The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro Read online

“Surely — I’ll sign it. Glad to. Have you made it out?”

  Fortescue went over to a desk in the corner of the room and brought back a brief paper which was typed out, and a long business-like envelope bearing his own name in the corner. He pulled out his fountain-pen. “Searles dictated to me over the ‘phone the brief form as he wanted it to read. He also asked it to be dated back to the day the spectacles were given over to you.”

  Middleton read it over once, and then quickly appended his name at the bottom. Its brief statement ran:

  “October 18, 1924.

  “Received from the Mid-West Trust Company in the First National Bank Building, Chicago, one pair of antique spectacles left in their charge by Digby Middleton as part of his estate.”

  He handed it back to Fortescue who, waving it in the air a bit to dry it, folded it up and sealed it within the envelope. “You’ll have to sign something of this nature every month for the rest of your life,” he commented dryly, stepping back to the desk where he busied himself for an instant, resuming his seat only after he had slid the sealed envelope part way between the covers of a large book, where it could be regained immediately on the arrival of the trust company’s messenger.

  He selected a rich, plump cigar from his stock and lighted it. In his crimson silk dressing-gown, he settled back comfortably and luxuriously in his chair. “Well, now, first, Jerry, before I put before you these other matters, including the odd proposition involving work for you, which was submitted to me to-day especially for you, I want to, if you don’t mind, dig into the facts of why you were left to live in Australia all your life while your father worked here piling up a fortune.”

  “I don’t object,” commented Jerome Middleton, “but I don’t see how I can throw any light on that.”

  “Well,” ventured Fortescue, “we might together, however, draw some deduction out of the facts. Two heads, you know — better than one.” He paused. “First, I want you to start with the earliest thing you can remember and recount for me the events of your life over there in Australia, omitting nothing in the way of names, dates, or any other data you may have. Give me everything. I may be able myself to supply something and thus cast some light on things.”

  Jerome Middleton took a few reflective puffs at his cigarette. Then he spoke.

  “Well then, Fortescue, to start with where you want me to start, the first thing I remember about my life is what everyone else remembers, being a small child; although I have, I admit, a hazy recollection of being out on the dancing waves for many, many days. An exceedingly long time it seems to me.”

  “I take it that in so far as you were born in ‘Frisco, this must have been your going to Australia as a very, very young child.”

  “I take it so, too. My father is part of the picture, for I remember him well; calling him ‘father.’ The next picture which follows in my mind is that of a woman who lay in a bed and hugged me tightly to her, showering me with what appeared to be endearments. Of course, as I have said, the pictures are not clear, for they are the earliest memories I have. All I can say is that, prior to this crossing of a big body of water, there is no picture of this woman or any other woman in my memory. Nor did she endure for any length of time. I think she must have died, for following a vague memory of seeing her lying in a bed quiet and still, she fades out, and there is no further recollection of her on my part.”

  Middleton paused a moment, gathering together the elusive threads of child memories.

  “Following this,” he went on finally, “I begin to have very definite mental pictures, for I remember myself very clearly as a boy in a home in the city of Melbourne — a small boy — and I lived with — ”

  “Do you mind speaking just a little louder, Jerry,” Fortescue interrupted, cupping his ear with his hand. “I got my ears full of water in the swimming tank at the Chicago Athletic Club to-day, and you’re competing with a miniature Niagara Falls just now.”

  “Not at all,” replied Middleton. He raised his voice so that Fortescue could hear more clearly and launched forth into his life, such as it was.

  In many respects it was a quite ordinary tale that he told to Fortescue, fact by fact, detail by detail, but in others it was an odd one too. There were the days when as a boy he lived in the city of Melbourne with the McQuanes, husband and wife, who received regularly their monthly remittance for his upkeep from his father; those most happy days spent with other boys, all scrambling, fighting, through the grammar school on Yarra Place. He even told, with a half-smile, how he had first learned to write, and with that first childish hand he was able to master, actuated by that miniature spending allowance which came from America, how he had written his father every week of his life a full account of his life and doings, of the people he met, of his reactions. In turn, the high-school days at the Victoria Street Academy. The visits, every other year, by his father; who remained for one long month with his son. The graduation from the academy, the death of the McQuanes within a few months of each other; his first violent desire to come to America. His father’s adamant refusal. The War. England being pushed hard. And then his disgruntled joining up with a troop of Anzacs, half of them under age.

