the treasure house of martin hews

Chapter I

In a fit of utter dejection, I stopped in the middle of the long cinder path and looked miserably around me. It was, perhaps without exception, the ugliest landscape upon which I had ever gazed—a flat and swampy region, ignored, apparently, by the agriculturist and scorned by even the most optimistic of builders. There were evidences here and there of calamitous speculative enterprise—a deserted brickyard, overrun with weedy grass, a onestoried factory which showed no signs of ever having been occupied, and every window of which was broken. For the most part, however, the Jand was a wilderness, with here and there an isolated and squalid-looking cottage. The fields, the grass of which seemed to lack any shade of colour or breath of vitality, were separated by dykes in which black, unwholesome water stood stagnant. A | few cows seemed oppressed by ruminating gloom. There were no trees, no birds save occasional flocks of inflying seagulls, great patches of sedgy, irreclaimable land stretching to the river banks. In the far distance, upon the other side of the unseen waterway, were factory chimneys, gaunt and stark, looming through the misty sky. For sound, in this dreary waste, there was only the screech of a passing locomotive from the branch line by which I had completed my journey, the distant hooting of a steamer, or the melancholy call of the drifting gulls. There came upon me, as I lingered there, a strong inclination to turn around, retrace my steps to the station, with its draughty shed for a booking office, sit down upon that solitary, decrepit bench, and, abandoning my enterprise, wait for the train which would. take me back to the warmth and humanity of a great city. Then my hand stole into my trousers pocket, the coins jingled through my fingers—ninepence-halfpenny, and an oblong piece of cardboard—my return third-class ticket to London. I remembered that this completed the total of my worldly possessions, and off I started again down that hideous cinder track, facing what had seemed to me from the first moment it had loomed up before me, the grimmest, the ugliest, the most fearsome building I had ever seen or conceived. It reminded me of one of those unnatural nightmares, the earliest sign of incipient lunacy, when one’s brain fails, and the ordinary buildings of some fancied city suddenly assume gigantic unnatural proportions, a hundred times the size of any possible effort of human hands. There was no doubt, however, as to the reality of this architectural abortion, and, as I stepped over the stile into the road and caught a fuller view of it rising from perfectly flat lands, arrogant, overmastering in its bare, assertive ugliness, an unpleasant conviction stole in upon me. I stopped the only human being I had seen since I had left the station—a road-mender, plodding slowly through the mud.

“Can you tell me what that building or institution is?” I asked him.

He turned a rheumaticky neck, and followed my pointing finger.

“That be Breezeley Mansion, sir,” he replied.

With that he had had enough of me and went on his way, and I, struggling with my fit of nervous aversion, pushed on until I stood almost under the shadow of this monstrosity of brick and stone. There was no lodge, no wall to protect it from the road, no garden. There it stood, a great building which age seemed only to have rendered more hideous, straight-fronted, with rows of uninviting windows, and at the two ends round towers, with huge windows. It was big enough for a prison or an asylum, and unpleasing enough for either. That it should be the dwelling place of any sane man seemed to me ineredible, and yet in my pocket reposed a letter addressed to “Martin Hews, Esq., Breezeley Mansion,” and that letter, together with ninepence-halfpenny, was my last resource against starvation.

I trod the granite avenue, pressed the electric bell, and received my first shock. The door was opened even before my finger had released the knob. A butler, who would not have disgraced a Grosvenor Square mansion, opened it and leaned forward with an air of benevolent enquiry.

*“T have come down from London to see Mr. Hews,” I explained. “I have a letter of introduction to him.”

The man smiled at me reassuringly.

“That is quite all right, sir. Will you come this way?”

He led me across a hall which, in those confused moments, seemed to me like the anteroom of a palace, motioned me to enter a small, automatic lift, followed me in and closed the gates. We shot up some three storeys, after which he again took charge of me, ushered me down a corridor where my feet fell soundlessly upon the thickly piled carpet, and at its further end touched the knob of a bell. We heard its gentle tinkling in the room, and almost immediately, without any visible agency, the door of an apartment almost as spacious as a museum swung open.

