in Copenhagen china. Lord Peebles had a collection of this pale fabric,
and his friend felt it would be a privilege to add to it. That also was
paid for in gold, and after he had left each shop a quiet man entered
and conferred privately with the proprietor, leaving a companion
outside, who strolled after the millionaire.
Returning home, he sent out a number of invitations for a dinner party
in ten days’ time. A royal princess had intimated that she would like to
dine with him that night, and he included in his invitations Lord and
Lady Peebles, both of whom were snobs of “purest ray serene.” Later on
he would ask them again to some similar function, for he felt that two
such invitations would make full compensation for the anxiety he had
caused. He did not regard the bagatelle of gold; that meant nothing to
either of them. Then after an hour with his beautiful collection of
Greek coins he dressed and went out to dinner.
Lord Peebles was of the party, and the two cut into a table of bridge
afterwards, and played for a couple of hours, with luck distinctly
against the newly created peer. Generally his losses caused him
exquisite agony: being very rich, he could not bear to be ever so little
poorer. But to-night he laid down a couple of ten-pound notes with a
smile.
“I pay you, my dear Whately,” he said, “fourteen pounds, is it not? I
wonder if you can give me six.”
Whately could and did.
“You have had the worst of luck,” he observed genially, “but it’s only a
game. By the way, I hope I shall see you and your wife to dinner on the
23rd. I sent you an invitation this evening.”
Lord Peebles took up his change and looked rather carefully at each
sovereign in turn, as if to question its genuineness.
“Curious thing,” he said, “each of these sovereigns is marked. There is
a small capital ‘P’ scratched on the field in front of St. George.”
He passed one over to Whately, who felt as if some warning whistle had
sounded remotely in his ears. But he contrived to speak in his natural
voice, and got up.
“I see,” he said; “I wonder what that means. Bates gave me them just
before I came out.”
“Indeed,” said Lord Peebles negligently. “Yes, the 23rd would be
delightful. Are you going?”
“Yes, I think I shall be off,” said Whately.
He drove back to Park Lane, and without setting the pleasant peal of
electric bells in the fan-room, went straight to his bedchamber and got
out the box which had thrilled him with such exquisite pangs of pleasure
that morning. He stripped the paper off sausage after sausage of gold,
until his bed was piled with the precious metal. And on each shining
disc the same ominous discovery met his eye: just in front of St.
George’s head on every one that he took up was scratched a small capital
“P.”
* * * * *
He slept far from well that night, for his mind, spinning madly like a
whirling top, came into collision with a series of hard angles of
uncomfortable circumstances. He told himself that it was inconceivable
that his friend should have suspected him of the odious crime of
blackmailing, but his friend evidently when paying the ransom had taken
steps to trace its destination, with a view to the apprehension of the
criminal. By a most strange coincidence it was he, Arthur Whately, who
had supplied him with a clue, though he had had the presence of mind to
say that Bates had given him these six pieces of evidence.... Then with
a pang of alarm that made him sit bolt upright in bed, he remembered
that there were four more of them in the shop where they sold china cats
and seagulls, fifteen more in the silversmith’s, where he had bought the
Charles II. spoon, and two others in the hair-cutting establishment in
St. James’s Street, where he had so lightly purchased a safety-razor
and a small indiarubber sponge. At all costs he must repossess himself
of these, and how was that to be done? In this short summer night there
was scarcely time, even if he had had the tools, to make a series of
single-handed burglaries, yet if he did not get those accursed
sovereigns back, he was letting the tap of evidence drip and drip and
drip. What, again, was the use of those nineteen hundred and odd
sovereigns on his bed if he could not put them in circulation without
multiplying the evidence already in existence? The suspense of the last
week, it is true, had been thrilling and delicious, but it appeared now
that there were at least two sorts of suspense, and the other, though
quite as thrilling, was not so pleasant. Sinking into an uneasy slumber,
he dreamed of skilly.
Haggard and unshaven (in spite of the new safety-razor), he was in Bond
Street next morning early, with cheque-book and bank-notes in his
pocket. The shop that dealt in old silver was only just open, and he
went hurriedly in.
