“This is some shameful hoax!” I exclaimed. “Who are you, and what do
you do here?”
“I should think I might put the same question to you, since I find you
sitting in the dark, at dead of night, with my landlord and landlady.”
“Lor’, Mr. Montmorency, it’s never you, sir!” ejaculated old Bizzey,
with a feeble giggle.
The voice seemed familiar to me. Who on earth was this Mr.
Montmorency, who had intruded upon our séance at the most important
juncture? I turned up the lamp and threw its light full upon his
features. “Good heavens!” I exclaimed, “it’s Julian Cockleboat.”
The young man was equally astonished with myself.
“Did Lord Seaborne send you after me?” he said, guessing the truth at
once. “And how did you find out I was lodging here?”
“Aha, my boy!” I replied, unwilling to deny the _kúdos_ with which he
credited me, “that’s _my_ secret. Do you suppose I have gained the
name of the amateur detective among my friends for nothing? No, no! I
am in Norwich expressly for the purpose of restoring you to your
guardian, and as I knew that to show my hand more openly would be to
scare you off to another hiding place, I devised this little plan for
making you reveal yourself in your true character.”
“Did Robson tell you, then, that I had taken an engagement at the
theatre here?”
“Never you mind, Mr. Cockleboat; it is quite sufficient that I knew
it. This is a proper sort of house to play hide-and-seek in, isn’t
it?”
I was dispersing the table and chairs again with angry jerks as I
spoke, fearful lest my attempted investigation of the occult mysteries
should be discovered before I had removed its traces.
“Still I can’t understand how you discovered that Mr. Montmorency was
myself, although naturally my night rehearsals must have disturbed
you. But you told me you had no other lodgers,” continued Julian
Cockleboat reproachfully, to the Bizzeys.
“And you said the same thing to me,” I added, in similar tones.
“Well, sir--well, Mr. Montmorency, I’m very sorry it should have
happened so,” replied the landlord, turning from one to the other,
“but it’s all my old woman’s fault, for I said to her--”
“You did nothing of the sort,” interrupted his better half; “for when
I come to you and told you as a second gentleman wanted rooms here, it
was you as said, ‘Let him have the little room upstairs, and no one
will be ever the wiser if he takes his meals out of a day.’”
“But we never thought--begging your pardon, Mr. Montmorency--as you’d
take such a liberty with the upper offices as to make noises in them
as should disturb the whole house.”
“Well, what was I to do?” replied the young man, appealing to me.
“They’ve given me three leading parts to get up at a fortnight’s
notice, and if I don’t study them at night I have no chance of being
ready in time.”
“In fact,” I said, oracularly, “you’ve been cheating each other all
round. Mr. Bizzey has cheated his employers by letting apartments to
which he has no right; you have cheated the Bizzeys by using one which
you never hired of them; and I have--” “cheated myself,” I might have
added, but I stopped short and looked wise instead.
“And it was never no ghosts after all!” said Mrs. Bizzey, in accents
of disappointment, as her husband marched her downstairs.
* * * * * * *
There is nothing more to tell. I reconciled Mr. Julian Cockleboat to
his guardian and his destiny; and I wrote “The Origin of Dreams,” the
best part, by the way (as all the critics affirmed), of “The
Cyclopædia of the Brain.” I made more money by my little trip than
six months of ordinary labour would have brought me; and Lord Seaborne
speaks of me to this day, amongst his acquaintances, as the “very
cleverest amateur detective he has ever known.”
And so I am.