The Crooked Hinge Page 4

  “I met Gore—I met you,” amplified the speaker, looking at his host steadily, “on B Deck. You had all your possessions in a little straw suitcase. You told me quite coolly that the ship was going down, and going down fast: if I really wanted to change identities, it might be managed in the confusion, or if either of us survived. I said, what about Murray? You lied, saying that Murray was overboard and dead already. And I was willing enough to become a great circus-performer, so we changed: clothes, papers, rings, everything. You even got my diary.”

  Farnleigh said nothing.

  “Afterwards,” added the claimant, without altering the tone of his voice, “you were very neat. We were ready to run for the boats. You waited until my back was turned; then you fished out the steward’s wooden mallet you had stolen, you caught me on the back of the skull with it, and you tried with three blows to finish the work.”

  Farnleigh still said nothing. Molly got up from her chair; but, at a gesture from him, she sat down again.

  “Mind you,” insisted the claimant, with a movement as though he were flicking dust from the table, “I am not here to bring that up against you. Twenty-five years is a long time, and you were a boy then, though I am wondering into what sort of man you have grown. I was considered a bad lot myself. It is possible that you despised me and believed you had justification. You need not have been so thorough, because I should have assumed your identity in any case. Still—even if I was the black sheep of the family, I was never quite so black as that.

  “The rest of it will be clear to you. By what I must insist was a stroke of luck I was found, damaged but alive, and pushed into the last surviving boat. The casualty lists were at first uncertain, and America is a large country, and I was for some time in the world of shadows. Both the names of John Farnleigh and Patrick Gore appeared as missing. I thought you were dead, as you thought I was. When my possessions and papers identified me as Patrick Gore to Mr. Boris Yeldritch, the circus-proprietor—who had never seen you—I was entirely content.

  “If I did not like the life, I thought, I could always reveal myself. Perhaps I should have better treatment, I thought, if I miraculously returned from the dead. The prospect pleased me; it was a dramatic card in reserve; and, believe me, it gave me many comforting nights.”

  “And,” said Molly as though with elaborate interest, “did you become the trick bicycle-rider of the circus?”

  The claimant turned his head sideways. His dark gray eye was kindled with such strong inner amusement that he resembled a crafty small boy. Again he lifted his hand and rubbed the thinning patch on the crown of his head.

  “No. No, although I had my first sensational success with the circus, I became something else. For the moment I should prefer not to tell you what it was. In addition to the fact that it is an excellent secret, I do not wish to bore you with details of my subsequent life.

  “Believe me, I had always intended one day to return to my old home and astonish them with the baaing of a black sheep from the grave. For I have been successful; by all the prophets I have!—and I felt that this would make my brother Dudley writhe. But this dramatic plum I reserved. I even visited England without being too much tempted. For, mind you, I had no reason to suspect that ‘John Farnleigh’ was alive. I thought he was supposed to be dead, instead of flourishing in Colorado.

  “You will therefore understand my surprise, some six months ago, when quite by chance I picked up an illustrated paper and saw the picture of Sir John and Lady Farnleigh. My brother Dudley, I noted, was dead of a surfeit of lampreys. His ‘younger brother’ had inherited. At first I thought this must be the mistake of the paper for some distant connection. But a few inquiries uncovered the truth; and after all, you know, I am the heir. Still a young man—still vigorous—but not revengeful.

  “Such things grow exceedingly dim. A generation has grown up; there are a thousand good memories between me and the small whelp who tried to alter the succession with a seaman’s mallet and who, I hear, has become a useful citizen since. All the trees look the same; but my eyes have changed. I feel strange and raw in my own home. I am not sure that I shall make the best possible patron for the local cricket-club or the local Boy Scouts. But I have (as you observe) a strong weakness for making speeches, and I daresay I shall get on well enough. Now, Patrick Gore, you have heard my proposal. It is generous enough. If I take you to court, I warn you I will have your hide. In the meantime, gentlemen, I am open to answer questions from anyone who has ever known me. I have a few questions to put myself, and I will defy Gore to answer them.”

