A silent witness
tripped down the lane and passed between the posts out into the
sunlight beyond, to vanish behind the trunks of the elms; then I
returned to my sketch and my struggles to express foliage with a touch
somewhat less suggestive of a birch-broom.
When I had finished my drawing, I sauntered on rather aimlessly,
speculating for the hundredth time on the meaning of those discoveries
of mine in this very lane. Was it possible that the man whom I had
seen was not dead, but merely insensible? I could not believe it. The
whole set of circumstances--the aspect of the body, the blood-stain on
the fence, the tracks through the high grass and the mysterious gold
trinket--were opposed to any such belief. Yet, on the other hand, one
would think that a man could not disappear unnoticed. This was no
tramp or nameless vagrant. He was a clergyman or a priest, a man who
would be known to a great number of persons and whose disappearance
must surely be observed at once and be the occasion of very stringent
enquiries. But no enquiries had apparently been made. I had seen no
notice in the papers of any missing cleric, and clearly the police had
heard nothing or they would have looked me up. The whole affair was
enveloped in the profoundest mystery. Dead or alive, the man had
vanished utterly; and whether he was dead or alive, the mystery was
equally beyond solution.
These reflections brought me, almost unconsciously, to another of my
favourite walks; the pretty footpath from the Heath to Temple Fortune.
I had crossed the stile and stepped off the path to survey the
pleasant scene, when my eye was attracted by a number of streaks of
alien colour on the leaves of a burdock. Stooping down, I perceived
that they were smears of oil-paint, and inferred that someone had
cleaned a palette on the herbage; an inference that was confirmed a
moment later by what looked like the handle of a brush projecting from
a clump of nettles. When I drew it out, however, it proved to be not a
brush, but a very curious knife with a blade shaped like a diminutive
and attenuated trowel; evidently a painting-knife and also evidently
home-made, at least in part, for the tang had been thrust into a
short, stout brush-handle and secured with a whipping of waxed thread.
I dropped it into my outside breast pocket and went on my way,
wondering if by chance it might have been dropped by my fair
acquaintance; and the thought was still in my mind when its object
hove in sight. Turning a bend in the path, I came on her quite
suddenly, perched on her little camp-stool in the shadow of the hedge,
with the open sketching-box on her knees, working away with an
industry and concentration that seemed to rebuke my own idleness.
Indeed, she was so much engrossed with her occupation that she did not
notice me until I stepped off the path and approached with the knife
in my hand.
“I wonder,” said I, holding it out and raising my cap, “if this
happens to be your property. I picked it up just now among the nettles
near the barn.”
She took the knife from me and looked at it inquisitively. “No,” she
replied, “it isn’t mine, but I think I know whose it is. I suspect it
belongs to an artist who has been doing a good deal of work about the
Heath. You may have seen him.”
“I have seen several artists working about here during the summer.
What was this one like?”
“Well,” she answered with a smile, “he was like an artist. Very much
like. Quite the orthodox get-up. Wide brimmed hat, rather long hair
and a ragged beard. And he wore sketching spectacles--half-moon-shaped
things, you know--and kid gloves--which were not quite so orthodox.”
“Very inconvenient, I should think.”
“Not so very. I work in gloves myself in the cold weather or if the
midges are very troublesome. You soon get used to the feel of them;
and the man I am speaking of wouldn’t find them in the way at all
because he works almost entirely with painting-knives. That is what
made me think that this knife was probably his. He had several, I
know, and very skillfully he used them, too.”
“You have seen his work, then?”
“Well,” she admitted, “I’m afraid I descended once or twice to play
the ‘snooper.’ You see, his method of handling interested me.”
“May I ask what a ‘snooper’ is?” I enquired.
“Don’t you know? It’s a student’s slang name for the kind of person
who makes some transparent pretext for coming off the path and passing
behind you to get a look at your picture by false pretences.”
For an instant there flashed into my mind the suspicion that she was
administering a quiet “back-hander,” and I rejoined hastily:
“I hope you are not including me in the genus ‘snooper.’”
She laughed softly. “It did sound rather like it. But I’ll give you
the benefit of the doubt in consideration of your finding the
knife--which you had better keep in trust for the owner.”
“Won’t you keep it? You know the probable owner by sight and I don’t;
and meanwhile you might experiment with it yourself.”
“Very well,” she replied, dropping it into her brush-tray, “I’ll keep
it for the present at any rate.”
There was a brief pause, and then I ventured to remark, “That looks a
very promising sketch of yours. And how well the subject comes.”
“I’m glad you like it,” she replied, quite simply, viewing her work
with her head on one side. “I want it to turn out well, because it’s a
commission, and commissions for small oil paintings are rare and
precious.”
“Do you find small oil pictures very difficult to dispose of?” I
asked.
“Not difficult. Impossible, as a rule. But I don’t try now. I copy my
oil sketches in water-colour, with modifications to suit the market.”
