23 chapters
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23 chapters
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
The 4.15 from Victoria to Lewes had been held up at Three Bridges in consequence of a derailment and, though John Lexman was fortunate enough to catch a belated connection to Beston Tracey, the wagonette which was the sole communication between the village and the outside world had gone. “If you can wait half an hour, Mr. Lexman,” said the station-master, “I will telephone up to the village and get Briggs to come down for you.” John Lexman looked out upon the dripping landscape and shrugged his
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
Assistant Commissioner of Police T. X. Meredith did not occupy offices in New Scotland Yard. It is the peculiarity of public offices that they are planned with the idea of supplying the margin of space above all requirements and that on their completion they are found wholly inadequate to house the various departments which mysteriously come into progress coincident with the building operations. “T. X.,” as he was known by the police forces of the world, had a big suite of offices in Whitehall.
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CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
In the early hours of the morning a tragic little party was assembled in the study at Beston Priory. John Lexman, white and haggard, sat on the sofa with his wife by his side. Immediate authority as represented by a village constable was on duty in the passage outside, whilst T. X. sitting at the table with a writing pad and a pencil was briefly noting the evidence. The author had sketched the events of the day. He had described his interview with the money-lender the day before and the arrival
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CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER IV
T. X. folded the telegram very carefully and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket. He favoured the newcomer with a little bow and taking upon himself the honours of the establishment, pushed a chair to his visitor. “I think you know my name,” said Kara easily, “I am a friend of poor Lexman's.” “So I am told,” said T. X., “but don't let your friendship for Lexman prevent your sitting down.” For a moment the Greek was nonplussed and then, with a little smile and bow, he seated himself by the writi
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CHAPTER V
CHAPTER V
Six months later T. X. Meredith was laboriously tracing an elusive line which occurred on an ordnance map of Sussex when the Chief Commissioner announced himself. Sir George described T. X. as the most wholesome corrective a public official could have, and never missed an opportunity of meeting his subordinate (as he said) for this reason. “What are you doing there?” he growled. “The lesson this morning,” said T. X. without looking up, “is maps.” Sir George passed behind his assistant and looked
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CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VI
A Man stood in the speckless courtyard before the Governor's house at Dartmoor gaol. He wore the ugly livery of shame which marks the convict. His head was clipped short, and there was two days' growth of beard upon his haggard face. Standing with his hands behind him, he waited for the moment when he would be ordered to his work. John Lexman—A. O. 43—looked up at the blue sky as he had looked so many times from the exercise yard, and wondered what the day would bring forth. A day to him was the
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CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VII
T. X. came from Downing Street at 11 o'clock one night, and his heart was filled with joy and gratitude. He swung his stick to the common danger of the public, but the policeman on point duty at the end of the street, who saw him, recognized and saluted him, did not think it fit to issue any official warning. He ran up the stairs to his office, and found Mansus reading the evening paper. “My poor, dumb beast,” said T. X. “I am afraid I have kept you waiting for a very long time, but tomorrow you
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CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER VIII
Two years after the events just described, T. X. journeying up to London from Bath was attracted by a paragraph in the Morning Post. It told him briefly that Mr. Remington Kara, the influential leader of the Greek Colony, had been the guest of honor at a dinner of the Hellenic Society. T. X. had only seen Kara for a brief space of time following that tragic morning, when he had discovered not only that his best friend had escaped from Dartmoor prison and disappeared, as it were, from the world a
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CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER IX
Kara folded the letter and inserted it in its envelope. He rang a bell on his table and the girl who had so filled T. X. with a sense of awe came from an adjoining room. “You will see that this is delivered, Miss Holland.” She inclined her head and stood waiting. Kara rose from his desk and began to pace the room. “Do you know T. X. Meredith?” he asked suddenly. “I have heard of him,” said the girl. “A man with a singular mind,” said Kara; “a man against whom my favourite weapon would fail.” She
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CHAPTER X
CHAPTER X
She felt her knees shake under her and thought she was going to swoon. She put out her disengaged hand to steady herself, and if the face which was turned to him was pale, there was a steadfast resolution in her dark eyes. “Let me relieve you of that, Miss Holland,” said Kara, in his silkiest tones. He wrenched rather than took the box from her hand, replaced it carefully in the drawer, pushed the drawer to and locked it, examining the key as he withdrew it. Then he closed the safe and locked th
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CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XI
Superintendent Mansus had a little office in Scotland Yard proper, which, he complained, was not so much a private bureau, as a waiting-room to which repaired every official of the police service who found time hanging on his hands. On the afternoon of Miss Holland's surprising adventure, a plainclothes man of “D” Division brought to Mr. Mansus's room a very scared domestic servant, voluble, tearful and agonizingly penitent. It was a mood not wholly unfamiliar to a police officer of twenty years
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CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XII
Kara lay back on his down pillows with a sneer on his face and his brain very busy. What started the train of thought he did not know, but at that moment his mind was very far away. It carried him back a dozen years to a dirty little peasant's cabin on the hillside outside Durazzo, to the livid face of a young Albanian chief, who had lost at Kara's whim all that life held for a man, to the hateful eyes of the girl's father, who stood with folded arms glaring down at the bound and manacled figure
