The blue scarab
have demanded a very profound knowledge of the Egyptian writing.”
“Not at all,” replied Thorndyke. “Any intelligent person could master
the Egyptian alphabet in an hour. The language, of course, is quite
another matter. The spelling of this is a little crude, but it is
quite intelligible and does Silas great credit, considering how little
was known in his time.”
“How do you suppose M. Fouquet came to overlook this?” Blowgrave
asked.
“Naturally enough,” was the reply. “He was looking for an Egyptian
inscription. But this is not an Egyptian inscription. Does he speak
English?”
“Very little. Practically not at all.”
“Then, as the words are English words and imperfectly spelt, the
hieroglyphics must have appeared to him mere nonsense. And he was
right as to the scarab being an imitation.”
“There is another point,” said Blowgrave. “How was it that Harold made
that extraordinary mistake about the place? The directions are clear
enough. All you had to do was to go out there with a compass and take
the bearings just as they were given.”
“But,” said Thorndyke, “that is exactly what he did, and hence the
mistake. He was apparently unaware of the phenomenon known as the
Secular Variation of the Compass. As you know, the compass does
not--usually--point to true north, but to the Magnetic North; and the
Magnetic North is continually changing its position. When Reuben was
buried--about 1810--it was twenty-four degrees, twenty-six minutes
west of true north; at the present time it is fourteen degrees,
forty-eight minutes west of true north. So Harold’s bearings would be
no less than ten degrees out, which, of course, gave him a totally
wrong position. But Silas was a ship-master, a navigator, and of
course, knew all about the vagaries of the compass; and, as his
directions were intended for use at some date unknown to him, I
assumed that the bearings that he gave were true bearings--that when
he said ‘north’ he meant true north, which is always the same; and
this turned out to be the case. But I also prepared a plan with
magnetic bearings corrected up to date. Here are the three plans: No.
1--the one we used--showing true bearings; No. 2, showing corrected
magnetic bearings which might have given us the correct spot; and No.
3, with uncorrected magnetic bearings, giving us the spot where Harold
dug, and which could not possibly have been the right spot.”
On the following morning I escorted the deed-box, filled with the
booty and tied up and sealed with the scarab, to Mr. Blowgrave’s bank.
And that ended our connection with the case; excepting that, a month
or two later, we attended by request the unveiling in Shawstead
churchyard of a fine monument to Reuben Blowgrave. This took the
slightly inappropriate form of an obelisk, on which were cut the name
and approximate dates, with the added inscription: “Cast thy bread
upon the waters and it shall return after many days”; concerning which
Thorndyke remarked dryly that he supposed the exhortation applied
equally even if the bread happened to belong to some one else.
II.
THE CASE OF THE WHITE FOOT-PRINTS
“Well,” said my friend Foxton, pursuing a familiar and apparently
inexhaustible topic, “I’d sooner have your job than my own.”
“I’ve no doubt you would,” was my unsympathetic reply. “I never met a
man who wouldn’t. We all tend to consider other men’s jobs in terms of
their advantages and our own in terms of their drawbacks. It is human
nature.”
“Oh, it’s all very well for you to be so beastly philosophical,”
retorted Foxton. “You wouldn’t be if you were in my place. Here, in
Margate, it’s measles, chicken-pox and scarlatina all the summer, and
bronchitis, colds and rheumatism all the winter. A deadly monotony.
Whereas you and Thorndyke sit there in your chambers and let your
clients feed you up with the raw material of romance. Why, your life
is a sort of everlasting Adelphi drama.”
“You exaggerate, Foxton,” said I. “We, like you, have our routine
work, only it is never heard of outside the Law Courts; and you, like
every other doctor, must run up against mystery and romance from time
to time.”
Foxton shook his head as he held out his hand for my cup. “I don’t,”
said he. “My practice yields nothing but an endless round of dull
routine.”
And then, as if in commentary on this last statement, the housemaid
burst into the room and, with hardly dissembled agitation, exclaimed:
“If you please, sir, the page from Beddingfield’s Boarding House says
that a lady has been found dead in her bed and would you go round
there immediately.”
“Very well, Jane,” said Foxton, and as the maid retired, he
deliberately helped himself to another fried egg and, looking across
the table at me, exclaimed: “Isn’t that always the way? Come
immediately--now--this very instant, although the patient may have
been considering for a day or two whether he’ll send for you or not.
But directly he decides, you must spring out of bed, or jump up from
your breakfast, and run.”
“That’s quite true,” I agreed; “but this really does seem to be an
urgent case.”
“What’s the urgency?” demanded Foxton. “The woman is already dead. Any
one would think she was in imminent danger of coming to life again and
that my instant arrival was the only thing that could prevent such a
catastrophe.”
“You’ve only a third-hand statement that she is dead,” said I. “It is
just possible that she isn’t; and even if she is, as you will have to
give evidence at the inquest, you don’t want the police to get there
first and turn out the room before you’ve made your inspection.”
“Gad!” exclaimed Foxton. “I hadn’t thought of that. Yes. You’re right.
I’ll hop round at once.”
He swallowed the remainder of the egg at a single gulp and rose from
the table. Then he paused and stood for a few moments looking down at
me irresolutely.
“I wonder, Jervis,” he said, “if you would mind coming round with me.