“I am Mr. Whately,” he said, “Mr. Whately, of Park Lane. Dear me, that
is a very pretty tankard. A hundred pounds only! Please send it round to
me to No. 93. The fact is, a rather curious thing has happened. I bought
a Charles II. spoon here yesterday afternoon and paid for it in
sovereigns. For certain curious, I may say family, reasons, I very much
want those sovereigns back again. There are sentimental associations
with them, you understand. Could you kindly let me have them back and
take my cheque or bank-notes in exchange?”
The shopman laughed.
“Well, sir, a very curious thing happened here too,” he said brightly.
“You had hardly left the shop when a gentleman came in and asked if I
could let him have any change for some bank-notes. There were your
sovereigns lying in the till, and I gave him them all. I offered him
five more as well, but after examining those he said he did not want
more than fifteen.”
Arthur Whately couldn’t suppress a slight groan.
“That was very precipitate of you,” he said. “What was the gentleman
like? Was it--a stout, dark-faced gentleman with yellowish hair and--and
probably a fur coat?”
“No, sir, a clean-shaven gentleman with a sharp sort of face.”
“Not Peebles,” said Whately to himself, as he skimmed out of the shop.
“It may still only be a coincidence.”
The shop of Danish china was open, and again he told his lame and
unconvincing tale. Here again the fever for gold had run riot yesterday
afternoon, and a gentleman with a big moustache had taken five
sovereigns and left a bank-note. And his scuttling footsteps took him to
the aseptic hairdresser’s.
“I am fighting single-handed against a positive gang of these wretches,”
was his bitter comment.
But the aseptic hairdresser’s was still shut, and after ringing several
wrong bells belonging to different floors, he gave up in despair and
went home to the mocking splendour of No. 93. A fresh-faced stable-boy
was just laying down the straw in the street, whistling as he plied his
nimble pitchfork. Whately wondered whether he would ever whistle again.
For an hour he sat there lost in a scorching desert of barren thought.
Visions of oakum and broad arrows flitted through his disordered mind,
and every now and then he came to himself as some fresh circumstance of
dawning significance rapped on his brain.
Once he hurried upstairs, remembering that the awful attire of George
Loring still lurked in a locked cupboard of his bedroom, and he took the
criminal’s coat and stuffed it in the fire in his sitting-room, with the
intention of burning all that costume which had seemed so exquisitely
humorous. But the coat seemed impervious to flames, and it was not till
a quarter of an hour later that he came downstairs again with roasted
face. Even then there were trousers and shirt and patent leather boots
to get rid of, and trouser buttons and the base metal of his gorgeous
tie-pin would be found amid the ashes. And even when it was all done, he
would only have destroyed one thread of evidence, leaving a network of
imperishable circumstance unimpaired.
Truly there was a dark side to the game on which he had so lightly
embarked, which the callous world could not ever so faintly appreciate,
or would probably but imperfectly sympathize with even if it did.
But for the sake of saving his sanity he had to occupy himself with
something, and after vainly attempting to follow the meaning of a leader
in the _Times_, he began reading, purely as a “sad narcotic exercise,”
the Agony column. And then he fairly bounded from his seat, as the
following met his eye:
“To George Loring. A packet of marked sovereigns, twenty-eight in
number, will be forwarded to the above-named at any address or given to
a messenger who hands to Mr. Arthur Armstrong (resident for this day
only at the Charing Cross Hotel) the sum of £4,000 (four thousand) in
bank-notes or bullion.”
He groaned aloud.
“It spells beggary,” he said to himself, “but I must have those
sovereigns. But let me see first whether twenty-eight is the full tale
of them,” and he snatched up a piece of paper and wrote:
To Lord Peebles 6
Silver Shop 15
Copenhagen China 5
Haircutting place 2
--
28
and at that, in spite of the ruinous expense, his heart bounded high
within him. It was wiser not to appear himself (he had, so it struck
him, appeared rather too frequently already), and sending for his
secretary he scrawled a cheque for £4,000, and bade him have it changed
into bank-notes and take it at once to the Charing Cross Hotel. There he
would ask for a certain Mr. Arthur Armstrong, who would give him a
packet containing twenty-eight marked sovereigns.
“It concerns a widowed aunt of mine,” he added, “and I cannot tell you
more. Speed and secrecy are essential to save her from ruin.”
