I AM INTERESTED IN THE BARON
(_From the Bickerdike MS._)
I seemed conscious somehow, at dinner on the night of our arrival,
of a feeling of electricity in the domestic atmosphere. Having no
clue, such as the later course of events came to supply, to its
origin, I diagnosed it, simply and vulgarly, as the vibrations from a
family jar, of the sort to which even the most dignified and
well-regulated households cannot always rise superior. Sir Calvin
himself, exacting and domineering, could never at the best of times be
considered a tactful autocrat: a prey to his hereditary foe, he
appeared often to go out of his way to be thought detestable. When
such was the case, his habit of harping on grievances could become an
exquisite torture, his propensity for persisting in the unwelcome the
more he saw it resented a pure malignancy. On this occasion, observing
an obvious inclination in his son, my friend, to silence and
self-obliteration, he took pleasure in drawing him out, with something
of the savagery, I could not but think, of a fisherman who wrenches an
obstinate hermit crab from its borrowed shell for bait. I saw how poor
Hugh was rasped and goaded, but could do no more than take upon
myself, where I could, the burden of response. Believing at the time
that this aggravated fencing between the two was a part, or
consequence, of some trouble, the serious nature of which might or
might not have been implied in my friend’s recent outburst, I made and
could make but an inefficient second; yet, even had I known, as I came
to know, that my surmise was wrong, and that the father’s persistence
was due to nothing but a perverse devil of teasing, it is not clear to
me how else I could have helped the situation. I could not have
hauled my host by the ears, as I should have liked to do, over his own
dining-room table.
But the sense of atmospheric friction was not confined to these two.
In some extraordinary way it communicated itself to the servants, the
very butler, our young hostess. I had not seen Audrey at tea, and now
greeted her for the first time. She came in late, to find us, by the
Bashaw’s directions, already seated, and to suffer a sharp reprimand
for her unpunctuality which brought a flush to her young rebellious
cheek. Nor did I better things, so far as she was concerned, by an
ostentatious display of attentions; she seemed to resent my sympathy
even more than the harshness which had provoked it. It is the way of
cats and women to tear the hand that would release them from the trap.
The dinner, in short, began very uncomfortably, with an irascible
host, a moody son, and an offended daughter, the butler taking his cue
from his master, and the servants from the butler. They waited
nervously, and got in one another’s way, only the more flurriedly for
their whispered harrying by the exacerbated Cleghorn. I was surprised,
I confess, by the change in that usually immaculate dignitary. The
very type and pattern of his kind, correct, imperturbable, pontifical,
I had never before known Cleghorn to manifest the least sign of human
emotion, unless it were when Mr. Yockney, the curate from Leighway,
had mixed water with his _Château Margaux_ 1907. Now, preposterous as
it appeared, I could have believed the great man had been crying. His
globous eyes, his mottled cheeks, bore suspicious evidences of the
fact; his very side-whiskers looked limp. Surely the domestic storm,
if such, which had rocked the house of Kennett must have been
demoralising to a hitherto unknown degree.
It was the Baron who redeemed the situation, winning harmony out of
discord. He had, to do him justice, the reconciliatory faculty,
chiefly, I think, because he could always find, as one should, a
bright interest in differences of opinion instead of a subject for
contention. I never knew him, then or thereafter, to be ruffled by
opposition or contradiction. He accepted them placidly, as
constituting possible rectifications of his own argumentative
frontiers.
His opportunity came with a growl of Sir Calvin’s over the lateness of
the evening papers. The General had been particularly curious to hear
the result of a local trial, known as the Antonferry Bank robbery
case, which was just reaching its conclusion, and it chafed him to be
kept waiting. Le Sage asked for information, and the supplying it
smoothed the troubled waters. There is a relish for most people in
being the first to announce news, whether good, bad, or indifferent.