  He described briefly that famous trip to England — that trip on which, in a long train of coaches whose windows were glued and tacked tight with black felt to foil German spies, he had crossed America, his father’s land, seeing of America only a black smudge at the midnight arrival representing ‘Frisco; and another black smudge at the midnight of departure representing New York City. London — three days. Tea at the Hotel Cecil with Fortescue and his father, who had come over to see him off to the front; and Lockwood over there on business. Then the trenches. Big shells a-plenty — but never a scratch. Exciting days under Colonel McGee. The Armistice. And McGee’s death on that very day by a spent bullet. The return home.

  After the return to Melbourne, another epistolary argument with his father — the same old question. Digby Middleton still adamant. Entering Canterbury University at Christchurch, New Zealand, at an age when most of his former school companions were getting out of college. Two years in Christchurch. Then another try at persuading Digby Middleton to let him finish up at Yale or Harvard in America. Again no permission. Too much pride to come on his own behalf, if he wasn’t wanted!

  At which juncture Fortescue put in a question. “Didn’t I hear Searles say something about having visited you while you were in Canterbury University at New Zealand?” he asked.

  Middleton nodded. “Yes, he and his wife called on me there at father’s request when they were on a torn of the Antipodes.”

  “Well now, Jerry, comes the buried year in your life — the year about which your father never knew anything. This is the year 1922 to 1923 — you were then going from the age of twenty-two to twenty-three — and during it all of your customary weekly letters to your father ceased entirely as I can well testify. Now tell me about that missing year. Was it an interesting one? Any love affairs — for instance?”

  There was a far-away and somewhat sad look in the younger man’s eyes as he replied to this direct question. “Well, it was at least a year in which I saw more adventure than in all my days in the trenches.” He told how, after cutting loose from Canterbury University, he went up to Auckland, New Zealand, and of the quaint haberdasher he had worked for on Queen Street; the shipping on a boat to Newcastle, New South Wales, and his three months as electrician’s helper in the Broken Hill Company’s steel mills under old Pat McKelly, the fighting foreman; of his drifting on to Canley Station, four hundred miles in the interior from the coast of New South Wales; how he had become….

  At which Fortescue, open-mouthed, broke into the story. “For the love of Mike!” he ejaculated. “You say you became a jackeroo — among — among the woollies! What on earth is a jackeroo — and what is a woollie?”

  Middleton looked up, eyes wide open. “Pardon — it didn’t occur to me that you wouldn’t know what I had reference to. The woollies — th
ey are the sheep of Australia, you know. And a jackeroo — ” he thought deeply for a moment. “A jackeroo would be what you would call here — say, a ranch hand — a sheep-herder, perhaps.”

  “I see,” nodded Fortescue. “And so you were even a jackeroo. And who owned this ranch or whatever you call it?”

  “It was owned by the Queen’s Limited Syndicate of Great Britain. It was under a manager named — let’s see — Kilhart. It — ”

  But at this juncture there came a ring at the bell of Fort-tescue’s apartment, and the latter, being apparently without any servant to-night, rose to answer it.

  Middleton could hear someone in the outer hall speaking. “Mr. Searles of the Mid-West Trust told me to come in here at nine to-night and get a receipt that would be waiting.”

  “Yes, come in,” came Fortescue’s voice. A moment later he reappeared in the living-room, at his heels a young blond fellow of the clerk type, whom Middleton remembered having seen in the Mid-West Trust Office when he had called there the previous week. Fortescue drew forth the book from which protruded the envelope containing the typed and signed receipt. The visitor buttoned it within his coat pocket, and was presently being ushered out. A few moments later Fortescue had resumed his chair. “Now go ahead, Jerry. When last we talked you were an — er — jackeroo among the — er — woollies.”

