The Crooked Hinge Read online

  Page whistled. He glanced out of the window, as though he expected to see Farnleigh himself.

  “At fifteen?” Page said. “Here, he must have been a lad!”

  “He was.”

  Page hesitated. “And yet, you know, I’d always thought from what I’ve seen of him that Farnleigh was______”

  “A bit of a Puritan?” supplied Burrows. “Yes. Anyhow, we’re talking about a boy aged fifteen. His studying occult matters, including witchcraft and Satanism, was bad enough. His being expelled from Eton was worse. But the public scandal with the barmaid, who thought she was going to have a child, finished it. Sir Dudley Farnleigh simply decided that the boy was bad clean through, some throwback to the Satanist Farnleighs: that nothing would ever change him: and that he did not care to see him again. The usual course was adopted. Lady Farnleigh had a cousin in America, who was doing well there, and John was packed off to the States.

  “The only person who seemed able to manage him at all was a tutor named Kennet Murray. The tutor, then a young fellow of twenty-two or three, had come to Farnleigh Close after John left school. Kennet Murray’s hobby, it is important to mention, was scientific criminology: which was what drew the boy to Murray from the beginning. It wasn’t a genteel hobby in those days; but old Sir Dudley liked and approved of Murray, so not much more was said.

  “Now at this time, it happened, Murray had just been offered a good position as assistant headmaster of a school in Hamilton, Bermuda—provided he cared to go so far away from home. He accepted; his services were no longer required at the Close, anyway. It was arranged that Murray should travel out with the boy to New York, to see that he kept out of trouble. He should hand over the boy to Lady Farnleigh’s cousin, and then take another ship down to Bermuda.”

  Nathaniel Burrows paused, considering the past.

  “I don’t remember much about those days, speaking personally,” he added. “We younger children were kept away from the wicked John. But little Molly Bishop, who was then only six or seven years old, was frantically devoted to him. She wouldn’t hear a word against him; and it may be significant that she has since married him. It seems to me I vaguely remember the day John was driven to the railway-station, in a phaeton, wearing a flat straw hat, with Kennet Murray beside him. They were sailing next day, which was a gala day for more reasons than one. I don’t need to tell you that the ship they took was the Titanic.”

  Both Burrows and Page now looked at the past. The latter remembered it as a confused time of shoutings, and newspaper-bills at the corners, and legends without foundation.

  “The unsinkable Titanic rammed an iceberg and sank on the night of April 15th, nineteen-twelve,” Burrows went on. “In the confusion Murray and the boy were separated. Murray drifted for eighteen hours in icy water, holding to a wooden grating with two or three others. They were presently picked up by a cargo-boat, the Colophon—bound for Bermuda. Murray was taken to the place he meant to go. But he did not worry any longer when he heard by wireless that John Farnleigh was safe, and later got a letter confirming it.

  “John Farnleigh, or a boy purporting to be John, was picked up by the Etrusca, bound for New York. There Lady Farnleigh’s cousin, a Westerner, met him. The situation was exactly as it had been before. Beyond making sure the boy was alive, Sir Dudley was still quit of him. And old Sir Dudley wasn’t any more bitter than the boy himself.

  “He grew up in America, and lived there for nearly twenty-five years. He wouldn’t write a line to his people; he would see them dead before he sent a photograph or a birthday message. Fortunately he took an immediate liking to the American cousin, a man named Renwick, and that supplied the need of parents. He—er—seemed to change. He lived quietly as a farmer on broad acres, just as he might have lived here. During the latter years of the war he served with the American army, but he never once set foot in England or met any of the people he had known. He never even saw Murray again. Murray was existing, though not prospering, in Bermuda. Neither could afford a journey to visit the other, especially as John Farnleigh lived in Colorado.

  “Back here at home nothing was disturbed. The boy had been practically forgotten; and, after his mother died in nineteen twenty-six, he was completely forgotten. The father followed her four years later. Young Dudley—he was not so young now—inherited the title and all the estate. He had never married; he said there was time enough for that. But there wasn’t. The new Sir Dudley died of ptomaine poisoning in August, nineteen thirty-five.”