The case, as stated, was remarkable for nothing but the skill with
which it had been unravelled. A Bank in Antonferry--a considerable
market town lying some eight or nine miles north of Wildshott--had
been robbed, and the question was by whom. That question had been
answered in the upshot by an astute Scotland Yard detective, who, in
spite of the obloquy thrown upon his kind by Mr. Sherlock Holmes, had
shown considerable sagacity in tracing the crime to its source in the
Bank’s own manager--a startling _dénouement_. The accused, on the
strength of this expert’s evidence, had been committed to stand his
trial at Winton Quarter Sessions, and it was the issue of that event
which was interesting Sir Calvin. He had had some dealings with the
Bank in question, and had even been brought into some personal contact
with the delinquent official.
“It seems,” he ended, “that there can be no doubt about the verdict.
That Ridgway is a clever dog.”
“The detective?” queried Le Sage; and the General nodded.
“The sort I should be sorry, if a thief, to have laid on my trail.”
“But supposing you left none?” questioned the Baron, with a smile.
“Ah!” said Sir Calvin, having nothing better to reply.
“I have often thought,” said Le Sage, “that if crime realised its own
opportunities, there would be no use for detectives at all.”
“Eh? Why not?” asked his host.
“Because there would be nothing to find out,” answered the Baron.
“How d’ye mean? Nothing to find out?”
“Nothing whatever. My idea, now, of a successful crime is not a crime
which baffles its investigators, but a crime which does not appear as
a crime at all.”
“Instance, M. le Baron,” I ventured to put in.
“Why,” said Le Sage good-humouredly, “a dozen may well present
themselves to a man of average inventive intelligence. Direct murder,
for example--how crude! when a hundred means offer themselves for
procuring plausible ends to life. Tetanus germs and an iron tack;
ptomaine, that toxicologic mystery, so easy to introduce; the edge of
a cliff and a windy day; a frayed picture cord; a loosened nut or two;
a scrap of soap left on the boards by an opened window--given
adroitness, timeliness, a little nerve, would not any of these do?”
Audrey drew back in her chair, with a flushed little laugh.
“What a diabolical list!” she said, and made a face as if she had
taken medicine.
“Yes,” said I. “But after all, Baron, this is no more than
generalising.”
“You want a concrete instance?” he answered, beaming on me. “What do
you say then to a swimmer being awarded the Humane Society’s
certificate for attempting to save the life of a man whom he had
really drowned? It needs only a little imagination to fill in the
details.”
“That is good,” I admitted. “We put one to your credit.”
“Again,” said the Baron, “I offer the case of a senseless young
spendthrift. He gambles, he drinks, his life is a bad life from the
insurance company’s point of view. When hard pressed, he is lavish
with his I.O.U.’s; when flush of money he redeems them; he pays up, he
throws the slips into the fire with hardly a glance at them. One who
holds a good deal of his paper observes this, and acts accordingly. He
preserves the original securities, and on redemption, offers forgeries
in their place, which he is careful to see destroyed. On the death of
the young man he puts in his claim on his estate on the strength of
the indisputable original documents. Thus he is paid twice over,
without a possibility of any suspicion arising.”
“But one of the forged I.O.U.’s,” said Audrey, “had been carried up
the chimney without catching a light, and had been blown through the
open window of the young man’s family lawyer, who had kept it as a
surprise.”
There was a shout of laughter, in which the Baron joined.
“Bravo, Audrey!” cried her brother. “What about your average inventive
intelligence, Baron?”
“I said, specifically, a man’s,” pleaded Le Sage. “Women, fortunately
for us, are not eligible for the detective force.”
Audrey laughed at the compliment, but I think she liked the Baron for
his pleasant good-nature. About that, for my part, I kept an open
mind. Had he really invented these cases on the spur of the moment, or
could it be possible that they touched on some experience of his own?
One could not say, of course; but one could bear the point in mind.
The dinner went cheerfully enough after this _jeu d’esprit_ of
Audrey’s. That had even roused Hugh from his glooms, and to quite
exaggerated effect. He became suddenly talkative where he had been
taciturn, and almost boisterously communicative where he had been
reserved. But I noticed that he drank a good deal, and detected
curiously, as I thought, a hint of desperation under his feverish
gaiety.
