The Bradmoor Murder Read online

  It was clear that this was the weapon with which the old Duke had been killed, for one barrel had been discharged. It was, therefore, more than probable—it was, in fact, certain—that the rifle had been made thus to fire at a touch, for the express purpose of this tragedy.

  But who could have wished it to fire at a touch?

  Who filed it, and for what definite purpose? I put the rifle together again, and we stood beside it where it lay across the table, the butt toward the stone fireplace. We were both aflame with the possibilities of this discovery. I winged out on the first suggestion that came into my mind.

  The triggers had been thus filed for a phantom finger, a finger with no power of this world in the crook of it; and the threat of that old forgotten god—on his bench of rose-colored stone—cut in the wedge writing of the Sumerian priests, came up before me.

  We could dismiss ancient religion with a gesture. These sinister gods were impotent images. How could they influence events? But after all, when we looked at the matter fairly, how did we know? The sacred books of every religion in the world were crowded with examples—especially the sacred books of the Jews, upon which our modern religions were all basically founded. What sinister power over events had the magicians of Pharaoh, the witch of Endor, the dead prophets of Yahveh!

  And I could see this hideous idol of blue ivory moving about the doomed man, invisibly.

  But I could not see it as Lord Dunn imagined, stumping heavily down from its seat of rose-colored stone to destroy the man who had outraged its dignity and looted it of its treasure. It seemed a nimble, insidious thing like that Devil’s imp around which the butler’s mother had built up her fantastic theory. I could see an avenging agent, of this sinister image, like that. Taking the doomed man at the moment of his unconcern—with a trigger filed to its phantom finger—and then slipping through that narrow slit in the wall to leap off into the sea, casting away the rifle as it descended!

  And then the accident happened that unlocked the mystery of Bradmoor’s death, like a key turned in the lock of a closed door.

  So many involved suggestions were moving in my mind, that, I fancy, I failed to remember the change that had been made in the mechanism of the rifle, and I no longer thought about it. The old established knowledge of such weapons must have taken the place of what I had just discovered, for in resting my hand on the table beside the rifle, I touched one of the triggers with my finger.

  I had forgotten that the opening of the breech had thrown back the hammers.

  There was an explosion. The big lead bullet flattened against the stone of the opposite wall, and the gun leaped back from the table, the butt striking the stone corner of the chimney.

  Joan cried out, and I stood for a moment astonished.

  Then I realized another thing that threw a ray of light into this mystery. The heavy recoil of this gun would carry it backward; and it carried it backward with enough violence to cause it to be thrown entirely off the table.

  It was Joan who caught the meaning of this thing.

  “Did you see that?” she cried. “How it leaped back of itself, without being touched?”

  “Yes,” I said. “These rifles all have a heavy recoil. They are apt to bruise the shoulder unless they are tightly held.”

  “But it leaped back,” she cried. “It leaped back of itself!”

  Then she came around the table to me.

  “If that rifle had been lying in the narrow slit of the window, it would have leaped out into the sea—it would have leaped out of itself!”

  She took hold of my arm.

  “Think about it! What does it mean? What does it mean that the gun has been made to fire with a touch?”

  What did it mean?

  I began to think madly along the line her suggestion indicated—the gun in the loophole—in the slit in the window: it would leap out into the sea when it was fired—and it would have leaped out, as she said, without being touched, without the assistance of any human agency!

  I caught at the suggestion.

  “That is true,” I said; “it would have leaped back out of the window of itself, without being touched by anybody.”

  “After it was fired,” she said. “But it had to be fired first.… Now, what did it mean that the mechanism was so filed that a touch would fire it? And what touch fired it? Who was it that wished the rifle to disappear after it was fired?”

  She went on, her eyes wide, her face white, the tips of her fingers straining against the edge of the table:

  “Not an assassin, for he could have thrown the rifle into the sea; it must have been someone who could not have thrown it in. Who after the shot was fired had to depend on the recoil of the rifle itself to cause it to disappear?”

  Again I winged out into fantastic regions.

  That old sinister god at his work of vengeance would require a slighter materialization than I had imagined. The heavy double express would itself leap into the sea if it lay in the slit of the wall and the triggers were touched by a phantom finger. But it would require to be placed there and trained on the doomed man seated in his chair, concerned with the preparation of his fishing tackle.

  How had the Blue Image managed it?

  Granted that it could move invisibly about Bradmoor on that afternoon, could it also move this heavy weapon invisibly about? And if it could also do that, why require that the triggers should be filed for a phantom finger? If it, or its invisible agents, could thus handle the heavy double express, would a ten-pound pull disturb them?

  But had they handled it? And a line of that sinister threat cut in the rose-colored stone returned to me:

  “I will encourage his right hand to destroy him.”

  The threat was not that this old, dread, mysterious, forgotten god would do the deed himself.

  “His right hand shall be his enemy. I will encourage his right hand to destroy him.”

  It was thus that the threat ran.

  It was the doomed man’s own hand that the Blue Image would set about this deadly work. It was his own hand that should carry out all these material preparations.

  And then I saw the answer to Joan’s query.

