Drury Lane’s Last Case

23 A Matter of Symbolism

There was nothing more to be done on the scene. Maxwell was advised to forget his employer and return to Tarrytown to resume the sadly broken thread of his hitherto peaceful life. Bolling, an energetic if plodding executive, placed the house under guard, leaving his two men to watch both the lane leading to the house and the rear, although the rear was inaccessible unless one plowed through a tangle of underbrush and treacherous leaf-mold. Of one point young Rowe, who had been progressively more silent with the discovery of the secret compartment in the study, made certain: Maxwell had stated that due to his being alone at night in the country he had on the previous night, as always, locked all doors and windows. Rowe then personally toured the house; he found that with the exception of the front door all doors and windows were locked from the inside. As for the cellar, it was not necessary to examine it, since there was no entrance to it except through the staircase near the kitchen inside the house... The bell contrivance on the front door jangled derisively after them as they left the house.

On the old gentleman’s invitation — Boiling took Maxwell into Tarrytown in the police car — Patience and Rowe followed Dromio’s limousine bound for The Hamlet. The young people retired gratefully to rooms assigned them by the Falstaffian little major-domo of the household, scrubbed themselves clean, and came down to a late luncheon refreshed in body if not in spirit. The three ate alone in the more intimate atmosphere of Lane’s private quarters. There was little said during the repast; Patience was fretfully quiet, Rowe thoughtful, and Lane devoted himself to mild conversation and a complete silence on the events of the morning. After luncheon he placed them in the hands of Quacey, excused himself, and retired to his study.

Patience and Rowe wandered idly about the vast acreage of The Hamlet. When they came to a lovely little garden, they flung themselves by tacit consent full length on the grass. Quacey peered at them, chuckling, and then vanished.

Birds sang, and the grass smelled hot and sweet. Neither spoke. Rowe twisted about to study the face of his companion. She was flushed a little with the warmth of the sun and her exertions; her slim body lay outstretched, healthily curved. To Rowe, watching her with a curious eagerness, she seemed at once enticing and remote. For her eyes were closed and there was a faint white line between her straight brows that did not invite either badinage or love-making.

Rowe sighed. “What do you make of it, Pat? For heaven’s sake, don’t frown that way! I like my women vapid.”

“Am I frowning?” she murmured; and she opened her eyes and smiled at him. “You’re such a child, Gordon. I’ve been thinking—”

“I supposed I’ll have to get resigned to a brainy wife,” said the young man dryly. “The point is, so have I — so that makes two.”

“Wife? That’s not funny, young man! I’ve been thinking that Dr. Ales’s house last night was invaded not by one person but by two.”

“Ah,” said Rowe; and he lay back suddenly and plucked a blade.

She sat up, her eyes warm. “So you saw it, too, Gordon? One was the wielder of the ax. The condition of the house clearly shows that he was searching for something; he didn’t know where it was and wanted desperately to find it — witness his systematic demolition of furniture and things with the ax. The important point is that the man wasn’t Dr. Ales.”

Rowe yawned. “Naturally not. If he’d been Ales he would have known exactly where to find something that he himself — surely it was Ales who made that little compartment in the wall — had hidden there.” Rowe yawned again. “And the other?”

“Don’t act so disinterested,” laughed Patience. “You know you’re thinking furiously... I don’t know. You’re right about the reason. The hacker is one of our unknowns; Dr. Ales wouldn’t have had to chop the place to kindling wood — he would have known where to find whatever the hacker was looking for. On the other hand, the thing the hacker sought was actually found: witness the secret compartment which we found open, and which therefore was left open by some one.”

“And that makes you think two people were in the house last night? Why couldn’t the hacker — confound that clumsy word! — have found the compartment himself, after he’d done the dirty work with the ax?”

“Well, smarty,” snapped Patience, “for one thing the compartment as you saw was very cleverly hidden. Only the fact that Bolling knew a compartment was in precisely that spot by seeing the open door led him to find that rosette. With the door closed and the wall a blank, the chances would be a million to one that a searcher would pick the right panel, and then the right rosette, and then would know enough to twist the rosette completely around twice, as Bolling had to do to open the door. In other words, the aperture couldn’t have been found by accident. Had the hacker known the secret of the rosette and the aperture there would have been no necessity for hacking. So I say it wasn’t the hacker who twisted the rosette, opened the compartment, took out what was in it, and left the door open. If it wasn’t the hacker it was some one else, and that makes two people, my man. Q.E.D.”

“A veritable lady-sleuth,” chuckled Rowe. “Pat, you’re a jewel. That’s excellent logic. And there’s another conclusion, too. When did the other man — if it was a man — go to the compartment? That is, did he precede the hacker or follow him?”

