the value of jewelry when they see it. They very properly regard it as
mere foolish waste to drop precious stones about in the snow, and would
refuse to company with a man weak enough to let fall his neckerchief on
a cold night. The whole business of the burglars was a particularly
inartistic trick, unworthy of its author. The mere facility with which
Randolph discovered the buried jewels by the aid of a dim lantern,
should have served as a hint to an educated police not afraid of facing
the improbable. The jewels had been _put_ there with the object of
throwing suspicion on the imaginary burglars; with the same design the
catch of the window had been wrenched off, the sash purposely left
open, the track made, the valuables taken from Lord Pharanx's room. All
this was deliberately done by some one--would it be rash to say at once
by whom?
'Our suspicions having now lost their whole character of vagueness, and
begun to lead us in a perfectly definite direction, let us examine the
statements of Hester Dyett. Now, it is immediately comprehensible to me
that the evidence of this woman at the public examinations was looked
at askance. There can be no doubt that she is a poor specimen of
humanity, an undesirable servant, a peering, hysterical caricature of a
woman. Her statements, if formally recorded, were not believed; or if
believed, were believed with only half the mind. No attempt was made to
deduce anything from them. But for my part, if I wanted specially
reliable evidence as to any matter of fact, it is precisely from such a
being that I would seek it. Let me draw you a picture of that class of
intellect. They have a greed for information, but the information, to
satisfy them, must relate to actualities; they have no sympathy with
fiction; it is from their impatience of what seems to be that springs
their curiosity of what _is_. Clio is their muse, and she alone. Their
whole lust is to gather knowledge through a hole, their whole faculty
is to _peep_. But they are destitute of imagination, and do not lie; in
their passion for realities they would esteem it a sacrilege to distort
history. They make straight for the substantial, the indubitable. For
this reason the Peniculi and Ergasili of Plautus seem to me far more
true to nature than the character of Paul Pry in Jerrold's comedy. In
one instance, indeed, the evidence of Hester Dyett appears, on the
surface of it, to be quite false. She declares that she sees a round
white object moving upward in the room. But the night being gloomy, her
taper having gone out, she must have been standing in a dense darkness.
How then could she see this object? Her evidence, it was argued, must
be designedly false, or else (as she was in an ecstatic condition) the
result of an excited fancy. But I have stated that such persons,
nervous, neurotic even as they may be, are not fanciful. I therefore
accept her evidence as true. And now, mark the consequence of that
acceptance. I am driven to admit that there must, from some source,
have been light in the room--a light faint enough, and diffused enough,
to escape the notice of Hester herself. This being so, it must have
proceeded from around, from below, or from above. There are no other
alternatives. Around these was nothing but the darkness of the night;
the room beneath, we know, was also in darkness. The light then came
from the room above--from the mechanic class-room. But there is only
one possible means by which the light from an upper can diffuse a lower
room. It _must_ be by a hole in the intermediate boards. We are thus
driven to the discovery of an aperture of some sort in the flooring of
that upper chamber. Given this, the mystery of the round white object
"driven" upward disappears. We at once ask, why not _drawn_ upward
through the newly-discovered aperture by a string too small to be
visible in the gloom? Assuredly it was drawn upward. And now having
established a hole in the ceiling of the room in which Hester stands,
is it unreasonable--even without further evidence--to suspect another
in the flooring? But we actually have this further evidence. As she
rushes to the door she falls, faints, and fractures the lower part of
her leg. Had she fallen _over_ some object, as you supposed, the result
might have been a fracture also, but in a different part of the body;
being where it was, it could only have been caused by placing the foot
inadvertently in a hole while the rest of the body was in rapid motion.
