§1
"Are you prepared to admit," the Old Man in the Corner said abruptly as soon as he had finished his glass of milk, "that sympathy, understanding, largeness of heart—what?—are invariably the outcome of a big brain? It is the fool who is censorious and cruel. Your clever man is nearly always sympathetic. He understands, he appreciates, he studies motives and understands them. During the war it was the fools who tracked down innocent men and women under pretence that they were spies; it was the fools who did not understand that a German might be just as fine a patriot as a Briton or a Frenchman if he served his own country. The hard, cruel man is almost always a fool; the backbiting old maid invariably so.
"I am tempted to say this," he went on, "because I have been thinking over that curious case which newspaper reporters have called the Fulton Gardens Mystery. You remember it, don't you?"
"Yes," I said, "I do. As a matter of fact I knew poor old Mr. Jessup slightly, and I was terribly shocked when I heard about that awful tragedy. And to think that that horrid young Leighton——"
"Ha!" my eccentric friend broke in, with a chuckle, "then you have held on to that theory, have you?"
"There was no other possible!" I retorted.
"But he was discharged."
I shrugged my shoulders under pretence of being unconvinced. As a matter of fact, all I wanted was to make the funny creature talk.
"A flimsy alibi," I said coldly.
"And a want of sympathy," he rejoined.
"What has sympathy got to do with a brutal assault on a defenceless old man? You can't deny that Leighton had something, at any rate, to do with it?"
"I did not mean sympathy for the guilty," he argued, "but for the women who were the principal witnesses in the case."
"I don't see——" I protested.
"No, but I do. I understood, and in a great measure I sympathised."
At which expression of noble sentiment I burst out laughing. I couldn't help it. In view of his preamble just now his fatuous statement was funny beyond words.
"You being the clever man who understands, etcetera," I said, as seriously as I could, "and I the censorious and cruel old maid who is invariably a fool."
"You put it crudely," he rejoined complacently, "and had you not given ample proof of your intelligence before now I might have thought it worth while to refute the second half of your argument. As for the first..."
"Hadn't you better tell me about the Fulton Gardens Mystery?" I broke in impatiently.
"Certainly," he replied, in no way abashed. "I have meant to talk to you about it all along, only that you would digress."
"Pax!" I retorted, and with a conciliatory smile I handed him a beautiful bit of string. He pounced on it with thin hands that looked like the talons of a bird, and he gloated on that bit of string for all the world as on a prey.
"I dare say," he began, "that to most people the mystery appeared baffling enough. But to me ... Well, there was the victim of what you very properly call the cowardly assault, your friend—or acquaintance—Mr. Seton Jessup, a man on the wrong side of sixty, but very active and vigorous for his years. He carried on the business of pearl merchant in Fulton Gardens, but he did not live there, as you know. He was a married man, had sons and daughters and a nice house in Fitzjohn's Avenue. He also owned the house in Fulton Gardens, a four-storied building of the pattern prevalent in that neighbourhood. The ground floor, together with the one above that, and the basement were used by Mr. Jessup himself for his business: on the ground floor he had his office and showroom, above that were a couple of reception rooms, where he usually had his lunch and saw a few privileged customers, and in the basement there was a kitchen with scullery and pantry, a small servants' hall, and a strong-room for valuables. The top story of all was let to a surgical-instrument maker who did not sleep on the premises, and the second floor—that is the one just below the surgical-instrument maker and immediately above the reception rooms—was occupied by Mrs. Tufnell, who was cook-housekeeper to Mr. Jessup, and her niece, Ann Weber, who acted as the house-parlourmaid. Mrs. Tufnell's son, Mark, who was a junior clerk in the office, did not sleep in the house. He was considered to be rather delicate, and lived with a family somewhere near the Alexandra Palace.
"All these people, as you know, played important parts in the drama that was enacted on the sixteenth of November at No. 13, Fulton Gardens—an unlucky number, by the way, but one which Mr. Jessup did not change to the usual 12a when he bought the house, because he despised all superstition. He was a hard-headed, prosperous business man; he worked hard himself, and expected hard work from his employés. Both his sons worked in the office, one as senior clerk, and the other as showman, and in addition to young Mark Tufnell there was another junior clerk—a rather unsatisfactory youth named Arthur Leighton, who was some sort of a relation of Mrs. Jessup's. But for this connection he never would have been kept on in the business, as he was unpunctual, idle, and unreliable. The housekeeper, as well as some of the neighbours, had been scandalised lately by what was picturesquely termed the 'goings on of that young Leighton with Ann, the housemaid at No. 13.'
"Ann Weber was a very pretty girl, and like many pretty girls she was fond of finery and of admiration. As soon as she entered Mr. Jessup's service she started a flirtation with Mark Tufnell, then she dropped him for a while in favour of the youngest Mr. Jessup; then she went back to Mark, and seemed really in love with him that time until, finally, she transferred her favours to Arthur Leighton, chiefly because he was by far the most generous of her admirers. He was always giving her presents of jewellery which Mark Tufnell could not afford, and young Jessup apparently did not care to give her. But she did not, by any means, confine her flirtations to one man: indeed, it appears that she had a marvellous facility for keeping several men hanging about her dainty apron-strings. She was not on the best of terms with her aunt, chiefly because the latter noted with some asperity that her son was far from cured of his infatuation for the pretty housemaid. The more she flirted with Leighton and the others the greater did his love for her appear, and all that Mrs. Tufnell could hope for was that Mr. Leighton would marry Ann one day soon, when he would take her right away and Mark would then probably make up his mind to forget her. Young Leighton was doing very well in business apparently, for he always had plenty of money to spend, whilst poor Mark had only a small salary, and, moreover, had nothing of the smart, dashing ways about him which had made the other man so attractive to Ann."