The mysterious Mr. Quin
He got up. It was not Roger Graham who had killed Mabelle Annesley. He
could have fled from her, but he could not have killed her. He had been
afraid of her, afraid of that wild, intangible, fairylike quality of
hers. He had known enchantment--and turned his back on it. He had gone
for the safe, sensible thing that he had known "would work" and had
relinquished the intangible dream that might lead him he knew not where.
He was a sensible young man, and, as such, uninteresting to Mr.
Satterthwaite, who was an artist and a connoisseur in life.
He left Roger Graham in his room and went downstairs. The drawing room
was empty. Mabelle's ukulele lay on a stool by the window. He took it
up and twanged it absent-mindedly. He knew nothing of the instrument,
but his ear told him that it was abominably out of tune. He turned a
key experimentally.
Doris Coles came into the room. She looked at him reproachfully. "Poor
Mabelle's uke," she said.
Her clear condemnation made Mr. Satterthwaite feel obstinate.
"Tune it for me," he said, and added, "if you can."
"Of course I can," said Doris, wounded at the suggestion of
incompetence in any direction.
She took it from him, twanged a string, turned a key briskly--and the
string snapped.
"Well, I never. Oh! I see--but how extraordinary. It's the wrong
string--a size too big. It's an A string. How stupid to put that on. Of
course it snaps when you try to tune it up. How stupid people are."
"Yes," said Mr. Satterthwaite. "They are--even when they try to be
clever."
His tone was so odd that she stared at him. He took the ukulele from
her and removed the broken string. He went out of the room holding it
in his hand. In the library he found David Keeley.
"Here," he said.
He held out the string. Keeley took it. "What's this?"
"A broken ukulele string." He paused and then went on: "_What did you
do with the other one?_"
"The other one?"
"_The one you strangled her with._ You were very clever, weren't you?
It was done very quickly--just in that moment we were all laughing and
talking in the hall.
"Mabelle came back into this room for her ukulele. You had taken the
string off as you fiddled with it just before. You caught her round
the throat with it and strangled her. Then you came out and locked the
door and joined us. Later, in the dead of night, you came down and--and
disposed of the body by hanging it on the door of her room. And you put
another string on the ukulele--_but it was the wrong string_, that's
why you were stupid."
There was a pause.
"But why did you do it?" said Mr. Satterthwaite. "In God's name, _why_?"
Mr. Keeley laughed, a funny giggling little laugh that made Mr.
Satterthwaite feel rather sick.
"It was so very simple," he said. "That's why! And then--nobody ever
noticed me. Nobody ever noticed what I was doing. I thought--I thought
I'd have the laugh on them."
And again he gave that furtive little giggle and looked at Mr.
Satterthwaite with mad eyes.
Mr. Satterthwaite was glad that at that moment Inspector Winkfield came
into the room.
* * * * *
It was twenty-four hours later, on his way to London, that Mr.
Satterthwaite awoke from a doze to find a tall dark man sitting
opposite to him in the railway carriage. He was not altogether
surprised.
"My dear Mr. Quin!"
"Yes--I am here."
Mr. Satterthwaite said slowly, "I can hardly face you. I am ashamed. I
failed."
"Are you so sure of that?"
"I did not save her."
"But you discovered the truth?"
"Yes, that is true. One or other of those young men might have been
accused--might even have been found guilty. So, at any rate, I saved
a man's life. But she--she--that strange, enchanting creature--" His
voice broke off.
Mr. Quin looked at him.
"Is death the greatest evil that can happen to anyone?"
"I--well--perhaps--No."
Mr. Satterthwaite remembered--Madge and Roger Graham--Mabelle's face in
the moonlight--its serene unearthly happiness--
"No," he admitted. "No--perhaps death is not the greatest evil."
He remembered the ruffled blue chiffon of her dress that had seemed to
him like the plumage of a bird, a bird with a broken wing.
When he looked up, he found himself alone. Mr. Quin was no longer
there. But he had left something behind.
On the seat was a roughly-carved bird fashioned out of some dim blue
stone. It had, possibly, no great artistic merit. But it had something
else.
It had the vague quality of enchantment.
So said Mr. Satterthwaite--and Mr. Satterthwaite was a connoisseur.
THE MAN FROM THE SEA
Mr. Satterthwaite was feeling old. That might not have been surprising
since, in the estimation of many people, he _was_ old. Careless
youths said to their partners, "Old Satterthwaite? Oh! he must be a
hundred--or at any rate about eighty." And even the kindest of girls
said indulgently, "Oh! Satterthwaite. Yes, he's quite old. He _must_ be
sixty." Which was almost worse, since he was sixty-nine.
In his own view, however, he was not old. Sixty-nine was an interesting
age--an age of infinite possibilities--an age when at last the
experience of a lifetime was beginning to tell. But to feel old--that
was different--a tired, discouraged state of mind when one was inclined
to ask oneself depressing questions. What was he, after all? A little
dried-up, elderly man, with neither chick nor child, with no human
belongings, only a valuable art collection which seemed at the moment
strangely unsatisfying. No one to care whether he lived or died--
At this point in his meditations Mr. Satterthwaite pulled himself up
short. What he was thinking was morbid and unprofitable. He knew well
enough, who better, that the chances were that a wife would have hated
him or, alternatively, that he would have hated her, that children
would have been a constant source of worry and anxiety and that demand
upon his time and affection would have worried him considerably.
