The mysterious Mr. Quin
Megaphone_ had it. The other papers were more restrained and delicate
in their language, but the fact was the same. Lady Stranleigh had been
found dead in her bath, and her death was due to drowning. She had, it
was assumed, lost consciousness and while in that state her head had
slipped below the water.
But Mr. Satterthwaite was not satisfied with that explanation. Calling
for his valet, he made his toilet with less than his usual care and ten
minutes later his big Rolls Royce was carrying him out of London as
fast as it could travel.
But strangely enough it was not for Abbot's Mede he was bound, but for
a small inn some fifteen miles distant which bore the rather unusual
name of The Bells and Motley. It was with great relief that he heard
that Mr. Harley Quin was still staying there. In another minute he was
face to face with his friend.
Mr. Satterthwaite clasped him by the hand and began to speak at once
in an agitated manner. "I am terribly upset. You must help me. Already
I have a dreadful feeling that it may be too late--that that nice
girl may be the next to go; for she is a nice girl, nice through and
through."
"If you will tell me," said Mr. Quin, smiling, "what it is all about?"
Mr. Satterthwaite looked at him reproachfully. "You know. I am
perfectly certain that you know. But I will tell you."
He poured out the story of his stay at Abbot's Mede and, as always with
Mr. Quin, he found himself taking pleasure in his narrative. He was
eloquent and subtle and meticulous as to detail.
"So you see," he ended, "there must be an explanation."
He looked hopefully at Mr. Quin, as a dog looks at his master.
"But it is you who must solve the problem, not I," said Mr. Quin. "I do
not know these people. You do."
"I knew the Barron girls forty years ago," said Mr. Satterthwaite with
pride.
Mr. Quin nodded and looked sympathetic, so much so that the other went
on dreamily:
"That time at Brighton now, Bottacetti-Boatupsetty; quite a silly joke
but how we laughed. Dear, dear, I was young then. Did a lot of foolish
things. I remember the maid they had with them. Alice, her name was, a
little bit of a thing--very ingenuous. I kissed her in the passage of
the hotel, I remember, and one of the girls nearly caught me doing it.
Dear, dear, how long ago that all was."
He shook his head again and sighed. Then he looked at Mr. Quin. "So you
can't help me?" he said wistfully. "On other occasions--"
"On other occasions you have proved successful owing entirely to your
own efforts," said Mr. Quin gravely. "I think it will be the same this
time. If I were you, I should go to Abbot's Mede now."
"Quite so, quite so," said Mr. Satterthwaite. "As a matter of fact,
that is what I thought of doing. I can't persuade you to come with me?"
Mr. Quin shook his head. "No," he said, "my work here is done. I am
leaving almost immediately."
At Abbot's Mede, Mr. Satterthwaite was taken at once to Margery Gale.
She was sitting dry-eyed at a desk in the morning room on which were
strewn various papers. Something in her greeting touched him. She
seemed so very pleased to see him.
"Roley and Marcia have just left. Mr. Satterthwaite, it is not as the
doctors think. I am convinced, absolutely convinced, that Mother was
pushed under the water and held there. She was murdered, and whoever
murdered her wants to murder me too. I am sure of that. That is why--"
She indicated the document in front of her.
"I have been making my will," she explained. "A lot of the money and
some of the property does not go with the title, and there is my
father's money as well. I am leaving everything I can to Noel. I know
he will make a good use of it, and I do not trust Roley; he has always
been out for what he can get. Will you sign it as a witness?"
"My dear young lady," said Mr. Satterthwaite, "you should sign a will
in the presence of two witnesses, and they should then sign themselves
at the same time."
Margery brushed aside this legal pronouncement.
"I don't see that it matters in the least," she declared. "Clayton
saw me sign and then she signed her name. I was going to ring for the
butler, but you will do instead."
Mr. Satterthwaite uttered no fresh protest; he unscrewed his fountain
pen and then, as he was about to append his signature, he paused
suddenly. The name, written just above his own recalled a flow of
memories. Alice Clayton.
Something seemed to be struggling very hard to get through to him.
Alice Clayton; there was some significance about that. Something to do
with Mr. Quin was mixed up with it. Something he had said to Mr. Quin
only a very short time ago.
Ah, he had it now. Alice Clayton, that was her name. _The little bit
of a thing._ People changed--yes, _but not like that_. And the Alice
Clayton he knew had had brown eyes. The room seemed whirling round him.
He felt for a chair and presently, as though from a great distance, he
heard Margery's voice speaking to him anxiously.
"Are you ill? Oh, what is it? I am sure you are ill!"
He was himself again. He took her hand.
"My dear, I see it all now. You must prepare yourself for a great
shock. The woman upstairs whom you call Clayton is not Clayton at all.
The real Alice Clayton was drowned on the _Uralia_."
Margery was staring at him. "Who--who is she then?"
"I am not mistaken; I cannot be mistaken. The woman you call Clayton
is your mother's sister, Beatrice Barron. You remember telling me that
she was struck on the head by a spar? I should imagine that that blow
destroyed her memory, and, that being the case, your mother saw the
chance--"
"Of pinching the title, you mean?" asked Margery bitterly. "Yes, she
would do that. It seems dreadful to say that, now she is dead, but she
was like that."
