CHAPTER XXXII

IN WHICH I AT LAST BECOME ACQUAINTED WITH THE TOP-FLOOR-FRONT, AND HEAR HIS ROMANTIC STORY

It was just as I was putting away my book, quite late, that Miss Laura knocked at the door to say that Mr. Carstairs, the gentleman on the top floor, who had been ill for some days, had asked if I would be so good as to pay him a short visit. This seemed to me odd, for beyond exchanging "good morning" now and then, we had never spoken; but it was not a request that I could disregard, and up I went.

The old gentleman was in bed, and as he lay there, gaunt and grey, with his hollow cheeks and bright eyes and pointed beard, he was like nothing in the world but Don Quixote. With a courteous movement he motioned me to a chair, and then thanked me for having compassion on a stranger's whim.

For a while after this there was silence, and I had an opportunity of noticing how bare was his room of all but necessities, although those seemed of the best. There were no pictures.

"I asked you to come," Mr. Carstairs began, "because I had a bad night last night and I have had a bad day. This you may think but a poor reason," he continued, in his quiet, cultured voice, smiling faintly, "and to you, who are well and strong, it is inadequate. But to me, who am dying, it is justification for any eccentricity. I liked you directly I saw you, and it pains me to think that I have taken no steps to cultivate the acquaintance of yourself and your wife; but I have long got out of the way of making overtures of friendship, and to occupy rooms in the same house is not one of the best passports to a good understanding."

He lay back exhausted and began to cough. I looked among the bottles for a lenitive and found only an empty one. Asking him if there was another, I understood him to say it was in the cupboard by the window; and to this I hurried. But no sooner was my hand on the handle than his face underwent a terrifying transformation, and he half-sprang from bed crying, "Not there! Not there!"

I came hurriedly from the door, and he quieted down and directed me to a cupboard on the other side. Now what Bluebeard's closet was this? I wondered (with Mrs. Wiles). I was soon to know.

"I throw myself on your good nature," he resumed, "because I am _in extremis_ and have no friend within call. It is extremely improbable that I shall get well from this attack. You see, for one thing I am a good age, and for another I have very little to live for, and therefore am not likely to make a fight of it."

I murmured the usual things.

"No," he said, "there's very little in it. If I recover it is only for a brief while, with impaired strength. If I were younger and happier even that would be worth having; but really one may as well die to-day as to-morrow. It's got to be."

This is a form of fatalism with which I am as fit to grapple as a seamstress with a cuttlefish, so I said nothing.

"Your kindness in coming up," he continued, "leads me to ask you to be kinder still and administer my effects. They are few enough. I want everything to go to the National Art Collections Fund. It sounds simple, but there is this complication, that the name by which I am known is not my real name; and my real name, although it is bound to come out, I want to be still suppressed in connection with myself. I die as John Carstairs."

My face, no doubt, indicated some perplexity, for he went on.

"You will understand only if I tell you the whole story; but first I must confess that I am one of the most notorious of living thieves--perhaps almost the most famous of all, in this country--who have never been found out. When I die the secret must of necessity be in part discovered. I look to you to help me so that my name and the theft are kept distinct."

I said nothing for a little while, but merely pondered on the accidents of life in general, and in particular that accident which had led me to 7 Primrose Terrace, Regent's Park, to a respectable-looking house kept by refined twins, in which I was to live beneath a dying brigand and be forced into the position of his executor.

"Does the prospect alarm you?" he asked.

"Well," I said, "to be frank, it is not what I should have asked for. But," I added hastily, "you may continue your instructions: that is, if you are really certain that there is no one but myself to help you. Have you no lawyer?"

"A lawyer witnessed my will quite recently," he said. "It is in order. You will perhaps go to him for its execution."

"And what about your next-door neighbour, Spanton?" I said.

He smiled grimly.

"Then Lacey, the best of men and the most ingenious and helpful?"

"Yes," he said, "I thought of Lacey. But he has too much to do; and I was afraid he might be too clever. He is impulsive. This topic is so delicate that impulse might ruin it. So," he smiled humorously, "I had your name put in the document."