The zealous secretary was back within an hour, and with a sob of relief
Whately, when he was alone, opened the packet he brought. Next moment
with a hollow groan he spilled the contents all over the table. The
sovereigns were marked indeed, but each of them had neatly incised on
it, not a “P” but an interrogation mark. Back went the zealous secretary
again to explain that these were not the right ones, and, if necessary,
to implore Mr. Arthur Armstrong, for the sake of his mother, to give up
the others. He was soon home again with the news that Mr. Arthur
Armstrong had already quitted the hotel, leaving no address.
* * * * *
Later on that abject day there arrived a note from Lord Peebles, saying
that it was doubtful whether he could come to dinner on the 23rd.
Events, at present private, might render it impossible. But he would
like a game of golf at Richmond next day if Whately was at liberty.
Again this proposal of a recreation detestable in itself and intolerable
to one with shaking hand and trembling knees! Yet if Peebles had
proposed a game of leap-frog Whately could not be so imprudent as to
refuse, for at all costs he must keep up friendly relations. He had half
a mind (but not the other half) to tell his friend that it was indeed he
who had attempted to blackmail him, for a joke, and that the retaliation
was getting beyond one. But it was not certain as yet that a confession
was necessary; there was nothing to show that Lord Peebles had
identified him with George Loring. It looked like it; it looked
uncommonly like it, but what proof had he? Whately, it is true, had
given him half a dozen of his own marked sovereigns, and no doubt
Peebles knew that he had expended others on Copenhagen china, Charles
II. silver and American articles of toilet, but that was all. It
certainly was a good deal----
* * * * *
There is no need to dwell on his further anguish. The game of golf was a
cruel parody of sport, and Peebles was in his most pompous mood,
speaking of the House of Lords as “we.” At other times he spoke with
strange persistence of the horrors of English prisons, and mentioned
that he had been appointed visitor to Wormwood Scrubs. Whately did not
know with any accuracy where that was, but Peebles described exactly how
you could get to it. Long-sentence men stayed there.
Another day he would see or think he saw a stranger watching his house.
Sometimes a second would join him, and if one was clean-shaven and the
other had a moustache, Whately’s heart would leap to his throat and
creakingly pulsate there. His appetite failed him; his brushes were full
of shed hair; dew suddenly broke out on his forehead. And seven dreadful
days passed.
Then the end came.
Lord Peebles telephoned to him asking if he could see him on important
business, and of course a welcoming affirmative was given.
“You appear far from well, my dear Whately,” he said, looking anxiously
at him, “far from well. A little dieting, do you think, a little regular
work, a little abstention from alcohol?”
Whately gave a haggard glance out of the window. It was a foggy morning,
and in the roadway he could but faintly distinguish a large black van
which had approached noiselessly over the straw and now stood there. At
that sight there was no longer any doubt in his mind that Peebles had
adopted the ruthless archidiaconal attitude towards blackmailers, and
was going to have him arrested. But harassed and unnerved as he was by a
succession of sleepless nights and nightmare days, he still despised
and refused to parley with the conventional narrowness of his accuser.
Yet Lord Peebles still wore his pleased and secret smile, and it was not
good manners to look like that in the act of committing a friend to a
convict prison. Whately drew himself up and spoke with wonderful
steadiness and dignity.
“I see it’s all up!” he said, “and that I shall soon get all the things
you so feelingly recommend. But after all I had a perfectly amazing week
when I waited for your answer. I don’t deny that you have given me an
awful week, too, or that there are many rather cheerless weeks in front
of me. It’s no use my attempting to explain; you would never understand.
Your soul doesn’t rise above sovereigns.”
Lord Peebles came a step nearer him, looking vexed.
“For those remarks,” he said, “you deserve to be treated as--as you
deserve. You don’t seem to realize that I have had a week of the most
thrilling enjoyment. You think that nobody has a sense of humour except
yourself. That attitude of yours has often annoyed me, for I have a
remarkably keen one, and for pure æsthetic pleasure I have just had the
week of my life. The fact that it was sugared with revenge hardly
enhanced it at all, nor did the fact that whereas you got two thousand
pounds out of me, I got four thousand out of you. You have been like a
monkey dancing on a hot plate. I have been the hot plate.”
