Book: Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces

T >> Thomas W. Hanshew >> Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces




Her absence seemed to make but little impression upon him, however; for,
following up a well-defined plan of action, he devoted himself wholly to
the Spanish woman, and both amazed her and gratified her vanity by
allowing her to learn that a man may be the silliest ass imaginable and
yet quite understand how to flirt and to make love to a woman. And so it
fell out that instead of "Lieutenant Rupert St. Aubyn" being elbowed out
by young Burnham-Seaforth, it was "Lieutenant St. Aubyn" who elbowed
_him_ out; and without being in the least aware of it, the flattered
Anita, like an adroitly hooked trout, was being "played" in and out and
round about the eddies and the deeps until the angler had her quite
ready for the final dip of the net at the landing point.

All this was to accomplish exactly what it _did_ accomplish, namely, the
ill temper, the wrath, the angry resentment of young Burnham-Seaforth.
And when the evening had passed and bedtime arrived, Cleek took his
candle and retired in the direction of the rooms set apart for him, with
the certainty of knowing that he had done that which would this very
night prove beyond all question the guilt or innocence of one person at
least who was enmeshed in this mysterious tangle. He was not surprised,
therefore, at what followed his next step.

Reaching the upper landing he blew out the light of his candle, slammed
the door to his own room, noisily turned the key, and shot the bolt of
another, then tiptoed his way back to the staircase and looked down the
well-hole into the lower hall.

Zuilika had retired to her room, the Major had retired to his, and now
Anita was taking up her candle to retire to hers. She had barely touched
it, however, when there came a sound of swift footsteps and young
Burnham-Seaforth lurched out of the drawing-room door and joined her. He
was in a state of great excitement and was breathing hard.

"Anita--Miss Rosario!" he began, plucking her by the sleeve and
uplifting a pale, boyish face--he was not yet twenty-two--to hers with a
look of abject misery. "I want to speak to you--I simply must speak to
you. I've been waiting for the chance, and now that it's come--Look
here! You're not going back on me, are you?"

"Going back on you?" repeated Anita, showing her pretty white teeth in
an amused smile. "What shall you mean by that 'going back on you'--eh?
You are a stupid little donkey, to be sure. But then I do not care to
get on the back of one--so why?"

"Oh, you know very well what I mean," he rapped out angrily. "It is not
fair the way you have been treating me ever since that yellow-headed
bounder came. I've had a night of misery--Zuilika never showing herself;
you doing nothing, absolutely nothing, although you promised--you _know_
you did!--and I heard you, I absolutely heard you persuade that St.
Aubyn fool to stop at least another night."

"Yes, of course you did. But what of it? He is good company--he talks
well, he sings well, he is very handsome and--well, what difference can
it make to you? You are not interested in _me, amigo_?"

"No, no; of course I'm not. You are nothing to me at all--you--Oh, I beg
your pardon; I didn't quite mean that. I--I mean you are nothing to me
in that way. But you--you're not keeping to your word. You promised, you
know, that you'd use your influence with Zuilika; that you'd get her to
be more kind to me--to see me alone and--and all that sort of thing. And
you've not made a single attempt--not one. You've just sat round and
flirted with that tow-headed brute and done nothing at all to help me
on; and--and it's jolly unkind of you, that's what!"

Cleek heard Anita's soft rippling laughter; but he waited to hear no
more. Moving swiftly away from the well-hole of the staircase he passed
on tiptoe down the hall to the Major's rooms, and, opening the door,
went in. The old soldier was standing, with arms folded, at the window
looking silently out into the darkness of the night. He turned at the
sound of the door's opening and moved toward Cleek with a white,
agonised face and a pair of shaking, outstretched hands.

"Well?" he said with a sort of gasp.

"My dear Major," said Cleek quietly. "The wisest of men are sometimes
mistaken--that is my excuse for my own short-sightedness. I said in the
beginning that his was either a case of swindling or a case of murder,
did I not? Well, I now amend my verdict. It is a case of swindling _and_
murder; and your son has had nothing to do with either!"

"Oh, thank God! thank God!" the old man said; then sat down suddenly and
dropped his face between his hands and was still for a long time. When
he looked up again his eyes were red, but his lips were smiling.

"If you only knew what a relief it is," he said. "If you only knew how
much I have suffered, Mr. Cleek. His friendship with that Spanish woman;
his going with her to identify the: body--even assisting in its hurried
burial! These things all seemed so frightfully black--so utterly without
any explanation other than personal guilt."