But this gives us an approximate idea of the _size_ of the lower hole;
it was at least big enough to admit the foot and lower leg, big enough
therefore to admit that "good-sized ball of cotton" of which the woman
speaks: and from the lower we are able to conjecture the size of the
upper. But how comes it that these holes are nowhere mentioned in the
evidence? It can only be because no one ever saw them. Yet the rooms
must have been examined by the police, who, if they existed, must have
seen them. They therefore did not exist: that is to say, the pieces
which had been removed from the floorings had by that time been neatly
replaced, and, in the case of the lower one, covered by the carpet, the
removal of which had caused so much commotion in Randolph's room on the
fatal day. Hester Dyett would have been able to notice and bring at
least one of the apertures forward in evidence, but she fainted before
she had time to find out the cause of her fall, and an hour later it
was, you remember, Randolph himself who bore her from the room. But
should not the aperture in the top floor have been observed by the
class? Undoubtedly, if its position was in the open space in the middle
of the room. But it was not observed, and therefore its position was
not there, but in the only other place left--behind the apparatus used
in demonstration. That then was _one_ useful object which the
apparatus--and with it the elaborate hypocrisy of class, and speeches,
and candidature--served: it was made to act as a curtain, a screen. But
had it no other purpose? That question we may answer when we know its
name and its nature. And it is not beyond our powers to conjecture this
with something like certainty. For the only "machines" possible to use
in illustration of simple mechanics are the screw, the wedge, the
scale, the lever, the wheel-and-axle, and Atwood's machine. The
mathematical principles which any of these exemplify would, of course,
be incomprehensible to such a class, but the first five most of all,
and as there would naturally be some slight pretence of trying to make
the learners understand, I therefore select the last; and this
selection is justified when we remember that on the shot being heard,
Randolph leans for support on the "machine," and stands in its shadow;
but any of the others would be too small to throw any appreciable
shadow, except one--the wheel, and-axle--and that one would hardly
afford support to a tall man in the erect position. The Atwood's
machine is therefore forced on us; as to its construction, it is, as
you are aware, composed of two upright posts, with a cross-bar fitted
with pulleys and strings, and is intended to show the motion of bodies
acting under a constant force--the force of gravity, to wit. But now
consider all the really glorious uses to which those same pulleys may
be turned in lowering and lifting unobserved that "ball of cotton"
through the two apertures, while the other strings with the weights
attached are dangling before the dull eyes of the peasants. I need only
point out that when the whole company trooped out of the room, Randolph
was the last to leave it, and it is not now difficult to conjecture
why.
'Of what, then, have we convicted Randolph? For one thing, we have
shown that by marks of feet in the snow preparation was made beforehand
for obscuring the cause of the earl's death. That death must therefore
have been at least expected, foreknown. Thus we convict him of
expecting it. And then, by an independent line of deduction, we can
also discover the _means_ by which he expected it to occur. It is clear
that he did not expect it to occur when it did by the hand of Maude
Cibras--for this is proved by his knowledge that she had left the
neighbourhood, by his evidently genuine astonishment at the sight of
the closed window, and, above all, by his truly morbid desire to
establish a substantial, an irrefutable _alibi_ for himself by going to
Plymouth on the day when there was every reason to suppose she would do
the deed--that is, on the 8th, the day of the earl's invitation. On the
fatal night, indeed, the same morbid eagerness to build up a clear
_alibi_ is observable, for he surrounds himself with a cloud of
witnesses in the upper chamber. But that, you will admit, is not nearly
so perfect a one as a journey, say, to Plymouth would have been. Why
then, expecting the death, did he not take some such journey? Obviously
because on _this_ occasion his personal presence was necessary. When,
_in conjunction_ with this, we recall the fact that during the
intrigues with Cibras the lectures were discontinued, and again resumed
immediately on her unlooked-for departure, we arrive at the conclusion
that the means by which Lord Pharanx's death was expected to occur was
the personal presence of Randolph _in conjunction_ with the political
speeches, the candidature, the class, the apparatus.
'But though he stands condemned of foreknowing, and being in some sort
connected with, his father's death, I can nowhere find any indication
of his having personally accomplished it, or even of his ever having
had any such intention. The evidence is evidence of complicity--and
nothing more. And yet--and yet--even of _this_ we began by acquitting
him unless we could discover, as I said, some strong, adequate,
altogether irresistible motive for such complicity. Failing this, we
ought to admit that at some point our argument has played us false, and
led us into conclusions wholly at variance with our certain knowledge
of the principles underlying human conduct in general. Let us therefore
seek for such a motive--something deeper than personal enmity, stronger
than personal ambition, _than the love of life itself!_ And now, tell
me, at the time of the occurrence of this mystery, was the whole past
history of the House of Orven fully investigated?'
