Drury Lane’s Last Case (8 page)

“You see,” explained Rowe, “the workmen finished this room only yesterday morning, and I've no doubt in coming back for a forgotten tool or something one of them accidentally poked in the glass. Nothing to get excited about.”

“Just when yesterday did you discover this, Mr. Rowe?” asked Patience slowly. And this time there was nothing personal in her glance.

“Oh, I should imagine about five-thirty.”

“And what time did your visiting delegation from Indiana leave, Dr. Choate, did you say?” she continued. She had quite lost her smile.

Dr. Choate seemed nettled. “Oh, I assure you it's nothing! And I really didn't say, Miss Thumm. The school-teachers left at five, I believe.”

“And the glass was crashed in at five-thirty, Mr. Rowe?”

The young man stared at her. “Miss Sherlocka! I really don't know. Are you a detectress?”

“Cut the comedy, younker,” said the Inspector, coming forward; but he said it without rancour and indeed seemed to have regained his good humour. “How's that? You must have heard the glass breaking.”

Rowe shook his head sadly. “But I didn't, Inspector. You see, the door to the Saxon Room from the reading-room was closed, and then I'm usually so absorbed in what I'm doing you could set a bomb off under my chair and I wouldn't blink an eye. So the accident might have happened any time at all yesterday afternoon, you see.”

“Hmm,” said the Inspector. He went over to the shattered case and peered in. “Anything stolen?”

Dr. Choate laughed heartily. “Come now, Inspector, we're not children, you know. Naturally it occurred to us that some one might have sneaked in here—there's another door over there, as you can see, which leads into the main corridor, making this room fairly accessible—and made off with one of the three very valuable volumes in the case. But they're still there, as you can see.”

The Thumms stared down at the broken cabinet. Its bottom was lined with soft black velvet; three oblong depressions had been artfully built into the velvet, and in each depression reposed a single book, large bulky volumes bound in stained and faded rough old calf. The book to the left was covered in a gold-brown calf, the book to the right in a faded scarlet, and the book in the middle in blue.

“There's a glazier coming in this afternoon to replace the glass lid,” continued the curator. “And now——”

“Hold your horses, Doc,” said Thumm abruptly. “You say the workmen got through with this room yesterday morning. Didn't you have a guard on duty here in the afternoon? I thought these museums were lousy with guards all the time.”

“Why, no, Inspector. We dispensed with our usual staff when the museum was closed for repairs. Donoghue and the caretaker Burch have been enough. Those Indiana people have been the first outsiders permitted here since we shut down. But we didn't think it necessary——”

“Well,” said the Inspector in a rumble, “I think I can tell you what happened, and it's not so damned innocent as you make it out.”

Patience's eyes were bright. Gordon Rowe looked puzzled.

“What do you mean?” asked Dr. Choate swiftly.

“I mean,” snapped the Inspector, “that your guess, Doc, that Donoghue saw something screwy about Mr. Blue Hat and followed him was right. Why did he follow Blue Hat? Because I say Blue Hat smashed this case, that's why, and Donoghue saw him do it!”

“Then why isn't anything missing?” objected the curator.

“Maybe Donoghue scared him off just before he could take one of these books. You say they're valuable. Plain enough—attempted robbery.”

Patience thoughtfully sucked her full lower lip and stared into the shattered case.

“And why didn't Donoghue raise an alarm, Inspector?” murmured Rowe. “And why didn't some one see this chap with the blue hat running out, if Donoghue was scrambling after him?”

“And most important of all,” said Patience in a low voice,” where
is
Donoghue? Why hasn't he returned?”

“I don't know,” retorted the Inspector savagely, “but I tell you that's what happened.”

“I'm very much afraid that what happened,” said Patience in a stiff queer tone, “is something rather terrible. And it didn't happen to the man in the blue hat, father. It happened to poor old Donoghue!”

The men were silent. The Inspector began to patrol the flagged floor.