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CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIII
“IF you would care to come in, sir, I'm sure Lexman would be glad to see you,” said T. X.; “it's very kind of you to take an interest in the matter.” The Chief Commissioner of Police growled something about being paid to take an interest in everybody and strolled with T. X. down one of the apparently endless corridors of Scotland Yard. “You won't have any bother about the pardon,” he said. “I was dining to-night with old man Bartholomew and he will fix that up in the morning.” “There will be no
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CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XIV
It was Mansus who found the second candle, a stouter affair. It lay underneath the bed. The telephone, which stood on a fairly large-sized table by the side of the bed, was overturned and the receiver was on the floor. By its side were two books, one being the “Balkan Question,” by Villari, and the other “Travels and Politics in the Near East,” by Miller. With them was a long, ivory paper-knife. There was nothing else on the bedside-table save a silver cigarette box. T. X. drew on a pair of glov
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CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XV
After a busy and sleepless night he came down to report to the Chief Commissioner the next morning. The evening newspaper bills were filled with the “Chelsea Sensation” but the information given was of a meagre character. Since Fisher had disappeared, many of the details which could have been secured by the enterprising pressmen were missing. There was no reference to the visit of Mr. Gathercole and in self-defence the press had fallen back upon a statement, which at an earlier period had crept
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CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVI
February as a rule is not a month of fogs, but rather a month of tempestuous gales, of frosts and snowfalls, but the night of February 17th, 19—, was one of calm and mist. It was not the typical London fog so dreaded by the foreigner, but one of those little patchy mists which smoke through the streets, now enshrouding and making the nearest object invisible, now clearing away to the finest diaphanous filament of pale grey. Sir William Bartholomew had a house in Portman Place, which is a wide th
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CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVII
Thomas Xavier Meredith was a shrewd young man. It was said of him by Signor Paulo Coselli, the eminent criminologist, that he had a gift of intuition which was abnormal. Probably the mystery of the twisted candle was solved by him long before any other person in the world had the dimmest idea that it was capable of solution. The house in Cadogan Square was still in the hands of the police. To this house and particularly to Kara's bedroom T. X. from time to time repaired, and reproduced as far as
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CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XVIII
T. X. sat at his desk, his chin in his hands, his mind remarkably busy. Grave as the matter was which he was considering, he rose with alacrity to meet the smiling girl who was ushered through the door by Mansus, preternaturally solemn and mysterious. She was radiant that day. Her eyes were sparkling with an unusual brightness. “I've got the most wonderful thing to tell you,” she said, “and I can't tell you.” “That's a very good beginning,” said T. X., taking her muff from her hand. “Oh, but it'
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CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XIX
One would not readily associate the party of top-booted sewermen who descend nightly to the subterranean passages of London with the stout viceconsul at Durazzo. Yet it was one unimaginative man who lived in Lambeth and had no knowledge that there was such a place as Durazzo who was responsible for bringing this comfortable official out of his bed in the early hours of the morning causing him—albeit reluctantly and with violent and insubordinate language—to conduct certain investigations in the
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CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XX
The room was a big one and most of the furniture had been cleared out to admit the guests who had come from the ends of the earth to learn the story of the twisted candles, and to test John Lexman's theory by their own. They sat around chatting cheerfully of men and crimes, of great coups planned and frustrated, of strange deeds committed and undetected. Scraps of their conversation came to Belinda Mary as she stood in the chintz-draped doorway which led from the drawing-room to the room she use
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CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXI
THE NARRATIVE OF JOHN LEXMAN “I am, as you may all know, a writer of stories which depend for their success upon the creation and unravelment of criminological mysteries. The Chief Commissioner has been good enough to tell you that my stories were something more than a mere seeking after sensation, and that I endeavoured in the course of those narratives to propound obscure but possible situations, and, with the ingenuity that I could command, to offer to those problems a solution acceptable, no
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CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXII
After a while Lexman resumed his story. “I told you that there was a man at the palazzo named Salvolio. Salvolio was a man who had been undergoing a life sentence in one of the prisons of southern Italy. In some mysterious fashion he escaped and got across the Adriatic in a small boat. How Kara found him I don't know. Salvolio was a very uncommunicative person. I was never certain whether he was a Greek or an Italian. All that I am sure about is that he was the most unmitigated villain next to h
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CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIII
They went out and left them alone, two people who found in this moment a heaven which is not beyond the reach of humanity, but which is seldom attained to. Belinda Mary had an eager audience all to her very self. “Of course she didn't die,” she said scornfully. “Kara was playing on his fears all the time. He never even harmed her—in the way Mr. Lexman feared. He told Mrs. Lexman that her husband was dead just as he told John Lexman his wife was gone. What happened was that he brought her back to
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