“Must have followed, teacher. If the man who rifled the compartment had been first, then the hacker, coming second, would have seen the open door of the compartment and therefore would have known at once where the hiding-place was. Result: he wouldn’t have chopped the house to little bits looking for the hiding-place... Yes, Gordon, the hacker came first, which must mean he was the man who held up Maxwell and left him trussed in the garage. And then a second man came, and what happened then goodness only knows.”

They were silent for a long time. They both lay on the grass and stared up at the wool-flecked sky. Rowe’s brown hand stirred and touched hers. It remained there, and she did not draw her hand away.

After an early dinner the three repaired to Lane’s study, an old English-style room which smelled of leather and books and wood-sparks. Patience sat down in the old gentleman’s armchair and, taking a piece of paper, idly began to scribble. Lane and Rowe seated themselves before the desk, relaxed in the half-light of the lamp on the desk.

“You know,” said Patience suddenly, “before dinner to-night I wrote down a few things that — well, bothered me. They might be called the specific mysteries. Some of them annoy me dreadfully.”

“Indeed?” murmured Lane. “My child, you possess a pertinacity positively amazing in a woman.”

“Sir! That’s my chief virtue. Shall I read my little essay?” She slipped a long sheet of paper out of her bag and unfolded it. And began to read in a clear voice:

“Phew!” said young Mr. Rowe. “What a tortuous mentality!” Patience glared at him and continued:

“One moment, Patience,” said Lane. “How do you know the wielder of the ax was not Dr. Ales, or that there were two persons in the Ales house last night?” Patience explained. Lane eyed her lips fixedly, nodding. “Yes, yes,” he murmured when she had finished. “Extraordinary. Eh, Gordon? And perfectly true... Is that all?”

“No. There’s one more,” said Patience, frowning, “and it’s the most important and puzzling of all.” She continued:

And she put down the paper and resumed her idle scribbling at the desk. Neither man spoke for some time. Then Rowe, who had been watching absently the gyrations of Patience’s pencil, stiffened and half-rose from his chair. Patience and Lane looked at him curiously.

“What are you writing there?” demanded the young man sharply.

“What?” Patience blinked. “That blankety-blank symbol. 3HS wM.”

“Eureka!” shouted Rowe. He sprang to his feet, eyes shining. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it! How perfectly, childishly simple it is after all!”

Mr. Drury Lane rose and went to the desk. His face leaped out of shadow, and every line was etched in fine black. “So you’ve seen it at last,” he murmured. “I saw it, knew it, the day we sat in your father’s office, Patience, and he unfolded the original sheet of Saxon stationery to disclose what was written on it. Tell her, Gordon.”

“I don’t understand you two,” complained Patience.

“How was I sitting when you just jotted the symbol down?” said Rowe.

“In front of the desk, facing me.”

“Exactly! In other words, I saw the characters of the symbol just as Mr. Lane must have seen them at the time he faced your father across the desk when the Inspector unfolded the original sheet. I saw them upside down.”

Patience uttered a faint cry. She snatched up the sheet and turned it around. The symbol now read:

She repeated slowly: “Wm SHe,” the individual characters, mouthing them as if to extract their essential flavor. “That looks — that looks like a signature of some sort. “W-m... William—” Both men watched her keenly. “William Shakespeare!” she cried, springing to her feet. “William Shakespeare!”

A little later Patience seated herself on the rug at the feet of the old gentleman; his long, white fingers played with her hair. Rowe sat slumped opposite them.

“I’ve gone through that mentally many times since that day,” Lane wearily explained. “It seems clear enough from the analytical standpoint. Dr. Ales was not copying a facsimile of a Shakespearian autograph; a facsimile would have been Elizabethan script with some fantastic notion of making it clearer — the capital letters of this unusual Shakespearian signature. What makes it unusual is the small-sized m and the script e. But why the capital H? Probably a vagary of Ales’s mind. It isn’t important.”

“What is important,” muttered Rowe, “is that this is one variation of the Shakespeare autograph. Queer!”

Lane sighed. “As you know even better than I, Gordon, there are only six fully authenticated signatures of Shakespeare extant.”

“Talk about queer,” remarked the young man. “One of them is written Willm Shak’p’.”

“Yes. But there are a number of the so-called ‘doubtful’ autographs, and among these is one spelled like the Ales symbol — a capital W, a small m aligned with the top of the W, space, then a capital S, capital H, and a small script e also aligned with the top.”

“Like the old English style of writing ‘ye’?” asked Patience.

“Exactly. This doubtful autograph appears in the Aldine edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, now at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.”

“Saw it when I was in England,” snapped the young man.

“I have checked with the Bodleian Library,” continued the old man quietly, “and the Ovid is still there. I had thought, you see, that this entire affair was mixed up perhaps with a theft of that volume. It was ridiculous, of course.” Patience felt his fingers stir on her head. “Let me go into this more deeply. Dr. Ales said the ‘secret’ was worth millions; he left this copy of the autograph of William Shakespeare as the key to the secret; so we must begin from there. Do you see now what the secret must be?”

