HATHERLY BELL
The queer, misshapen figure striding along by Steel's side would have
attracted attention anywhere; indeed, Hatherly Bell had been an
attractive personality from his schooldays. A strange mixture of vanity
and brilliant mental qualities, Bell had almost as many enemies as
friends. He was morbidly miserable over the score of his personal
appearance despite the extraordinary beauty of his face--to be pitied or
even sympathised with almost maddened him. Yet there were many women who
would gladly have shared the lot of Hatherly Bell.
For there was strength in the perfectly moulded face, as well as beauty.
It was the face of a man possessed of marvellous intellectual powers, and
none the less attractive because, while the skin was as fair as a woman's
and the eyes as clear as a child's, the wavy hair was absolutely white.
The face of a man who had suffered fiercely and long. A face hiding a
great sorrow.
Time was when Bell had promised to stand in the front rank of operative
physicians. In brain troubles and mental disorders he had distinguished
himself. He had a marvellous faculty for psychological research; indeed,
he had gone so far as to declare that insanity was merely a disease and
capable of cure the same as any ordinary malady. "If Bell goes on as he
has started," a great German specialist once declared, "he will
inevitably prove to be the greatest benefactor to mankind since the
beginning of the world." Bell was to be the man of his time.
And then suddenly he had faded out as a star drops from the zenith. There
had been dark rumours of a terrible scandal, a prosecution burked by
strong personal influence, mysterious paragraphs in the papers, and the
disappearance of the name of Hatherly Bell from the rank of great medical
jurists. Nobody seemed to know anything about it, but Bell was ignored by
all except a few old friends, and henceforth he devoted his attention to
criminology and the evolution of crime. It was Bell's boast that he could
take a dozen men at haphazard and give you their vices and virtures
point-blank. He had a marvellous gift that way.
A few people stuck to him, Gilead Gates amongst the number. The
millionaire philanthropist had need of someone to pick the sheep from the
goats, and Bell made no mistakes. David Steel had been able to do the
specialist some slight service a year or two before, and Bell had been
pleased to magnify this into a great favour.
"You are a fast walker," David said, presently.
"That's because I am thinking fast," Bell replied. "Steel, you are in
great trouble?"
"It needs no brilliant effort on your part to see that," David said,
bitterly. "Besides, you heard a great deal just now when you--you--"
"Listened," Bell said, coolly. "Of course I had no intention of playing
eavesdropper; and I had no idea who the Mr. Steel was who wanted to see
Miss Gates. They come day by day, my dear fellow, garbed in the garb of
Pall Mall or Petticoat Lane as the case may be, but they all come for
money. Sometimes it is a shilling, sometimes £100. But I did not gather
from your chat with Miss Gates what your trouble was."
"Perhaps not, but Miss Gates knew perfectly well."
Bell patted his companion, approvingly.
"It is a pleasure to help a lucid-minded man like yourself," he said.
"You go straight to the root of the sore and cut all the superfluous
matter away. I was deeply interested in the conversation which I
overheard just now. You are in great trouble, and that trouble is
connected with 219, Brunswick Square--a house where you have never
been before."
"My dear chap, I was in that dining-room two nights ago. Nothing will
convince me to the--"
"There you are wrong, because I am going to convince you to the
contrary. You may smile and shake your head, but before an hour has
passed I am going to convince you beyond all question that you were
never inside No. 219."
"Brave words," David muttered. "Still, an hour is not a long time to
wait."
"No. But you must enlighten me if I am to assist you. I am profoundly
interested. You come to the house of my friend on a desperate errand.
Miss Gates is a perfect stranger to you, and yet the mere discovery of
your identity fills her with the most painful agitation. Therefore,
though you have never been in 219 before, you are pretty certain, and I
am pretty certain, that Ruth Gates knows a deal about the thing that is
touching you. On the contrary, I know nothing on that head. Won't you let
me into the secret?"
"I'll tell you part," Steel replied. "And I'll put it pithily. For mere
argument we assume that I am selected to assist a damsel in distress who
lives at No. 219, Brunswick Square. We will assume that the conversation
leading up to the flattering selection took place over the telephone. As
a matter of fact, it did take place over the telephone. The thing was
involved with so much secrecy that I naturally hesitated. I was offered
£1,000 for my services; also I was reminded by my unseen messenger that I
was in dire need of that money."
"And were you?"
"My dear fellow, I don't fancy that I should have hesitated at burglary
to get it. And all I had to do was to meet a lady secretly in the dead of
night at No. 219, and tell her how to get out of a certain difficulty. It
all resolved itself round the synopsis of a proposed new story of mine.
But I had better go into details."
David proceeded to do so. Bell, with his arm crooked through that of his
companion, followed the story with an intelligent and flattering interest.