To be safe and comfortable, said Mr. Satterthwaite firmly--that was the
thing.
The last thought reminded him of a letter he had received that
morning. He drew it from his pocket and reread it, savoring its
contents pleasurably. To begin with, it was from a duchess, and Mr.
Satterthwaite liked hearing from duchesses. It is true that the letter
began by demanding a large subscription for charity and but for that
would probably never have been written, but the terms in which it was
couched were so agreeable that Mr. Satterthwaite was able to gloss over
the first fact.
_So you've deserted the Riviera. What is this island of yours like?
Cheap? Cannotti put up his prices shamefully this year, and I
shan't go to the Riviera again. I might try your island next year
if you report favorably, though I should hate five days on a boat.
Still, anywhere you recommend is sure to be pretty comfortable--too
much so. You'll get to be one of those people who do nothing
but coddle themselves and think of their comfort. There's only
one thing that will save you, Satterthwaite, and that is your
inordinate interest in other people's affairs--_
As Mr. Satterthwaite folded the letter, a vision came up vividly
before him of the duchess. Her meannesses, her unexpected and alarming
kindness, her caustic tongue, her indomitable spirit.
Spirit! Everyone needed spirit. He drew out another letter with
a German stamp upon it--written by a young singer in whom he had
interested himself. It was a grateful, affectionate letter.
_How can I thank you, dear Mr. Satterthwaite? It seems too
wonderful to think that in a few days I shall be singing Isolde.--_
A pity that she was to make her debut as Isolde. A charming,
hard-working child, Olga, with a beautiful voice, but no temperament.
He hummed to himself. "_Nay, order him! Pray understand it! I command
it. I, Isolde._" No, the child hadn't got it in her--the spirit--the
indomitable will--all expressed in that final "_Ich, Isolde!_"
Well, at any rate he had done something for somebody. This island
depressed him--why, oh! why had he deserted the Riviera which he
knew so well, and where he was so well known? Nobody here took any
interest in him. Nobody seemed to realize that here was _the_ Mr.
Satterthwaite--the friend of duchesses and countesses and singers and
writers. No one in the island was of any social importance or of any
artistic importance either. Most people had been there seven, fourteen,
or twenty-one years running, and valued themselves and were valued
accordingly.
With a deep sigh Mr. Satterthwaite proceeded down from the hotel to
the small, straggling harbor below. His way lay along an avenue of
bougainvillea--a vivid mass of flaunting scarlet, that made him feel
older and grayer than ever.
"I'm getting old," he murmured. "I'm getting old and tired."
He was glad when he had passed the bougainvillea and was walking down
the white street with the blue sea at the end of it. A disreputable
dog was standing in the middle of the road, yawning and stretching
himself in the sun. Having prolonged his stretch to the utmost limits
of ecstasy, he sat down and treated himself to a really good scratch.
He then rose, shook himself, and looked round for any other good things
that life might have to offer.
There was a dump of rubbish by the side of the road and to this he went
sniffing in pleasurable anticipation. True enough, his nose had not
deceived him! A smell of such rich putrescence that it surpassed even
his anticipations! He sniffed with growing appreciation, then, suddenly
abandoning himself, he lay on his back and rolled frenziedly on the
delicious dump. Clearly the world this morning was a dog paradise!
Tiring at last, he regained his feet and strolled out once more
into the middle of the road. And then, without the least warning, a
ramshackle car careened wildly round the corner, caught him full and
square, and passed on unheeding.
The dog rose to his feet, stood a minute regarding Mr. Satterthwaite,
a vague dumb reproach in its eyes, then fell over. Mr. Satterthwaite
went up to him and bent down. The dog was dead. He went on his way,
wondering at the sadness and cruelty of life. What a queer dumb look
of reproach had been in the dog's eyes. "Oh! world," it seemed to say.
"Oh! Wonderful world in which I have trusted. Why have you done this
to me?"
Mr. Satterthwaite went on, past the palm trees and the straggling white
houses, past the black lava beach where the surf thundered and where
once, long ago, a well-known English swimmer had been carried out to
sea and drowned, past the rock pools where children and elderly ladies
bobbed up and down and called it bathing, along the steep road that
winds upward to the top of the cliff. For there on the edge of the
cliff was a house, appropriately named La Paz. A white house with faded
green shutters tightly closed, a tangled beautiful garden, and a walk
between cypress trees that led to a plateau on the edge of the cliff
where you looked down--down--down--to the deep blue sea below.
It was to this spot that Mr. Satterthwaite was bound. He had developed
a great love for the garden of La Paz. He had never entered the villa.
It seemed always to be empty. Manuel, the Spanish gardener, wished one
good morning with a flourish, and gallantly presented ladies with a
bouquet and gentlemen with a single flower as a buttonhole, his dark
face wreathed in smiles.
Sometimes Mr. Satterthwaite made up stories in his own mind about the
owner of the villa. His favorite was a Spanish dancer, once world-famed
for her beauty, who hid herself here so that the world should never
know that she was no longer beautiful.
He pictured her coming out of the house at dusk and walking through the