The Moon Rock. Arthur J. Rees
He gave a great knock at the door of my lodgings like the thunder of doom, and when I got downstairs he blurted out that my brother was killed—shot—but not another word of explanation could I get out of him. What does it all mean?”
“I cannot say. Your sister and I reached the house just as Thalassa was about to leave it to seek my assistance. Your sister is in the sitting-room.”
Austin Turold brushed past the doctor and opened the door of the lighted room. At his entrance Mrs. Pendleton sprang from her seat to greet him. Grief and horror were in her look, but surprise contended with other emotions in Austin’s face. She kissed him with clinging hands on his shoulders.
“Oh, Austin,” she cried, “Robert is dead—killed!”
“The news has shocked me to the last degree,” responded her brother. “What has happened? Did somebody send for you? Is that what brought you here?”
Mrs. Pendleton shook her head, embarrassed in her grief. She remembered that she wished to keep the object of her visit secret from her younger brother, and she could not very well disclose the truth then.
“Not exactly,” she replied, a trifle incoherently. “I wanted to see Robert again before I returned to London in the morning. So we motored over after dinner, and found him—dead.” Fresh tears broke from her.
Austin Turold wandered around the room quickly and nervously, then drew Dr. Ravenshaw to the door with a glance. “I should like to go upstairs before the police come,” he whispered.
Dr. Ravenshaw nodded, and they went upstairs together. The shattered door creaked open to their touch, revealing the lighted interior and the dead man prone on the floor. Austin approached his brother’s corpse, eyed it shudderingly, and turned away. Then he stooped to look at the small revolver lying alongside, but did not touch it. Again he bent over the corpse, this time with more composure in his glance.
The object on which the outstretched arms rested was an old Dutch hood clock, which had fallen or been dragged from a niche in the wall, and lay face uppermost, the glass case open and smashed, the hands: stopped at the hour of half-past nine. It was a clock of the seventeenth century, of a design still to be found occasionally in old English houses. A landscape scene was painted in the arch above the dial, showing the moon above a wood, in a sky crowded with stars. The moon was depicted as a human face, with eyes which moved in response to the swing of the pendulum. But the pendulum was motionless, and the goggle eyes of the mechanism stared up almost reproachfully, as though calling upon the two men to rescue it from such an undignified position. At the bottom of the dial appeared the name of Jan Fromantel, the famous Dutch clockmaker, and underneath was an inscription in German lettering—
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