“Do you mean to say,” asked Patience in an awed voice, “that all this stealing and mystery and everything revolve about the discovery of a seventh genuine Shakespeare signature?”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” Rowe laughed bitterly. “Here I’ve squandered my youth — ha, ha! — messing about old Elizabethan records, and I’ve never even run across a hint of such an extraordinary thing.”

“What else?” murmured Lane. “If the secret is indeed worth millions, then Dr. Ales had reason to believe the signature was authentic. How would it be worth millions? Ah, there’s a fascinating question.”

“In itself,” said the young man softly, “it would be priceless. It would have incalculable historic and literary value.”

“Yes, a newly discovered and fully authenticated seventh Shakespearian autograph would bring even in auction, as I’ve read somewhere, a cool million or more. And I don’t know whether my authority meant dollars or pounds sterling! But no signature exists without purpose. Signatures are generally affixed to some type of document.”

“The paper in the book!” cried Patience.

“Hush, Pat. That’s true, although not always,” said Rowe reflectively. “The six authentic signatures are documented, of course: one is on a legal deposition in a suit in which the old boy was involved; one on the purchase deed of a house he bought about 1612; another on a mortgage deed involving the same house; and the last three on the three sheets of his will. But it might be on the flyleaf of a book, you know.”

“I think not, as Patience has already seen,” said Lane. “Would this seventh signature appear on a document — a deed, a lease — in which event the document itself would have comparatively small historic value? Well, perhaps—”

“Not small,” said Rowe defensively. “If it were a deed or a lease it might have tremendous importance. It might show where Shakespeare was at a certain date — clarify all sorts of issues.”

“Yes, yes. I meant small from the human side. But suppose it is on a letter?” Lane leaned forward, and his fingers gripped Patience’s curls so tightly she almost cried out. “Think of the possibilities! A letter signed, written by the immortal Shakespeare!”

“I’m thinking,” muttered Rowe. “It’s almost too much. To whom might it have been addressed? What did it say? Autobiographical data. A genuine Shakespearian holograph—”

“Certainly it’s within the realm of possibility,” continued the old gentleman in a queerly choked voice. “If it appears at the bottom of a letter, the letter would be worth almost more than the signature! No wonder respectable old scholars are apparently at each other’s throats. It would be like — like finding, by heaven, one of the original epistles of Paul!”

“That document was in the 1599 Jaggard,” whispered Patience fiercely. “Dr. Ales evidently searched the first two existing copies of the 1599 Jaggard and, finding nothing, made every effort to get hold of the third, which was in the Saxon collection. And he did! Is it — could it be possible...?”

“It looks that way,” grinned Rowe. “He’s found it, lucky dog!”

“And now somebody’s stolen it. Oh, dear! I’ll bet it was in that compartment in Dr. Ales’s study.”

“That’s very probably so,” said Lane. “There’s another thing. I have discovered that this third copy, stolen and then returned, was originally bought by Samuel Saxon from Sir John Humphrey-Bond, the British collector.”

“The man who recommended Hamnet Sedlar to Mr. Wyeth?” cried Patience, aghast.

“The same.” Lane shrugged. “Humphrey-Bond is dead; he died only a few weeks ago. No, no,” he said with a smile as they both started, “don’t be alarmed. It was a perfectly natural death, in the sense that it was caused by no human agency. He was eighty-nine and died of pleural pneumonia. But my correspondent on the other side cabled me also that the Jaggard, bought by Saxon from Humphrey-Bond, the one that’s been causing all this trouble, had been in possession of the Humphrey-Bond family since Elizabethan times. Sir John was the last of his family; had no heir.”

“He couldn’t have known there was such a document hidden in the back cover of the Jaggard,” remarked Rowe, “or he wouldn’t have sold the book in the first place.”

“Naturally not. The chances are that for many generations none of the Humphrey-Bonds even suspected the existence of such a document in one of their books.”

“But why,” demanded Patience, “was the document hidden in the binding at all? And who hid it there?”

“There’s a question,” sighed Lane. “I suppose it’s been nestling there for centuries; it might have been addressed to a contemporary; who knows? But the fact that it was hidden at all points to an extra value or significance connected with the document itself. I believe—”

Old Quacey slipped into the study. His ancient face was wrinkled in a thousand places, and each place was the repository of bad news. He tugged at his master’s sleeve. “Man named Bolling,” he complained. “Policeman from Tarrytown, Mr. Drury.”

Lane frowned. “Eternally Caliban! What are you talking about?”

“He ’phoned. He said to tell you that an hour ago” — the clock on the study wall showed seven o’clock — “the house of Dr. Ales was destroyed in a mysterious explosion!”