  “Yes, I was a jackeroo and slept in barracks. But finally, after several months of it, I got tired of the loneliness of inland Australian life. The loneliness eats into you like a canker. And, as I say, it got the better of me, and in due course I drifted on to the silver-lead mines of the Kensington Mining Syndicate, where, under a foreman named Cittrain, I again puttered around for a while with pliers fixing electric shorts and breaks. I worked there three months and then, with my pockets full of money I drifted into Sydney, where I began to take life easy. I rigged myself up in new clothes, and rented quite decent diggings not far from the Chinese section. And then — well — I got laid up with the ‘flu, and a Chinese woman — let’s see — ” He thought. “Yes — a Chinese woman, named Mrs. Mock Lee, attended me all through it and brought me around. I tell you, Fortescue, father came near losing me that time, for I nearly went under. Good old Mrs. Mock Lee.” He was lost a moment in retrospection. Then he went on.

  “Well, I pulled out all right, and, recuperating, went out to the Randwick racecourse every day, and what did I do but finally lose practically every shilling I had, playing the horses. They had the totalisators there — a form of betting-machine that is the fairest thing ever invented — but I didn’t have the right machinery in my head for selecting the horses, and so I lost the entire wealth that I had made by the sweat of my brow in a sheep station, in a steel mill and in a lead mine. And I finally quit playing the horses just in time to avoid being downright hungry.”

  At this juncture Middleton stopped so long that Fortescue put in a question. “You have almost brought your life up to date,” he commented. “But just where does the incident come in regarding that last cheque which we sent out at your request?”

  “I am coming to that,” said the younger man. “I was sitting on a bench in the park off Macquarie Street in Sydney each day, soaking in the sunshine, still unable to work on account of my loss of strength, but with enough shillings left to barely live in a small room and have one meal per day, when one afternoon a young woman with red hair — a fairly young woman — came up to me like a flash from around the bushes at back of me and crying: ‘You dog — I have watched you now here for three days — take this ‘ — flung something squarely into my eyes from a vial. It burned like a thousand — devils — and reason enough, for it was an acid, and a friendly policeman, who came on the scene just in time, rushed me up into a little hospital on Macquarie Street, where I was quickly put under the attention of a doctor and into bed. He was an old doctor, this Doctor Phineas Harrow, although it was weeks before I actually saw him. He maintained but one nurse, and the one he had when I entered it was a young American girl who was not even a complete graduate in nursing. What she looked like I can’t tell you, for to be quite candid I never saw her. She had come to Australia as a nurse to some old lady who had died there, and there she was stranded without either money or friends. And old Harrow, with his pitifully meagre allowance for a nurse, had hired her.”

  Fortescue here put in a question. “Did she ever see you face to face? For you have stated that you never saw her.”

  “Well,” said Middleton slowly, “we never looked into each other’s eyes, at any rate, for the only man who saw my eyes for weeks and weeks was old Harrow himself who dressed them. She did see me with a bandage always around that part of my face, and I knew her only as a gentle spirit that hovered around my bed and seemed to guess my every wish.” He paused. “Fortescue, I don’t know whether you will believe it or not that a man could do it, but I fell in love with that girl — I fell in love with her young contralto voice, her gentle personality, her touch, her self that I could not see. And one day I proposed marriage to her. I told her that my father was wealthy, very, very wealthy. And I drew her down to me and held her in my arms and kissed her full on the lips. Fortescue, we humans are strange creatures, but that warm kiss of hers, that long moment when, a blinded man, I held her in my arms, seems to comprise a memory, a period of time that will never pass from my mind. For next day she was gone. She had found a sudden unexpected opportunity, so Harrow told me, of going back to America as attendant to some invalid, and had had to leave immediately.” He sighed deeply.

