CHAPTER IICONCERNING THE GREUZE, SOME GENTILES, AND A JEW
Later on that same morning all London was thrilled by the story of a sensational burglary at the house of Mr. Hildebrand Flurscheim, the noted connoisseur and dealer in objects of art.
Just at daybreak Mr. Flurscheim had been aroused by the ringing of the burglar alarm, and, throwing on his dressing-gown, he had rushed downstairs. There he had found the front door open, and, running into the street, he commenced to blow frantically the police whistle which he had in his hand—he always slept with a police whistle attached to a ribbon round his neck and with a revolver under his pillow.
He had not been compelled to waste much breath before the summons was responded to, for a constable was almost instantly on the spot.
Mr. Hildebrand Flurscheim dwelt in a quarter of London greatly favoured by rank, fashion, and the children of Abraham. His house was at the corner of a street turning into Park Lane, and at the shrill sound of the whistle there emerged from turning after turning helmeted men in blue who with one accord made their way at paces varying with each man's temperament to the place where the excited art dealer stood beckoning vigorously.
Mr. Flurscheim had speedily revealed his reason forgiving the alarm. The house was surrounded by constables, and two of the force accompanied the owner back into his house, which they proceeded to search systematically. At this time, Mr. Flurscheim had not discovered his loss and was disposed to think that the electric alarm had frustrated an attempt of someone to enter his abode. But when he arrived, in the course of the search, at his drawing-room on the first floor, he learned that the thief had been only too successful in the object which had brought him thither. From the place on the wall where the gem of his collection, the Greuze, which he had sworn should never leave his possession until £20,000 should have been paid into his banking account, had hung, only an empty frame confronted him, while tossed carelessly aside on the table was an ordinary table knife which had been used for the purpose of cutting the canvas from the frame.
Upon the discovery of his loss, Mr. Flurscheim had for a while been bereft of speech and movement. When volition returned to him, he behaved as one demented. He wrung his hands, he tore his hair and his clothes, and he called upon the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob to visit his despoiler with condign punishment.
When a little later he discovered that some more of his choicest treasures, the jewelled snuff-boxes of which he had the finest collection in the world, had been carried away, he became absolutely frantic with grief, so that even the policemen felt moved in their hearts to pity him.
The frenzy did not endure long. A thing trifling in itself was sufficient to restore the dealer to full possession of his senses. The sergeant of police who had accompaniedhim into the room had pulled out his note book in readiness to make notes of the occurrence, when a clock on the mantel-shelf struck four. At the sound, Flurscheim became still.
"Four o'clock," he murmured. "Four o'clock. There's no time to lose. We must be doing." He turned to the policeman. "Sergeant," he said dejectedly, "I shall trust you to forget the exhibition I have made of myself—I——"
The sergeant answered briskly. "Very natural, I'm sure, sir. Should have felt just like it myself, though I must admit I've put the bracelets on many a man who hasn't said half as much as you have done—of course, in the public streets, sir."
There was a sickly smile on Flurscheim's face as he answered: "I hope none of them had such good reason for cursing as I have."
He did not pursue the topic. With an effort he forced his mind from contemplation of the loss. "Hadn't we better leave things in this room untouched, while we search the rest of the house? There may be some one of the burglars, if there was more than one, still on the premises."
The sergeant agreed. But the search was a fruitless one. Mr. Flurscheim's butler and his four women servants were the only other persons found on the premises, and after their unsuccessful search the uniformed members of the force withdrew and the dealer sat down to await the arrival of the detective with what patience he could summon to his aid.
It was the bitterest moment in Flurscheim's career. Despite Lynton Hora's sneer, it was not the monetaryvalue of his loss which troubled him, for though he dealt in pictures and other art objects, yet he never parted with any of his treasures without a poignant feeling of regret. When he sold them, however, he knew that they would pass into appreciative hands, that they would be guarded carefully and preserved jealously. To him they were what horses are to one man or dogs to another. They were his companions, his friends, his children—and to have the chief of them ruthlessly cut from its frame and carried away, he knew not where, was as if his household had been robbed of an only child.
He gazed forlornly at the empty frame. Since the Greuze had come into his possession, never a night had passed without his taking a last glance at it before going upstairs to bed, never a morning dawned but he had feasted his eyes upon it before sitting down to his breakfast. To live alone without the Greuze seemed to him an unthinkable existence.
Yet the frame was empty. There took root in his heart a desire for revenge upon the man who had robbed him.