"Yet they are all easily explained, Major. His friendship for the
Spanish woman is merely due to a promise to intercede for him with
Zuilika. She is his one aim and object, poor little donkey! As for his
identification of the body--well, if the widow herself could find points
of undisputed resemblance, why not he? A nervous, excitable, impetuous
boy like that--and anxious, too, that the lady of his heart should be
freed from the one thing, the one man, whose existence made her
everlastingly unattainable--why, in the hands of a clever woman like
Anita Rosario such a chap could be made to identify anything and to
believe it as religiously as he believes. Now, go to bed and rest easy,
Major. I'm going to call up Dollops and do a little night prowling. If
it turns out as I hope, this little riddle will be solved to-morrow."

"But how, Mr. Cleek? It seems to me that it is as dark as ever. You put
my poor old head in a whirl. You say there is swindling; you hint one
moment that the body was not that of Ulchester, and in the next that
murder has been done. Do, pray, tell me what it all means--what you make
of this amazing case."

"I'll do that to-morrow, Major; not to-night. The answer to the
riddle--the answer that's in my mind, I mean--is at once so simple and
yet so appallingly awful that I'll hazard no guess until I'm sure. Look
here"--he put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a gold piece--"do
you know what that is, Major?"

"It looks like a spade guinea, Mr. Cleek."

"Right; it is a spade guinea--a pocket piece I've carried for years.
You've heard, no doubt, of vital things turning upon the tossing of a
coin. Well, if you see me toss this coin to-morrow, something of that
sort will occur. It will be tossed up in the midst of a riddle, Major;
when it comes down it will be a riddle no longer."

Then he opened the door, closed it after him, and, before the Major
could utter a word, was gone.




CHAPTER XXIX


The promise was so vague, so mystifying, indeed, so seemingly absurd,
that the Major did not allow himself to dwell upon it. As a matter of
fact, it passed completely out of his mind; nor did it again find
lodgment there until it was forced back upon his memory in a most
unusual manner.

Whatsoever had been the result of what Cleek had called his "night
prowling," he took nobody into his confidence when he and the Major and
the Major's son and Senorita Rosario met at breakfast the next day
(Zuilika, true to her training and the traditions of her people, never
broke morning bread save in the seclusion of her own bed-chamber, and
then on her knees with her face towards the east) nor did he allude to
it at any period throughout the day.

He seemed, indeed, purposely, to avoid the Major, and to devote himself
to the Spanish woman with an ardour that was positively heartless,
considering that as they two sang and flirted and played several sets of
singles on the tennis court, Zuilika, like a spirit of misery, kept
walking, walking, walking through the halls and the rooms of the house,
her woeful eyes fixed on the carpet, her henna-stained fingers
constantly locking and unlocking, and moans of desolation coming now and
again from behind her yashmak as her swaying body moved restlessly to
and fro. For to-day was memorable. Five weeks ago this coming nightfall
Ulchester had flung himself out of this house in a fury of wrath, and
this time of bitter regret and ceaseless mourning had begun.

"She will go out of her mind, poor creature, if something cannot be done
to keep her from dwelling on her misery like this," commented the
housekeeper, coming upon that restless figure pacing the darkened hall,
moaning, moaning--seeing nothing, hearing nothing, doing nothing but
walk and sorrow, sorrow and walk, hour in and hour out. "It's enough to
tear a body's heart to hear her, poor dear. And that good-for-nothing
Spanish piece racing and shrieking round the tennis court like a she
tom-cat, the heartless hussy. Her and that simpering silly that's
trotting round after her had ought to be put in a bag and shaken up,
that they ought. It's downright scandalous to be carrying on like that
at such a time."

And so both the Major and his son thought too, and tried their best to
solace the lonely mourner and to persuade her to sit down and rest.

"Zuilika, you will wear yourself out, child, if you go on walking like
this," said the Major solicitously. "Do rest and be at peace for a
little time at least."

"I can never have peace in this land--I can never forget the day!" she
answered drearily. "Oh, my beloved! Oh, my lord, it was I who sent thee
to it--it was I, it was I! Give me my own country--give me the gods of
my people; here there is only memory and pain, and no rest, no rest
ever!"

She could not be persuaded to sit down and rest until Anita herself took
the matter into her own hands and insisted that she should. That was at
tea-time. Anita, showing some little trace of feeling now that Cleek had
gone to wash his hands and was no longer there to occupy her thoughts,
placed a deep, soft chair near the window, and would not yield until the
violet-clad figure of the mourner sank down into the depths of it and
leaned back with its shrouded face drooping in silent melancholy.

And it was while she was so sitting that Cleek came into the room and
did a most unusual, a most ungentlemanly thing, in the eyes of the Major
and his son.

