The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Modern English
year. Lady Carwitchet seemed perfectly content. She reveled in the soft
living and good fare of the Manor House, the drives in Leta's big
barouche, and Domenico's dinners, as one to whom short commons were not
unknown. She had a hungry way of grabbing and grasping at everything she
could--the shillings she won at whist, the best fruit at dessert, the
postage stamps in the library inkstand--that was infinitely suggestive.
Sometimes I could have pitied her, she was so greedy, so spiteful, so
friendless. She always made me think of some wicked old pirate putting
into a peaceful port to provision and repair his battered old hulk,
obliged to live on friendly terms with the natives, but his piratical old
nostrils asniff for plunder and his piratical old soul longing to be off
marauding once more. When would that be? Not till the arrival in Paris of
her distinguished American friends, of whom we heard a great deal.
"Charming people, the Bokums of Chicago, the American branch of the
English Beauchamps, you know!" They seemed to be taking an unconscionable
time to get there. She would have insisted on being driven over to
Northchurch to call at the palace, but that the bishop was understood to
be holding confirmations at the other end of the diocese.
I was alone in the house one afternoon sitting by my window, toying with
the key of my safe, and wondering whether I dare treat myself to a peep at
my treasures, when a suspicious movement in the park below caught my
attention. A black figure certainly dodged from behind one tree to the
next, and then into the shadow of the park paling instead of keeping to
the footpath. It looked queer. I caught up my field glass and marked him
at one point where he was bound to come into the open for a few steps. He
crossed the strip of turf with giant strides and got into cover again, but
not quick enough to prevent me recognizing him. It was--great
heavens!--the bishop! In a soft hat pulled over his forehead, with a long
cloak and a big stick, he looked like a poacher.
Guided by some mysterious instinct I hurried to meet him. I opened the
conservatory door, and in he rushed like a hunted rabbit. Without
explanation I led him up the wide staircase to my room, where he dropped
into a chair and wiped his face.
"You are astonished, Mr. Acton," he panted. "I will explain directly.
Thanks." He tossed off the glass of brandy I had poured out without
waiting for the qualifying soda, and looked better.
"I am in serious trouble. You can help me. I've had a shock to-day--a
grievous shock." He stopped and tried to pull himself together. "I must
trust you implicitly, Mr. Acton, I have no choice. Tell me what you think
of this." He drew a case from his breast pocket and opened it. "I promised
you should see the Valdez sapphire. Look there!"
The Valdez sapphire! A great big shining lump of blue crystal--flawless
and of perfect color--that was all. I took it up, breathed on it, drew out
my magnifier, looked at it in one light and another. What was wrong with
it? I could not say. Nine experts out of ten would undoubtedly have
pronounced the stone genuine. I, by virtue of some mysterious instinct
that has hitherto always guided me aright, was the unlucky tenth. I looked
at the bishop. His eyes met mine. There was no need of spoken word
between us.
"Has Lady Carwitchet shown you her sapphire?" was his most unexpected
question. "She has? Now, Mr. Acton, on your honor as a connoisseur and a
gentleman, which of the two is the Valdez?"
"Not this one." I could say naught else.
"You were my last hope." He broke off, and dropped his face on his folded
arms with a groan that shook the table on which he rested, while I stood
dismayed at myself for having let so hasty a judgment escape me. He lifted
a ghastly countenance to me. "She vowed she would see me ruined and
disgraced. I made her my enemy by crossing some of her schemes once, and
she never forgives. She will keep her word. I shall appear before the
world as a fraudulent trustee. I can neither produce the valuable confided
to my charge nor make the loss good. I have only an incredible story to
tell," he dropped his head and groaned again. "Who will believe me?"
"I will, for one."
"Ah, you? Yes, you know her. She took my wife from me, Mr. Acton. Heaven
only knows what the hold was that she had over poor Mira. She encouraged
her to set me at defiance and eventually to leave me. She was answerable
for all the scandalous folly and extravagance of poor Mira's life in
Paris--spare me the telling of the story. She left her at last to die
alone and uncared for. I reached my wife to find her dying of a fever from
which Lady Carwitchet and her crew had fled. She was raving in delirium,
and died without recognizing me. Some trouble she had been in which I must
never know oppressed her. At the very last she roused from a long stupor
and spoke to the nurse. 'Tell him to get the sapphire back--she stole it.
She has robbed my child.' Those were her last words. The nurse understood
no English, and treated them as wandering; but _I_ heard them, and knew
she was sane when she spoke."
"What did you do?"
"What could I? I saw Lady Carwitchet, who laughed at me, and defied me to
make her confess or disgorge. I took the pendant to more than one eminent
jeweler on pretense of having the setting seen to, and all have examined
and admired without giving a hint of there being anything wrong. I allowed
a celebrated mineralogist to see it; he gave no sign--"
"Perhaps they are right and we are wrong."
"No, no. Listen. I heard of an old Dutchman celebrated for his imitations.
I went to him, and he told me at once that he had been allowed by
Montanaro to copy the Valdez--setting and all--for the Paris Exhibition. I
showed him this, and he claimed it for his own work at once, and pointed
out his private mark upon it. You must take your magnifier to find it; a
Greek Beta. He also told me that he had sold it to Lady Carwitchet more
than a year ago."
