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Page 73
"I don't blame the police for being at fault. I don't see how
it could have been otherwise. There was just one little clue that
they might have followed up, but it was a small one. I mean that
small, circular mirror which was found in my brother's pocket. It
isn't a very common thing for a young man to carry about with him,
is it? But a gambler might have told you what such a mirror may
mean to a card-sharper. If you sit back a little from the table,
and lay the mirror, face upwards, upon your lap, you can see, as
you deal, every card that you give to your adversary. It is not
hard to say whether you see a man or raise him when you know his
cards as well as your own. It was as much a part of a sharper's
outfit as the elastic clip upon Sparrow MacCoy's arm. Taking that,
in connection with the recent frauds at the hotels, the police
might have got hold of one end of the string.
"I don't think there is much more for me to explain. We got to
a village called Amersham that night in the character of two
gentlemen upon a walking tour, and afterwards we made our way
quietly to London, whence MacCoy went on to Cairo and I returned to
New York. My mother died six months afterwards, and I am glad to
say that to the day of her death she never knew what happened. She
was always under the delusion that Edward was earning an honest
living in London, and I never had the heart to tell her the truth.
He never wrote; but, then, he never did write at any time, so that
made no difference. His name was the last upon her lips.
"There's just one other thing that I have to ask you, sir, and
I should take it as a kind return for all this explanation, if you
could do it for me. You remember that Testament that was
picked up. I always carried it in my inside pocket, and it
must have come out in my fall. I value it very highly, for it was
the family book with my birth and my brother's marked by my father
in the beginning of it. I wish you would apply at the proper place
and have it sent to me. It can be of no possible value to anyone
else. If you address it to X, Bassano's Library, Broadway, New
York, it is sure to come to hand."
The Japanned Box
It WAS a curious thing, said the private tutor; one of those
grotesque and whimsical incidents which occur to one as one goes
through life. I lost the best situation which I am ever likely
to have through it. But I am glad that I went to Thorpe Place,
for I gained--well, as I tell you the story you will learn what I
gained.
I don't know whether you are familiar with that part of the
Midlands which is drained by the Avon. It is the most English part
of England. Shakespeare, the flower of the whole race, was born
right in the middle of it. It is a land of rolling pastures,
rising in higher folds to the westwards, until they swell into the
Malvern Hills. There are no towns, but numerous villages, each
with its grey Norman church. You have left the brick of the
southern and eastern counties behind you, and everything is stone--
stone for the walls, and lichened slabs of stone for the roofs. It
is all grim and solid and massive, as befits the heart of a great
nation.
It was in the middle of this country, not very far from
Evesham, that Sir John Bollamore lived in the old ancestral home of
Thorpe Place, and thither it was that I came to teach his two
little sons. Sir John was a widower--his wife had died three years
before--and he had been left with these two lads aged eight and
ten, and one dear little girl of seven. Miss Witherton, who is now
my wife, was governess to this little girl. I was tutor to the two
boys. Could there be a more obvious prelude to an engagement? She
governs me now, and I tutor two little boys of our own. But,
there--I have already revealed what it was which I gained in Thorpe
Place!
It was a very, very old house, incredibly old--pre-Norman, some
of it--and the Bollamores claimed to have lived in that situation
since long before the Conquest. It struck a chill to my heart when
first I came there, those enormously thick grey walls, the rude
crumbling stones, the smell as from a sick animal which exhaled
from the rotting plaster of the aged building. But the modern wing
was bright and the garden was well kept. No house could be dismal
which had a pretty girl inside it and such a show of roses in
front.
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