  For a time after he had spoken, it was quiet in the darkening room. He had an almost hypnotic voice. But they were looking at Farnleigh, who had risen and stood with his knuckles on the table. In Farnleigh’s dark face there was quiet, and relief, and a certain curiosity as he examined his guest. He brushed a hand under his cropped moustache; he almost smiled.

  Molly saw that smile, and drew a deep breath.

  “You have something to say, John?” she prompted.

  “Yes. I don’t know why he’s come here with this story, or what he hopes to get out of it. But what this man says is absolutely false from beginning to end.”

  “You intend to fight?” asked the claimant with interest.

  “Of course I mean to fight, you ass. Or, rather, I’ll let you do the fighting.”

  Mr. Welkyn seemed about to intervene, with a vast throat-clearing, but the claimant stopped him.

  “No, no,” he said comfortably. “Please stay out of this, Welkyn. You brethren of the law are all very well to put in the ‘whereases’ and the ‘proceed with caution,’ but you are out of place in a personal skirmish like this. To tell the truth, I shall enjoy this. Well, let us apply a few tests. I wonder if you would mind calling your butler in here?”

  Farnleigh frowned. “But look here: Knowles wasn’t—”

  “Why not do as he asks, John?” suggested Molly sweetly.

  Farnleigh caught her look; and, if there is a paradox which can be called humorless humor, his sharp features showed it. He rang for Knowles, who entered in the same uncertain way. The claimant regarded him musingly.

  “I thought I recognized you when we came in here,” the claimant said. “You were here in my father’s time, were you not?”

  “Sir?”

  “You were here in my father’s, Sir Dudley Farnleigh’s, time. Weren’t you?”

  An expression of disgust went over Farnleigh’s face.

  “You will do your case no good by this,” interposed Nathaniel Burrows sharply. “The butler in Sir Dudley Farnleigh’s time was Stenson, who has been dead—”

  “Yes. I was aware of that,” said the claimant, turning his eyes sideways. Then he contemplated the butler, sitting back and crossing his legs with some effort. “Your name is Knowles. In my father’s time you were the butler at old Colonel Mardale’s place, over in Frettenden. You used to keep two rabbits that the colonel knew nothing about. You kept them in a corner of the coach-house nearest the orchard. One of the rabbits was named Billy.” He looked up. “Ask this gentleman the name of the other.”

  Knowles had gone slightly pink.

  “Ask him, will you?”

  “Rot!” snapped Farnleigh, and drew himself back into his dignity again.

  “Oh,” said the claimant. “You mean you cannot answer?”

  “I mean I don’t choose to answer.” Yet six pairs of eyes were fastened on him, and he seemed to feel the pressure; he shifted and almost stuttered. “Who can be expected to remember the name of a rabbit after twenty-five years? All right, all right: stop a bit! There was some nonsense about their names, I remember. Let me think. Billy and W—no, that’s not it. Billy and Silly, that’s it? Or was it? I’m not sure.”

  “That is correct, sir,” Knowles told him with an air of relief.

  The claimant was not out of countenance.

  “Well, let us try again. Now, Knowles. One evening in summer—it was the year before I went away�
�you were going through that same orchard to take a message to a certain neighbor. You were surprised and rather shocked to find me making love to a certain young lady of twelve or thirteen. Ask your employer the name of that young lady.”

  Farnleigh was dark and heavy-looking.

  “I don’t remember any such incident.”

  “Are you trying to convey the impression,” said the claimant, “that your natural chivalry restrains you? No, my friend, that will not do. It was a long time ago and I give you my solemn word that nothing of a compromising nature passed. Knowles, you remember what went on in the apple-orchard, don’t you?”

  “Sir,” said the bedevilled butler, “I—”

  “You do. But I thought this man would not remember it, because I do not think I entered the fact in my valuable diary. What was the name of the young lady?”

  Farnleigh nodded. “All right,” he answered with an attempt at lightness. “It was Miss Dane, Madeline Dane.”