Without hesitating, he walked to within a yard or two of where she was
sitting, and then, in the silliest of silly tones, blurted out suddenly:
"I say, don't you know, I've had a jolly rum experience. You know that
blessed room at the angle just opposite the library--the one with the
locked door?"

The drooping, violet figure straightened abruptly, and the Major felt
for the moment as if he could have kicked Cleek with pleasure. Of course
they knew the room. It was there that the two mummy cases were kept,
sacred from the profaning presence of any but this stricken woman. No
wonder that she bent forward, full of eagerness, full of the dreadful
fear that Frankish feet had crossed the threshold, Frankish eyes looked
within the sacred shrine.

"Well, don't you know," went on Cleek, without taking the slightest
notice of anything, "just as I was going past that door I picked up a
most remarkable thing. Wonder if it's yours, madam?" glancing at
Zuilika. "Just have a look at it, will you? Here, catch!" And not until
he saw a piece of gold spin through the air and fall into Zuilika's lap
did the Major remember that promise of last night.

"Oh, come, I say, St. Aubyn, that's rather thick!" sang out young
Burnham-Seaforth indignantly, as Zuilika caught the coin in her lap.
"Blest if I know what you call manners, but to throw things at a lady is
a new way of passing them in this part of the world, I can assure you."

"Awfully sorry, old chap, no offence, I assure you," said Cleek, more
asinine than ever, as Zuilika, having picked up the piece and looked at
it, disclaimed all knowledge of it, and laid it on the edge of the table
without any further interest in it or him. "Just to show, you know, that
I--er--couldn't have meant anything disrespectful, why--er--you all
know, don't you know, how jolly much I respect Senorita Rosario, by
Jove! and so--Here, senorita, you catch, too, and see if the blessed
thing's yours." And, picking up the coin, tossed it into her lap just as
he had done with Zuilika.

She, too, caught it and examined it, and laughingly shook her head.

"No--not mine!" she said. "I have not seen him before. To the finder
shall be the keep. Come, sit here. Will you have the tea?"

"Yes, thanks," said Cleek; then dropped down on the sofa beside her, and
took tea as serenely as though there were no such things in the world as
murder and swindling and puzzling police-riddles to solve.

And the Major, staring at him, was as amazed as ever. He had said, last
night, that when the coin fell the answer would be given--and yet it had
fallen, and nothing had happened, and he was laughing and flirting with
Senorita Rosario as composedly and as persistently as ever. More than
that; after he had finished his second cup of tea, and immediately
following the sound of someone just beyond the verandah rail whistling
the lively, lilting measures of "There's a Girl Wanted There"--the
"silly ass" seemed to become a thousand times sillier than ever; for he
forthwith set down his cup, and, turning to Anita, said with an inane
sort of giggle, "I say, you know, here's a lark. Let's have a game of
'Slap Hand,' you and I--what? Know it, don't you? You try to slap my
hands, and I try to slap yours, and whichever succeeds in doing it first
gets a prize. Awful fun, don't you know. Come on--start her up."

And, Anita agreeing, they fell forthwith to slapping away at the backs
of each other's hands with great gusto, until, all of a sudden, the
whistler outside gave one loud, shrill note, and--there was a great and
mighty change.

Those who were watching saw Anita's two hands suddenly caught, heard a
sharp, metallic "click," and saw them as suddenly dropped again to the
accompaniment of a shrill little scream from her ashen lips, and the
next moment Cleek had risen and jumped away from her side--clear across
to where Zuilika was; and those who were watching saw Anita jump up with
a pair of steel handcuffs on her wrists, just as Dollops vaulted up
over the verandah rail and appeared at one window, whilst Petrie
appeared at another, Hammond poked his body through a third, and the
opening door gave entrance to Superintendent Narkom.

"The police!" shrilled out Anita in a panic of fright. "_Madre de Dios_,
the police!"

The Major and his son were on their feet like a shot; Zuilika, with a
faint, startled cry, bounded bolt upright, like an imp shot through a
trap-door; but before the little henna-stained hands could do more than
simply move, Cleek's arms went round her from behind, tight and fast as
a steel clamp, there was another metallic "click," another shrill cry,
and another pair of wrists were in gyves.

"Come in, Mr. Narkom; come in, constables," said Cleek, with the utmost
composure. "Here are your promised prisoners--nicely trussed, you see,
so that they can't get at the little popguns they carry--and a worse
pair of rogues never went into the hands of Jack Ketch!"

"And Jack Ketch will get them, Cleek, if I know anything about it. Your
hazard was right. I've examined the caliph's mummy-case; the mummy
itself has been removed--destroyed--done away with utterly--and the poor
creature's body is there!"