Patience sighed and bent over the cabinet again. A triangular card was propped behind each of the three books in the case. A larger placard in the foreground bore the printed legend:

“Elizabethan?” asked Patience.

Dr. Choate nodded absently. “Yes. Interesting items here, Miss Thumm. Jaggard was the famous London printer and publisher who did the First Folio of Shakespeare, you know. These things come from Samuel Saxon's collection—where he got them the Lord alone knows! He was something of a miser.”

“I shouldn't say that exactly,” remarked Gordon Rowe with a glint in his hazel eyes.

“Oh, purely in the bibliophilic sense,” added Dr. Choate hastily.

“Come on,” said the Inspector in a gruff tone. “I want to find out something.”

But while there was much to find out, literally nothing was found. With Dr. Choate's assistance Inspector Thumm marshalled all the workmen—decorators, painters, masons, and carpenters—in the Britannic Museum and questioned them exhaustively about the events of the day before. No one among them remembered seeing a man in a blue hat enter or leave the Saxon Room, nor did anyone recall the exact movements of the missing Donoghue.

Patience, who had lingered behind in the Saxon Room and had been seized in conversation by young Mr. Rowe, hurried into the reading-room where the Inspector had conducted his fruitless examination of the workmen, her face glowing.

“Father! I think there's something … Would you mind terribly if I didn't return to the office with you?”

Forcibly reminded of his fatherhood, the Inspector assumed a stern air, “Where're you bound?”

“Luncheon,” said Patience gaily, stealing a glance at her profile in her hand-bag mirror.

“Ha,” said the Inspector. “Lunch, hey?” He looked sad.

“With young Rowe, I'll wager,” chuckled Dr. Choate. “For a student of such a serious subject as literature that lad is the most incorrigible flibberty-gibbet. Ah, here he is,” he said as Rowe marched in with his hat and stick. “Coming back this afternoon, Rowe?”

“If I can tear myself away,” grinned the young man. “Shakespeare has been waiting for over three hundred years, so I suppose he can wait a little longer. You don't mind, Inspector?”

“Mind? Mind?” snarled Thumm. “Why the devil should I mind?” And he kissed Patience fiercely on the forehead.

The young couple walked briskly out of the room, deep in a conversation which seemed to have begun in antiquity and would probably continue to eternity. There was a little silence.

“Well,” sighed the Inspector, “guess I'll be trottin' along, too. Just keep an eye peeled, will you? And if you hear anything from or about Donoghue, give me a buzz.” He gave the curator his card, shook hands rather limply, and stumped out of the reading-room.

Dr. Choate stared thoughtfully after his broad simian back. Then he tapped the edge of the card against his bearded lips, whistled softly, and turned back to the Saxon Room.

6

Help Wanted

“I always thought,” said Patience over the grape-fruit, “that research students of literature were like research chemists—bowed, thin young men with a fanatical light in their eyes and a total absence of sex appeal. Are you the exception to the rule, or have I been missing something?”

“
I've
been missing something,” asserted Mr. Rowe, swallowing a mouthful of fruit powerfully.

“I notice that that spiritual lack hasn't affected your appetite!”

“Who said it was spiritual?”

The waiter took away the empty rinds and replaced them with cups of
consommé
.

“Lovely day,” said Patience hurriedly, and took a hasty sip of soup. “Tell me something about yourself, young man. Pass the biscuits? … I mean, make it a personal biography.”

“I'd rather make it a cocktail. George here knows me, and even if he doesn't it won't make any difference. George, a couple of Martinis. Dry as hell.”

“Shakespeare and Martinis!” murmured Patience, giggling. “How refreshing! I see it all now. That's why you're a scholar and still resemble a human being. You sprinkle the dusty page with alcohol, and somehow it burns, doesn't it?”

“Like the very devil,” grinned young Mr. Rowe. “As a matter of fact, you're betraying a most becoming ignorance. I'm deathly sick of lunching intelligent women.”