Whately was scarcely listening; with chattering teeth he looked at the
huge ominous van in the street, and Lord Peebles followed his gaze.
“You deserve that that van should be Black Maria,” he went on in injured
tones, “to take you to Wormwood Scrubs, where I am visitor.”
“Is--isn’t it?” asked Whately.
Lord Peebles peered into the fog.
“The harmless, necessary pantechnicon,” he said.
Then he subsided into a chair and his great bulk began to shake with
spasms of ungovernable laughter. And gradually the colour came back to
Whately’s face, and shortly after an uncertain smile hovered on his
mouth.
“And is it all over?” he asked.
Lord Peebles took a small sausage of sovereigns out of his pocket.
“I brought these along with me,” he said, “please count them; they are
all marked, and there are twenty-eight of them. I will exchange them
with those you possess marked with an interrogation point.”
“You shall!” said Whately. “God bless you!”
“I was not certain, when I came here,” continued Lord Peebles,
disregarding this interruption, “whether I should put you out of your
suspense or not, but your haggard and emaciated appearance, my dear
fellow, decided me. Besides, I am two thousand pounds to the good, or
nearly so, for I owe some small sum to detectives. If I did not have
mercy on you, you would probably be too unwell to give your party for
the princess on the 23rd, and I should be sorry to miss that. Otherwise
I might have let you have a week or so more of excitement. I had several
other little notions, little tunes for you to dance to.”
“You shall sit next her,” said Whately with quivering lips.
GENERAL STORIES
THE DANCE ON THE BEEFSTEAK
This Midsummer day, the early hours of which were bathed in so serene a
sunshine, has ended in storm and hurly-burly. Only this morning the
general outlook was as unclouded as is now the velvet blue of the
star-scattered Italian sky, but this evening our very souls are driven
like dead leaves before a shrivelling blast. Nature, unsympathetic,
indifferent, still holds on her great unruffled courses; the stars
wheel, the north wind blows lightly from across the gulf; the little
ripples shed themselves in lines of phosphorescent flame; Naples lies a
necklace of light on the edge of the sea, the loveliness of the Southern
night is undiminished. But Mrs. Mackellar has danced on the beefsteak,
and she has dismissed Seraphina.
To the dweller in cities or other light-minded and populous places this
may appear but the most farcical of tragedies, worthy of no more than
the scoffing laugh of a passer-by. But such do not know Mrs. Mackellar,
nor Seraphina, nor life in Alatri. For in Alatri as a rule nothing
happens--certainly nothing unpleasant--our lives are as smooth as the
halcyon summer seas, and it will, I am afraid, be impossible to give to
any but the most imaginative reader an adequate idea of the devastating
nature of the catastrophe.... It will be necessary in any case to
recount in brief the events of the last twenty-four hours.
Yesterday afternoon we were all _en fête_; Mrs. Mackellar gave a party
for two reasons, either of which was amply justifiable. The first was
that the engagement of Seraphina her cook to Antonio her man-servant was
definitely sanctioned by her, and so made food for public rejoicing; the
second that Seraphina had been with her as cook for an entire year. Now
in Alatri servants do not, as a rule, stop with Mrs. Mackellar more than
a few weeks. Then they leave. There is no dissatisfaction expressed and
no public quarrel. They just lose their nerve and go away. But the days
had added themselves into weeks, and the weeks into months, and before
any of us knew where we were, Seraphina had been a year with Mrs.
Mackellar. Hence the party.
There were in fact two parties, for Seraphina and Antonio entertained
their friends in the kitchen, while Mrs. Mackellar received on the
house-roof. She is an immense Scotchwoman, broad in bosom and in accent,
and feels the heat acutely. Consequently when I received an invitation
for four o’clock on an afternoon in the middle of June, it was clear
that she must have a real desire to celebrate the event.