"Beatrice was the elder sister," said Mr. Satterthwaite. "By your
uncle's death she would inherit everything and your mother would get
nothing. Your mother claimed the wounded girl as her _maid_, not as her
_sister_. The girl recovered from the blow and believed of course what
was told her, that she was Alice Clayton, your mother's maid. I should
imagine that, just lately, her memory has begun to return, but that
the blow on the head, given all these years ago, has at last caused
mischief on the brain."
Margery was looking at him with eyes of horror. "She killed Mother and
she wanted to kill me," she breathed.
"It seems so," said Mr. Satterthwaite. "In her brain there was just one
muddled idea--that her inheritance had been stolen and was being kept
from her by you and your mother."
"But--but Clayton is so old."
Mr. Satterthwaite was silent for a minute as a vision rose up before
him--the faded old woman with gray hair and the radiant golden-haired
creature sitting in the sunshine at Cannes. Sisters! Could it really be
so? He remembered the Barron girls and their likeness to each other.
Just because two lives had developed on different tracks--
He shook his head sharply, obsessed by the wonder and pity of life.
He turned to Margery and said gently, "We had better go upstairs and
see her."
They found Clayton sitting in the little workroom where she sewed.
She did not turn her head as they came in, for a reason that Mr.
Satterthwaite soon found out.
"Heart failure," he murmured, as he touched the cold, rigid shoulder.
"Perhaps it is best that way."
THE FACE OF HELEN
Mr. Satterthwaite was at the opera and sat alone in his big box on the
first tier. Outside the door was a printed card bearing his name. An
appreciator and a connoisseur of all the arts, Mr. Satterthwaite was
especially fond of good music and was a regular subscriber to Covent
Garden every year, reserving a box for Tuesdays and Fridays throughout
the season.
But it was not often that he sat in it alone. He was a gregarious
little gentleman, and he liked filling his box with the élite of the
great world to which he belonged, and also with the aristocracy of
the artistic world, in which he was equally at home. He was alone
tonight because a countess had disappointed him. The Countess, besides
being a beautiful and celebrated woman, was also a good mother. Her
children had been attacked by that common and distressing disease, the
mumps, and the Countess remained at home in tearful confabulation with
exquisitely starched nurses. Her husband, who had supplied her with the
aforementioned children and a title, but who was otherwise a complete
nonentity, had seized at the chance to escape. Nothing bored him more
than music.
So Mr. Satterthwaite sat alone. _Cavalleria Rusticana_ and _Pagliacci_
were being given that night, and, since the first had never appealed
to him, he arrived just after the curtain went down on Santuzza's
death agony, in time to glance round the house with a practiced eye,
before everyone streamed out, bent on paying visits or fighting for
coffee or lemonade. Mr. Satterthwaite adjusted his opera glasses,
looked round the house, marked down his prey, and sallied forth with a
well-mapped-out plan of campaign ahead of him, a plan, however, which
he did not put into execution, for just outside his box he cannoned
into a tall, dark man, and recognized him with a pleasurable thrill of
excitement.
"Mr. Quin," cried Mr. Satterthwaite.
He seized his friend warmly by the hand, clutching him as though he
feared any minute to see him vanish into thin air. "You must share my
box," said Mr. Satterthwaite determinedly. "You are not with a party?"
"No, I am sitting by myself in the stalls," responded Mr. Quin with a
smile.
"Then that is settled," said Mr. Satterthwaite with a sigh of relief.
His manner was almost comic, had there been anyone to observe it.
"You are very kind," said Mr. Quin.
"Not at all. It is a pleasure. I didn't know you were fond of music?"
"There are reasons why I am attracted to _Pagliacci_."
"Ah! of course," said Mr. Satterthwaite, nodding sapiently, though, if
put to it, he would have found it hard to explain just why he had used
that expression. "Of course, you would be."
They went back to the box at the first summons of the bell and, leaning
over the front of it, they watched the people returning to the stalls.
"That's a beautiful head," observed Mr. Satterthwaite suddenly.
He indicated with his glasses a spot immediately beneath them in the
stalls circle. A girl sat there whose face they could not see--only the
pure gold of her hair that fitted with the closeness of a cap till it
merged into the white neck.
"A Greek head," said Mr. Satterthwaite reverently. "Pure Greek." He
sighed happily. "It's a remarkable thing when you come to think of
it--how very few people have hair that _fits_ them."
"You are so observant," said Mr. Quin.
"I see things," admitted Mr. Satterthwaite. "I do see things. For
instance, I picked out that head at once. We must have a look at her
face sooner or later. But it won't match, I'm sure. That would be a
chance in a thousand."
Almost as the words left his lips, the lights flickered and went down,
the sharp rap of the conductor's baton was heard, and the opera began.
A new tenor, said to be a second Caruso, was singing that night. He had
been referred to by the newspapers as a Yugoslav, a Czech, an Albanian,
a Magyar, and a Bulgarian, with a beautiful impartiality. He had given
an extraordinary concert at the Albert Hall, a program of the folk
songs of his native hills, with a specially tuned orchestra. They were
in strange half-tones, and the would-be musical had pronounced them
"too marvelous." Real musicians had reserved judgment, realizing that
the ear had to be specially trained and attuned before any criticism
was possible. It was quite a relief to some people to find this evening