The Woman with One Hand (and) Mr. Ely's Engagement Part 11

The bedroom door, in the hurry of my entrance, had been left wide open. Turning, I perceived that Mrs. Lascelles-Trevor was staring in at us.

"Your prisoner!" She echoed the fellow's words. "Mr. Southam is your prisoner? Who, then, are you?" She put her hand to her breast as if to control her agitation.

"I am a detective."

"And you have arrested Mr. Southam--for what?"

"For the murder of Jonas Hartopp."

She clasped her hands together in a kind of ecstasy. "I am so glad! so glad! I congratulate you, sir, on having brought the crime home to the real criminal at last." She addressed me with an air of triumph which was wholly unconcealed. "Did I not tell you that your course was nearly run? It was nearer its close even than I thought."

"I am obliged to you for your prognostication, madam, but I may a.s.sure you that though I am not the first person who has been wrongfully accused of a crime of which he was completely innocent, I do venture to indulge in a hope that this is the first occasion on which a woman has permitted herself to gloat over the misfortunes of a man who, without having wronged a living creature, is himself friendless, helpless, and injured."

So far from my words succeeding in reaching the sympathetic side of her--if she had one--she glared at me, if it were possible, more malignantly than before.

"You hypocrite!" she hissed.

My captor placed his hand upon my shoulder. "Come," he said, in a tone which was unmistakably official. "It is no use staying here to bandy words. Downstairs, Mr. Southam, if you please, and mind, no tricks upon the way."

I told him that he need not apprehend anything in the nature of what he called tricks from me. We went downstairs, Mrs. Lascelles-Trevor close at our heels.

"Step into the coffee-room, Mr. Southam, if you please. I am going to send for a cab. Mrs. Barnes!" That lady appeared. "I have effected this man's capture, as I told you that I probably should do."

So she had known all along who he was, and in concealing the fact, in a sense, had betrayed me. And this was the meaning of her futile, eleventh-hour attempt at warning of the night before.

"Let me have a cab at once. And allow no one to enter this man's bedroom until I have had an opportunity of examining all that it contains. I shall hold you responsible."

I saw that Mrs. Barnes's head was nodding like a Chinese mandarin's, and that it was set in motion evidently by the agitated condition of her nerves. The detective perceived that it would be as well for him to repeat his instructions if he wished them to be acted on.

"Now then, Mrs. Barnes, pull yourself together! Let me have that cab."

As Mrs. Barnes moved aside, with the possible intention of taking steps to execute the officer's commands, I observed that some one was standing at her back. It was her husband. He stood just inside the hall door as if he had just come in, and was wondering what was taking place. He was as shabbily and as poorly dressed as he very well could have been. But there was something in his face and in his bearing which, for some reason which I will not stay to fathom, brought good hope into my heart.

"It's you? Thank G.o.d!" I cried. "They have arrested me for murder! I hope you have come to help me!"

At the sound of my voice they turned to see to whom it was I was speaking. When Mrs. Barnes saw her husband, without any sort of notice she broke into a fit of hysterics, laughing and screaming and kicking all at once so that the maid had to hold her tightly round the waist to prevent her making an untimely descent to the ground.

But there was one person on whom his sudden appearance seemed to have an even greater effect than it had on Mrs. Barnes, and that was Mrs.

Lascelles-Trevor. When she realised who it was who had come so unexpectedly on the scene, she began to stare at him as if he exercised over her the fabulous fascination of the snake. She shrank from before his glance, crouching closer and closer to the wall. She seemed to actually diminish in size. "You!--you!" she gasped.

"No!--no!--not you!"

She put up her hands as if to ward him off her. As he made a forward movement, one could see that she shivered, as if in mortal terror.

"And you!" he said, with an intensity of meaning in his voice of which I had not thought it capable. "And you!" He turned to me, pointing an accusatory finger at the woman in whose bearing so strange a metamorphosis had taken place. "If you had told me last night that she was here, I would have solved the mystery for you there and then. Her presence here makes the thing as clear as daylight. It was she who killed Duncan Rothwell. Acknowledge it, you woman with the blood-red hand!"

He addressed her with a gesture of terrible denunciation. His stature seemed to have magnified, even as the woman seemed to have decreased.

His face and eyes were blazing. I understood then how it came about that he had mesmerised poor, weak-minded, nerveless Mrs. Barnes.

"No!" wailed Mrs. Lascelles-Trevor. "No! I never touched him!"

"You dare to deny it!" In the man's voice there seemed to be a wonderful resonance, in his bearing a singular air of command. He took from his pocket a box, and from wrappings in the box the ghastly relics which still haunted Mrs. Barnes in dreams. "Here are the four fingers and the thumb, and the palm of your right hand, woman, with which you would have made an end of me. Clearly, therefore, it was with your left hand that you murdered Duncan Rothwell. Deny it if you dare!"

As he spoke he threw at her the dreadful fragments. They struck her full in the face.

"I did it! I own it! Don't touch me--not that!" she screamed.

She fell to the ground--as with amazement and, so far as I was concerned, with horror, we stared at her--in what proved to be an epileptic fit.

CHAPTER X

THE JEWEL KING

The story of Duncan Rothwell's murder, when it came to be unfolded in a court of law, proved to be not the least strange of the many strange tales which have been unfolded there. Its turnings and twistings and involutions were many, but briefly summed up it came to this:

The man who had married the landlady of that hotel in the turning off the Strand, and who, in marrying her, had brought such havoc on her head, turned out to be a man with many names. What his real name was, if he ever had one, was never clearly shown. But there had been a time during which the name by which he had been best known to a certain section of society had been that of the "Jewel King." He had been the perpetrator of most of the remarkable jewel robberies which have so much disturbed society during recent years--a scamp, in short, on a truly notorious scale. Jonas Hartopp had played receiver to his thief.