You know all the medico-legal ropes, and I don’t. What do you say?”
I agreed instantly, having, in fact, been restrained only by delicacy
from making the suggestion myself; and when I had fetched from my room
my pocket camera and telescopic tripod, we set forth together without
further delay.
Beddingfield’s Boarding House was but a few minutes’ walk from
Foxton’s residence, being situated near the middle of Ethelred Road,
Cliftonville, a quiet, suburban street which abounded in similar
establishments, many of which, I noticed, were undergoing a
spring-cleaning and renovation to prepare them for the approaching
season.
“That’s the house,” said Foxton, “where that woman is standing at the
front door. Look at the boarders, collected at the dining-room window.
There’s a rare commotion in that house, I’ll warrant.”
Here, arriving at the house, he ran up the steps and accosted in
sympathetic tones the elderly woman who stood by the open street door.
“What a dreadful thing this is, Mrs. Beddingfield! Terrible! Most
distressing for you!”
“Ah, you’re right, Dr. Foxton,” she replied. “It’s an awful affair.
Shocking. So bad for business, too. I do hope and trust there won’t be
any scandal.”
“I’m sure I hope not,” said Foxton. “There shan’t be if I can help it.
And as my friend, Dr. Jervis, who is staying with me for a few days,
is a lawyer as well as a doctor, we shall have the best advice. When
was the affair discovered?”
“Just before I sent for you, Dr. Foxton. The maid noticed that Mrs.
Toussaint--that is the poor creature’s name--had not taken in her hot
water, so she knocked at the door. As she couldn’t get any answer, she
tried the door and found it bolted on the inside, and then she came
and told me. I went up and knocked loudly, and then, as I couldn’t get
any reply, I told our boy, James, to force the door open with a
case-opener, which he did quite easily as the bolt was only a small
one. Then I went in, all of a tremble, for I had a presentiment that
there was something wrong; and there she was, lying stone dead, with a
most ’orrible stare on her face and an empty bottle in her hand.”
“A bottle, eh!” said Foxton.
“Yes. She’d made away with herself, poor thing; and all on account of
some silly love affair--and it was hardly even that.”
“Ah,” said Foxton. “The usual thing. You must tell us about that
later. Now we’d better go up and see the patient--at least
the--er--perhaps you’ll show us the room, Mrs. Beddingfield.”
The landlady turned and preceded us up the stairs to the first-floor
back, where she paused, and softly opening a door, peered nervously
into the room. As we stepped past her and entered, she seemed inclined
to follow, but, at a significant glance from me, Foxton persuasively
ejected her and closed the door. Then we stood silent for a while and
looked about us.
In the aspect of the room there was something strangely incongruous
with the tragedy that had been enacted within its walls; a mingling of
the commonplace and the terrible that almost amounted to anticlimax.
Through the wide-open window the bright spring sunshine streamed in on
the garish wall-paper and cheap furniture; from the street below, the
periodic shouts of a man selling “sole and mack-ro!” broke into the
brisk staccato of a barrel-organ and both sounds mingled with a
raucous voice close at hand, cheerfully trolling a popular song, and
accounted for by a linen-clad elbow that bobbed in front of the window
and evidently appertained to a house painter on an adjacent ladder.
It was all very commonplace and familiar and discordantly out of
character with the stark figure that lay on the bed like a waxen
effigy symbolic of tragedy. Here was none of that gracious somnolence
in which death often presents itself with a suggestion of eternal
repose. This woman was dead; horribly, aggressively dead. The thin,
sallow face was rigid as stone, the dark eyes stared into infinite
space with a horrid fixity that was quite disturbing to look on. And
yet the posture of the corpse was not uneasy, being, in fact, rather
curiously symmetrical, with both arms outside the bed-clothes and both
hands closed, the right grasping, as Mrs. Beddingfield had said, an
empty bottle.
“Well,” said Foxton, as he stood looking down on the dead woman, “it
seems a pretty clear case. She appears to have laid herself out and
kept hold of the bottle so that there should be no mistake. How long
do you suppose this woman has been dead, Jervis?”
I felt the rigid limbs and tested the temperature of the body surface.
“Not less than six hours,” I replied. “Probably more. I should say
that she died about two o’clock this morning.”
“And that is about all we can say,” said Foxton, “until the
post-mortem has been made. Everything looks quite straightforward. No
signs of a struggle or marks of violence. That blood on the mouth is
probably due to her biting her lip when she drank from the bottle.
Yes; here’s a little cut on the inside of the lip, corresponding to
the upper incisors. By the way, I wonder if there is anything left in
the bottle.”
As he spoke, he drew the small, unlabelled, green glass phial from the
closed hand--out of which it slipped quite easily--and held it up to
the light.
“Yes,” he exclaimed, “there’s more than a drachm left; quite enough
for an analysis. But I don’t recognize the smell. Do you?”
I sniffed at the bottle and was aware of a faint unfamiliar vegetable
odour.
“No,” I answered. “It appears to be a watery solution of some kind,
but I can’t give it a name. Where is the cork?”
“I haven’t seen it,” he replied. “Probably it is on the floor
somewhere.”
We both stooped to look for the missing cork and presently found it in
the shadow, under the little bedside table. But, in the course of that
brief search, I found something else, which had indeed been lying in