Adventures of Martin Hewitt (24 page)

She handed the box to Hewitt, who murmured, “Indeed! Very
interesting—very wonderful, really,” and returned it to the lady
immediately.

“That, Mr. Hewitt, was the property of my great-uncle, Joseph Simpson, who
once had the honour of shaking hands with his late Majesty King George the
Fourth. The box was presented to my uncle by——,” and then Mrs.
Mallett plunged into the whole history and adventures of the box, in the
formula wherewith Hewitt subsequently became so well acquainted, and which
need not be here set out in detail. When the box had been properly honoured
Mrs. Mallett proceeded with her business.

“I am convinced, Mr. Hewitt,” she said, “that systematic attempts are
being made to rob me of this snuff-box. I am not a nervous or weak-minded
woman, or perhaps I might have sought your assistance before. The watching
and following of myself I might have disregarded, but when it comes to
burglary I think it is time to do something.”

“Certainly,” Hewitt agreed.

“Well, I have been pestered with demands for the box for some time past. I
have here some of the letters which I have received, and I am sure I know at
whose instigation they were sent.” She placed on the table a handful of
papers of various sizes, which Hewitt examined one after another. They were
mostly in the same handwriting, and all were unsigned. Every one was couched
in a fanatically toned imitation of scriptural diction, and all sorts of
threats were expressed with many emphatic underlinings. The spelling was not
of the best, the writing was mostly uncouth, and the grammar was in ill shape
in many places, the “thous” and “thees” and their accompanying verbs falling
over each other disastrously. The purport of the messages was rather vaguely
expressed, but all seemed to make a demand for the restoration of some
article held in extreme veneration. This was alluded to in many figurative
ways as the “token of life,” the “seal of the woman,” and so forth, and
sometimes Mrs. Mallett was requested to restore it to the “ark of the
covenant.” One of the least vague of these singular documents ran
thus:—
“Thou of no faith put the bond of the woman clothed with the
sun on the stoan sete in thy back garden this night or thy blood beest on
your own hed. Give it back to us the five righteous only in this citty, give
us that what saves the faithful when the erth is swalloed up.”
Hewitt
read over these fantastic missives one by one till he began to suspect that
his client, mad or not, certainly corresponded with mad Quakers. Then he
said, “Yes, Mrs. Mallett, these are most extraordinary letters. Are there any
more of them?”

“Bless the man, yes, there were a lot that I burnt. All the same
crack-brained sort of thing.”

“They are mostly in one handwriting,” Hewitt said, “though some are in
another. But I confess I don’t see any very direct reference to the
snuff-box.”

“Oh, but it’s the only thing they can mean,” Mrs. Mallett replied with
great positiveness. “Why, he wanted me to sell it him; and last night my
house was broken into in my absence and everything ransacked and turned over,
but not a thing was taken. Why? Because I had the box with me at my sister’s;
and this is the only sacred relic in my possession. And what saved the
faithful when the world was swallowed up? Why, the ark of course.” The old
lady’s manner was odd, but notwithstanding the bizarre and disjointed
character of her complaint Hewitt had now had time to observe that she had
none of the unmistakable signs of the lunatic. Her eye was steady and clear,
and she had none of the restless habits of the mentally deranged. Even at
that time Hewitt had met with curious adventures enough to teach him not to
be astonished at a new one, and now he set himself seriously to get at his
client’s case in full order and completeness.

“Come, Mrs. Mallett,” he said, “I am a stranger, and I can never
understand your case till I have it, not as it presents itself to your mind,
in the order of importance of events, but in the exact order in which they
happened. You had a great-uncle, I understand, living in the early part of
the century, who left you at his death the snuff-box which you value so
highly. Now you suspect that somebody is attempting to extort or steal it
from you. Tell me as clearly and simply as you can whom you suspect and the
whole story of the attempts.”

“That’s just what I’m coming to,” the old lady answered, rather pettishly.
“My uncle Joseph had an old housekeeper, who of course knew all about the
snuff-box, and it is her son Reuben Penner who is trying to get it from me.
The old woman was half crazy with one extraordinary religious superstition
and another, and her son seems to be just the same. My great-uncle was a man
of strong common-sense and a churchman (though he did think he could write
plays), and if it hadn’t been for his restraint I believe—that is I
have been told—Mrs. Penner would have gone clean demented with
religious mania. Well, she died in course of time, and my great-uncle died
some time after, leaving me the most important thing in his possession (I
allude to the snuff-box of course), a good bit of property, and a tin box
full of his worthless manuscript. I became a widow at twenty-six, and since
then I have lived very quietly in my present house in Fulham.

