The Mysterious Three

“I dusn’t say, sir,” he answered. “I dusn’t say.”

He looked to right and left, as it seemed to me instinctively, and as though to assure himself that no one else was present, that no one overheard him. It was evident to me that there was somebody he feared.

Several times I tried tactfully to “draw” him, but to no purpose.

“I should like to look over the house again,” I said at last. “I know it well, for I stayed here often in days gone by, though I don’t recollect ever seeing you here. How long is it since Sir Charles stayed here?”

“Three years come Lady Day,” he answered.

“And has the house been empty ever since? Has it never been sub-let?”

“Never. Sir Charles never would sub-let it, though there were some who wanted it.”

“Well, I will look over it, I think,” I said, moving to rise. “I’m inclined to rent it myself; that’s really why I am here.”

He may, or may not, have believed the lie. Anyway, my suggestion filled him with alarm. He got up out of his chair.

“You can’t, you can’t,” he exclaimed, greatly perturbed. He pushed his skinny hand into his jacket-pocket, and I heard him clutch his bunch of keys. “The doors are all locked – all locked.”

“You have the keys; give them to me.”

“I dusn’t, I dusn’t, indeed. All, you are a gen’leman, sir, you won’t take the keys from an old man, sir, I know you won’t.”

“Sit down,” I said, sharply.

Idle curiosity had prompted me to wish to go over the house. The old man’s anxiety that I should not do so settled my determination. My thought travelled quickly.

“Have you a drop of anything to drink that you can give me?” I asked suddenly. “I should like a little whisky – or anything else will do.”

Again the expression of dismay came into his old eyes.

“Don’t tempt me, sir, ah, don’t tempt me!” he exclaimed. “Sir Charles made me promise as long as I was with him I wouldn’t touch a drop. I did once. Oh, I did once.”

“And what happened?”

He hid his face in his hands, as if to shut out some horrid memory.

“Don’t ask me what happened, sir, don’t ask me. And I swore I wouldn’t touch a drop again. And I haven’t got a drop – except a cup of tea.”

The kettle on the gas-stove had been boiling for some time. My intention – an evil one – when I had asked for something alcoholic, had been to induce the old man to drink with me until the effects of the whisky should cause him to overcome his scruples and hand over his keys. But tea!

At that moment my elbow rested on something hard in my pocket. Almost at the same moment an idea flashed into my brain. I tried to dispel it, but it wouldn’t go. I allowed my mind to dwell upon it, and quickly it obsessed me.

Why, I don’t know, but since the chemist had returned the little flask to me, after analysing its contents, I had carried it in my pocket constantly. It was there now. It was the flask that my elbow had pressed, recalling it to my mind.

“Twenty drops will send a strong man to sleep – for ever,” he had said.

The words came back to me now. If it needed twenty drops to kill a strong man, surely a small dose could with safety be administered to a wiry little old man who, though decrepit, seemed still to possess considerable vitality. But would it be quite safe? Did I dare risk it?

“A cup of tea will do just as well,” I said carelessly, tossing aside my cigarette. “No, don’t you move. I see you have everything ready, and there are cups up on the shelf. Let me make the tea. I like tea made in one way only.”

I felt quite guilty when he answered —

“You are very kind, sir; you are very kind; you are a gen’leman.”

It was easily and quickly done. I had my back to him. I poured the tea into the cups. Then I let about five drops of the fluid in the flask fall into a spoon. I put the spoon into his cup, and stirred his tea with it.

In a few moments I saw he was growing drowsy. His bony chin dropped several times on to his chest, though he tried to keep awake. He muttered some unintelligible words. In a few minutes he was asleep.

I took his pulse. Yes, it was still quite strong. I waited a moment or two. Then, slipping my hand into his jacket-pocket, I took out the bunch of keys noiselessly, turned out the gas-stove, and stepped quietly out of the room, closing the door behind me.

Chapter Seven

Treading among Shadows

The house was found very dirty and neglected. It contained but little furniture. Dust lay thickly upon everything. The windows, I was almost tempted to think, had not been opened since Sir Charles had last lived there three years ago. There was also a damp, earthy smell in the hall.