Again there was a pause; and, as her brush wandered towards the
palette, it occurred to me that I had stayed as long as good manners
permitted. Accordingly, I raised my cap, and, having expressed the
hope that I had not greatly hindered her, prepared to move away.
“Oh, not at all,” she answered; “and thank you for the knife, though
it isn’t mine--or, at any rate, wasn’t. Good-morning.”
With this and a pleasant smile and a little nod, she dismissed me; and
once more I went my idle and meditative way.
It had been quite a pleasant little adventure. There is always
something rather interesting in making the acquaintance of a person
whom one has known some time by sight but who is otherwise an unknown
quantity. The voice, the manner, and the little revelations of
character, which confirm or contradict previous impressions, are
watched with interest as they develop themselves and fill in, one by
one, the blank spaces of the total personality. I had, as I have said,
often met this industrious maiden in my walks and had formed the
opinion that she looked a rather nice girl; an opinion that was
probably influenced by her unusual good looks and graceful carriage.
And a rather nice girl she had turned out to be; very dignified and
self-possessed, but quite simple and frank--though, to be sure, her
gracious reception of me had probably been due to my sketch-book; she
had taken me for a kindred spirit. She had a pleasant voice and a
faultless accent, with just a hint of the fine lady in her manner; but
I liked her none the less for that. And her name was a pretty name,
too, if I had guessed it correctly; for, on the inside of the lid of
her box, which was partly uncovered by the upright panel, I had read
the letters “Syl.” The panel hid the rest, but the name could hardly
be other than Sylvia; and what more charming and appropriate name
could be bestowed upon a comely young lady who spent her days amidst
the woods and fields of my beloved Hampstead?
Regaling myself with this somewhat small beer, I sauntered on along
the grassy lane, between hedgerows that in the summer had been
spangled with wild roses and that were now gay with the big, oval
berries, sleek and glossy and scarlet, like overgrown beads of red
coral; away, across the fields to Golder’s Green and thence by
Millfield Lane, back to my lodgings at Gospel Oak, and to my landlady,
Mrs. Blunt, who had a few plaintive words to say respecting the
disastrous effects of unpunctuality--and the resulting prolonged
heat--on mutton cutlets and fried potatoes.
It had been an idle morning and apparently void of significant events;
but yet, when I look back on it, I see a definite thread of causation
running through its simple happenings, and I realize that, all
unthinking, I had strung on one more bead to the chaplet of my
destiny.
CHAPTER IV.
SEPTIMUS MADDOCK, DECEASED
It was getting well on into November when I strolled one afternoon
into the hospital museum, not with any specific object but rather
vaguely in search of something to do. During the last few days I had
developed a slight revival of industry--which had coincided, oddly
enough, with a marked deterioration of the weather--and, pathology
being my weakest point, the museum had seemed to call me (though not
very loudly, I fear) to browse amongst its multitudinous jars and dry
preparations.
There was only one person in the great room; but he was a very
important person; being none other than our lecturer on Medical
Jurisprudence, Dr. John Thorndyke. He was seated at a small table
whereon was set out a collection of jars and a number of large
photographs, of which he appeared to be making a catalogue; but intent
as he was on his occupation, he looked up as I entered and greeted me
with a genial smile.
“What do you think of my little collection, Jardine?” he asked, as I
approached deferentially. Before replying, I ran a vaguely enquiring
eye over the group of objects on the table and was mighty little
enlightened thereby. It was certainly a queer collection. There was a
flat jar which contained a series of five differently-coloured mice,
another with a similar series of three rats, a human foot, a
hand--manifestly deformed--a series of four fowls’ heads and a number
of photographs of plants.
“It looks,” I replied, at length, “like what the auctioneers would
call a miscellaneous lot.”
“Yes,” Dr. Thorndyke agreed, “it is a miscellaneous collection in a
sense. But there is a connecting idea. It illustrates certain
phenomena of inheritance which were discovered and described by
Mendel.”
“Mendel!” I exclaimed. “Who is he? I never heard of him.”
“I daresay not,” said Thorndyke, “though he published his results
before you were born. But the importance of his discoveries is only
now beginning to be appreciated.”
“I suppose,” said I, “the subject is too large and complex for a short
explanation to be possible.”
“The subject is a large one, of course,” he replied; “but, put in a
nutshell, Mendel’s great discovery amounts to this; that, whereas
certain characters are inherited only partially and fade off gradually
in successive generations, certain other characters are inherited
completely and pass unchanged from generation to generation. To take a
couple of illustrative cases: If a negro marries a European, the
offspring are mulattoes--forms intermediate between the negro and the
European. If a mulatto marries a European, the offspring are
quadroons--another intermediate form; and the next generation gives us
the octoroon--intermediate again between the quadroon and the
European. And so, from generation to generation, the negro character
gradually fades away and finally disappears. But there are other
characters which are inherited entire or not at all, and such
characters appear in pairs which are positive or negative to one
another. Sex is a case in point. A male marries a female and the
offspring are either male or female, never intermediate. The
sex-character of only one parent is inherited, and it is inherited
completely. The characters of maleness and femaleness pass down