'Not to my knowledge,' I answered; 'in the papers there were, of
course, sketches of the earl's career, but that I think was all.'
'Yet it cannot be that their past was unknown, but only that it was
ignored. Long, I tell you, long and often, have I pondered on that
history, and sought to trace with what ghastly secret has been pregnant
the destiny, gloomful as Erebus and the murk of black-peplosed Nux,
which for centuries has hung its pall over the men of this ill-fated
house. Now at last I know. Dark, dark, and red with gore and horror is
that history; down the silent corridors of the ages have these
blood-soaked sons of Atreus fled shrieking before the pursuing talons
of the dread Eumenides. The first earl received his patent in 1535 from
the eighth Henry. Two years later, though noted as a rabid "king's
man," he joined the Pilgrimage of Grace against his master, and was
soon after executed, with Darcy and some other lords. His age was then
fifty. His son, meantime, had served in the king's army under Norfolk.
It is remarkable, by the way, that females have all along been rare in
the family, and that in no instance has there been more than one son.
The second earl, under the sixth Edward, suddenly threw up a civil
post, hastened to the army, and fell at the age of forty at the battle
of Pinkie in 1547. He was accompanied by his son. The third in 1557,
under Mary, renounced the Catholic faith, to which, both before and
since, the family have passionately clung, and suffered (at the age of
forty) the last penalty. The fourth earl died naturally, but suddenly,
in his bed at the age of fifty during the winter of 1566. At midnight
_of the same day_ he was laid in the grave by his son. This son was
later on, in 1591, seen by _his_ son to fall from a lofty balcony at
Orven Hall, while walking in his sleep at high noonday. Then for some
time nothing happens; but the eighth earl dies mysteriously in 1651 at
the age of forty-five. A fire occurring in his room, he leapt from a
window to escape the flames. Some of his limbs were thereby fractured,
but he was in a fair way to recovery when there was a sudden relapse,
soon ending in death. He was found to have been poisoned by _radix
aconiti indica_, a rare Arabian poison not known in Europe at that time
except to _savants_, and first mentioned by Acosta some months before.
An attendant was accused and tried, but acquitted. The then son of the
House was a Fellow of the newly-founded Royal Society, and author of a
now-forgotten work on Toxicology, which, however, I have read. No
suspicion, of course, fell on _him_.'
As Zaleski proceeded with this retrospect, I could not but ask myself
with stirrings of the most genuine wonder, whether he could possess
this intimate knowledge of _all_ the great families of Europe! It was
as if he had spent a part of his life in making special study of the
history of the Orvens.
'In the same manner,' he went on, 'I could detail the annals of the
family from that time to the present. But all through they have been
marked by the same latent tragic elements; and I have said enough to
show you that in each of the tragedies there was invariably something
large, leering, something of which the mind demands explanation, but
seeks in vain to find it. Now we need no longer seek. Destiny did not
design that the last Lord of Orven should any more hide from the world
the guilty secret of his race. It was the will of the gods--and he
betrayed himself. "Return," he writes, "the beginning of the end is
come." What end?