  Brian Page reflected.

  “That was just before I came here,” Page observed. “But look here! Didn’t Dudley try to get in touch with his brother at any time?”

  “Yes. The letters were returned unopened. Dudley had been—well, rather a prig in the old days. By this time they had grown so far apart that apparently John didn’t feel any family relationship. However, when it became a question of John’s inheriting the title and the estate at Dudley’s death______”

  “John accepted.”

  “He accepted. Yes. That’s the point,” said Burrows explosively. “You know him and you understand. Nothing seemed so right as his coming back here. It didn’t even seem strange to him, though he’d been away for nearly twenty-five years. He didn’t seem strange: he still thought and acted and to a certain extent talked like the heir of Farnleigh. He came here at the beginning of nineteen thirty-six. As an additional romantic touch, he met a grown-up Molly Bishop and married her in May of the same year. He settles in for a little over a year; and now this happens. This happens.”

  “I suppose the suggestion is,” said Page with some uncertainty, “that there was a substitution of identities at the time of the Titanic disaster? That the wrong boy was picked up at sea, and for some reason pretended to be John Farnleigh?”

  Burrows had been walking up and down with measured slowness, wagging his finger at any piece of furniture he passed. But he did not look comic. There was about him an intellectual strength which soothed or even hypnotized clients. He had a trick of turning his head sideways and peering at a companion past the sides of his big spectacles, as he did now.

  “That’s exactly it. Exactly. If the present John Farnleigh has been playing an imposture, don’t you see, he has been playing it since nineteen-twelve—while the real heir lay low? He has grown into it. When he was rescued from the lifeboat after the wreck he wore Farnleigh’s clothes and ring; he carried Farnleigh’s diary. He has been exposed to the reminiscences of his Uncle Renwick in America. He has come back and settled into old ways. And twenty-five years! Handwritings change; faces and marks alter; even memories become uncertain. Do you see the difficulty? If sometimes he makes a slip, if there are gaps or clouds anywhere, that’s only natural. Isn’t it?”

  Page shook his head.

  “All the same, my lad, this claimant has got to have a thundering good case to gain any credence. You know what the courts are like. What sort of case has he got?”

  “The claimant,” answered Burrows, folding his arms, “offers absolute proof that he is the real Sir John Farnleigh.”

  “Have you seen this proof?”

  “We are to see it—or not to see it—tonight. The claimant asks for an opportunity to meet the present holder. No, Brian: I am not in the least simple-minded, although I have nearly gone mad over this affair. It is not merely that the claimant’s story is convincing, and that he offers all the minor proofs. It is not merely that he walked into my office (with, I regret to tell you, a bounder who is his legal representative) and told me things which only John Farnleigh could have known. Only John Farnleigh, I say. But he has proposed that he and the present holder shall submit to a certain test, which should be conclusive.”

  “What test?”

  “You will see. Oh, yes. You will see.” Nathaniel Burrows picked up his brief-case. “There has been only one gleam of comfort in the whole cursed mess. That is, so far there has been no publicity. The claimant is at least a gentleman—both of ’em are—bah—and he i
sn’t anxious for a row. But there is going to be a remarkable row when I get my fingers on the truth. I’m glad my father isn’t alive to see this. In the meantime, you be at Farnleigh Close at seven o’clock. Don’t bother to dress for dinner. Nobody else will. It’s only a pretext and there probably won’t even be any dinner.”

  “And how is Sir John taking all this?”

  “Which Sir John?”

  “For the sake of clearness and convenience,” retorted Page, “the man we have always known as Sir John Farnleigh. But this is interesting. Does it mean you believe the claimant is the real thing?”

  “No. Not actually. Certainly not!” said Burrows. He caught himself up and spoke with dignity. “Farnleigh is only—sputtering. And I think that’s a good sign.”

  “Does Molly know?”

