IN WHICH I AT LAST BECOME ACQUAINTED WITH THE TOP-FLOOR-FRONT, AND
HEAR HIS ROMANTIC STORY
It was just as I was putting away my book, quite late, that Miss
Laura knocked at the door to say that Mr. Carstairs, the gentleman on
the top floor, who had been ill for some days, had asked if I would
be so good as to pay him a short visit. This seemed to me odd, for
beyond exchanging "good morning" now and then, we had never spoken;
but it was not a request that I could disregard, and up I went.
The old gentleman was in bed, and as he lay there, gaunt and grey,
with his hollow cheeks and bright eyes and pointed beard, he was like
nothing in the world but Don Quixote. With a courteous movement he
motioned me to a chair, and then thanked me for having compassion on
a stranger's whim.
For a while after this there was silence, and I had an opportunity of
noticing how bare was his room of all but necessities, although those
seemed of the best. There were no pictures.
"I asked you to come," Mr. Carstairs began, "because I had a bad
night last night and I have had a bad day. This you may think but a
poor reason," he continued, in his quiet, cultured voice, smiling
faintly, "and to you, who are well and strong, it is inadequate. But
to me, who am dying, it is justification for any eccentricity. I
liked you directly I saw you, and it pains me to think that I have
taken no steps to cultivate the acquaintance of yourself and your
wife; but I have long got out of the way of making overtures of
friendship, and to occupy rooms in the same house is not one of the
best passports to a good understanding."
He lay back exhausted and began to cough. I looked among the bottles
for a lenitive and found only an empty one. Asking him if there was
another, I understood him to say it was in the cupboard by the
window; and to this I hurried. But no sooner was my hand on the
handle than his face underwent a terrifying transformation, and he
half-sprang from bed crying, "Not there! Not there!"
I came hurriedly from the door, and he quieted down and directed me
to a cupboard on the other side. Now what Bluebeard's closet was
this? I wondered (with Mrs. Wiles). I was soon to know.
"I throw myself on your good nature," he resumed, "because I am _in
extremis_ and have no friend within call. It is extremely improbable
that I shall get well from this attack. You see, for one thing I am
a good age, and for another I have very little to live for, and
therefore am not likely to make a fight of it."
I murmured the usual things.
"No," he said, "there's very little in it. If I recover it is only
for a brief while, with impaired strength. If I were younger and
happier even that would be worth having; but really one may as well
die to-day as to-morrow. It's got to be."
This is a form of fatalism with which I am as fit to grapple as a
seamstress with a cuttlefish, so I said nothing.
"Your kindness in coming up," he continued, "leads me to ask you to
be kinder still and administer my effects. They are few enough. I
want everything to go to the National Art Collections Fund. It
sounds simple, but there is this complication, that the name by which
I am known is not my real name; and my real name, although it is
bound to come out, I want to be still suppressed in connection with
myself. I die as John Carstairs."
My face, no doubt, indicated some perplexity, for he went on.
"You will understand only if I tell you the whole story; but first I
must confess that I am one of the most notorious of living
thieves--perhaps almost the most famous of all, in this country--who
have never been found out. When I die the secret must of necessity
be in part discovered. I look to you to help me so that my name and
the theft are kept distinct."
I said nothing for a little while, but merely pondered on the
accidents of life in general, and in particular that accident which
had led me to 7 Primrose Terrace, Regent's Park, to a
respectable-looking house kept by refined twins, in which I was to
live beneath a dying brigand and be forced into the position of his
executor.
"Does the prospect alarm you?" he asked.
"Well," I said, "to be frank, it is not what I should have asked for.
But," I added hastily, "you may continue your instructions: that is,
if you are really certain that there is no one but myself to help
you. Have you no lawyer?"
"A lawyer witnessed my will quite recently," he said. "It is in
order. You will perhaps go to him for its execution."
"And what about your next-door neighbour, Spanton?" I said.
He smiled grimly.
"Then Lacey, the best of men and the most ingenious and helpful?"
"Yes," he said, "I thought of Lacey. But he has too much to do; and
I was afraid he might be too clever. He is impulsive. This topic is
so delicate that impulse might ruin it. So," he smiled humorously,
"I had your name put in the document."