_The_ end--perfectly well known to Randolph, needing no explanation for
_him_. The old, old end, which in the ancient dim time led the first
lord, loyal still at heart, to forsake his king; and another, still
devout, to renounce his cherished faith, and yet another to set fire to
the home of his ancestors. You have called the two last scions of the
family "a proud and selfish pair of beings"; proud they were, and
selfish too, but you are in error if you think their selfishness a
personal one: on the contrary, they were singularly oblivious of self
in the ordinary sense of the word. Theirs was the pride and the
selfishness of _race_. What consideration, think you, other than the
weal of his house, could induce Lord Randolph to take on himself the
shame--for as such he certainly regards it--of a conversion to
radicalism? He would, I am convinced, have _died_ rather than make this
pretence for merely personal ends. But he does it--and the reason? It
is because he has received that awful summons from home; because "the
end" is daily coming nearer, and it must not find him unprepared to
meet it; it is because Lord Pharanx's senses are becoming _too_ acute;
because the clatter of the servants' knives at the other end of the
house inflames him to madness; because his excited palate can no longer
endure any food but the subtlest delicacies; because Hester Dyett is
able from the posture in which he sits to conjecture that he is
intoxicated; because, in fact, he is on the brink of the dreadful
malady which physicians call "_General Paralysis of the Insane_." You
remember I took from your hands the newspaper containing the earl's
letter to Cibras, in order to read it with my own eyes. I had my
reasons, and I was justified. That letter contains three mistakes in
spelling: "here" is printed "hear," "pass" appears as "pas," and "room"
as "rume." Printers' errors, you say? But not so--one might be, two in
that short paragraph could hardly be, three would be impossible. Search
the whole paper through, and I think you will not find another. Let us
reverence the theory of probabilities: the errors were the writer's,
not the printer's. General Paralysis of the Insane is known to have
this effect on the writing. It attacks its victims about the period of
middle age--the age at which the deaths of all the Orvens who died
mysteriously occurred. Finding then that the dire heritage of his
race--the heritage of madness--is falling or fallen on him, he summons
his son from India. On himself he passes sentence of death: it is the
tradition of the family, the secret vow of self-destruction handed down
through ages from father to son. But he must have aid: in these days it
is difficult for a man to commit the suicidal act without
detection--and if madness is a disgrace to the race, equally so is
suicide. Besides, the family is to be enriched by the insurances on his
life, and is thereby to be allied with royal blood; but the money will
be lost if the suicide be detected. Randolph therefore returns and
blossoms into a popular candidate.
'For a time he is led to abandon his original plans by the appearance
of Maude Cibras; he hopes that _she_ may be made to destroy the earl;
but when she fails him, he recurs to it--recurs to it all suddenly, for
Lord Pharanx's condition is rapidly becoming critical, patent to all
eyes, could any eye see him--so much so that on the last day none of
the servants are allowed to enter his room. We must therefore regard
Cibras as a mere addendum to, an extraneous element in, the tragedy,
not as an integral part of it. She did not shoot the noble lord, for
she had no pistol; nor did Randolph, for he was at a distance from the
bed of death, surrounded by witnesses; nor did the imaginary burglars.
The earl therefore shot himself; and it was the small globular silver
pistol, such as this'--here Zaleski drew a little embossed Venetian
weapon from a drawer near him--'that appeared in the gloom to the
excited Hester as a "ball of cotton," while it was being drawn upward
by the Atwood's machine. But if the earl shot himself he could not have
done so after being stabbed to the heart. Maude Cibras, therefore,
stabbed a dead man. She would, of course, have ample time for stealing
into the room and doing so after the shot was fired, and before the
party reached the balcony window, on account of the delay on the stairs
in procuring a second light; in going to the earl's door; in examining
the tracks, and so on. But having stabbed a dead man, she is not guilty
of murder. The message I just now sent by Ham was one addressed to the
Home Secretary, telling him on no account to let Cibras die to-morrow.
He well knows my name, and will hardly be silly enough to suppose me
capable of using words without meaning. It will be perfectly easy to
prove my conclusions, for the pieces removed from, and replaced in, the
floorings can still be detected, if looked for; the pistol is still, no
doubt, in Randolph's room, and its bore can be compared with the bullet
found in Lord Pharanx's brain; above all, the jewels stolen by the
"burglars" are still safe in some cabinet of the new earl, and may
readily be discovered I therefore expect that the dénoûment will now
take a somewhat different turn.'
That the dénoûment did take a different turn, and pretty strictly in
accordance with Zaleski's forecast, is now matter of history, and the
incidents, therefore, need no further comment from me in this place.