“Well, I like that,” gasped Patience. “Why, you insolent B-Bacchus! I've my M.A., I'll have you know, and I wrote a scintillating paper on
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy
!”

“Hardy? Hardy?” asked the young man, wrinkling his firm straight nose. “Oh, the versifier!”

“And just what did you mean by that crack? I'm betraying ignorance of precisely what?”

“The essential spirit of old Will. My dear girl, if you had a really deep-seated appreciation of Shakespeare, you would know that his poetry needs no external stimulant. It burns with its own fire.”

“Hear, hear,” murmured Patience. “Thank you, sir. I shall never forget this little lesson in æsthetics.” There were two fiery pink spots in her cheeks, and she tore a biscuit in half.

He threw back his head and roared, startling George, who was approaching with a tray on which stood two frosty amber-filled glasses. “Oh, good Lord!” he gasped. “She can't take it! I think we're both a little mad.… Ah, George. Set them down, my boy.… Down the hatch, Miss Thumm?”

“Miss Thumm?”

“Darling!”

“Patience to you, Mr. Rowe.”

“Very well, Patience it shall be.” They drank gravely; their eyes met over the brims of their glasses and they laughed together, choking over the cocktails. “And now for the autobiography. My name is Gordon Rowe. I shall be twenty-eight come Michaelmas, I am an orphan, I have a pitifully small income, I think the Yankees have a rotten team this year, I see Harvard has bought a swell quarter-back, and if I look at you much longer I shall be tempted to kiss you.”

“You're a strange young man,” said Patience with a furious blush. “No, no, that doesn't mean acceptance, so you'd better drop my hand; those two old ladies at the next table are looking at you with disapproval.… Heavens, I'm mortified! Blushing like any callow schoolgirl at mere mention of a kiss! Are you always so flippant? I'd rather looked forward to an engrossing discussion about the splitting of the infinitive as split by John Milton, or the domestic problems of the Lepidoptera.”

He stared at her, his grin fading. “You're horribly nice,” he said, and attacked his chop furiously, and for the moment there was silence. When he looked up they examined each other with searching seriousness, and it was Patience's eyes which fell. “To tell the truth, Pat—I'm glad you let me call you that—this sort of childish vulgarity is my escape. It's not very bright, I know, and I've never felt myself capable of holding my own in the social sense. I've devoted the best years of my young life so far to getting an education, and these last few years to doing something earth-shaking in the line of literary research. I've enormous ambition, you know.”

“Ambition never ruined any young man,” said Patience softly.

“Thanks for the kind words, young lady. I'm not the creative type, though. Research fascinates me. I suppose I should have gone in for biochemistry, or astrophysics.”

Patience devoted herself chastely to her salad. She toyed for an instant with a crisp emerald leaf of cress. “I'm really—oh, it's silly.”

He leaned forward and took her hand. “Please tell me, Pat.”

“Mr. Rowe, they're looking!” said Patience, but she did not withdraw her hand.

“Gordon, please.”

“Gordon.… You've hurt me,” said Patience tragically. “Oh, I know it was ragging, and all that, but the fact is, Mr. Rowe—very well, Gordon!—I despise most women for their doughty minds.”

“I'm sorry,” he said contritely. “It was a poor joke.”

“No, it's more than that, Gordon. I've been making poor jokes, too. I've never found anything I
really
wanted to do, while you——” She smiled. “Of course, it sounds ridiculous. But the only thing that differentiates us from the lower primates is the power of reasoning, and I don't see why the mere fact that a woman is biologically different from a man should prevent her from cultivating her mind.”

“It's the fashion to be horrified at the mere notion,” grinned the young man.

“I know it is, and I detest the fashion. I don't believe the full force of the mind's possibilities struck home to me until I met Drury Lane. He's—oh, he tones you up, he makes you
want
to think, to know. And it doesn't prevent him from being a very charming old gentleman, either.… But we've strayed from the point.” She withdrew her hand shyly and regarded him with earnest eyes. “Do tell me about your work, and yourself, Gordon. I'm really interested.”