  “Bradmoor!” I cried. “But how could he have fired the rifle?”

  Joan looked at me a moment, her face tense in its abstraction.

  “There was the fishing rod in his hand; he could—he could——”

  And then I saw the whole thing as the old Duke had so carefully planned it.

  He knew that the recoil of this heavy rifle would carry it out of this window into the sea after it was fired. He had filed the catch on the triggers until a touch would fire it; then he had placed the rifle carefully, adjusting its position so the bullet would strike him in the chest near the heart; and sitting down in the chair in the middle of the room, on that afternoon, he had touched the trigger with the end of the fishing rod. The great lead bullet had plowed its way into his chest; the gun had leaped into the sea; and Bradmoor’s body had crumpled in its chair—some flies in his left hand, and the fishing rod gripped in the fingers of his other hand.

  And he had left behind him a mystery that no man could solve!

  The splash that the old woman had heard, sitting in her cottage, was caused by the heavy double express descending into the water!

  And then I remembered the penciled note that old Sir Godfrey Simon had handed to me, when, after the dinner, he had got into his motor:

  “To-morrow,” he had said, “when your head is cool, read it.”

  I brought it out of my pocket now, and tore it open. There were a few lines in a clear, fine hand like copperplate.

  “Bradmoor killed himself, of course,” the note ran. “I don’t know how he did it, but in some clever way. They have all gone out like that—his grandfather, who left his death on the West Coast to look like an accident, and his father, who pretended to fall from the steeple of the chapel. There has always been a monomania of fear preceding the act. It is a common symptom. I said t
hey were all under a curse. A streak of insanity is a curse. It is the worst form of curse, because it cannot be prayed off in a meeting-house.”

  I read the note and put it down on the table before the girl. She moved her head slowly, her eyes wide, her face still in its tense abstraction.

  “The Blue Image carried out his threat,” she murmured. “It was the dead man’s right hand that destroyed him; it was his right hand that was his enemy! How awful!”

  But the Blue Image, as a directing factor in this tragedy, seemed all at once a remote, fantastic notion, like the devil theory of the old paralytic helpless in her chair.

  Sir Godfrey Simon had been right—alone of all the theorists right. The curse on this family had extended itself to Bradmoor. Sir Godfrey had seen it on the way. He had marked the evidential signs of it, the monomania of fear that preceded it, and the care to give the act the distinguishing features of a criminal agent.

  Bradmoor’s father and his grandfather had staged their self-directed act for accident, the tragedy of chance. But the old Duke had gone a step beyond them, and with a stroke of genius had put his exit beyond a conjecture of self-direction.

  It was the cunning of the unbalanced mind in a moment of inspiration.

  And it had sent the keenest intelligence of England to fantastic theories. Henry Marquis and his hard-headed experts had stopped against a wall; the countryside had gone full cry after a devil theory; and men like the Earl of Dunn, accustomed to the somber realities of life, had seen no solution except through the supernatural agency of a Dunsany god on his bench of rose-colored stone.

  And yet how snugly the whole thing ran in the grooves of this fantastic theory!

  It held, it enveloped the girl, beyond me. And how lovely, how desirable a thing she was! And the bargain with the god, struck in that mood of half humor, on the arc of sand, under the moon, before the sea, returned to me.

  If there was any virtue in the legend cut in the wedge characters of the ancient Sumerian priests on the bench of rose-colored stone below that sinister image, let it now appear. If it was the moving factor in this affair, let it go on. If it had, as its threat ran, encouraged Brad-moor’s right hand to destroy him, let it carry out the remainder of that legend. And the words of it returned striding through my memory:

  “His right hand shall be his enemy; and the son of another shall sit in his seat. I will encourage his right hand to destroy him. And I will bring the unborn through the Gate of Life. And they shall lean upon me. And I will enrich them, and guide their feet and strengthen their hearts. And they shall laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces.”

  The thing was like the pronouncement of a fate. And Bradmoor’s death awfully confirmed it.

  But was that one fact merely a sinister coincidence—or would the thing go on? If it required faith, here was the faith of Joan, and here was the bargain I had struck.

  But the beauty, the charm, the fascination of the girl overwhelmed me. She became in that moment above all things, in any world, desirable, and I said aloud what I had already determined in my heart:

  “If the God of the Mountain is so great a god, then let him carry out the remainder of his prophecy, for I shall never give you up.”

  For a moment there was utter silence. The girl looked about her vaguely, like one in a dream, like one expecting a visitation; and the beauty and the charm of her seemed to extend itself, to fill the empty places of the room.

  Then suddenly something on the stones by the hearth came within the sweep of my eye. It looked like a red bead.

  I went over and picked up the heavy double express from the hearth. The hard rubber butt plate, striking against the stone corner of the fireplace, had been broken to pieces, and a stream of rubies poured out.

  The explanation was clear.

  Slaggerman, when he had robbed Bradmoor in the desert, had unscrewed the butt plate, hollowed out the stock, and concealed the treasure in it.

  As in a sort of dream I gathered up the handful of great gleaming rubies, and put them on the table.