The Duchess of Alatri--to her more intimate friends, Bianca--came with
me by special invitation. Her Grace is a huge white Campagna sheep-dog,
so tall that she can, when sitting down, put her chin on an ordinary
dining-room table and eat your bread when you are not looking. At rest
she resembles a large rug (and as such is not infrequently trodden on),
and when in motion she resembles nothing that I have ever seen. Her sole
method of progression is a trot; she never walks, and she cannot gallop,
but the trot varies from a pace so surprisingly slow that she appears
only to be marking time, to that of the passage of an express train. The
other day she was investigating interesting smells in the piazza, when
out for a walk with me, and so got left behind. I did not miss her till
I was some half-mile away, and looking round saw a distant white speck
where the road leaves the town. I whistled shrilly on my fingers, and
without appreciable interval she was with me. She belongs not, alas, to
me, but to an American, who has left the enchanted island for the summer
(unless perhaps it is more just to say that he belongs to her), and
committed Her Grace to my care. Her passions are being combed, cheese
and dancing.
This latter I discovered by a happy accident. For the first afternoon
that she was with me she was very sorrowful, and though I ran up the
Stars and Stripes on the flagstaff, instead of the Union Jack, wondering
if this would give her the thrill of home, she remained dispirited. But
shortly before going to bed, hoping in some vague way to cheer her, and
being myself futile, I danced round her, snapping my fingers. The
effect was magical. The rug shuffled swiftly to its feet, and began
gambolling. She jumped in the air, she turned briskly round and round,
she took little leaps with her head down like a bucking pony, she upset
a small table on which was standing an open tin of biscuits, and
scarcely pausing to sweep up the greater part with her tongue she
lurched heavily into an oleander-tub on the veranda, snapping the shrub
off short. And when, about ten minutes later, I sank into a chair
breathless and exhausted, the Duchess was herself again. Only once when
passing her old home did she show any desire to remain there, and even
then I had but to execute two fantastic steps down the path, when she
gave a sort of choking cry, her apology for a bark, and came after me
behaving like a rocking-horse.
So Bianca and I went up the steep path to Mrs. Mackellar’s shortly after
four yesterday afternoon. She lives in a stucco castle with battlements.
There was already a tarantella going on in the kitchen--Seraphina is a
notable dancer--and Bianca brightened up. She said, “This is the place
for me,” and brushing rudely by me trotted down the back-stairs and I
saw her no more. So I went alone to the house-roof.
“All Alatri” was there, perspiring under an Oriental awning, which Mrs.
Mackellar had put up for the shelter of her guests. It seemed calculated
to concentrate the heat of the sun, and to exclude all air. The German
doctor, who has not left the island, even to go to Naples, for nine
years, was talking the native dialect to a Swedish painter; the
mysterious Russian widow who plays picquet every evening with her man
cook was chattering voluble French to a circle of mixed nationality; and
Mrs. Mackellar, resplendent in tartan, was treating bewildered listeners
to the Peebles speech. The ices had transformed themselves into a
delicious fruit-cream, and the sugar was melting like tallow off the
cakes. We indulged in the usual topics, the impossibility of leaving
Alatri that summer, the promise of a fine vintage, the apocryphal shark
three metres long, whose dorsal fin had appeared only a few yards from
the shore of the Bagno, the iniquity of servants in general, and the
conspicuous virtue of Seraphina.
Mrs. Mackellar, in the democratic spirit that helps to make Alatri so
wildly interesting, had added that when the feasting in the kitchen was
over, and when no one wanted to eat more ice-cream on the house-top, the
party from below should join the party up above, so that we all should
be one on this happy occasion.
Accordingly, after a while she leaned over the battlements of her
castle, gave a loud war-cry, and up came Seraphina’s party. She led the
way with her _promesso_, in a state of high hilarity, and all the
servants of all Mrs. Mackellar’s guests brought up the rear. There was
no blushing possible, for everybody was scarlet with heat already, and
we split off into domestic groups. Francesco sat by me, and began to
tell me why nobody went to mass on this name day of St. John the
Baptist. This was interesting, but on the other side of me was Seraphina
discussing _trousseau_ with her mistress, and the loud arresting Italian
of Mrs. Mackellar only permitted me to give half an ear to the story of
San Giovanni. However, Francesco could tell me about it again to-morrow,
in less distracted conditions, and when the discussion about the
_trousseau_ was over (I had gathered several plums, _un tartano di
Edinborgo_ being a fine one) I left.