These two had been really remarkable men--men of parts which, fortunately for the world at large, are not often found joined in two individuals.

For years these two had been close friends--colleagues--with souls but for a single thought, which thing was plunder, until a woman came between. This was the woman who has figured in these pages as Mrs.

Lascelles-Trevor, but whose real patronymic was shown to be rather more plebeian--Amelia Martin. The man who, for the sake of convenience, I will continue to call Mr. Barnes, was in his way a genius, and a little mad. He lived for a long time with Amelia Martin as her husband, without ever having married her. It is probable that during the whole of this period the woman was in a state of daily and hourly terror. He had a pleasant habit of playing tricks with women, particularly mesmeric tricks, of a sort which would hardly have endeared any husband to any wife. It was seriously alleged, for instance, that on a Monday he would throw her into a mesmeric sleep, and leave her quite alone in the house, and in a state of trance, until he returned on the Sat.u.r.day to restore her, at his leisure--very much at his leisure--to a condition of consciousness. Thus she was continually losing large slices out of her life, under circ.u.mstances which no one could describe as wholly satisfactory.

By degrees she transferred her affections to Jonas Hartopp, and with them she decided to transfer herself as well. Mr. Barnes had just made a great coup. The world will remember the disappearance of the Countess of Crawley's wedding presents. Mr. Barnes walked away from Crawley House with those priceless gems packed comfortably away in his pockets. Amelia Martin persuaded Jonas Hartopp to rob his friend, if, in a little transaction of that peculiar kind, one may speak of robbery. She offered Mr. Hartopp the Countess's gems for nothing if he would take her with them. In a weak moment Mr. Hartopp yielded to temptation. Unfortunately Mr. Barnes detected her in the very act of flight. She struck a blow for freedom--with a knife. The injury which she inflicted was, however, a superficial one. Before she could strike again he had her in a mesmeric sleep. While she was in that state he cut off at the wrist her right hand, the one with which she had tried to stab him. Restoring her, he showed her what he had done. In her agony she vowed that she would turn Queen's evidence and betray him to the tender mercies of the police, let the consequences to herself be what they might. In short, she made herself so extremely disagreeable that, all things considered, Mr. Barnes thought it the better part of wisdom to decamp.

It was while he was in full flight that he lighted on that hotel in the street off the Strand, on the landlady of which he so generously and rapidly bestowed the name of Barnes. He perfectly realised that his friend and his mistress were leagued together against him, and he took it that Barnes's hotel would form a convenient resting-place and cover until such time as he saw his way to crying quits with the pair.

It is here that the odd part of the story begins, having its origin in one of those freaks of coincidence which, after all, are not so common in fiction as they are in actual life, and are certainly not stranger.

The _soi-disant_ Mr. Barnes had, in his palmy days, taken up his residence for business purposes, of all places in the world, at Dulborough. Finding that there had been a James Southam thereabouts, and conceiving that it would be as well, in case of accidents, that the credit of his misdeeds should stand a chance of being fathered on the real James Southam instead of on the false one, he had not only taken to himself my name, but had actually located himself in the house in which I had been bred and born.

Jonas Hartopp regretted his treachery almost as soon as he had played the traitor. Either he did not find the lady such a good bargain as he thought he should, or, at any rate, not a commensurate exchange for the good offices of his ingenious and profitable friend. He decided after a while to extend the olive branch towards his whilom colleague.

It was with that idea in view that he had inserted the advertis.e.m.e.nt addressed to James Southam, of Dulborough, which had caught my eye.

Under the circ.u.mstances, when the newly-fledged Mr. Barnes, acting his _role_ of waiter, heard the stranger on whom he was attending p.r.o.nounce his quondam cognomen, it was not surprising that he jumped to the conclusion that the Philistines had tracked him to his lair, and that, in consequence, he turned tail and ran.

Amelia Martin, having played the part of traitor herself, was quick at suspecting intended treachery in another. She had an inkling of what it was Jonas Hartopp, _alias_ Duncan Rothwell, proposed to do. The pair had a violent quarrel the night before he went to town. She followed him without his being conscious of the fact, on that eventful journey, in a dangerous mood; and in what, doubtless, was a moment half of fear and half of frenzy, she struck him dead. The evidence at the inquest, and the discovery that there was a real James Southam in the world, and that "Duncan Rothwell," therefore, had started on a futile quest, gave her the idea of removing suspicion from herself by attributing the crime to me--which ingenious plan she might have carried to a successful issue, and I been hanged for what I never had the faintest thought of doing, if the false James Southam had not come on the scene in the very nick of time. It was she who placed the knife with which she had done the deed behind the wainscot in my bedroom!

The trial of Amelia Martin for the murder of Jonas Hartopp, during which this tale was unfolded, continued for a week. On her behalf medical evidence was brought to show that she suffered from periodical attacks of mania, during which she could not justly be held responsible for her actions--for which condition of affairs Mr.

Barnes's mesmeric experiments had probably something to do. She was sentenced to be confined as a criminal lunatic during her Majesty's pleasure.

Mr. Barnes's suicide in his cell, on the night before he was to be brought to trial--for, in spite of the a.s.sistance which he rendered in the case of Amelia Martin, the police, apparently, had no intention of letting him go "scot free"--was the sensation of a "special edition."

"Mrs. Barnes" sold the hotel and retired into private life. At present, I believe, she is residing with some relatives in a corner of far-off Canada. As for me, I still seem very far from being on the road which leads to the making of a fortune; but, at any rate, I am not at present out of employment, and I sincerely trust that the time is very far distant when I shall be.

The End.