  Then I turned toward the girl, standing with her arms hanging, her lips parted, her eyes wide with wonder.

  She came with a little cry into my arms.

  “You shall sit in his seat,” she said. “The God of the Mountain has carried out his prophecy.”

  I drew her in against my heart.

  “But not all of it,” I said. “I hold him to the letter of that contract. ‘I will bring the unborn through the Gate of Life.’”

  But her face crimson with blushes was bedded into my shoulder, and her hand creeping up, covered my mouth.

  THE BLACKMAILER

  My amazement at the painting above the mantel in the smoking room did not escape Sir Rufus.

  It was the notorious Lady Gault in the most beautiful frame that one could buy in Bond Street. I was astonished to see her picture in this house, or in any house.

  She was an unspeakable person.

  Sir Rufus had sent me word to ride over and sit with him. The fifth Duke of Dorset was expected on this night. The great old English house, above the ancient oak trees, and the dark, swift river, was lighted and silent, with that tense vague expectancy which inanimate things seem sometimes able to take on. Sir Rufus was the greatest surgeon in England. He was alone in the smoking room but for me, with a bottle of port on the table at his elbow.

  He watched me looking at the picture.

  “There is another that goes with it,” he said. There was a sort of glee in his voice. “One I always bring out when I am here.” He pointed to a little frame beyond the bottle of port. It was the Rajah of Gujrat, photographed by “The Bystander” at one of the Ranelagh polo games.

  Sir Rufus laughed.

  “You will understand this,” he said. “There will be a reason for this picture here. It was the Indian Rajah of Gujrat who came to the rescue of the young duke’s wrecked fortune.”

  I knew what Sir Rufus was driving at.

  It was the inexplicable purchase at the moment of crying need of that great barren tract of deer forest in Argyleshire for a fabulous sum—a sum beyond all reason, beyond all sense. The deer forest was a practically valueless property. It was hardly an asset of the wrecked estate, and to the amazement of the whole of England this Indian Rajah had come forward with an offer of one hundred thousand pounds sterling for it!

  It was not worth five thousand pounds sterling!

  It was not, in fact, worth anything. An immense barren mountain with a vast rain-soaked moor, extending into the Firth of Lorn.

  What value could the Rajah of Gujrat see in it?

  Scotland was the last land in the world that a native Indian prince would wish to live in. England was cold and wet enough; what the Rajah of Gujrat should have been seeking was a dry land, baking in the sun.

  Here was a mystery that no man in England could unravel.

  The Rajah had never set foot on the estate after its purchase. He had never gone to see what he had bought. It had very nearly escheated to the Crown from neglect. Why, then, had he paid one hundred thousand pounds sterling for it? I took a cigarette out of a lacquered Japanese box on the table and lighted it.

  “I can understand why the Rajah of Gujrat might be set up here,” I said. “He was the Fairy Friend, by whose mysterious aid all these things have resulted.”

  Sir Rufus poured out a bottle of port and drank it slowly.

  “Why, no,” he said, “it was the woman over the mantel who was the Fairy Friend.”

  The words brought me up sharply before the woman.

  She was there in the exquisite oval frame, as she had so often been notoriously before us in life. The big, determined bony face; the sharp, hawk eyes, that had an aspect of a bird of prey. She was the worst woman in England. I don’t mean immoralities. I mean she was the most dangerous woman in England. She wasn’t a factor in love affairs. She had a profession. She was the greatest blackmailer in the world!

  She was of a good fam
ily, a distinguished family; determined in any direction it chose to set out on. She had chosen to set out in the direction of the devil, and—well, she outdistanced all competitors. It was an insult to know the woman; it was an unspeakable outrage to have her picture up.

  I saw the smile deepening on Sir Rufus’s face.

  He twisted the cigarette a moment in his fingers, and his voice went into a soft, facetious note.

  “It is I,” he said, “who am the instigator of this abomination. I put the picture up there. They”—he made a slight gesture toward the far-away portions of the great English house—“the Two Innocents”—he meant the young duke and his American wife—“don’t know who she is. He doesn’t even remember her. It’s hardly a wonder; she was in a fury of the fiends the only time he ever saw her. He thinks she is a friend of mine, and keeps the picture in a cupboard until I come down, and then he sets it up.”

  He laughed again.

  “She was never a friend of mine, but she was a friend to him with the friendship mentioned in the Scriptures!

  “She died in one of my rest houses in London, when she might have lived forever in a yacht on the Mediterranean.”

  “I know. Heaven, what a world it is!”

  He got up with a sudden energy, and threw the glass down on the floor. It broke into a dozen pieces.

  “She was the Fairy Friend,” he said; “but for her none of it would have happened; they wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be here, nor the thing that will happen to-night.”

  I thought Sir Rufus was drunk. And there must have been some evidence of the thing in my face, for he crossed to the writing table, picked up two pencils, sharpened at the points and, taking one in either hand, extended his arms and brought the points of the two pencils together before him. The two points touched, and were held without the slightest tremor. The man had the steadiest hands of any human creature in the world. A bottle of port could not unhinge a nerve in him.