“A couple of years ago I received a visit from Reuben Penner. I didn’t
recognise him, which wasn’t wonderful, since I hadn’t seen him for thirty
years or more. He is well over fifty now, a large heavy-faced man with
uncommonly wild eyes for a greengrocer—which is what he is, though he
dresses very well, considering. He was quite respectful at first, and very
awkward in his manner. He took a little time to get his courage, and then he
began questioning me about my religious feelings. Well, Mr. Hewitt, I am not
the sort of person to stand a lecture from a junior and an inferior, whatever
my religious opinions may be, and I pretty soon made him realise it. But
somehow he persevered. He wanted to know if I would go to some place of
worship that he called his ‘Tabernacle.’ I asked him who was the pastor. He
said himself. I asked him how many members of the congregation there were,
and (the man was as solemn as an owl. I assure you, Mr. Hewitt) he actually
said five! I kept my countenance and asked why such a small number couldn’t
attend church, or at any rate attach itself to some decent Dissenting chapel.
And then the man burst out; mad—mad as a hatter. He was as incoherent
as such people usually are, but as far as I could make out he talked, among a
lot of other things, of some imaginary woman—a woman standing on the
moon and driven into a wilderness on the wings of an eagle. The man was so
madly possessed of his fancies that I assure you for a while he almost ceased
to look ridiculous. He was so earnest in his rant. But I soon cut him short.
It’s best to be severe with these people—it’s the only chance of
bringing them to their senses. ‘Reuben Penner,’ I said, ‘shut up! Your mother
was a very decent person in her way, I believe, but she was half a lunatic
with her superstitious notions, and you’re a bigger fool than she was.
Imagine a grown man, and of your age, coming and asking me, of all people in
the world, to leave my church and make another fool in a congregation of
five, with you to rave at me about women in the moon! Go away and look after
your greengrocery, and go to church or chapel like a sensible man. Go away
and don’t play the fool any longer; I won’t hear another word!’

“When I talk like this I am usually attended to, and in this case Penner
went away with scarcely another word. I saw nothing of him for about a month
or six weeks and then he came and spoke to me as I was cutting roses in my
front garden. This time he talked—to begin with, at least—more
sensibly. ‘Mrs. Mallett,’ he said, ‘you have in your keeping a very sacred
relic.’

“‘I have,’ I said, ‘left me by my great-uncle Joseph. And what then?’

“‘Well’—he hummed and hawed a little—‘I wanted to ask if you
might be disposed to part with it.’

“‘What?’ I said, dropping my scissors—‘sell it?’

“‘Well, yes,’ he answered, putting on as bold a face as he could.

“The notion of selling my uncle Joseph’s snuff-box in any possible
circumstances almost made me speechless. ‘What!’ I repeated. ‘Sell
it?—sell it? It would be a sinful sacrilege!’

“His face quite brightened when I said this, and he replied, ‘Yes, of
course it would; I think so myself, ma’am; but I fancied you thought
otherwise. In that case, ma’am, not being a believer yourself, I’m sure you
would consider it a graceful and a pious act to present it to my little
Tabernacle, where it would be properly valued. And it having been my mother’s
property——’

“He got no further. I am not a woman to be trifled with, Mr. Hewitt, and I
believe I beat him out of the garden with my basket. I was so infuriated I
can scarcely remember what I did. The suggestion that I should sell my uncle
Joseph’s snuff-box to a greengrocer was bad enough; the request that I should
actually give it to his ‘Tabernacle’ was infinitely worse. But to claim that
it had belonged to his mother—well I don’t know how it strikes you, Mr.
Hewitt, but to me it seemed the last insult possible.”

“Shocking, shocking, of course,” Hewitt said, since she seemed to expect a
reply. “And he called you an unbeliever, too. But what happened after
that?”

“After that he took care not to bother me personally again; but these
wretched anonymous demands came in, with all sorts of darkly hinted threats
as to the sin I was committing in keeping my own property. They didn’t
trouble me much. I put ‘em in the fire as fast as they came, until I began to
find I was being watched and followed, and then I kept them.”

“Very sensible,” Hewitt observed, “very sensible indeed to do that. But
tell me as to these papers. Those you have here are nearly all in one
handwriting, but some, as I have already said, are in another. Now before all
this business, did you ever see Reuben Penner’s handwriting?”

“No, never.”

“Then you are not by any means sure that he has written any of these
things?”

“But then who else could?”

“That of course is a thing to be found out. At present, at any rate, we
know this: that if Penner has anything to do with these letters he is not
alone, because of the second handwriting. Also we must not bind ourselves
past other conviction that he wrote any one of them. By the way, I am
assuming that they all arrived by post?”

“Yes, they did.”

“But the envelopes are not here. Have you kept any of them?”

“I hardly know; there may be some at home. Is it important?”

“It may be; but those I can see at another time. Please go on.”

“These things continued to arrive, as I have said, and I continued to burn
them till I began to find myself watched and followed, and then I kept them.
That was two or three months ago. It is a most unpleasant sensation, that of
feeling that some unknown person is dogging your footsteps from corner to
corner and observing all your movements for a purpose you are doubtful of.
Once or twice I turned suddenly back, but I never could catch the creatures,
of whom I am sure Penner was one.”

“You saw these people, of course?”

“Well, yes, in a way—with the corner of my eye, you know. But it was
mostly in the evening. It was a woman once, but several times I feel certain
it was Penner. And once I saw a man come into my garden at the back in the
night, and I feel quite sure that was Penner.”

“Was that after you had this request to put the article demanded on the
stone seat in the garden?”

“The same night. I sat up and watched from the bath-room window, expecting
someone would come. It was a dark night, and the trees made it darker, but I
could plainly see someone come quietly over the wall and go up to the
seat.”

“Could you distinguish his face?”

“No, it was too dark. But I feel sure it was Penner.”