"Very strange and very fascinating," he said, presently. "I'll think it
out presently. Nobody could possibly think of anything but their toes in
Western Road. Go on."
"Now I am coming to the point. I had the money, I had that lovely
cigar-case, and subsequently I had that battered and bleeding specimen of
humanity dumped down in the most amazing manner in my conservatory. The
cigar-case lay on the conservatory floor, remember--swept off the table
when I clutched for the telephone bell to call for the police. When
Marley came he asked if the cigar-case was mine. At first I said no,
because, you see--"
"I see quite plainly. Pray go on."
"Well, I lose that cigar-case; I leave it in the offices of Mossa, to
whom I pay nearly £1,000. Mossa, to spite me, takes or sends the case to
the police, who advertise it not knowing that it is mine. You will see
why they advertise it presently--"
"Because it belonged to the injured man, eh?"
David pulled up and regarded his companion with amazement.
"How on earth--" he gasped. "Do you mean to say that you know--"
"Nothing at present, I assure you," Bell said, coolly. "Call it
intuition, if you like. I prefer to call it the result of logical mental
process. I'm right, of course?"
"Of course you are. I'd claimed that case for my own. I had cut my
initials inside, as I showed Marley when I went to the police-station.
And then Marley tells me how I paid Mossa nearly £1,000; how the money
must have come into my hands in the nick of time. That was pretty bad
when I couldn't for the life of me give a lucid reason for the possession
of those notes; but there was worse to come. In the pocket of the injured
man was a receipt for a diamond-studded gun-metal cigar-case, purchased
the day of the outrage. And Walen, the jeweller, proved beyond a doubt
that the case I claimed was purchased at his shop."
Bell nodded gravely.
"Which places you in an exceedingly awkward position," he said.
"A mild way of putting it," David replied. "If that fellow dies the
police have enough evidence to hang me. And what is my defence? The story
of my visit to No. 219. And who would believe that cock-and-bull story?
Fancy a drama like that being played out in the house of such a pillar of
respectability as Gilead Gates."
"It isn't his house," said Bell. "He only takes it furnished."
"In anybody else your remark would be puerile," David said, irritably.
"It's a deeper remark than you are aware of at present," Bell replied. "I
quite see your position. Nobody would believe you, of course. But why not
go to the post-office and ask the number of the telephone that called you
up from London?"
The question seemed to amuse David slightly. Then his lips were drawn
humorously.
"When my logical formula came back I thought of that," he said. "On
inquiring as to who it was rang me up on that fateful occasion I learnt
that the number was 0017 Kensington and that--"
"Gates's own number at Prince's Gate," Bell exclaimed. "The plot
thickens."
"It does, indeed," David said, grimly. "It is Wilkie Collins gone mad,
Gaboriau _in extremis_, Du Boisgobey suffering from _delirium tremens_.
I go to Gates's house here, and am solemnly told in the midst of
surroundings that I can swear to that I have never been there before;
the whole mad expedition is launched by the turning of the handle of a
telephone in the house of a distinguished, trusted, if prosaic,
citizen. Somebody gets hold of the synopsis of a story of mine, Heaven
knows how--"
"That is fairly easy. The synopsis was short, I suppose?"
"Only a few lines, say 1,000 words, a sheet of paper. My writing is very
small. It was tucked into a half-penny open envelope--a magazine office
envelope, marked 'Proof, urgent.' There were the proofs of a short story
in the buff envelope."
"Which reached its destination in due course?"
"So I hear this morning. But how on earth--"
"Easily enough. The whole thing gets slipped into a larger open envelope,
the kind of big-mouthed affair that enterprising firms send out circulars
and patterns with. This falls into the hands of the woman who is at the
bottom of this and every other case, and she reads the synopsis from
sheer curiosity. The case fits her case, and there you are. Mind you, I
don't say that this is how the thing actually happened, but how it might
have done so. When did you post the letter?"
"I can't give you the date. Say ten days ago."
"And there would be no hurry for a reply," Bell said, thoughtfully. "And
you had no cause for worry on that head. Nor need the woman who found it
have kept the envelope beyond the delay of a single post, which is only a
matter of an hour or so in London. If you go a little farther we find
that money is no object, hence the £1,000 offer and the careful, and
doubtless expensive, inquiry into your position. Steel, I am going to
enjoy this case."
"You're welcome to all the fun you can get out of it," David said,
grimly. "So far as I am concerned, I fail to see the humour. Isn't this
the office you are after?"
Bell nodded and disappeared, presently to return with two exceedingly
rusty keys tied together with a drab piece of tape. He jingled them on
his long, slender forefinger with an air of positive enjoyment.
"Now come along," he said. "I feel like a boy who has marked down
something rare in the way of a bird's nest. We will go back to Brunswick
Square exactly the same way as you approached it on the night of the
great adventure."