In all this, it may be said, I was appropriating to myself, without
authority, a sort of watching brief on behalf of a purely chimerical
client. I had no real justification for suspecting the Baron, either
on his own account, or in association with my friend’s apparent state;
it was presumptive that Sir Calvin knew at least as much about the man
as I did; still, I thought, so long as I preserved my attitude of what
I may call sympathetic vigilance _à la sourdine_, nothing could be
lost, and something even might be gained. The common atmosphere,
perhaps, affected me with the others, and inclined me to an unusually
observant mood; a mood, it may be, prone to attach an over-importance
to trifles. Thus, I could find food for it in an incident so ordinary
as the following. There was a certain picture on the wall, a genre
painting, to which Le Sage, sitting opposite it, referred in some
connexion. Sir Calvin, replying, remarked that so-and-so had declared
one of the figures to be out of proportion--too short or too tall, I
forget which--and, in order to measure the discrepancy, interposed,
after the manner of the connoisseur, a finger between his eye and the
subject. There was nothing out of the common in the action, save only
that the finger he raised was the second finger of his right hand, the
first having been shot away in some long-past engagement; but it
appeared, quite obviously to me, to arrest in a curious way the
attention of the visitor. He forgot what he was saying at the moment,
his speech tailed off, he sat gazing, as if suddenly fascinated, not
at the picture but at the finger. The next instant he had caught up
and continued what he was observing; but the minute incident left me
wondering. It had signified, I was sure, no sudden realization of the
disfigurement, since that must have been long known to him, but of
some association with it accidentally suggested. That, in that single
moment, was my very definite impression--I could hardly have explained
why at the time; but there it was. And I may say now, in my own
justification, that my instinct, or my intuition, was not at fault.
Once or twice later I seemed to catch Le Sage manœuvring to procure a
repetition of the action, but without full success; and soon
afterwards the two men fell upon the ever-absorbing subject of chess,
and lapsed into vigorous discussion over the relative merits of
certain openings, such as the Scotch, the Giuoco Piano, the Ruy Lopez
attack, Philidor’s defence, and the various gambits; to wit, the
Queen’s, the Allgaier, the Evans, the Muzio, the Sicilian, and God
knows what else. They did not favour the drawing-room for long after
dinner, but went off to the library to put their theories into
practice, leaving Hugh and me alone with the lady. I cannot admit that
I found the subsequent evening exhilarating. Hugh appeared already to
be suffering a relapse from his artificial high spirits, and again
disturbed me by the capricious oddity of his behaviour. He and his
sister bickered, after their wont, a good deal, and once or twice the
girl was brought by him near the verge of angry tears, I thought. I
never could quite make out Audrey. She seemed to me a young woman of
good impulses, but one who was for ever on the defensive against
imagined criticism, and inclined therefore, in a spirit of pure
perversity, to turn her worst side outermost. Yet she was a really
pretty girl, a tall stalk of maidenhood, nineteen, and athletically
modern in the taking sense, and had no reason but to value herself and
her attractions at the plain truth they represented. The trouble was
that she was underestimated, and I think proudly conscious of the
fact. With a father like Sir Calvin, it was, and must be, Hugo first
and the rest nowhere. He bullied every one, but there was no
under-suggestion of jealous proprietorship in his bullying of Audrey
as there was in his adoring bullying of his son. He did not care
whether _she_ felt it or not; with the other it was like a lover’s
temper, wooing by chastisement. Nor was Hugo, perhaps, a very
sympathetic brother. He could enjoy teasing, like his father, and feel
a mischievous pleasure in seeing “the galled jade wince.” Audrey, I
believe, would have worshipped him had he let her--I had observed how
gratified she looked at dinner over his commendation of her jest--but
he held her aloof between condescension and contempt, and the two had
never been real companions. The long-motherless girl was lonely, I
think, and it was rather pathetic; still, she did not always go the
right way about it to avoid unfavourable criticism.
We were out for a day in the stubble on the morrow, and I made it an
excuse for going to bed betimes. The trial of the Bank-Manager, I may
mention by the way, had ended in a verdict of guilty, and a sentence
of three years penal servitude. I found, and took the paper in to Sir
Calvin before going upstairs. The servants never dared to disturb him
at his game.