“The gentleman you were expecting, sir,” the butler announced, leading the way towards a distant corner— and forthwith took his leave.

I advanced a few steps farther and stood staring like the clumsiest of rustics. Before me, seated at a large rosewood writing table, upon which were several telephone receivers, a row of ivory push bells, and various other unusual-looking instruments, was the man whom I had come to visit. My first impression of him was that he was seated—but at that moment I could not be sure of anything definite as regards his posture. He was enclosed in what seemed to be an amazing sort of Bathchair, the front of which was hidden in the knee hole of the desk, so that only the upper part of his body was visible. The effect he produced upon me, during those first few minutes, remains to this day an indescribable thing. One would have expected, from an afflicted person, a certain delicacy of expression and outline, the pallor which is nearly always associated with every sort of suffering. The man before me was of an entirely different type. His face was inclined to be round in shape. He had colour upon his cheeks which at first seemed to me as though it must be unnatural. His brown eyes were curiously prominent, almost beady. He had carefully trimmed, bushy eyebrows of a lighter shade, and a mass of brown hair, arranged with such absolute perfection that from the first I suspected it to be a wig. His mouth was by far his most attractive feature. It had a delicacy of its own, and a sensitiveness almost childish. He was dressed with meticulous care in dark clothes, his folded satin tie of deep purple fastened by a pin with a quaint foreign stone. When I tried afterwards to reconstruct in my mind his personality, from amongst a haze of tangled impressions, I could think of nothing but the curving mouth and prominent eyes which seemed never to leave my face.

“You are Major Owston?” he asked, looking across at me.

“That is my name, sir,” I answered.

“What sort of employment do you want?”

“Any sort in the world which will keep me from starvation.”

He scrutinised me thoughtfully, raised his hand and pointed to a chair. I sat down, and would have moved it a little nearer to his desk, but found to my amazement that it was screwed to the floor, and that underneath the seat was a maze of wire and tubes. I found also that it faced the great window through which the light was streaming in.

“You will forgive the peculiarity of the chair,” my host begged. “I have visitors of many sorts, and I like sometimes to know exactly how far they are away from me. It would perhaps amuse you—”

He broke off, and touched one of a line of ivory knobs on the right-hand side of his desk. I felt a sudden tingling in my arms and legs. If the room had been on fire, I could not have moved from my place. He chuckled softly, touched another knob, and everything was again normal. ‘He rubbed his hands together with positively childish delight.

“One of my little devices,” he explained, with a curious touch of vanity in his tone. “I am a helpless person, you see, and I must defend myself. . . . So you want any sort of employment, Henry Owston? Are there any limitations to that somewhat daring statement?”

“None that I can think of,” I assured him.

He eyed me critically.

“You are not overscrupulous, then?”

“Not in a general way. I don’t want to get into trouble. I have been in prison once. That was quite enough for me.”

“In England?”

“No, in France.”

‘Ah, I remember,” he murmured, nodding his head reflectively. “It was at Marscilles, was it not? That affair with a French Artillery Officer. You have a violent temper, I imagine.”

I looked at him in astonishment. Not even Leonard

Joyce, my friend who had given me the letter of introduction, knew of that episode in my life to which Martin Hews had alluded.

“Tf I have,” I told him, after a moment’s deliberation, “it is very seldom roused, and there is generally sufficient provocation.”

He eyed me appraisingly.

“You are how tall, Major Owston?” he enquired.

I was a little surprised, but I answered him at once.

“Six feet three and a half, sir.”

“Magnificently developed around the shoulders,” he went on, moving his head a little sideways. “A trifle underfed, I should say, by the look of you. I have need of strong men, Major Owston, both for my own protection, and to carry on my business.”

“IT am not a weakling,” I assured him.

