He had mysteriously disappeared, and Doc. Gus had a right to put the worst construction upon his conduct. Father Lessing knew the truth; why did Father Lessing allow Doc. Gus to remain in ignorance?
But the most serious blunder in the plot relates to the climax—the fire in Colonel Quillmore’s laboratory.
Doc. Gus sees the shadow of two men thrown upon the window shade. Only one of these men is accounted for, and the reader is left not only in doubt as to what happened, but in hopeless confusion. He cannot adopt any theory which will explain all the facts.
Now, that is against the rules. Let the plot be ever so complicated, the mystery ever so deep, the author must either clear it up himself, or furnish the reader with the clue. Wilkie Collins, in spite of his bewildering tangles, unravels everything before he quits. In “Edwin Drood,” the book which Dickens was writing when death interrupted the story, the author had constructed one of his most involved and difficult plots. Before he had furnished the key to the riddle, he died. Yet Edgar Allan Poe was able to tell, with unerring certainty, just how the story was meant to end. By a keen analysis of the facts which Dickens had already related, and by a course of reasoning that left no room for doubt, Poe demonstrated that Jasper, the guardian and devoted friend of Edwin Drood, had murdered him; that jealousy was the motive; that the body of the victim was hidden in the new tomb which the inflated ass, Sapsea, had recently built for the deceased Mrs. Sapsea; and that the corpse was located by old Durdles, the drunken workman whose skill with his hammer was so great that he could, by tapping, tapping, tapping on the outside or a wall, tell whether a foreign substance, such as a human body, was inclosed within.
Poe’s own matchless story, “The Gold Bug,” illustrates the rule which Mr. Chatterton broke. There are all sorts of mystifications to start with, but they are cleared up at the end.
Even in Frank Stockton’s famous “The Lady or the Tiger,” the rule is kept. The reader is left in a dilemma, but he can clear up everything by choosing one horn or the other. If he says that it is the lady who is behind the door which is about to be opened, no mystery remains. If he says that it is the tiger which is behind the door, nothing is left of the puzzle.
But in the Quillmore story there is no possible explanation which will dispose of the facts. If Colonel Quillmore died in the laboratory, and L’Oiseau did not kill him, who did? What about the two men quarreling in there at the time of the tragedy? What becomes of that other man? And how could Quillmore’s son meet him again in Paris? With the exception of L’Oiseau, no one had the motive to kill Colonel Quillmore; and the author made a point of showing that other people were afraid to go near the laboratory.
But if the Colonel did not die in the laboratory, how did his false teeth get into the mouth of the dead man when Doc. Gus dragged him out of the flames? How did the Colonel’s Masonic ring get on the dead man’s finger? How did the Colonel make his escape without being seen, and, who was it that he quarreled with and killed before he fled? Nobody appears to have been missing from the neighborhood. Usually when somebody is killed, somebody is missed.
Had Mr. Chatterton refrained from putting another man in the laboratory, had he left the Colonel dead in the flames, identified by his Masonic ring, had he left the reader to suppose that the sudden death of the Colonel and the sudden blaze which broke out in the building resulted from some dangerous chemical experiment, such as the Colonel delighted in—the story would have lost not a grain of interest and would have escaped a flagrant violation of the rules of literary construction.
The Game and the Candle. By Frances Davidge. D. Appleton & Co., New York.