That thought matured in the days which followed—the days which came swiftly and passed swiftly, but without bringing him any trace of his treasure, days in which the detectives continually buoyed him up with hopes that his picture was on the ace of being restored to him.
They had indeed thought that the task would not have proved a difficult one. Their inspection of the room from which the picture had been stolen had led to the discovery of a number of clues to work upon. They decided that an entry must have been effected through a window which opened upon the portico over the frontdoor. At that window were a number of scarlet berried shrubs, and some of the berries were found crushed on the carpet inside. On the balcony they discovered a palette knife, with smears of cobalt and chrome upon it, which obviously had been used to force back the catch of the window. For days afterwards, detectives might have been observed knocking at the doors of London studios and offering themselves as models to aspiring Academicians, in the hope of ascertaining the whereabouts of the missing picture. But they found no trace of the Greuze.
On the knife-handle too, were unmistakable finger-prints, and on the empty frame were others. All were photographed, and hope was strong that the identity of the thief would be disclosed thereby, through comparison with the records of convicts at Scotland Yard. But when the first comparison seemed to point to the fact that every print was that of a different person, and closer investigation proved that the dirty smudges were not finger-prints at all, the problem became indubitably more complex. As for the knife which had been used to cut the canvas from the frame, that was an ordinary table-knife, of which counterparts might have been discovered in every mean house in the metropolis, and it supplied no basis for any theory as to the owner. The one fact which chiefly puzzled Scotland Yard, however, was the fact that no suspicious characters had been observed anywhere in the neighbourhood, while the position of the house was such that it was particularly open to observation.
Standing at the corner of two streets, in a neighbourhood where all the houses would be described in a houseagent's catalogue as "highly desirable family town residences," it was under observation from at least three quarters. The streets at three or four o'clock were at that time practically empty of all pedestrians save the police. Yet not a member of the police on duty in the vicinity had seen a suspicious looking character.
This was the more astonishing, because two extra constables were on duty that night in the near neighbourhood. They had been detailed for duty at the town mansion of one of the most popular of society hostesses, Lady Greyston, who was giving the first of her dances for the season. Lady Greyston's house was only six removed from Mr. Flurscheim's, and until three o'clock one of the constables had been stationed at the corner of the street, practically at Mr. Flurscheim's front door, in order to direct the carriages arriving to pick up departing guests. The stream of carriages had thinned shortly after three, and then the constable had joined a colleague at the door, but at no time during the night had anything out of the way attracted his attention. The police were quite at a loss for an object of suspicion.
But while Scotland Yard was hopelessly at a loss for a clue, the newspapers had been busy printing stories of the crime, which did great credit to the fertility of the imagination of the reporters who were detailed to work up the case. Those who read these stories might have had warrant almost for believing that each writer must have been the principal, so intimately and minutely was the crime reconstructed.
But throughout the public excitement and conjecture which the burglary created, Lynton Hora and Guy remained entirely undisturbed,or, at the most, merely stirred to mild amusement as each new theory was evolved—each was so very wide of the mark. Yet audacious as many of these theories were, none of them paralleled the audacity of the real attempt.
How the burglary had been carried out was explained by Guy when, refreshed by six hours' sleep and a cold bath, he joined Myra and Hora at the breakfast table.
"I followed your plans almost exactly," he said to the elder man, "and I found the interior of the house precisely as you described it."
"H—m," chuckled Hora, glancing at a print hung upon the wall opposite him, "that Morland would have been a cheap investment, even if it had been a fake. As it is——"
"As it is," laughed Guy, "your capital has returned to you more than a thousandfold. Still I can't help marvelling at your wonderful eye for detail. You could not have been in Flurscheim's house more than an hour, and yet I found every wire, every lock, every catch, exactly where you told me I should find them. Some of the doors and windows you could never have seen? How could you know?"
"It was not through any capacity for seeing through brick walls," said Hora drily. "But merely a deduction from what Flurscheim himself did not tell me. He was very proud of a system of alarm designed by himself for the protection of his treasures. He told me that it was impossible for a window sash to be lifted or an outer door to be unlatched without setting off the alarm—I observed from outside that the attics were fitted with swing casements and I drew my own conclusions."
"You omitted to inform me that the servants slept inthose attics," remarked Guy. "I nearly stepped on the bed of one of them when I entered the window."
"So that is why you left by the front door, was it?" enquired Hora. "It was a little bit risky, wasn't it?"