  “The red-haired girl who flung the acid into your eyes was not captured?” queried Fortescue curiously.

  Middleton shook his head. “No — she disappeared in the excitement and that ends her connection with the case.”

  “And this tender being who worked in the little emergency hospital, whom you never saw but whom you fell in love with” — there was the most subtle tinge of irony or sarcasm in Fortescue’s voice, a tinge which would have eluded the most astute analyst of intonation — ” she, perhaps, among her other tender ministrations to you, read to you while you were in bed?” It was an odd question.

  “Yes,” admitted Middleton. “She read to me an English novel ‘Dreaming Spires,’ by one — I think — Diana Patrick, and an Australian novel rather popular at that time by a writer called Clyde Entwistle. Its name was ‘The Ragged Edge.’ “ He paused. “But, of course, such trivialities will hardly be of any value to you, Fortescue.”

  “Probably not,” acquiesced Fortescue, oddly displaying, now that his peculiar question had been answered, a surprising lack of interest in that same answer. But he nevertheless drove quickly back to his line of questioning.

  “Now what happened after she left?” was his next query.

  “Well,” the younger man returned regretfully, “shortly after she left, I was permitted to have the bandage removed from my eyes; and I now found as my nurse a big Amazonian sort of woman with a bass voice whom Harrow had hired to take the place of the young American girl. I really believe, Fortescue, that now that the attraction was gone I got well a good deal sooner that I would have otherwise. At any rate, I left the hospital about ten days later, and because I had caused poor old Harrow considerable trouble and extra expense, so to speak, now carrying a debt of honour with respect to him, I went straight back to Melbourne and wrote to father just a year from the time I disappeared. This was last year — 1923. I told him that I owed old Dr. Harrow a debt and asked father to send him a cheque for fifteen guineas. This I presume he did.”

  “Yes,” admitted Fortescue. “Your father was a little puzzled as to what it was for, but he nevertheless had it drawn up. I drew it up myself, in fact. Your Dr. Harrow, however, Jerry, is dead, for the cheque was returned eventually to us, marked ‘Payee deceased.’ “

  A genuine look of pain flooded Middleton’s face. “Poor old man,” he commented slowly. “He was a prince.” He sighed. “Well, the pater and I agreed by letter at last that as soon as I completed tha
t badly interrupted university course of mine, I could come to on America. So I put in the next year and a half working like a trojan at the University of Melbourne. I was just finishing with flying colours when your cablegram came saying that father was dead. And once more my plans were interrupted by Fate, for I not only missed out on my sheepskin by some three weeks, but I came on to America in a much different way than I anticipated. Now I believe that covers my whole life. Are there any particular questions you want to ask?”

  “None, I guess,” said Fortescue ruminatively. His brows wrinkled into fine lines, and his eyes half closed as though he were threshing out some problem. He opened them again. “None, I guess,” he repeated. “Except perhaps this: who was your dean in Canterbury College, New Zealand, and who was your dean at the University of Melbourne?”

  “The former was Dr. Stout,” came the younger man’s answer in a somewhat surprised tone. “The latter was Professor Coleridge. But of course, Fortescue, those points are of little signif — ”

  “Little significance,” Fortescue put in, nodding. “Indeed, yes. Of no significance, I agree.” He shook his head slowly. “Well, it looks as though we’ve unfolded your entire life, but it doesn’t seem to throw a bit of light, does it, Jerry, upon your father’s stubborn insistence on keeping you over there on the other side of the world?”

  Middleton shook his head. “It assuredly does not. Yet I did not believe when I began to relate my life to you that it would. But you insisted, you’ll remember?”

  Fortescue nodded abstractedly. He seemed quite lost in reflections of some sort. And it was Middleton who finally broke the silence. “Well, Fortescue,” he said slowly, “what — what are those matters you wanted to take up with me, including not only the one which concerns those old spectacles of father’s, but also the one that involves work of some sort that has come to you for me? I’m sitting on the anxious seat — ready for anything, you know.”