"Kismet," I replied; but Heaven knows I wished myself downstairs with my door carefully locked. I neither wanted to hear his story nor administer his ill-gotten estate. The whole thing was absurd. The chance of passing fellow-lodgers on the stairs and having the misfortune to appear benevolent and virtuous to their defective vision ought not to be permitted to lead to such embroilments as this. But I have ever been weak and acquiescent; and when I looked at his melancholy, wasted features, what else could I do? A dying Don Quixote--who would not be foolish for him?

When I agreed he gave a great sigh of relief--probably at once the most tragic and satisfactory sound I shall ever hear--and held out his long, bony hand.

"You can take it without fear," he said, smiling again; "when I said I was a thief I did not say all. There is such a thing as stealing your own. But listen. The story briefly is this: I was a well-to-do business man, unmarried and not very sociable. That was twenty and more years ago. Then a serious crisis came in my life of which I need say nothing, and I decided suddenly to leave civilization completely and begin all over afresh where the conditions were simpler. There was no disgraceful element in the matter. An event occurred which led to complete disillusionment setting in; I developed acute misanthropy and realized that England and I were incompatible. That is all. Many men--and perhaps many women--must have been through a similar experience; but not all are as free as I was to act.

"I laid my plans very carefully. I converted a sufficient amount of stock into cash; I made my will, leaving everything to the establishment of a certain kind of night refuge in London for the homeless, wherever they were most needed; and then I disappeared. This was not difficult. I took a passage to America. Between Liverpool and Queenstown I shaved off my long beard and moustache and changed my clothes. At Queenstown I left my stateroom, after depositing a last letter on the table, and went ashore among a crowd of other passengers. There I took train at once and was soon in London again, where I shipped for Australia and the South Seas. Meanwhile, that had happened on the steamer which I had foreseen. My stateroom was not opened until some hours after the vessel was on her way to America, and the contents of the letter there led people to assume that I had jumped overboard. I was therefore dead. A sufficient time having elapsed, the courts officially presumed my death, my estate was wound up, and I was a thing of the past. Any reasonably careful man can disappear still, in spite of Marconi and all the other modern obstacles, provided he has not committed a crime. And it was easier then."

"Were the night refuges built?" I asked.

"Oh yes," he said. "I have slept in one. A most curious experience.

"Arrived in Sydney I opened a banking account in my new name, made some investments, and passed on to the South Seas, where, for fifteen years, I lived a calm life, succeeding commercially, as I was bound to do, and happier perhaps than not, although happiness was never in my grasp, nor could it be. Then gradually the desire once more to be in London became very powerful; while an absolute mania seized me again to see pictures. Particularly one picture. That it would be safe, I felt sure, for I was much changed and had had few intimate friends at any time."

He paused, tired with his effort, and lay still.

"I must tell you," he continued, "that I had been not only a great lover of pictures wherever they were to be seen, but a collector too. At the time of my disappearance I had one of the best small private collections in the country. Such, however, had been my disgust with life that it included these pictures too, and in my rage and haste to have broken with everything, I was ready to break with them as well, and my will gave instructions for all my pictures to be sold save one little jewel of paint, the very gem of the collection--a small Madonna which has been attributed to Verrocchio--and this I left to the National Gallery. It was this picture that I felt I must at any risk again see. I therefore sold my South Sea business, wound up my affairs, and returned to London, again a rich man, finding a lodging in this house. That was seven years ago.

"So far all is well. Now comes the criminal part of the story. No sooner did I see my little Verrocchio on its easel in the National Gallery--in the most honoured place--than I realized that I could not live without it. I had not known what a spell I was under or I would have stayed away. It had always been in my living-room in my old life, and I found that I belonged to it still. I used to go day after day to Trafalgar Square to worship it--nothing less. I became known to the attendants. After closing hours I would plot how to get possession of it again. I could not go to the Director and say who I was and insist on a return of the picture until I died in earnest. For one thing he would not have believed me, and to make him believe me would have meant an endless and merciless raking up of the past: more than that, a return to my old identity, which was unbearable: men shaking hands with me, newspaper comment, and all the rest of it. Again, there was the risk that he might think me a dangerous lunatic and forbid me the Gallery. Think of that!