THE STONE OF THE EDMUNDSBURY MONKS
'Russia,' said Prince Zaleski to me one day, when I happened to be on a
visit to him in his darksome sanctuary--'Russia may be regarded as land
surrounded by ocean; that is to say, she is an island. In the same way,
it is sheer gross irrelevancy to speak of _Britain_ as an island,
unless indeed the word be understood as a mere _modus loquendi_ arising
out of a rather poor geographical pleasantry. Britain, in reality, is a
small continent. Near her--a little to the south-east--is situated the
large island of Europe. Thus, the enlightened French traveller passing
to these shores should commune within himself: "I now cross to the
Mainland"; and retracing his steps: "I now return to the fragment rent
by wrack and earthshock from the Mother-country." And this I say not in
the way of paradox, but as the expression of a sober truth. I have in
my mind merely the relative depth and extent--the _non-insularity_, in
fact--of the impressions made by the several nations on the world. But
this island of Europe has herself an island of her own: the name of it,
Russia. She, of all lands, is the _terra incognita_, the unknown land;
till quite lately she was more--she was the undiscovered, the
unsuspected land. She _has_ a literature, you know, and a history, and
a language, and a purpose--but of all this the world has hardly so much
as heard. Indeed, she, and not any Antarctic Sea whatever, is the real
Ultima Thule of modern times, the true Island of Mystery.'
I reproduce these remarks of Zaleski here, not so much on account of
the splendid tribute to my country contained in them, as because it
ever seemed to me--and especially in connection with the incident I am
about to recall--that in this respect at least he was a genuine son of
Russia; if she is the Land, so truly was he the Man, of Mystery. I who
knew him best alone knew that it was impossible to know him. He was a
being little of the present: with one arm he embraced the whole past;
the fingers of the other heaved on the vibrant pulse of the future. He
seemed to me--I say it deliberately and with forethought--to possess
the unparalleled power not merely of disentangling in retrospect, but
of unravelling in prospect, and I have known him to relate _coming_
events with unimaginable minuteness of precision. He was nothing if not
superlative: his diatribes, now culminating in a very _extravaganza_ of
hyperbole--now sailing with loose wing through the downy, witched,
Dutch cloud-heaps of some quaintest tramontane Nephelococcugia of
thought--now laying down law of the Medes for the actual world of
to-day--had oft-times the strange effect of bringing back to my mind
the very singular old-epic epithet, [Greek: aenemoen]--_airy_--as
applied to human thought. The mere grip of his memory was not simply
extraordinary, it had in it a token, a hint, of the strange, the
pythic--nay, the sibylline. And as his reflecting intellect, moreover,
had all the lightness of foot of a chamois kid, unless you could
contrive to follow each dazzlingly swift successive step, by the sum of
which he attained his Alp-heights, he inevitably left on you the
astounding, the confounding impression of mental omnipresence.
I had brought with me a certain document, a massive book bound in iron
and leather, the diary of one Sir Jocelin Saul. This I had abstracted
from a gentleman of my acquaintance, the head of a firm of inquiry
agents in London, into whose hand, only the day before, it had come. A
distant neighbour of Sir Jocelin, hearing by chance of his extremity,
had invoked the assistance of this firm; but the aged baronet, being in
a state of the utmost feebleness, terror, and indeed hysterical
incoherence, had been able to utter no word in explanation of his
condition or wishes, and, in silent abandonment, had merely handed the
book to the agent.
A day or two after I had reached the desolate old mansion which the
prince occupied, knowing that he might sometimes be induced to take an
absorbing interest in questions that had proved themselves too
profound, or too intricate, for ordinary solution, I asked him if he
was willing to hear the details read out from the diary, and on his
assenting, I proceeded to do so.
The brief narrative had reference to a very large and very valuable
oval gem enclosed in the substance of a golden chalice, which chalice,
in the monastery of St. Edmundsbury, had once lain centuries long
within the Loculus, or inmost coffin, wherein reposed the body of St.
Edmund. By pressing a hidden pivot, the cup (which was composed of two
equal parts, connected by minute hinges) sprang open, and in a hollow
space at the bottom was disclosed the gem. Sir Jocelin Saul, I may say,
was lineally connected with--though, of course, not descendant
from--that same Jocelin of Brakelonda, a brother of the Edmundsbury
convent, who wrote the now so celebrated _Jocelini Chronica_: and the
chalice had fallen into the possession of the family, seemingly at some
time prior to the suppression of the monastery about 1537. On it was
inscribed in old English characters of unknown date the words:
'Shulde this Ston stalen bee,
Or shuld it chaunges dre,
The Houss of Sawl and hys Hed anoon shal de.'