The Complete Simon Iff (5 page)

Flynn said nothing; but his eyes were streaming; he had loved Dick Ffoulkes dearly, and a thousand memories were urgent in his heart and mind. Iff seemed not to notice it.

“But the murderer of Marsden is still a mystery. Ffoulkes can hardly have done that.”

Flynn sat up and laughed wildly. “I’ll tell you all about that,” he cried. “Ezra Robinson did it, with the help of the floor clerk. They were to meet on the anniversary of the murder. I tracked them down, and I hanged them with these hands.” He stretched them out in a gesture of agony. The old man took them in his.

“Boy!” he said, “—for you will never grow up—you have perhaps erred in some ways—ways which I find excusable—but you need never lose a night’s sleep over this business.”

“Ah!” cried Jack, “but it was I who tempted my friend—it was a moment of absolute madness, and now I have lost him!”

“We are all punished,” said the old man solemnly, “exactly where we have offended, and in the measure thereof.”

I

Jack Flynn was the centre of a happy group of artists. They were seated upon the terrace of the Café d’Alençon to drink the apéritif; for although November was upon Paris, the Sun still remembered his beloved city, and fed it with light and warmth.

Flynn had come over from London for a week to see the Autumn Salon, and to gossip with his old friends. The conversation was naturally of Art, and, like the universe itself, had neither beginning nor end, being self-created by its own energy, so rolled easily through the Aeons in every combination of beauty.

But half of beauty is melancholy, a subtle subcurrent of sadness; and on this particular occasion it was visible, giving a grey tone to the most buoyant rhapsodies. The talkers were in fact subdued and restrained; each spoke gaily, yet stood upon his guard, as if there were some subject near his consciousness which he must be careful not to broach.

It was a curiously distinguished group. Two of the men wore the Légion d’Honneur; the elder of the two, who looked more like a soldier or a diplomat than a painter, seemed to be the object of constant solicitude on the part of the younger, whose ruddy, cheerful ironic face was like a picture by Franz Hals—but a Franz Hals in the mood of Rabelais. He seemed particularly anxious lest the other should say something unfortunate, but he should really have been looking round the corner, for there was where the danger lay.

Round that corner, all arms and legs, came swinging the agile body of no less a person than the mystic, Simon Iff.

His first greeting was the bombshell! “Ah ha!” he cried, grasping the hand of the elder of the two decores. “and how’s the dear old Sea?” For the person addressed happened to be famous all over the world as a marine painter. The younger man sprang to his feet. “Just don’t mention the sea, please, for a few months!” he said in Simon’s ear. It was unnecessary. Even in the general joy at the return of an old friend, Iff’s quick apprehension could not fail to detect a suppressed spasm of pain on every face.

The mystic turned and greeted the man who had interrupted him with honest gladness; then his other hand shot out to Flynn. “I’ve been out of the world all summer,” he cried, shaking hands all round, “in a hermitage after my own heart. Fancy a castle dating from the crusades, on the very edge of a glacier, and every practicable route barred against the world the flesh, and the devil, in the shape of tourists, tables d’hôte, and newspapers!” “You look thirty!” declared one of the men. “And I feel twenty,” laughed the magician; “what do you say to a little dinner at Lapérouse? I want to walk across the Luxembourg to a feast, as I’ve done any time these fifty years!”

As it happened, only two of the party were free; Major, the young man with the button, and Jack Flynn.

After some quiet chat the three strolled off together, arm in arm, down the Boulevard Montparnasse.

When they reached the Avenue de l’Observatoire, they turned down that noble grove. Here, at all hours of day and night, is a stately solitude. Intended for gaiety, devised as a symbol of gaiety by the most frivolous age of all time, it has become by virtue of age the very incarnation of melancholy grandeur. It seems almost to lament that eighteenth century which fathered it.

Before they had passed into this majesty more than an hundred yards, the mystic said abruptly: “What’s the trouble?”

“Haven’t you really seen a paper for six months?” countered Flynn.

“Of course I haven’t. You know my life; you know that I retire, whenever I am able, from this nightmare illusion of matter to a world of reality. So tell me your latest evil dream!”

“Evil enough!” said Major, “it doesn’t actually touch us, but it’s a narrow escape. We only heard the climax three days ago; so it’s a green wound, you see.”