“Apparently not,” he assented. “Let me see. Shall I tell you a little more about yourself? In the Inter-Varsity Sports eighteen years ago, you won all the prizes which were worth taking. Later you have thrown the hammer as only the Americans can throw it. You were in the semifinals of the Amateur Boxing Championship twelve years ago. There was a rumour that it was a gesture of chivalry which prevented your winning. You were supposed to be good enough for county cricket, even for Yorkshire, but the war came, and you developed into a keen soldier. You did a little more than average well—twice mentioned, I believe, and the D.S.O. Afterwards you had the usual bad luck of a man who had not settled upon his profession definitely when the war broke out. You left your regiment and tried soldicring in Morocco with the Spaniards. Then, of course, there was that French affair—rather an unfortunate episode just then. Anything I have forgotten, Major Owston2?”

I was speechless. I could think of no living person who could have told me as much as this stranger had done. He watched my surprise with that same smile of absolutely childish gratification.

“Ah, well,” he went on, “if I take you into my employ you will realise that it is my business sometimes to know everything. Directly Joyce mentioned your name, I began to set enquiries on foot. By-the-by, did he prepare you for the fact that I was an invalid?”

“He gave me to understand,” I admitted diffidently, “that you were—that you had lost the use of your legs.”

He frowned as though, for some reason, my answer annoyed him.

“I never had any legs,” he explained abruptly. “I am a human freak, Major Owston. I was born without legs. ‘You can see very nearly all there is of me. That is why I sit in the most amazing motor chair that has ever been designed. My own invention, Major—entirely my own invention.”

I muttered a word of sympathy, which he acknowledged gravely.

“J wonder,” he speculated, “whether I really lose much through not having legs. You shall judge. Sit still. I will give you an exhibition.”

There followed the most extraordinary performance I had ever seen in my life, With the touch of a finger upon the steering wheel of his chair, an engine began to throb, and he glided from behind the desk in a graceful backward curve. He came to a standstill, and then suddenly seemed to flash away from before my eyes. He was across at the other side of the room before I could realise that he had moved, threading his course amongst chairs and tables, skirting the edge of various articles of furniture with the most amazing precision, now and then revolving, running backwards with only a careless turn of the head over his shoulder, never losing that curiously conceited smile, and glancing more than once quickly across at me as though for my approbation. Finally he passed me like a streak and before I could thoroughly collect myself he was seated again opposite to me behind the table. The motor ceased to throb, His eyes sought mine triumphantly. He was evidently wrapped in deep enjoyment of my stupefaction.

“Have you ever seen anything like that?” he demanded.

“Never in my life,” I assured him, as soon as I could find words. “I can’t even now understand how such delicate steering can ever be learned. It’s—it’s miraculous !”

His smile was like the smile of a child whose dolls have been praised, or a mother whose infant has been flattered. It transformed his whole appearance, and it helped me to appreciate the persistence of those small vanities which were woven like a thread through the man’s whole being. Incidentally it gave me confidence. I had no longer any fear about that ninepence-halfpenny in my trousers pocket. He pointed to the window—the great, uncurtained window in the full light of which I sat.

“Go over there,” he ordered. “Follow the road back to London. Tell me if you see anything.”

I obeyed him and looked searchingly along that soggy, ill-made, muddy thoroughfare, stretching across the marshes bordered by the threadbare hedges and yawning dykes, to where a lowering mass of mingled mist and smoke hung over the approaches to the city.

“I see the road until it disappears,” I reported. “It is empty.”

He glanced at an electric clock upon the table and frowned. Then he lifted from its stand one of the telephone receivers by which he was surrounded and spoke into it so softly that I failed to hear a word he said. Again he turned towards me.

TREASURE HOUSE OF MARTIN HEWS it

“Your eyes appear to be strong,” he remarked. “How far can you follow the road backwards?”

“Past the station,” I told him, “past what seems to: be a sewerage farm, across a wooden bridge to what might be a main road beyond.”

“Look again,” he enjoined. “Watch.”