As I went slowly up the stairs, bare of carpet or any other covering, they creaked and groaned in a way that was astonishing, for the houses in Belgrave Street are not so very old. The noises the stairs made echoed higher up.

I had decided to enter the rooms on the ground floor last of all. The first floor looked strangely unfamiliar. When last I had been here the house had been luxuriously furnished, and somehow the landing, in its naked state, seemed larger than when I remembered it.

Ah! What fun we had had in that house long ago!

My friends the Thorolds had entertained largely, and their acquaintances had all been bright, amusing people, so different, as I had sometimes told my friends, from the colourless, stupid folk whose company one so often has to endure when staying in the houses of acquaintances. I often think, when mixing with such people, of the story of the two women discussing a certain “impossible” young man, of a type one meets frequently.

“How deadly dull Bertie Fairbairn is,” one of them said. “He never talks at all.”

“Oh, he is better than his brother Reggie,” the other answered. “Whenever you speak to Bertie he says, ‘Right O!’”

The door of the apartment that had been the large drawing-room was locked. On the bunch of keys, I soon found the key that fitted, and I entered.

Phew, what a musty smell! Most oppressive. The blinds were drawn half-way down the windows and, by the look of them, had been so for some considerable time. The furniture that remained was all hidden under holland sheets, and the pictures on the walls, draped in dust-proof coverings, looked like the slabs of salted beef, and the sides of smoke-cured pork one sees hung in some farmhouses. The carpets were dusty, moth-eaten and rotten.

Gingerly, with thumb and forefinger, I picked up the corners of some of the furniture coverings. There was nothing but the furniture underneath, except in one instance, where I saw, upon an easy-chair, a plate with some mouldy remnants of food upon it. No wonder the atmosphere was foetid.

I was about to leave the room, glad to get out of it, when I noticed in a corner of the ceiling a dark, yellow-brown stain, about a yard in circumference. This struck me as curious, and I went over and stood under it, and gazed up at it, endeavouring to discover its origin. Then I saw that it was moist. I pulled up one of the blinds in order to see better, but my scrutiny failed to give me any inkling as to the origin of the stain.

I went out, shut and locked the door, and entered several other rooms, the doors of all of which I found locked. One room was very like another, the only difference being that the smell in some was closer and nastier than the smell in others, though all the smells had, what I may call the same “flavour” – a “taste” of dry rot. I wondered if Sir Charles knew how his house was being neglected, how dirt and dust were being allowed to accumulate.

This was Lady Thorold’s boudoir, if I remembered aright. The inside of the lock was so rusty that I had difficulty in turning the key. Everything shrouded, as elsewhere, but, judging from the odd projections in the coverings, I concluded that ornaments and bric-à-brac had been left upon the tables.

Nor was I mistaken. As I lifted the cloths and dust sheets, objects that I remembered seeing set about the room in the old days, became revealed. There were several beautiful statues, priceless pieces of antique furniture from Naples and Florence, curious carved wooden figures that Sir Charles had collected during his travels in the Southern Pacific, cloisonné vases from Tokio and Osaka, a barely decent sculpture bought by Sir Charles from a Japanese witch-doctor who lived a hermit’s life on an island in the Inland Sea – how well I remembered Lady Thorold’s emphatic disapproval of this figure, and her objection to her husband’s displaying it in the way he did – treasures from different parts of China, from New Guinea, Burmah, the West Indies and elsewhere.

Another cloth I lifted. Beneath it were a number of photographs in frames, piled faces downward in heaps. I picked up some of them, and took them out to look at. A picture of Vera in a short frock, with a teddy-bear tucked under her arm, interested me; so did a portrait of Lady Thorold dressed in a fashion long since past; and so did a portrait of my old father in his Guards uniform. The rest were portraits of people I didn’t know. I looked at one or two more, and was about to replace the frames where I had found them, when I turned up one that startled me.

It was a cabinet, in a bog-oak frame, of the man whose likeness had caused the commotion at Houghton, the man who had called himself Smithson. But it was not a portrait similar to the one I had taken away. The same man, undoubtedly, but in a different attitude, and apparently many years younger.

Closely I scrutinised it.