And here the poor, dumfounded, utterly bewildered Major found voice to
speak at last.

"Mummy-case! Body! Dear God in heaven, Mr. Cleek, what are you hinting
at?" he gasped. "You--you don't mean that she--that Zuilika--killed
him?"

"No, Major, I don't," he made reply. "I simply mean that he killed her!
The body in the mummy-case is the body of Zuilika, the caliph's
daughter! This is the creature you have been wasting your pity on--see!"

With that he laid an intense grip on the concealing yashmak, tore it
away, and so revealed the close-shaven, ghastly-hued countenance of the
cornered criminal.

"My God!--Ulchester--Ulchester himself!" said the Major in a voice of
fright and surprise.

"Yes, Ulchester himself, Major. In a few more days he'd have withdrawn
the money, and got out of the country, body and all, if he hadn't been
nabbed, the rascal. There'd have been no tracing the crime then; and he
and the Senorita here would have been in clover for the rest of their
natural lives. But there's always that bright little bit of Bobby Burns
to be reckoned with. You know: 'The best laid schemes of mice and men,'
_et cetera_--that bit. But the Yard's got them, and--they'll never leave
the country now. Take them, Mr. Narkom, they're yours!"

* * * * *

"How did I guess it?" said Cleek, replying to the Major's query, as they
sat late that night discussing the affair. "Well, I think the first
faint inkling of it came when I arrived here yesterday, and smelt the
overpowering odour of the incenses. There was so much of it, and it was
used so frequently--twice a day--that it seemed to suggest an attempt
to hide other odours of a less pleasant kind. When I left you last
night, Dollops and I went down to the mummy-chamber, and a skeleton key
soon let us in. The unpleasant odour was rather pronounced in there. But
even that didn't give me the cue, until I happened to find in the
fireplace a considerable heap of fine ashes, and in the midst of them
small lumps of gummy substance, which I knew to result from the burning
of myrrh. I suspected from that and from the nature of the ashes that a
mummy had been burnt, and as there was only one mummy in the affair, the
inference was obvious. I laid hands on the two cases and tilted them.
One was quite empty. The weight of the other told me that it contained
something a little heavier than any mummy ought to be. I came to the
conclusion that there was a body in it, injected full of arsenic, no
doubt, to prevent as much as possible the processes of decay, the odour
of which the incense was concealing. I didn't attempt to open the thing;
I left that until the arrival of the men from The Yard, for whom I sent
Dollops this afternoon. I had a vague notion that it would not turn out
to be Ulchester's, and I had also a distinct recollection of what you
said about his being able to mimic a Gaiety chorus-girl and all that
sort of thing, and the more I thought over it, the more I realized what
an excellent thing to cover a bearded face a yashmak is. Still, it was
all hazard. I wasn't sure--indeed, I never was sure--until tea-time, when
I caught this supposed 'Zuilika' sitting at last, and gave the spade
guinea its chance to decide it."

"But, Mr. Cleek, how could it have decided it? That's the thing which
amazes me most of all. How could the tossing of that coin have decided
the sex of the wearer of those garments?"

"My dear Major, it is an infallible test. Did you ever notice that if
you throw anything for a man to catch in his lap, he pulls his knees
together to _make_ a lap in order to catch it; whereas a woman--used to
wearing skirts and, thereby, having a lap already prepared--immediately
broadens that lap by the exactly opposite movement, knowing that
whatever is thrown has no chance of slipping through and falling to the
floor. When I tossed the coin to Ulchester, he instinctively jerked his
knees together. That settled it, of course. And now, if you won't mind
my saying it, I'm a bit sleepy and it is about time I took myself off to
home and bed."

"But not at this late hour, surely? You will never catch a train."

"I shan't need one, Major. They are holding a horse and trap ready for
me at the stables of the 'Coach and Horses.' Mr. Narkom promised to look
out for that, and--I beg pardon? No, I can't stop over night. Thank you
for the invitation, but Dollops would raise half London if I didn't turn
up after promising to do so."

"I should have thought you might have simplified matters and obviated
that by keeping the boy when you had him here," said the Major. "We
could easily have found a place to put him up for the night."

"Thanks very much, but I wouldn't interrupt the course of his studies
for the world," replied Cleek. "I've found an old chap--an
ex-schoolmaster, down on his luck and glad for the chance to turn an
honest penny--who takes him on every night from eight to ten; and the
young monkey is so eager and is absorbing knowledge at such a rate that
he positively amazes me. But now, really, it must be good-night. The boy
will be waiting and I must hear his lessons before I go to bed."