  “Yes; he told her today. Well, there you are. I’ve talked to you as no solicitor should and few ever do; but if I can’t trust you I can’t trust anybody, and I’ve been a bit uneasy about my conduct of things since my father died. Now get into the swim. Try my spiritual difficulties for yourself. Come up to Farnleigh Close at seven o’clock; we want you as a witness. Inspect the two candidates. Exercise your intelligence. And then, before we get down to business,” said Burrows, banging the edge of his brief-case on the desk, “kindly tell me which is which.”

  Chapter Two

  SHADOWS WERE GATHERING ON the lower slopes of the wood called Hanging Chart, but the flat lands to the left of it were still clear and warm. Set back from the road behind a wall and a screen of trees, the house had those colors of dark-red brick which seem to come from an old painting. It was as smoothed, as arranged, as its own clipped lawns. The windows were tall and narrow, with panes set into a pattern of stone oblongs; and a straight gravel drive led up to the door. Its chimneys stood up thin and close-set against the last light.

  No ivy had been allowed to grow against its face. But there was a line of beech-trees set close against the house at the rear. Here a newer wing had been built out from the center—like the body of an inverted letter T—and it divided the Dutch garden into two gardens. On one side of the house the garden was overlooked by the back windows of the library; on the other by the windows of the room in which Sir John Farnleigh and Molly Farnleigh were waiting now.

  A clock ticked in this room. It was what might have been called in the eighteenth century a Music Room or Ladies’ Withdrawing Room, and it seemed to indicate the place of the house in this world. A pianoforte stood here, of that wood which in old age seems to resemble polished tortoise-shell. There was silver of age and grace, and a view of the Hanging Chart from its north windows; Molly Farnleigh used it as a sitting-room. It was very warm and quiet here, except for the ticking of the clock.

  Molly Farnleigh sat by the window in the shadow of a great “octopus” beech-tree. She was what is called an outdoor girl, with a sturdy and well-shaped body, and a square but very attractive face. Her dark brown hair was uncompromisingly bobbed. She had light hazel eyes in a tanned, earnest face; and a directness of look which was as good as a handclasp. Her mouth might have been too broad, but she showed fine teeth when she laughed. If she was not exactly pretty, health and vigour gave her a strong attractiveness which was better than that.

  But she was not laughing now. Her eyes never left her husband, who was pacing the room with short, sharp steps.

  “You’re not worried?” she asked.

  Sir John Farnleigh stopped short. Then he fiddled with his dark wrists, and resumed his pacing.

  “Worried? No. Oh, no. It’s not that. It’s only—oh, damn it all!”

  He seemed an ideal partner for her. It would convey the wrong impression to say that he looked in his element as a country squire, for the word has come to be associated with beefy roisterers of a hundred years ago. Yet there is a truer type. Farnleigh was of middle height, of a stringy, active leanness which somehow suggested the lines of a plough: the bright metal, the compactness, the crisp blade that cuts the furrow.

  His age might have been forty. He was of darkish complexion, with a thick but close-cropped moustache. He had dark hair in which there were thin lines of gray, and sharp dark eyes with growing wrinkles at the corners. You would have said that at the moment he was at the top of his mental and physical form, a man of enormous repressed energies. Striding back and forth in the little room, he seemed less angry or upset than uncomfortable and embarrassed.

  Molly started to rise. She cried:

  “Oh, my dear, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “No use worrying you with it,” the other said. “It’s my affair. I’ll manage.”

  “How long have you known about it?”

  “A month or so. Thereabouts.”

  “And that’s what’s been worrying you all this time?” she asked, with a shade of different worry in her eyes.

  “Partly,” he grunted, and looked at her quickly.

  “Partly? What do you mean by that?”

  “What I say, my dear: partly.”

  “John . . . it hasn’t got anything to do with Madeline Dane, has it?”

  He stopped. “Good God, no! Certainly not. I don’t know why you ask questions like that. You don’t like Madeline, really, do you?”

  “I don’t like her eyes. They’re queer eyes,” said Molly, and checked herself out of a certain pride or another feeling she refused to name. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything like that, with all these other things coming up. It’s not very pleasant; but there’s nothing to it, is there? Of course the man hasn’t got a case?”

