure, singing as he walked, his thoughts altogether on
life, and more especially on life as revealed by the limbs of a girl
gleaming in the dark waters of a pool.