Max Pemberton - Murder Mysteries Boxed-Set - 40+ Books in One Edition

"Good God, sir," said I, the sweat starting sudden to my forehead, "there's some one lying on this sofa!"

"You don't mean that!" cried he.

"As I'm a living man, I do. Hold the camera a minute, and let me see."

He took the camera out of my hands, and I struck a lucifer. Its poor passing light lit up our corner of the room maybe for ten seconds before we were in the dark again. But the sight which we both saw is one which I shall never forget to my dying day. Miss More herself lay huddled up on the sofa, her left hand touching the floor, her right hand supporting her head. Her face was the face of one sleeping restfully, yet so pale and unearthly looking that I knew she was dead. And in death all the kindness and sweetness of her nature seemed written ten times over upon her placid features. It might have been a child lying there—a child that had died laughing into a mother's eyes.

For some seconds neither of us spoke. I never remember a minute like that when we stood dumb and trembling in the face of death, and the dark seemed to hide the whole of the awful truth from us. When at last my master opened his lips, his voice was like a whisper of a man in a vault.

"Run for help and a doctor," said he. "God grant we are dreaming!"

He staggered out with me to the door, and our cries brought the old hag from the porter's lodge. She had a lantern in her hand, and she and my master went back to the studio together. When I returned in ten minutes' time—a doctor at my heels—I found the two together chafing the dead woman's hands, and trying to force brandy between her lips. Nor do I know which was the whiter of the two—my master or the dead girl who had befriended him.

"Oh, for God's sake do something, doctor!" said he. "’Tis the sweetest creature in the world to die like this! Ye'll not tell me that there's no hope!"

But the doctor said nothing. He was listening for a beat of the heart—a thing I was sure he would never hear. Five minutes, perhaps, he bent over the little figure of the woman whose laughter had been music to every soul she knew. Then he rose like a man who has done all possible.

"I come too late," he said; "your friend is dead from laudanum poisoning."

A quick glance round the room gave strength to his words. There was a blue bottle upon the table, and a letter by it. The doctor picked up the bottle and smelt it; Sir Nicholas took the letter and read it.

"Pat (it said), take my picture for the love of auld lang syne; take it as I lie when you will see me, and send it to the man whose address is here. I can do no more for him. God bless all who have done me any kindness!"

My master shuddered.

"God forgive any one that ever did harm to so sweet a woman," said he.

Table of Contents

There was no sleep for either of us that night; nor, I think, did Sir Nicolas take off his clothes for two days after Miss More died. The black mystery of the whole thing, the extraordinary surprise of it, was more than he or I could cope with. We had seen the dead woman in the afternoon as merry and as light-hearted as a child; she had asked us to come down to her rooms and to take her picture just as one might ask a friend to pay a pleasant call. What had happened in the between time, what trouble or disappointment or sorrow had come upon her, I knew no more than the dead. That she loved Sir Nicolas Steele I was sure; that her death was in some way to be connected with the strange letter of warning my master had received was equally obvious. But who the writer of that letter was, and what was his claim upon Lilian More, I had yet to find out.

I say that I had yet to find out, and this is true. A jury returned a plain verdict,—a merciful verdict, you may be sure,—and the police, who had taken charge of the writing we found in the room, could add no information to our own. They went to the house to which we had been asked to send the photograph, and found it in a slum in Hammersmith—an empty house, once kept by a woman who let lodgings, but then deserted and almost in ruins. Nor was there any friend of Miss More who could add to what we knew. As for Connoley, he had gone to Scotland the very day his sister-in-law died. No one knew his address, and we took it that he saw nothing in the papers. Indeed, he told me, when I met him in Paris a year later, that he never learned the news until a month after his kinswoman was dead.

All this did not help me in getting at what I wanted; nor was my master any readier in doing what I could not do.

"’Tis a story of trouble, ye may be sure," he said to me on the second morning, "but I doubt if any man will write it. Whatever it was, it must have happened after I gave her the promise to take her picture. 'Twould be terrible to think that she meant it otherwise."

"That's so, sir," said I. "Yet, when a woman is driven to that state, God knows what she won't think of! Be sure of this, that she wanted somebody to know she was dead, and this was the queer idea she had of telling him."

"Would it be the man who wrote me the murdering letter?" he asked.

"I have no doubt of it—her husband, very likely, if she had one. At least, that's what appears on the face of it."

"I never thought of that," he said quickly. "It may be as you say, but he'll go wanting the picture, any way. I wouldn't have taken it for a thousand down."

"There you're wrong, sir," said I; "if we're prudent men we'll find out who this person is, and what he has against us. And the picture may help us. It's here, in my pocket, any way."

I never saw a man more astonished.

"Ye had it taken, then?" he cried.

"That's so, sir. I called in a photographer yesterday, and here's the print."

He took the picture and looked at for a long time.

"Well," said he, "we must all come to that, some day or other. Good God! it makes me cold to think of it. And the sweetest little woman that ever drew breath. Ye won't leave it about the place? I couldn't sleep with a thing like that in my rooms."

I told him that I would not, and I put the picture away. It was clear that I could do nothing with it until he should give me some information which I did not then possess; and, as it turned out, I had almost forgotten the affair when that information came to me. Indeed, three weeks had passed and Jack Ames had paid the two hundred, and we were on the eve of going up to Yorkshire, when, just as Nicky had left Gower Street one night to dine at the Green House Club, there came a ring at our bell and a tall man stepped into the hall and asked for him. There was only a bit of a gas-flare burning in the passage then, and the man being in the shadow, I couldn't very well see his face; but I noticed that his clothes were very shabby and that he wore a rough overcoat which was a size too small for him. And his hat was an old silk one; but so black inside that a regiment of heads might have worn it.

"You desire to see Sir Nicolas Steele?" said I, not much liking the look of him, for he stood there just like a mute.

"I want to see him," he answered in a thick, husky voice, "and to see him at once."

"Well," said I, not liking his manner, "I've a notion that you can't do that, since he isn't in the house."

"Not in the house!" cried he, losing his temper all in a minute. "Oh! I'll soon know about that. Come, no lies—where is he, and where is the other?"

With this word, he took a step forward into the passage, and I saw his face for the first time. It was the face of an exceedingly handsome man, but there was a queer look in the eyes, such as I have never seen in the eyes of a human being before or since. Try as I might I couldn't describe that strange expression of his. Anger, determination, cruelty, all these were in it, but there was something beyond, a look as though the man had no power to keep his thoughts on any one thing for two minutes together; not the peering gaze of the madman, but the glance of one weakened by long illness until the nerves were shattered and the brain unhinged.