  “Madeline Dane—” began Molly.

  For the first time the claimant seemed a little taken aback. His quick eyes moved round the group, and his quick intuition seemed to move too.

  “She must have written to you in America,” returned the claimant. “We shall have to cut deeper. But I beg your pardon: I hope I have committed no blunder? I hope the young lady is not still living in the district at a more mature age, and that I have not touched on any inconvenient subject?”

  “Damn you,” said Farnleigh suddenly, “I’ve stood about enough of this. I can’t keep my temper much longer. Will you kindly get out of here?”

  “No,” said the other. “I mean to break down your bluff. For it is a bluff, my boy, and you know it. Besides, I think it was agreed that we should wait for Kennet Murray.”

  “Suppose we do wait for Murray?” Farnleigh spoke with toiling lucidity. “Where will it get us? What will it prove, beyond this fiddle-faddle of questions to which we both apparently know the answers? And yet you don’t know the answers, because you’re the one who is bluffing. I could ask some myself, just as nonsensical as yours. But that’s nothing. How did you ever expect to prove a thing like this. How do you still think you can prove it?”

  The claimant sat back, richly enjoying his position.

  “By the incontrovertible evidence of fingerprints,” he said.

  Chapter Four

  IT WAS AS THOUGH the man had been keeping this in reserve, waiting for the proper moment to say it and savoring triumph in advance. He seemed a little disappointed that he had to produce the trump so early, and under circumstances less dramatic than he might have wished. But the others were not thinking in terms of drama.

  Brian Page heard Burrows breathe in with a shaky kind of noise. Burrows got to his feet.

  “I was not informed of this,” the solicitor said fiercely.

  “But you guessed it?” smiled fat Mr. Welkyn.

  “It is not my business to guess at anything,” returned Burrows. “I repeat, sir, I have not been informed of this. I have heard nothing about fingerprints.”

  “Nor have we, officially. Mr. Murray has kept his own counsel. But,” inquired Welkyn, with rich suavity, “does the present holder need to be told? If he is the real Sir John Farnleigh, surely he remembers that Mr. Murray took the fingerprints of the boy as long ago as the year nineteen-ten or eleven.”

  “I repeat, sir—”

  “Let me repeat, Mr. Burrows: did you need to be informed of it? What does the present holder himself have to say?”

  Farnleigh’s expression seemed to have retreated, to have become locked up. As usual when he was among mental brambles, he did two things. He began to walk round the room with short, quick steps; and he took a key-ring out of his pocket and twirled it round his forefinger.

  “Sir John!”

  “Eh?”

  “Do you remember,” asked Burrows, “any such circumstances as Mr. Welkyn mentions? Did Mr. Murray ever take your fingerprints?”

  “Oh, that,” said Farnleigh, as though it were of no importance. “Yes, I remember it now. I’d forgotten it. But it occurred to me when I was talking to you and my wife a while ago—you know. I wondered if that could be it, and it made me a whole lot easier in my mind. Yes, old Murray got my fingerprints right enough.”

  The claimant turned round. He wore an expression not only of mild astonishment, but of sudden and wondering suspicion as well.

  “This will not do, you know,” the claimant said. “You don’t maintain that you will face the test of fingerprints?”

  “Face it? Face it?” repeated Farnleigh, with grim pleasure. “Man, it’s the best thing that could have happened. You’re the impostor, and you know it. Murray’s old fingerprint test—by George, now I come to think of it, I can remember every detail of that business!—will settle matters. Then I can throw you out.”

  And the two rivals looked at each other.

  For some time Brian Page had been trying to put weights into a scales which would not remain still. He had been trying, without friendship or prejudice, to see where the imposture lay. This issue was simple. If Patrick Gore (to give him the name by which he had been announced) were the impostor, he was one of the coolest and most smooth-faced crooks who ever walked into another man’s house. If the present John Farnleigh were the impostor, he was not only a slippery criminal behind that naive, straightforward mask: he was a would-be murderer as well.

  There was a pause.