"Kismet," I replied; but Heaven knows I wished myself downstairs with
my door carefully locked. I neither wanted to hear his story nor
administer his ill-gotten estate. The whole thing was absurd. The
chance of passing fellow-lodgers on the stairs and having the
misfortune to appear benevolent and virtuous to their defective
vision ought not to be permitted to lead to such embroilments as
this. But I have ever been weak and acquiescent; and when I looked
at his melancholy, wasted features, what else could I do? A dying
Don Quixote--who would not be foolish for him?
When I agreed he gave a great sigh of relief--probably at once the
most tragic and satisfactory sound I shall ever hear--and held out
his long, bony hand.
"You can take it without fear," he said, smiling again; "when I said
I was a thief I did not say all. There is such a thing as stealing
your own. But listen. The story briefly is this: I was a well-to-do
business man, unmarried and not very sociable. That was twenty and
more years ago. Then a serious crisis came in my life of which I
need say nothing, and I decided suddenly to leave civilization
completely and begin all over afresh where the conditions were
simpler. There was no disgraceful element in the matter. An event
occurred which led to complete disillusionment setting in; I
developed acute misanthropy and realized that England and I were
incompatible. That is all. Many men--and perhaps many women--must
have been through a similar experience; but not all are as free as I
was to act.
"I laid my plans very carefully. I converted a sufficient amount of
stock into cash; I made my will, leaving everything to the
establishment of a certain kind of night refuge in London for the
homeless, wherever they were most needed; and then I disappeared.
This was not difficult. I took a passage to America. Between
Liverpool and Queenstown I shaved off my long beard and moustache and
changed my clothes. At Queenstown I left my stateroom, after
depositing a last letter on the table, and went ashore among a crowd
of other passengers. There I took train at once and was soon in
London again, where I shipped for Australia and the South Seas.
Meanwhile, that had happened on the steamer which I had foreseen. My
stateroom was not opened until some hours after the vessel was on her
way to America, and the contents of the letter there led people to
assume that I had jumped overboard. I was therefore dead. A
sufficient time having elapsed, the courts officially presumed my
death, my estate was wound up, and I was a thing of the past. Any
reasonably careful man can disappear still, in spite of Marconi and
all the other modern obstacles, provided he has not committed a
crime. And it was easier then."
"Were the night refuges built?" I asked.
"Oh yes," he said. "I have slept in one. A most curious experience.
"Arrived in Sydney I opened a banking account in my new name, made
some investments, and passed on to the South Seas, where, for fifteen
years, I lived a calm life, succeeding commercially, as I was bound
to do, and happier perhaps than not, although happiness was never in
my grasp, nor could it be. Then gradually the desire once more to be
in London became very powerful; while an absolute mania seized me
again to see pictures. Particularly one picture. That it would be
safe, I felt sure, for I was much changed and had had few intimate
friends at any time."
He paused, tired with his effort, and lay still.
"I must tell you," he continued, "that I had been not only a great
lover of pictures wherever they were to be seen, but a collector too.
At the time of my disappearance I had one of the best small private
collections in the country. Such, however, had been my disgust with
life that it included these pictures too, and in my rage and haste to
have broken with everything, I was ready to break with them as well,
and my will gave instructions for all my pictures to be sold save one
little jewel of paint, the very gem of the collection--a small
Madonna which has been attributed to Verrocchio--and this I left to
the National Gallery. It was this picture that I felt I must at any
risk again see. I therefore sold my South Sea business, wound up my
affairs, and returned to London, again a rich man, finding a lodging
in this house. That was seven years ago.
"So far all is well. Now comes the criminal part of the story. No
sooner did I see my little Verrocchio on its easel in the National
Gallery--in the most honoured place--than I realized that I could not
live without it. I had not known what a spell I was under or I would
have stayed away. It had always been in my living-room in my old
life, and I found that I belonged to it still. I used to go day
after day to Trafalgar Square to worship it--nothing less. I became
known to the attendants. After closing hours I would plot how to get
possession of it again. I could not go to the Director and say who I
was and insist on a return of the picture until I died in earnest.
