The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley. Tracy Louis
glint of hair tightly coifed under a bathing cap – a species of head-dress which had puzzled him at the first glance – and there was more than a suggestion of a veritable portrait of the regular, lively and delicately beautiful features which belonged to a type differing in every essential from the cold, classic loveliness of the statue, yet vastly more appealing in its sheer femininity.
Then the spell was broken. The girl slipped on her shoes, dressed herself in a few seconds, and was hurrying back to the house, almost before Trenholme dared to breathe normally.
"Well," he muttered, watching the swaying of the green skirt as its owner traversed the park, "this is something like an adventure! By Jove, I've been lucky this morning! I've got my picture for next year's Salon!"
He had got far more, if only he were gifted to peer into the future; but that is a privilege denied to men, even to artists. Soon, when he was calmer, and the embryo sketch had assumed its requisite color notes for subsequent elaboration, he smiled a trifle dubiously.
"If that girl's temperament is as attractive as her looks I'd throw over the Salon for the sake of meeting her," he mused. "But that's frankly impossible, I suppose. At the best, she would not forgive me if she knew I had watched her in this thievish way. I could never explain it, never! She wouldn't even listen. Well, it's better to have dreamed and lost than never to have dreamed at all."
And yet he dreamed. His eyes followed the fair unknown while she entered the garden through a gateway of dense yews, and sped lightly up the steps of a terrace adorned with other statues in marble and bronze. No doorway broke the pleasing uniformity of the south front, but she disappeared through an open window, swinging herself lightly over the low sill. He went with her in imagination. Now she was crossing a pretty drawing-room, now running upstairs to her room, now dressing, possibly in white muslin, which, if Trenholme had the choosing of it, would be powdered with tiny fleurs de lys, now arranging her hair with keen eye for effect, and now tripping down again in obedience to a gong summoning the household to breakfast.
He sighed.
"If I had the luck of a decent French poodle, this plutocrat Fenley would eke have invited me to lunch," he grumbled.
Then his eyes sought the sketch, and he forgot the girl in her counterfeit. By Jove, this would be a picture! "The Water Nymphs." But he must change the composition a little – losing none of its character; only altering its accessories to such an extent that none would recognize the exact setting.
"Luck!" he chortled, with mercurial rise of spirits. "I'm the luckiest dog in England today. Happy chance has beaten all the tricks of the studio. O ye goddesses, inspire me to heights worthy of you!"
His visions were rudely dispelled by a gunshot, sharp, insistent, a tocsin of death in that sylvan solitude. A host of rooks arose from some tall elms near the house; a couple of cock pheasants flew with startled chuckling out of the wood on the right; the white tails of rabbits previously unseen revealed their owners' whereabouts as they scampered to cover. But Trenholme was sportsman enough to realize that the weapon fired was a rifle; no toy, but of high velocity, and he wondered how any one dared risk its dangerous use in such a locality. He fixed the sound definitely as coming from the wood to the right – the cover quitted so hurriedly by the pheasants – and instinctively his glance turned to the house, in the half formed thought that some one there might hear the shot, and look out.
The ground floor window by which the girl had entered still remained open, but now another window, the most easterly one on the first floor, had been raised slightly. The light was peculiarly strong and the air so clear that even at the distance he fancied he could distinguish some one gesticulating, or so it seemed, behind the glass. This went on for a minute or more. Then the window was closed. At the same time he noticed a sparkling of glass and brasswork behind the clipped yew hedge which extended beyond the east wing. After some puzzling, he made out that a motor car was waiting there.
That was all. The clamor of the rooks soon subsided. A couple of rabbits skipped from the bushes to resume an interrupted meal on tender grass shoots. A robin trilled a roundelay from some neighboring branch. Trenholme looked at his watch. Half past nine! Why, he must have been mooning there a good half hour!
He gathered his traps, and as the result of seeing the automobile, which had not moved yet, determined to forego his earlier project of walking out of the park by the Easton gate.
He had just emerged from the trees when a gruff voice hailed him.
"Hi!" it cried. "Who're you, an' what are you doin' here!"
A man, carrying a shotgun and accompanied by a dog, strode up with determined air.
Trenholme explained civilly, since the keeper was clearly within his rights. Moreover, the stranger was so patently a gentleman that Velveteens adopted a less imperative tone.
"Did you hear a shot fired somewhere?" he asked.
"Yes. Among those trees." And Trenholme pointed. "It was a rifle, too," he added, with an eye at the twelve-bore.
"So I thought," agreed the keeper.
"Rather risky, isn't it, firing bullets in a place like this?"
"I just want to find out who the ijiot is that did it. Excuse me, sir, I must be off." And man and dog hurried away.
And Trenholme, not knowing that death had answered the shot, took his own departure, singing as he walked, his thoughts altogether on life, and more especially on life as revealed by the limbs of a girl gleaming in the dark waters of a pool.
CHAPTER II
"Who Hath Done This Thing?"
Trenholme's baritone was strong and tuneful – for the Muses, if kind, are often lavish of their gifts – so the final refrain of an impassioned love song traveled far that placid morning. Thus, when he reached the iron gates, he found the Roxton policeman standing there, grinning.
"Hello!" said the artist cheerily. Of course he knew the policeman. In a week he would have known every man and dog in the village by name.
"Good mornin', sir," said the Law, which was nibbling its chin strap and had both thumbs stuck in its belt. "That's a fine thing you was singin'. May I arsk wot it was? I do a bit in that line meself."
"It's the cantabile from Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila," replied Trenholme. "Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix!"
"Is it now? An' wot may that be, sir?"
The policeman's humor was infectious. Trenholme laughed, too. Realizing that the words and accent of Paris had no great vogue in Hertfordshire, he explained, and added that he possessed a copy of the song, which was at the service of the force. The man thanked him warmly, and promised to call at the inn during the afternoon.
"By the way, sir," he added, when Trenholme had passed through the wicket, "did you hear a shot fired while you was in the park?"
"Yes."
"Jer see anybody?"
"A keeper, who seemed rather annoyed about the shooting. Some one had fired a rifle."
"It sounded like that to me, sir, and it's an unusual thing at this time of the year."
"A heavy-caliber rifle must sound unusual at any time of the year in an enclosed estate near London," commented Trenholme.
"My idee exactly," said the policeman. "I think I'll go that way. I may meet Bates."
"If Bates is a bandy-legged person with suspicious eyes, a red tie, many pockets, brown leggings, and a yellow dog, you'll find him searching the wood beyond the lake, which is the direction the shot came from."
The policeman laughed.
"That's Bates, to a tick," he said. "If he was 'wanted,' your description would do for the Police Gazette."
They parted. Since Trenholme's subsequent history is bound up more closely with the policeman's movements during the next hour than with his own unhindered return to the White Horse Inn, it is well to trace the exact course of events as they presented themselves to the ken of a music-loving member of the Hertfordshire constabulary.
Police