There ensued a brief silence—a silence of perhaps three minutes—during which no sign of human life appeared upon the miserable plain across which I looked. At last, at the far end of the road, there was a speck. I scrutinised it narrowly. _

“There is a vehicle—a motor car—coming,” I \nnounced.

“Describe it to me.”

I waited until it came nearer. It was being driven at a _ great speed, rocking from side to side upon the road, sending up little fountains of water from the holes across which it sped. I turned my head.

“Tt is a very big car—I should say a Rolls-Royce. It is being driven apparently by a chauffeur. There is another man inside, and I think a girl.”

My new employer—already I felt that I was in his. service—nodded shortly.

“Come here,” he directed. “Turn around. Look at that wall.”

He pointed to a strip of oak panelling, not far from the door, and before my eyes, without any visible agency,. it parted and slid gently open. Afterwards I knew that he had touched a button under his desk.

“Go in there,” he ordered. “You can listen to all that is said by means of the instrument standing on a bracket upon your right-hand side. There is a lookout hole there too. If I should strike the desk with the flat of my hand twice, I need help. The door will open by means of a button underneath the bracket.”

“T understand,” I assured him.

I moved towards the recess. As I was crossing the threshold, he called after me.

“With the flat of my hand twice,” he repeated, “but do not be disappointed if nothing happens, Henry Owston. Others have been before you, and waited in vain. I run my risks as docs every man who has enemies, but never yet, poor cripple though I am, have I had to call for help. To-night, however—it may be different. It depends in what spirit my visitor comes. ... Take your place, please. Adjust the microphone to your ears. You can open the door, remember, if I give the signal, by pressing the button just below the instrument.”

After which instructions, he dismissed me with a little wave of the hand, and I passed into my hiding place.

ee

Chapter II

I rounp my temporary refuge larger than I had expected, with some sort of ventilation from overhead, and lit by an electric bulb which flashed out with the closing of the door. I fitted the microphone to my head, and established myself in a not uncomfortable chair before the spy-hole. Then I suddenly received an unexpected shock. Exactly opposite to the opening through which I had entered there flashed, through a chink in the wall, a thin line of light. Noiselessly the panels rolled back and a woman stood framed in the aperture—a woman whom I

_ judged at first, notwithstanding the youthfulness of her figure, to be elderly. Then, as she lowered her head a little, I saw that what I had taken for grey hair was in reality a very beautiful shade of ash-coloured blonde, fine as silk, and glimmering almost to gold as she stooped to enter the closet and stood for a moment under the electric bulb. She held up her finger, and I checked my first exclamation of surprise.

“Pay attention, please, to what I have to say, and answer me in as low a tone as possible,” she begged.

“But who are you?” I enquired.

“J will explain directly. Put on your microphone again, and listen for the opening of the door. Your mission, which I suppose is to guard Martin Hews, does not commence until then.”

I obeyed her, almost unconsciously. Her voice, soft and pleasant though it was, had in it some curiously compelling quality. With the instrument fixed to my ears, my sense of hearing became at once more acute. I could hear the scratching of a pen upon note-paper, the hissing of a log in the grate; otherwise there was silence in the room.

“You are poor,” she continued. “You came down here on a desperate chance. You may not know it, but you have failed. Martin Hews has decided not to employ you. The car is already ordered to take you back to the station.”

It was like a sentence of Cate and my heart sank.

“How do you know that?” I demanded.

“Tt is my business. I am Martin Hews’ niece. I know most of the secrets even of this house.”

“Well,” I sighed, “I hope you are making a mistake. Unless you have been listening—”

“JT have been listening,” she interrupted, “and I know my uncle.”

“He was pretty well my last chance,” I confided gloomily.

“Then you have lost it. You are, I think you said, in straightened means. You can earn this, if you care to.”

She handed me a folded slip of paper. I opened it out and found that it was a twenty-pound Bank of England note.

“Who am I to serve for this?” I asked. “Your uncle or you! Pp?

“Me,” she answered calmly. “Hush !””