  “He hasn’t got a right. I don’t know whether he’s got a case.”

  He spoke brusquely, and she studied him.

  “But why is there so much fuss and mystery? If he’s an impostor, couldn’t you sling him out and let the matter drop?”

  “Burrows says it wouldn’t be wise. Not yet, anyway, until we’ve—er—heard what he has to say. Then we can take action. And real action. Besides______”

  Molly Farnleigh’s face grew expressionless.

  “I wish you’d let me help you,” she said. “Not that I could do anything, I suppose, but I should just like to know what it’s all about. I know this man challenges you to let him prove he’s really you. Of course that’s all nonsense. I knew you years ago; and I knew you when I saw you again; you would be surprised how easily I knew. But I know you’re having this fellow here at the house, with Nat Burrows and another solicitor, and being horribly mysterious. What are you going to do?”

  “Do you remember my old tutor, Kennet Murray?’

  “Faintly,” said Molly, wrinkling her forehead. “Largish, pleasant man with a little cropped beard like a naval man or an artist. I suppose he was really young then, but he seemed ages old. Told wonderful stories______”

  “His ambition was always to be a great detective,” answered the other curtly. “Well, the Opposition have brought him from Bermuda. He says he can absolutely identify the real John Farnleigh. He’s at the Bull and Butcher now.”

  “Wait a bit!” said Molly. “There’s a man staying there who ‘looks like an artist.’ The village is full of it. Is that Murray?”

  “That’s old Murray. I wanted to go down and see him; but it wouldn’t be—well, it wouldn’t be sporting,” said her husband, with a kind of inner struggle and writhing. “It might look as though I were trying to influence him. Or something. He’s coming up here to see us both, and identify—me.”

  “How?”

  “He’s the one person in the world who really knew me well. The family has pretty well died out; you know that. The old servants have died out with my parents: except Nannie, and she’s in New Zealand. Even Knowles has been here for only ten years. There are plenty of people that I knew vaguely, but you know I was an unsociable cuss and I didn’t make friends. Poor old criminal-investigating Murray is undoubtedly it. He’s remaining neutral and not having anything to do with either side; but, if he wants to have the one shot of his life at playing th
e great detective______”

  Molly drew a deep breath. The health of her tanned face, the health of her whole body, animated the directness with which she spoke.

  “John, I don’t understand this. I do not understand it. You talk as though this were a wager or a game of some kind. ‘Wouldn’t be sporting.’ ‘Not having anything to do with either side.’ Do you realize that this man—whoever he is—has coolly announced that he owns everything you own? That he’s John Farnleigh? That he’s the heir to a baronetcy and thirty thousand pounds a year? And that he means to have it from you?”

  “Yes, I realize that.”

  “But doesn’t it mean anything to you?” cried Molly. “You’re treating him with as great care and consideration as though it didn’t.”

  “It means everything to me.”

  “Well, then! If anybody had come to you and said, ‘I am John Farnleigh,’ I should have thought you would have said, ‘Oh, really?’ and merely kicked him out without thinking anything more about it, unless you sent for the police. That’s what I should have done.”

  “You don’t understand these things, my dear. And Burrows says_____”

  He looked slowly round the room. He seemed to be listening to the quiet ticking of the clock, to be savoring the odors of scrubbed floors and fresh curtains, to be reaching out in the sunlight over all the rich and quiet acres he now owned. At that moment, oddly enough, he looked most like a Puritan; and also he looked dangerous.

  “It would be rather rotten,” he said slowly, “to lose all this now.”

  He caught himself up, altering the quiet violence of his manner, as the door opened. Knowles, the old and bald-headed butler, ushered in Nathaniel Burrows and Brian Page.

  Burrows, as Page had observed during their walk up here, wore now his most buttoned-up and halibut-like look. Page would not have known him for the human being of that afternoon. But Page supposed it was necessary because of the awkward atmosphere: he felt it at its worst. Glancing at his host and hostess, he began to wish he hadn’t come.