For one thing he would not have believed me, and to make him believe
me would have meant an endless and merciless raking up of the past:
more than that, a return to my old identity, which was unbearable:
men shaking hands with me, newspaper comment, and all the rest of it.
Again, there was the risk that he might think me a dangerous lunatic
and forbid me the Gallery. Think of that!
"I had therefore to consider how to get the picture secretly, and at
last I managed it--at noon, of course, for that is the true time for
successful theft, and by means of a big cloak on copying day. I had
carefully noted the times when vigilance was relaxed, and waited my
chance. It came; I removed the picture, passed quietly into the
street, and found my way here unobserved."
He paused again. "You will, of course, remember the incident," he
went on. "The world rang with it. 'Theft of the famous Verrocchio.'
I had very little fear of being discovered and, naturally, no
remorse; but I must admit to a little self-consciousness on my next
visit to Trafalgar Square--for, of course, I was not so foolish as to
discontinue my old habits. But I was cunning. I went to the
Director and offered to give £5000 as a reward for the detection of
the thief--on the condition that the donor's name was not published.
I was able also to discuss the theft with the officials quite calmly.
My one regret was that the custodian of the room in which my little
masterpiece was kept was discharged, but I have seen to it, always
anonymously, that he has not lost financially.
"I now began to be almost happy. I had my picture and, the National
Gallery being negligible, I was again able to look in at Christie's
whenever I wished and mix again in this ocean we call London. I
bought no more; I had the best; but I saw everything that was good,
and became an amateur expert at the service of any of my dealer
acquaintances.
My one disappointment was that being so exceptional a picture thief I
was not and am not able to enter into the feelings of the more
typical kind. For naturally the one thing above all others that I
want to know is who took the Louvre Leonardo, and why, and where it
is. The motive could not have been identical with mine, but it might
be akin. But this I shall never know, because I am going to die."
"Not yet," I said, "not yet."
"Yes," he replied. "And I must waste no more time. I am very weak.
What I want you to do is to get this picture back into the possession
of the National Gallery without anyone suspecting my connection with
it. That is all. The ordinary execution of my will you and the
lawyer can manage without the faintest difficulty, and I have left
you plenty for such expense and trouble as you are put to. But the
restitution of this picture I count on you to make alone. You will
do it?"
I shook his hand. "I will do everything possible to preserve
secrecy," I said.
"There is no hurry," he replied. "Take your time. Keep it in your
room in a parcel until you are ready. Only the suspected are
suspected in this world, and you and I are equally remote from their
thoughts."
He lay still again.
"But where," I asked, after a while, "is the picture?"
"In there," he said, pointing to the door to which I had wrongly gone
for the cough mixture. "Go in. No one has seen it here but myself."
I opened the door and found myself in a little room lighted by one
window. Opposite this on the wall was a curtain.
"Turn on the light," he said, "and draw back the curtain."
I did so, and beheld one of the most exquisite paintings I ever
saw--the head of a girl, sweet, wistful, understanding, and gay. Not
quite a Madonna; no mother; but the very personification of youthful
joy, sympathy, and loveliness. I knew too little of painting to
express an opinion as to the authenticity, and Verrocchio, I am told,
although he was the master of Leonardo and Perugino and Lorenzo di
Credi, has left almost nothing authentically from his own brush; but
there is a candour and charm in the treatment, and transparency in
the colours, which are like nothing that I know except the National
Gallery picture attributed to this master's school.
"Bring it to me, please," said Carstairs from his bed, and I carried
it in and held it for him.
"No one has ever seen it but myself--and now you--since it left the
Gallery four years ago," he said. "Mrs. Wiles has done her best to
get into that room, but in vain. I suppose everyone who steals a
picture or becomes the owner of a stolen picture has similar
difficulties. Perhaps the safer way would be to have another canvas
or panel over the stolen one, in the same frame, to slide aside when
one is alone; but that would mean taking a workman more or less into
one's confidence, and no wise thief does that.
"Put it back, put it back," he cried suddenly, as he fell on his
pillow unconscious.
I did so at once, put the key of the cupboard door in my pocket, and
telephoned for the doctor.
Carstairs died that night.