"No," said the young man. "I calculated that I should get a minute's start, and thirty seconds was quite enough. As a matter of fact, I had a clear minute. I looked out into the street from a window and saw that the coast was clear and the brougham was waiting. There were two or three parties just leaving Lady Greyston's and I calculated upon being able to join them without exciting observation. The street was very much in shadow, and just between lights, after a dance, you know, no one observes very clearly."
"Still it was a risk," observed Hora. "I should have returned by the way I had gone."
"I still think I took the lesser evil," replied Guy. "Besides the chance of finding Flurscheim's servants awake, there was the possibility of being seen from the street as I passed along the parapet back to the window of the Greyston's house. Then suppose I had met someone on the stairs at the Greyston's. The function was practically over. There was every likelihood that some of the servants would be going to their quarters—it would have been deuced unpleasant to have had to explain what I was doing there."
"At all events," remarked Hora, "you ought to have cut off the alarm. Did you forget how to do it?"
A smile flickered across the young man's face.
"No," he said, "I left it in position on purpose. I thought I should like to give Flurscheim a sporting chance of getting his own back. There were just twoflights of stairs and a bedroom door between us. I thought that if that were not sufficient to enable me to get away I should deserve to be captured."
Myra, who had been listening to the conversation in silence, half uttered an exclamation. But she checked it so that only Hora's keen ears heard. He smiled, but said nothing. Guy continued lazily: "You see that I did not misjudge the conditions. I am here." Then he repeated the words he had used a few hours previously. "You must set me a more difficult task next time, Commandatore."
"What an enthusiast you are," remarked Hora. "If you go on at this rate, there will be nothing left for you to do."
"I hate being idle," remarked the young man.
"Never fear, never fear," said Hora, "I have no doubt you will manage to amuse yourself. You did so last night, did you not?"
Although the question was asked carelessly, the young man flushed slightly as he answered: "Tolerably well."
"Only tolerably well?" asked Hora, "and yet you postponed your enterprise until almost too late, for only 'tolerable' amusement."
"Admitted, Commandatore," answered Guy gaily, "the adverb is not sufficient. To tell the truth, I met some very pleasant people, and the time passed swiftly."
Myra sprung the next question.
"Who were they, Guy? Anyone I have met?"
"No," he answered. "A Captain and Mrs. Marven and——"
He did not get to the end of his sentence. Lynton Hora had risen from his chair and interrupted him:"Who did you say? Say the name again," he cried hoarsely.
Both Myra and Guy looked at him in amazement. Hora was not given to showing emotion, and there could be no doubt but that he was deeply moved. His lips were drawn closely together, beads of perspiration broke out on his forehead, every line in his face deepened.
"What's the matter, Commandatore—father?" cried Guy in alarm, as he sprung to Hora's side and laid his hand on the elder man's arm.
Hora shook off the touch roughly.
"Say the name again," he repeated.
"Marven," repeated Guy, "Captain Marven."
Gradually Hora regained control of himself. His features resumed their normal air of petulant acquiescence with the world, but there was a gleam in his eyes which revealed a very different spirit within him. Presently he spoke.
"You are surprised to see me so much moved by the mention of a name. You would not be if you knew what reason I have to hate the possessor of it. So you found Captain Marven very good company, eh, Guy?" He laughed sardonically.
"Why, yes," replied the young man.
"I wonder," he mused, "if you would have thought him as entertaining if you knew the part he has played in my life."
"In your life?" queried Myra and Guy in the same breath.
"In my life," repeated Hora with deliberation. Then he continued in accents which showed how deeply memories of the past rankled: "That is the man, Guy, towhose actions my quarrel with the world is due. Owing to him I found every man's hand raised against me. Owing to him I was compelled in self-defence to raise my hand against every man. Owing to him I became another Ishmael—thrust out into the world, branded, a mark for every man's scorn and every woman's jeers. Oh, I have taken my revenge upon the scorners," he laughed harshly, "but not upon him—not upon him—yet."
He paused, and once more, it was only with an effort that he regained control of himself. He did not again trust himself to speech. He turned on his heel abruptly. At the door he paused.
"You have given me much to think about, Guy," he said. "At present I am unable to think calmly. Some other time I will discuss the matter with you."
He left the room swiftly and the firm step of his sound leg and the following shuffle as he dragged the other foot along after it was the only sound to be heard until the closing of another door told Myra and Guy that he had shut himself in his own apartment.