“Yet it doesn’t touch you.”

“No; but it touches Art, and that’s me, all right!”

“Will you tell me the story?”

“I´ll leave that to Flynn. He´s been on the trail all the time.”

“I was even at the trial.” said Flynn.

“Come, come” laughed Iff “all these be riddles.”

“I’ll make them clear enough—all but the one. Now, no interruptions! I have the thing orderly in my mind.”

“Five: four three: two one: gun!”

“The place is a small rocky islet off the west coast of Scotland, by name Dubhbheagg. A few fisher-folk live there; nobody else. There is one landing-place, and one only, even in calm weather; in a storm it is inaccessible altogether. Overlooking this quay is a house perched on the cliff; an old stone mansion. The proprietor is one of our sacred guild, and spends most of his time in Central Asia or Central Africa or Central America or Central Australia—anything to be central!— and he lets the house to any one who is fool enough to pay the price.

“This summer it was rented by the president of the Royal Academy.”

“What’s that?” said Iff, sharply.

“The Royal Academy,” explained Flynn, is an institution devised by divine Providence for the detection of British Artists. It brings them into notice by ostentatiously rejecting their works. The president is Lord Cudlipp.”

“Wasn’t he a Joseph Thorne, or some such name?” asked Simon Iff.

“Thornton, I think. Ennobled thirteen years ago,” corrected Flynn.

“It was Thornley,” insisted the sculptor, Major.

“Yes, Thornley; I remember now. I know him slightly; and I knew his father before him; an M.P and a biscuit manufacturer,” exclaimed the mystic.

“A pity the son didn’t follow the father,” murmured Major. “I feel sure that his biscuits would have been delightful!”

“You’re interrupting the court,” protested the editor “To proceed. Here we have Cudlipp in the Big House of Dubhbheagg, with a man and wife to cook for him, both old servants, with him thirty years. There are also his son Harry, his daughter Eleanor, her companionmaid, and—a man from the Quarter!”

“This Quarter?”

“Up in Montrouge his studio is, I think, one of those lost cottages with a garden in the middle of a block of houses. Well, this man, or rather boy, he’s not twentyyet, is, or wants to be, a marine painter like Cudlipp—”

“God forbid!” groaned the Major.

“Shut up! the boy’s name is Andre de Bry; he’s half Frenchf, half English, I believe, a pretty hot combination.”

“So I’ve noticed, remarked Iff, as they turned into Lapérouse, crept up the narrow stair, and found a table by the window in the Salle de Miroirs.

“Harry and Eleanor were born seventeen years ago, twins”

“Which is dead?” interrupted Iff. The others stared.

“Excuse an old man’s vanity!” laughed the mystic. “I really have to show off sometimes! You see, I know Jack’s passion for precision of language. He wouldn’t say the simple thing, ’They are twins,’ or ’They are seventeen years old,’ and he wouldn’t say ’They were twins,’ or ’were seventeen years old,’ so I knew that one, and one only, was dead.”

“I hope your acuteness will continue through dinner,” laughed the editor. “We need it. Now, then, to business. Cudlipp had sort of adopted André de Bry, Used him to prepare his bigger canvases, and so on. De Bry had fallen in love with Eleanor. She returned bis passion De Bry was hopelessly poor—no, not hopelessly, for he had a rich uncle, who had a fad of independence. He wouldn’t give André a farthing; but if the boy succeeded in making himself a career, he promised to leave him every penny he had. The family is noble, much better than Cudlipp’s; so the boy was not a bad match for Eleanor, and, contigently, a very good one. He and Harry were perfectly good friends. There was, in short, no element of disagreement worth notice. The days passed pleasantly, either in painting or fishing, and the evenings in games. One can hardly imagine a more harmonious group.