"I had therefore to consider how to get the picture secretly, and at last I managed it--at noon, of course, for that is the true time for successful theft, and by means of a big cloak on copying day. I had carefully noted the times when vigilance was relaxed, and waited my chance. It came; I removed the picture, passed quietly into the street, and found my way here unobserved."

He paused again. "You will, of course, remember the incident," he went on. "The world rang with it. 'Theft of the famous Verrocchio.' I had very little fear of being discovered and, naturally, no remorse; but I must admit to a little self-consciousness on my next visit to Trafalgar Square--for, of course, I was not so foolish as to discontinue my old habits. But I was cunning. I went to the Director and offered to give £5000 as a reward for the detection of the thief--on the condition that the donor's name was not published. I was able also to discuss the theft with the officials quite calmly. My one regret was that the custodian of the room in which my little masterpiece was kept was discharged, but I have seen to it, always anonymously, that he has not lost financially.

"I now began to be almost happy. I had my picture and, the National Gallery being negligible, I was again able to look in at Christie's whenever I wished and mix again in this ocean we call London. I bought no more; I had the best; but I saw everything that was good, and became an amateur expert at the service of any of my dealer acquaintances.

My one disappointment was that being so exceptional a picture thief I was not and am not able to enter into the feelings of the more typical kind. For naturally the one thing above all others that I want to know is who took the Louvre Leonardo, and why, and where it is. The motive could not have been identical with mine, but it might be akin. But this I shall never know, because I am going to die."

"Not yet," I said, "not yet."

"Yes," he replied. "And I must waste no more time. I am very weak. What I want you to do is to get this picture back into the possession of the National Gallery without anyone suspecting my connection with it. That is all. The ordinary execution of my will you and the lawyer can manage without the faintest difficulty, and I have left you plenty for such expense and trouble as you are put to. But the restitution of this picture I count on you to make alone. You will do it?"

I shook his hand. "I will do everything possible to preserve secrecy," I said.

"There is no hurry," he replied. "Take your time. Keep it in your room in a parcel until you are ready. Only the suspected are suspected in this world, and you and I are equally remote from their thoughts."

He lay still again.

"But where," I asked, after a while, "is the picture?"

"In there," he said, pointing to the door to which I had wrongly gone for the cough mixture. "Go in. No one has seen it here but myself."

I opened the door and found myself in a little room lighted by one window. Opposite this on the wall was a curtain.

"Turn on the light," he said, "and draw back the curtain."

I did so, and beheld one of the most exquisite paintings I ever saw--the head of a girl, sweet, wistful, understanding, and gay. Not quite a Madonna; no mother; but the very personification of youthful joy, sympathy, and loveliness. I knew too little of painting to express an opinion as to the authenticity, and Verrocchio, I am told, although he was the master of Leonardo and Perugino and Lorenzo di Credi, has left almost nothing authentically from his own brush; but there is a candour and charm in the treatment, and transparency in the colours, which are like nothing that I know except the National Gallery picture attributed to this master's school.

"Bring it to me, please," said Carstairs from his bed, and I carried it in and held it for him.

"No one has ever seen it but myself--and now you--since it left the Gallery four years ago," he said. "Mrs. Wiles has done her best to get into that room, but in vain. I suppose everyone who steals a picture or becomes the owner of a stolen picture has similar difficulties. Perhaps the safer way would be to have another canvas or panel over the stolen one, in the same frame, to slide aside when one is alone; but that would mean taking a workman more or less into one's confidence, and no wise thief does that.

"Put it back, put it back," he cried suddenly, as he fell on his pillow unconscious.

I did so at once, put the key of the cupboard door in my pocket, and telephoned for the doctor.

Carstairs died that night.