  “You know, my friend,” observed the claimant, as though with refreshed interest, “I admire your cheek. One moment, please. I do not say that as a baiting jeer or to start a row. I state, as a matter of simple fact, that I admire an aes-triplex cheek which Casanova himself could not have equalled. Now, I am not surprised that you ‘forgot’ the fingerprints. They were taken at a time before I began to keep my diary. But to say you forgot them: to SAY you forgot them—”

  “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

  “John Farnleigh wouldn’t or couldn’t have forgotten a detail of that. I, being John Farnleigh, certainly didn’t. That is why Kennet Murray was the only person in the world who had any influence with me. Murray on Footprints. Murray on Disguises. Murray on the Disposal of the Body. Wough! And particularly Murray on Fingerprints, which were then the newest scientific craze. I am aware,”—he interrupted himself, raising his voice and looking round the group,—“that fingerprints were discovered by Sir William Herschel in the eighteen-fifties, and re-discovered by Dr. Faulds in the late seventies. But they were not admitted as legal evidence in an English court until nineteen-five, and even then the judge was dubious. It took years of argument to establish them. Yet, as a possible ‘test’ of Murray’s, you say you never thought of fingerprints.”

  “You’re doing a hell of a lot of talking,” said Farnleigh, who again looked swollen and dangerous.

  “Naturally. Though you never once thought of fingerprints before, it all comes back to you now. Tell me this. When the prints were taken, how were they taken?”

  “How?”

  “In what form?”

  Farnleigh pondered. “On a sheet of glass,” he said.

  “Nonsense. They were taken in a ‘Thumbograph,’ a little book which was quite a popular game or toy at the time. A little gray book. Murray had a lot of others, my father’s and my mother’s and anybody else’s he could get.”

  “Stop a bit. Hold on. I believe there was a book—we sat over in that window—”

  “So you profess to remember now.”

  “Look here,” said Farnleigh quietly, “who do you think I am? Do you think I’m that fellow in the music-halls, the one you shoot questions at and he instantly tells you the number of clauses in the Magna Charta or what horse ran second in the Derby in 1882? That’s what you sound like. There’s a lot of rubbish that’s better forgotten. People change. They change, I tell you.”

  “But not their basic characters, as you profess to have changed. That is the point I am making. You cannot turn your whole sou
l inside out, you know.”

  During this controversy Mr. Welkyn had been sitting back with a massive gravity but with a certain complacence which beamed forth from his protuberant blue eyes. Now he lifted his hand.

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen. Surely this wrangling is not—er—seemly, if you will allow me to say so? The matter, I am glad to say, can be settled within a very short time—”

  “I still insist,” snapped Nathaniel Burrows, “that, not having been instructed about this matter of the fingerprints, I may, in the interests of Sir John Farnleigh—”

  “Mr. Burrows,” said the claimant calmly, “you must have guessed it, even if we did not choose to tell you. I suspect you guessed it from the first, and that is why you tolerated this claim. You are trying to save your face on both sides, whether your man should turn out to be a fraud or whether he should not. Well, you had better come over to our side soon.”

  Farnleigh stopped pacing. He tossed up the key-ring, caught it with a flat smack against his palm, and closed his long fingers round it.

  “Is that true?” he asked Burrows.

  “If it were true, Sir John, I should have been compelled to take other steps. At the same time, it is my duty to investigate—”

  “That’s all right,” said Farnleigh. “I only wanted to know where my friends stand. I’m not saying much. My memories, pleasant or unpleasant: and some of them have kept me awake at nights: I’ll keep to myself. Just bring on your fingerprints, and then we shall see. The point is, where is Murray? Why isn’t he here?”

  The claimant wore a look of Mephistophelian pleasure, in which he contrived to suggest a sinister frown.

  “If events ran according to form,” he answered with relish, “Murray would already have been murdered and his body hidden in the pond in the garden. (There is still a pond there, isn’t there? I thought so.) As a matter of sober fact, I believe he is on his way here now. Besides, I do not wish to put ideas into anybody’s head.”