”On the 18th of August the yacht, which supplied the island with stores from the mainland, called and left provisions for the party. To avert false conjecture from the start, I may say that it is absolutely impossible that some mysterious stowaway could have landed from the yacht and hidden somewhere on the island. The police subsequently went through the place with a fine tooth comb. It is thirty miles from the nearest land, is barely a quarter of a mile in its greatest length, has neither a cave nor a tree on it. So don’t talk about that! Well, the yacht weighed anchor on the afternoon of the 18th; that night a storm came up from the Atlantic, and raged for a whole week. It is physically impossible that any one should have landed on the rock during that period. Furthermore, the Big House stands on a quite unclimbable pinnacle—I’m a rock climber, as you know, and I went to see it, and there’s not a crack anywhere. It was only connected with the rest of the island by a wooden bridge of the cantilever type; and the violence of the wind was such that on the second night of the storm it carried it away. This was inconvenient for them, as will be seen; but it simplifies the matter a good deal for us. Well, on the 25th the storm abated, and the fishermen were about to put to sea when they observed Lord.Cudlipp on the edge of the cliff, firing his shotgun. Seeing he was noticed, he signalled and shouted to them to come up. He met them, so far as he could, at the chasm where the bridge had been. ”There has been murder done here,” he said shortly, ”take this message and telegraph it at once.” He flung a stone to them, with a paper wrapped about it. The telegram asked for the police; also for a gang of men with materials to build up the bridge. The following noon relief arrived.

“The rest of the story needs little detail. It is as astonishingly simple as it is perplexing. The naked body of the boy Harry was found on the morning of the 23rd in the big room used by the other men as a studio—Harry and Eleanor took not the slightest interest in art. Death had been caused by a small deep wound in the femoral artery; a penknife might have made it. But there was no blood; and at the postmortem was revealed the utterly astonishing fact that there was no blood in the whole body—when I say no blood, I mean, not enough for a rabbit! It had been systematically drained. I need hardly tell you that the whole island went wild with stories of vampires and witches; I won’t bother you with that sort of rubbish.

“But the horror of the circumstances cannot be easily matched. Imagine to yourselves that lonely crag, itself a monument of desolation, towering from sea to sky, bleak, bare, barren and heartless as sea and sky themselves. Such a place has always bred strange stories—and strange crimes.

“But think of the feelings of the people in the house, one of them certainly a murderer!

“However, the police were easily able to narrow down the possibilities. The boy had been chloroformed or otherwise rendered unconscious, without doubt, for there could have been no struggle. The wound was clean, and obviously inflicted by some one with first rate anatomical knowledge. It was, too, a highly civilized crime, so to speak.

“This really restricted the field of inquiry to the two painters. Common sense excluded the father, whose main hope of an illustrious line was thus cut off. On the other hand, de Bry was a doubtful character. In Paris he had been accustomed to frequent the lowest haunts—the sort of places one find in these little streets about here—and as a matter of fact, he was usually called the ’Apache’ as a sort of nickname. But no one had ever heard of anything very definite, except an alleged duel with knives in a shop off the Boulevard St. Germain called Tout à la Joie, a low drinking cellar. This came out in court later, and sounded nasty, though it was proven that he had been attacked without provocation, and the police had not even arrested him. Still, a man so ready with a knife—it impressed the jury! badly, I could see that.

“To cut a long story short, they arrested André. He refused to enter the witness hox; he had no story to tell; nor, indeed, had any of the others. Harry had gone to bed alive; he was found dead in the morning. No quarrel anywhere. No motive for anybody.

“The jury was out for twenty-four hours; they came back with that jov which only Scotland offers to its jurymen—the Verdict of the Sitter on the Fence: ’Not proven.’ They all thought he did it, but they couldn´t make up their minds to hang him; so there was the way out. Therefore, André de Bry is at large again; and, by the same token, I came over on the boat with him. He was muffled to the eyes, but I knew him. So he’s probably within a mile of us at this minute.”

“What do you think of the story?” asked Major, a little anxiously “Oh, I agree with the natives,” replied the mystic, laughingly, to the astonishment of his hearers. “Excuse my referring to the fact that I’m a professional Magus— still, you should not be surprised if I tell you that I hold to the theory of vampires and wehr-wolves and sirens and the rest of the dear creatures!”

“Be serious, master!” urged Flynn, using a title which he knew would put the mystic on his honor.

“My dear lad, I believe this murder was done by some one whom none of them knew to have been there.”

“But how could he have got away?”

“Vanished whence he came.”

“A haunted house? Damn it, something in your tone makes my blood run cold.”

“Well,” slowly answered the mystic, “possibly, in a sense, a haunted house.”