“Perhaps,” said the other slowly, as he explored the safe with an electric torch, “perhaps they didn’t require much of that. My word! it strikes warm coming out of that place! like a vault, it is. But here, what’s this bank-like of dust all spread out into the room? That must have come there since the door was opened; it would sweep it all away if you moved it—see? Now what do you make of that?”
“Make of it? About as much as I make of anything else in this case. One of London’s mysteries this is going to be, by what I can see. And I don’t believe a photographer’s box full of large-size old-fashioned Prayer-Books is going to take us much further. For that’s just what your package is.”
It was a natural but hasty utterance. The preceding narrative shows that there was in fact plenty of material for constructing a case; and when once Messrs Davidson and Witham had brought their end to Scotland Yard, the join-up was soon made, and the circle completed.
To the relief of Mrs Porter, the owners of Brockstone decided not to replace the books in the Chapel; they repose, I believe, in a safe-deposit in town. The police have their own methods of keeping certain matters out of the newspapers; otherwise, it can hardly be supposed that Watkins’s evidence about Mr Poschwitz’s death could have failed to furnish a good many head-lines of a startling character to the press.
A NEIGHBOUR’S LANDMARK
THOSE who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy. Happy in these employments, and in occasionally opening an eighteenth-century octavo, to see “what it is all about,” and to conclude after five[71] minutes that it deserves the seclusion it now enjoys, I had reached the middle of a wet August afternoon at Betton Court——
“You begin in a deeply Victorian manner,” I said; “is this to continue?”
“Remember, if you please,” said my friend, looking at me over his spectacles, “that I am a Victorian by birth and education, and that the Victorian tree may not unreasonably be expected to bear Victorian fruit. Further, remember that an immense quantity of clever and thoughtful Rubbish is now being written about the Victorian age. Now,” he went on, laying his papers on his knee, “that article, ‘The Stricken Years,’ in the Times Literary Supplement the other day,—able? of course it is able; but, oh! my soul and body, do just hand it over here, will you? it’s on the table by you.”
“I thought you were to read me something you had written,” I said, without moving, “but, of course——”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “Very well, then, I’ll do that first. But I should like to show you afterwards what I mean. However——” And he lifted the sheets of paper and adjusted his spectacles.