I, too, had heard the click of the motor chair. I looked through my peephole. Its occupant had simply changed his position in order to reach a box of cigarettes. He lit one and recommenced his writing. The room was still empty. I turned back to the girl. Her eyes were fixed upon me—grey eyes with a glint of green in them, indifferent, almost inhuman, as it seemed to me at that moment, yet curiously impressive under her strange-coloured hair. For the first time I realised that in her own fashion—and a very distinctive one it was—she was beautiful.

es.

“You can earn this twenty pounds,” she whispered, “by leaving your place here and catching the train for London which starts in twenty minutes. I will show you the way to where the car is waiting. All that you will have to do is to deliver a letter in Berkeley Square, and never come near this house again.”

We looked at one another for a few seconds in silence. Her eyes never left mine, but it would have taken a cleverer man than I to have guessed what was passing in her brain.

“Tf your uncle will not engage me,” I said, “that is my misfortune. I have accepted the task of watching here until his visitor has gone, and I must carry it out.”

“Take my advice,” she begged. “Don’t waste your time. You owe nothing to Martin Hews. Soon he will dismiss you with a cynical word of farewell. There is not a soul in this house who does not hate him. Those of us who live here and obcy his orders do it because we must. As yet you are free. Take my offer and hurry away.”

“And leave him without a protector in case there is trouble,” I reminded her.

She laughed very softly, but with a scorn which was almost malicious.

“My uncle can look after himself,” she assured me. “Besides, if his time has come, you would be of very little help to him. It would be all over before you could get halfway across the room. Will you come?”

I looked at her once more, and my decision, if anything, was, strengthened by what I saw in her eyes, but failed wholly to read.

“JT will not,” I decided, turning my back upon her, and peering through my spy-hole. . . . “There is some one coming into the room. Please go away.”

Apparently she was convinced of my obduracy, and, in a measure, reconciled to it, for I heard the door roll smoothly back and the click of its fastening. I had no time to indulge in speculations as to this strange happening, for it was obvious that the expected visitors had arrived. I heard the opening of the door and the butler’s sonorous voice. I saw Martin Hews’ eyebrows go up, saw him lean a little forward in his strange chair. Then the other two figures came into view—a fair, sturdily built man, commonplace enough in appearance, but with a bulldog type of feature and keen blue eyes. There was a look of suffering in his face as though he were ill, and he leaned upon a stick. He was dressed in reasonable clothing, but his hair was unkempt, his collar crumpled, one of his shoe laces undone. I judged that he had come from some adventure, for there was an air of exhaustion about him, and in his eyes there was fear. Holding on to his arm was a girl—a little Jewess she seemed to me— small, with an exquisite cameo-like face, dark brown eyes and hair, and brilliantly red lips. She looked defiantly at Martin Hews.

“T was expecting you, Jim Donkin—but the young lady?”

The man sank into the fixed chair with a little groan of relief,

“You'll have to look after her, Guv’nor,” he declared. “If she can’t come with me, you'll have to keep her safe. You know what happened last night?”

“T know that you committed a murder,” Martin Hews observed calmly. “You are trying me very high, Donkin. You were on your own last night, you must remember, and it is not an easy thing to protect a murderer. Tell me about the girl.”

“You know who she is. This is Rachel. ’Tain’t her fault, but it was because of her the row began last night. The newspapers haven’t got half of it yet. There were a hundred of us fighting down in the Mews, back of the Bethnal

Green Road, and Phil Abrahams wasn’t the only one who got his. We were obeying orders too, you know, Guv’nor. The cops were getting too inquisitive about what we were really out for. You wanted a real hooligan fight, and we b y well had it.”

“There isn’t a great deal of time to waste if I am to get you away,” Martin Hews warned him. “Why have you brought the girl with you? It is quite true that I am _ willing to undertake the task of looking after her, but I did not intend to have her here.”

“Where in hell could I leave her in London?” the man demanded. “Abrahams took her from me, as he had sworn to Joseph that he would, but he was a dying man before he could hand her over, bleeding to death in Aldgate Passage. We’re pretty well wiped out now, though. They’ll get her if I leave her in London.”

