The Sleuth of St. James's Square, Melville Davisson Post [learn to read activity book .txt] 📗
- Author: Melville Davisson Post
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“I thought Sir Henry was going to crumple up in his chair. He seemed to get loose and baggy in some extraordinary fashion, and his gaping jaw worked. 'But the footprints,' he said, 'the naked footprints?' His voice was a sort of stutter-the sort of shaken stutter of a man who has come a' tumbling cropper.
“The American actually laughed: he laughed as we sometimes laugh at a mental defective.
“'They're not footprints!' he said. 'Nobody ever had a foot cambered like that, or with a heel like it, or with toes like it. Somebody made those prints with his hand—the edge of his palm for the heel and the balls of his fingers for the toes. The wide, unstained distances between these heelprints and the prints of the ball of the toes show the impossible arch.'
“Sir Henry was like a man gone to pieces. 'But who—who made them?' he faltered.
“The American leaned forward and put the big glass over the prints that Sir Henry had made with his fingers in the white dust on the mahogany table. 'I think you know the answer to your question,' he said. 'The whorls of these prints are identical with those of the toe tracks.'
“Then he laid the glass carefully down, sat back in his chair, folded his arms and looked at Sir Henry.
“'Now,' he said, 'will you kindly tell me why you have gone to the trouble of manufacturing all these false evidences of a crime?”'
The girl paused. There was intense silence in the drawing-room. The aged man at the window had turned and was looking at her. The face of the old woman seemed vague and uncertain.
The girl smiled.
“Then,” she said, “the real, amazing miracle happened. Sir Henry got on his feet, his big body tense, his face like iron, his voice ringing.
“'I went to that trouble,' he said, 'because I wished to demonstrate—I wished to demonstrate beyond the possibility of any error—that Mr. Arthur Meadows, the pretended American from St. Paul, was in fact the celebrated criminologist, Karl Holweg Leibnich, of Bonn, giving us the favor of his learned presence while he signaled the German submarines off the east coast roads with his high-powered motor lights.'”
Now there was utter silence in the drawing-room but for the low of the Highland cattle and the singing of the birds outside.
For the first time there came a little tremor in the girl's voice.
“When Sir Henry doubted this American and asked me to go down and make sure before he set a trap for him, I thought—I thought, if Tony could risk his life for England, I could do that much.”
At this moment a maid appeared in the doorway, the trim, immaculate, typical English maid. “Tea is served, my lady,” she said.
The tall, fine old man crossed the room and offered his arm to the girl with the exquisite, gracious manner with which once upon a time he had offered it to a girlish queen at Windsor.
The ancient woman rose as if she would go out before them. Then suddenly, at the door, she stepped aside for the girl to pass, making the long, stooping, backward curtsy of the passed Victorian era.
“After you, my dear,” she said, “always!”
V. The Man in the Green Hat
“Alas, monsieur, in spite of our fine courtesies, the conception of justice by one race must always seem outlandish to another!”
It was on the terrace of Sir Henry Marquis' villa at Cannes. The members of the little party were in conversation over their tobacco—the Englishman, with his brier-root pipe; the American Justice, with a Havana cigar; and the aged Italian, with his cigarette. The last was speaking.
He was a very old man, but he gave one the impression of incredible, preposterous age. He was bald; he had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes. A wiry mustache, yellow with nicotine, alone remained. Great wrinkles lay below the eyes and along the jaw, under a skin stretched like parchment over the bony protuberances of the face.
These things established the aspect of old age; but it was the man's expression and manner that gave one the sense of incalculable antiquity. The eyes seemed to look out from a window, where the man behind them had sat watching the human race from the beginning. And his manners had the completion of one whose experience of life is comprehensive and finished.
“It seems strange to you, monsieur”—he was addressing, in French, the American Justice—“that we should put our prisoners into an iron cage, as beasts are exhibited in a circus. You are shocked at that. It strikes you as the crudity of a race not quite civilized.
“You inquire about it with perfect courtesy; but, monsieur, you inquire as one inquires about a custom that his sense of justice rejects.”
He paused.
“Your pardon, monsieur; but there are some conceptions of justice in the law of your admirable country that seem equally strange to me.”
The men about the Count on the exquisite terrace, looking down over Cannes into the arc of the sea, felt that the great age of this man gave him a right of frankness, a privilege of direct expression, they could not resent. Somehow, at the extremity of life, he seemed beyond pretenses; and he had the right to omit the digressions by which younger men are accustomed to approach the truth.
“What is this strange thing in our law, Count?” said the American.
The old man made a vague gesture, as one who puts away an inquiry until the answer appears.
“Many years ago,” he continued, “I read a story about the red Indians by your author, Cooper. It was named 'The Oak Openings,' and was included, I think, in a volume entitled Stories of the Prairie. I believe I have the names quite right, since the author impressed me as an inferior comer with an abundance of gold about him. In the story Corporal Flint was captured by the Indians under the leadership of Bough of Oak, a cruel and bloodthirsty savage.
“This hideous beast determined to put his prisoner to the torture of the saplings, a barbarity rivaling the crucifixion of the Romans. Two small trees standing near each other were selected, the tops lopped off and the branches removed; they were bent and the tops were lashed together. One of the victim's wrists was bound to the top of each of the young trees; then the saplings were released and the victim, his arms wrenched and dislocated, hung suspended in excruciating agony, like a man nailed to a cross.
“It was fearful torture. The strain on the limbs was hideous, yet the victim might live for days. Nothing short of crucifixion—that beauty of the Roman law—ever equaled
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