"Not surely when you are so tired as you say?"

"Never too tired for that, Major. It makes me sleep better and sounder
to know that the lad's getting on and that I've cheated the Devil in
just one more instance. Good-night and good luck to you. It's a bully
old world after all, isn't it, Major?" Then laughed and shook hands with
him and fared forth into the starlight, whistling.




CHAPTER XXX


Who feeds on Hope alone makes but a sorry banquet; and for the next few
weeks Hope was all--or nearly all--that came Cleek's way.

For some unexplained reason, Miss Lorne's letters--never very frequent,
and always very brief--had, of late been gradually growing briefer: as
if written in haste and from a mere sense of duty and at odd moments
snatched from the call of more absorbing things; and, finally, there
came a dropping off altogether and a week that brought no message from
her at all.

The old restlessness, the almost outlived sense of personal injury and
rebellion against circumstances, took hold of Cleek again when that time
came; and the soul of him drank deep of the waters of bitterness.

So, then, it was all to be in vain, was it, this long struggle with the
Devil of Circumstances, this long striving for a Goal? And after all,
"Thou shalt not enter" was to be written over the gateway of his
ambition? He had been lifted only to be dropped again, redeemed only to
let him see how vain it was for the leopard, even though he achieved the
impossible and changed his spots, to be other than a leopard always; how
impossible it was for a man to override the decrees of Nature or evade
the edicts of Providence? That was what it meant, eh?

To a nature such as his, Life was always a picture drawn out of
perspective. There was never any Middle Distance; never any proper
gradation. It was always either the Highest Heights or the Lowest
Depths; the glare of fierce light or the black of deepest darkness. He
could not plod; he must either fly or fall; either loll at the Gates of
Paradise or groan in the depths of Hell. And the failure of Ailsa
Lorne's letters sent him to the darkest and most hopeless corner of it.

Not that he blamed her--wholly; but that he blamed that Fate which had
so persistently dogged him from childhood on. For now that the letters
had ceased altogether, he recalled things which otherwise would have
been forgotten; and, his sense of proportion being distorted, made
mountains out of sand dunes.

In one of those letters, he recollected, she had spoken of meeting
unexpectedly an old friend whom she had not seen since the days of his
boyhood; in another, she had casually remarked, "I met Captain Morford
again to-day and we spent a very pleasant half hour together," and in a
third had written, "The Captain promised to call and take tea to-day but
didn't. I rather fancy he divines the fact that Lady Chepstow does not
care for him. Indeed, she dislikes him immensely. Why, I wonder?
Personally, I think him exceedingly pleasant, and there are things in
his character for which I have the deepest respect and admiration."

And out of these trifling circumstances--lo! the darkest corner that
darkest Hell contained.

So that was how it was to end, was it? That was the card which Fate had
all along kept up her sleeve while she stood off laughing at his
endeavours, his hopes, his struggles against the inevitable? In the end,
another man was to appear, another man was to win her, and the dream was
to turn out nothing more than a dream after all.

Once again the voices of the Wild called out to the Caged Wolf; once
again, the old things beckoned and the new things lost their savour and
the Devil said, as before, "What is the use? What _is_ the use?" and the
Savage cried out to be stripped and flung back into the wilderness as
God made him, and called and called and called for an end to the things
that stank in his nostrils and for the fierce companionship of his kind.
And but that Time had staled these things a little and blunted the keen
edge of them so that they could not endure for long, and there was
Dollops and the lessons and Dollops' future to recollect, the Wolf and
the Savage and the Devil might not have hungered in vain.

Followed a period of intense depression when all things seemed to lose
their savour and when Narkom, amazed, said to himself that the man had
come to the end of his usefulness and had lost every attribute of the
successful criminologist. For the next three cases he brought him Cleek
botched in a manner that would have disgraced the merest tyro. Two, he
failed utterly to solve, although the solutions were eventually worked
out by the ordinary forces of the Yard; and in the third he let his man
get away under his very nose and convey Government secrets to a foreign
Power. It was but natural that these three dismal failures should find
their way to the newspapers and that, in the hysterical condition of
modern journalism, they should be flung out to the world at large with
all the ostentation of leaded type and panicky scare heads, and that
learned editors should discourse knowingly of "the limitations of
mentality" and "the well-authenticated cases of the sudden warping of
abnormal intelligences resulting in the startling termination of amazing
careers," or snivel dismally over "the complete collapse of that
imaginative power which, hitherto, had been this detective's greatest
asset, and which now, on the principle that however deep a well may be
if a force-pump be put into it it must some time suck gravel, seemed to
have come to its end."

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