HE men stood facing each other, the one quick and eager, sanguine as to his eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses, the other bent and twisted with the reflection of some great tragedy on his face. A clock somewhere lazily chimed the half past eleven.
"What do I look like, Brownsden?" the twisted man asked hoarsely. "I know what a marvel you are in the indexing of the emotions. What do I look like?"
"Like a man who has done something years ago and just been found out, Ramsay," the other said. "It is almost a new expression to me, though I did see it once before in South Africa. He was a well-to-do, prosperous man, long married, respected, his crime twenty years old. And he was expecting hourly arrest.… Strange how those old things come to light. Make no mistake—yours is the face of an honest man. And yet!"
"Wonderful!" Ramsay muttered under his breath. "As a criminal psychologist, you have no equal in the world. It was your marvellous book on the ramifications of the criminal mind that first attracted you to me. And it was my privilege to do you some trifling service "
"To save my life and my reputation. If only I had your scientific knowledge!"
"Yes, yes," Ramsay said impatiently. "If ever I found myself in trouble, you promised to come and help me. Hence my telegram this morning. Brownsden, I am in the deepest distress—nobody but you can save me. Look round you."
The criminal specialist Brownsden looked around accordingly. Ramsay's dining-room in Upper Quadrant, Brighton, was an artistic one. It had evidently been furnished by a scholar and a man of taste. There was a marvellously carved oak sideboard, then a Queen Anne bookcase; a fireplace carved by Grindley Gibbons himself; the electric lights were demurely shaded, only the flowers looked faded. The artistic reticence of it all struck the proper, soothing, refining chord.
"All mine," Ramsay said almost fiercely. "Gathered together bit by bit, pieced like some perfect old mosaic. It has been the one delight in a hard and gloomy life. All the house is the same. And the name of Dr. Alfred Ramsay is becoming known. Then it is all kicked away by a sudden and unexpected tragedy. Sit down."
Brownsden sat down obediently in a Cromwellian chair upholstered in speaking tapestry. It was his cue to get the other to talk. The deformed figure bobbed up and down over the soft red of the Persian carpet—words began to stream from him.
"I have been here now for four years," he began. "It was a hard struggle at first, but I had only myself to keep, and I managed to pull through. Then my books began to sell, but I did not get many patients—not that they mattered much. I kept to myself, with the result that I know nobody, and nobody here knows me except by name and sight. Yet I was not unhappy. I was making money until a month ago, when a sudden attack of nervous sleeplessness warned me that I was going too far. I decided on a month's cycling in the country—it has been very pleasant this Easter—and I went.
"A week before my departure it struck me as a good idea to let the house furnished, so I put an advertisement in the Morning Post. In reply I received a letter from a gentleman in London. I saw him by appointment, and—to make a long story short—he took the house for a month and paid the rent. Like me, my tenant was a man of the closet, an American, and he wanted a change. I was to leave the house just as it was, and my tenant would find his own servants. I gave my old housekeeper a holiday and started on my vacation.
"At the end of three weeks I was quite myself again, and longing to be in harness once more. Two days ago I was rather pleased to get a telegram from my tenant, saying that he had been called back to the States again by urgent business, and that he was leaving at once. He had sent the key to my agents. I telegraphed to my agents to send for my old housekeeper and explain to her what had happened, and to give her instructions to go home, saying that I would follow to-day. All this seems very bald, but I have not finished yet.
"I came back to-day, expecting no evil. I opened the door with my latch-key and came in here. To my surprise, I found the place dirty, the fire out, the flowers left by my tenant still in the rooms as you see them. Now, this is all so unlike my housekeeper that I was vaguely alarmed. I looked all over the house, finding nobody, until I entered my study and laboratory, which is at the back here. That was half an hour before I sent you my wire. As you are a man with no nerves, I will show you what I found. Come this way."