"It is a terrible position."
"It is. My co-trustee died lately. I have never dared to have another
appointed. I am bound to hand over the sapphire to my daughter on her
marriage, if her husband consents to take the name of Montanaro."
The bishop's face was ghastly pale, and the moisture started on his brow.
I racked my brain for some word of comfort.
"Miss Panton may never marry."
"But she will!" he shouted. "That is the blow that has been dealt me
to-day. My chaplain--actually, my chaplain--tells me that he is going out
as a temperance missionary to equatorial Africa, and has the assurance to
add that he believes my daughter is not indisposed to accompany him!" His
consummating wrath acted as a momentary stimulant. He sat upright, his
eyes flashing and his brow thunderous. I felt for that chaplain. Then he
collapsed miserably. "The sapphires will have to be produced, identified,
revalued. How shall I come out of it? Think of the disgrace, the ripping
up of old scandals! Even if I were to compound with Lady Carwitchet, the
sum she hinted at was too monstrous. She wants more than my money. Help
me, Mr. Acton! For the sake of your own family interests, help me!"
"I beg your pardon--family interests? I don't understand."
"If my daughter is childless, her next of kin is poor Marmaduke Panton,
who is dying at Cannes, not married, or likely to marry; and failing him,
your nephew, Sir Thomas Acton, succeeds."
My nephew Tom! Leta, or Leta's baby, might come to be the possible
inheritor of the great Valdez sapphire! The blood rushed to my head as I
looked at the great shining swindle before me. "What diabolic jugglery was
at work when the exchange was made?" I demanded fiercely.
"It must have been on the last occasion of her wearing the sapphires in
London. I ought never to have let her out of my sight."
"You must put a stop to Miss Panton's marriage in the first place," I
pronounced as autocratically as he could have done himself.
"Not to be thought of," he admitted helplessly. "Mira has my force of
character. She knows her rights, and she will have her jewels. I want you
to take charge of the--thing for me. If it's in the house she'll make me
produce it. She'll inquire at the banker's. If _you_ have it we can gain
time, if but for a day or two." He broke off. Carriage wheels were
crashing on the gravel outside. We looked at one another in consternation.
Flight was imperative. I hurried him downstairs and out of the
conservatory just as the door bell rang. I think we both lost our heads in
the confusion. He shoved the case into my hands, and I pocketed it,
without a thought of the awful responsibility I was incurring, and saw him
disappear into the shelter of the friendly night.
When I think of what my feelings were that evening--of my murderous hatred
of that smirking, jesting Jezebel who sat opposite me at dinner, my
wrathful indignation at the thought of the poor little expected heir
defrauded ere his birth; of the crushing contempt I felt for myself and
the bishop as a pair of witless idiots unable to see our way out of the
dilemma; all this boiling and surging through my soul, I can only
wonder--Domenico having given himself a holiday, and the kitchen maid
doing her worst and wickedest--that gout or jaundice did not put an end to
this story at once.
"Uncle Paul!" Leta was looking her sweetest when she tripped into my room
next morning. "I've news for you. She," pointing a delicate forefinger in
the direction of the corridor, "is going! Her Bokums have reached Paris at
last, and sent for her to join them at the Grand Hotel."
I was thunderstruck. The longed-for deliverance had but come to remove
hopelessly and forever out of my reach Lady Carwitchet and the great
Valdez sapphire.
"Why, aren't you overjoyed? I am. We are going to celebrate the event by a
dinner party. Tom's hospitable soul is vexed by the lack of entertainment
we had provided her. We must ask the Brownleys some day or other, and they
will be delighted to meet anything in the way of a ladyship, or such smart
folks as the Duberly-Parkers. Then we may as well have the Blomfields, and
air that awful modern Sèvres dessert service she gave us when we were
married." I had no objection to make, and she went on, rubbing her soft
cheek against my shoulder like the purring little cat she was: "Now I want
you to do something to please me--and Mrs. Blomfield. She has set her
heart on seeing your rubies, and though I know you hate her about as much
as you do that Sèvres china--"
"What! Wear my rubies with that! I won't. I'll tell you what I will do,
though. I've got some carbuncles as big as prize gooseberries, a whole
set. Then you have only to put those Bohemian glass vases and candelabra
on the table, and let your gardener do his worst with his great forced,
scentless, vulgar blooms, and we shall all be in keeping." Leta pouted. An
idea struck me. "Or I'll do as you wish, on one condition. You get Lady
Carwitchet to wear her big sapphire, and don't tell her I wish it."
I lived through the next few days as one in some evil dream. The
sapphires, like twin specters, haunted me day and night. Was ever man so
tantalized? To hold the shadow and see the substance dangled temptingly
within reach. The bishop made no sign of ridding me of my unwelcome
charge, and the thought of what might happen in a case of
burglary--fire--earthquake--made me start and tremble at all sorts of
inopportune moments.
I kept faith with Leta, and reluctantly produced my beautiful rubies on
the night of her dinner party. Emerging from my room I came full upon Lady
Carwitchet in the corridor. She was dressed for dinner, and at her throat
I caught the blue gleam of the great sapphire. Leta had kept faith with