“Half a dozen of ’em,” the girl intervened, “half a dozen of ’em who reckon I never ought to have left Joseph, and who mean to get me back if they can. Mind you, they’ll soon forget it,” she went on, “and I don’t know that I’m so scared as it is. Joseph would have something to say if they turned ugly, but Jim here, he’s all for me lying low. You’re afraid Joseph will get me again, ain’t you, Jim?” she asked, with a mocking laugh.

“I’d come back from the dead, blast you, if you went back to him,” the man growled. “What about me, Chief ?”’ he went on, looking anxiously across the desk. “It wasn’t exactly your work we were on last night, but you wanted a row—a real, ordinary row—to put the cops off the scent, Yesterday’s began on the race course, went on in the train from Newmarket, and finished—my Gawd, what a finish!—down Bethnal Green Road way.”

Martin Hews leaned forward in his chair and contemplated the two. His face was unclouded, his smile almost benevolent. He might have been the head of some great charitable organisation, evolving his plans for the protection of this outcast.

“I grasp the position,” he said at last. “Everything is arranged so far as you are concerned, Donkin. You must be prepared to leave here in five minutes. A car is waiting for you now. As for the young lady, I shall offer her at any rate temporary shelter.”

“What, here?” she demanded, with a grimace.

“Certainly. You will be safer under this roof than anywhere. The housekeeper will look after you. As for you, Donkin, please follow my servant downstairs now. I shall keep my word and get you out of this, but you have disappointed me. I wanted Joseph’s gang crushed. I wanted Joseph himself removed. You have failed me.”

“Tf I get over this,” Donkin muttered, a spasm of pain suddenly contorting his face, “I'll get Joseph as soon as I can sneak back to the country.”

“That is your own affair,’? Martin Hews said equably. “TI shall probably have settled with him myself before that . can happen. In the meantime, kindly follow my servant downstairs. You will be provided with ample funds, and I wish you well; at the same time, in the struggle between you and Joseph, you are up to now the loser, and I have no use for the second best.”

He dismissed them with an imperative little wave of the hand, and they disappeared, ushered out by the butler who had entered without any visible or audible means of summons. The panels glided open in front of me, and I stepped out. Martin Hews looked at me thoughtfully.

“You can drive a car?” he asked.

“I can,” I answered, with a sudden return of hope.

“You can fight, I know,” he continued. “Do your best to get Donkin away. If you come up against the police, you had better offer no resistance and be sure that my name is not mentioned. If any members of Joseph’s gang try to intercept you, that will be a different matter. Fight if you have any chance at all. They will kill Donkin if they get him . . . Here!”

He opened the drawer and handed me a flat-handled automatic, of the latest type, fully charged. Behind me was standing once more that ubiquitous butler, waiting to show me downstairs.

“Don’t use the gun if you can help it,” Martin Hews enjoined. “Those things are for show more than for use, but remember they'll kill Donkin if they get him. You may report here later if all goes well. . . .”

Five minutes afterwards we were swinging down the straight, muddy road leading towards the river, in a large, open touring car, built apparently for speed. Donkin was by my side, muffled up in an overcoat and groaning every now and then in pain. A dark-complexioned chauffeur in the front crouched over his wheel. One glance I threw behind as we started off, and curiously enough I looked, as though by instinct, at one particular window. Leaning out of it was the girl who had offered me the twenty-pound note and assured me that Martin Hews had decided to turn me down. She stood like a statue, watching us. I shook my fist at her. She turned away.

Chapter III

WE drew up, after a ghastly six-mile drive across the wilderness of my destination, at the end of what was little better than a rough cart track leading down to the river. My companion, with a final groan, stepped heavily out, and looked with anxious eyes first along the road by which we had come, and afterwards at the motor launch moored a score of yards out in the sluggish stream. He stepped into the dinghy which was waiting under the bank, and for the first time the strained look of apprehension seemed to pass from his face.