The Lock and Key Library Part 38

"It looks like a coffin," and coming rapidly down again the young man pushed his way through the rank growth. The clergyman followed.

In a little depression between the mounds of two graves lay a plain coffin of stained wood. It was closed, but an attempt to move it showed that it was not empty. A nearer inspection revealed that the lid was not screwed down in the usual manner, but hastily fastened with nails. Dr. Lynn and Gerald looked at each other.

There was something mysterious in the presence of this coffin above ground.

"Has there been a funeral--interrupted--or anything of that kind?"

asked Gerald.

"Nothing of the sort. I wish Bolan were here. He might have something to say about it."

Bolan was the s.e.xton. Gerald knew where he lived, within a stone's throw of the spot, and volunteered to fetch him. Dr. Lynn looked all over the sinister black box, but no plate or mark of any kind rewarded his search. Meanwhile, young Ffrench sped along the lower road to Bolan's house.

The s.e.xton was in, just preparing for a smoke in company with the local blacksmith, when Gerald entered with the news of the uncanny discovery in the churchyard. Eleven young Bolans, grouped around the turf fire, drank in the intelligence and instantly scattered to spread the report in eleven different directions. A tale confided to the Bolan household was confided to rumor.

Blacksmith and s.e.xton rose together and accompanied Gerald to the spot where he had left Dr. Lynn, but Dr. Lynn was no longer alone.

The rector had heard steps in the road; it was a constabulary patrol on its round, and the old gentleman's hail had brought two policemen to his side. There they stood, profoundly puzzled and completely in the dark, except for the light given by their bull's- eye lanterns. But the glare of these lanterns had been seen from the road. Some people shunned them, as lights in a graveyard should always be shunned; but others, hearing voices, had suffered their curiosity to overcome their misgivings, and were gathered around, silent, open-mouthed, wondering. So stood the group when Gerald and his companions joined it.

In reply to general questions Bolan was dumb. In reply to particular interrogations he did not hesitate to admit that he was "clane bate." Gerald, seeing that no one had ventured to touch the grim casket, hinted that it would be well to open it. There was a dubious murmur from the crowd and a glance at the constables as the visible representatives of the powers that be. The officers tightened their belts and seemed undecided, and Dr. Lynn took the lead with a clear, distinct order, "Take off the lid, Andy," he said.

"An' why not? Isn't his riverince a magistrate? Go in, Andy, yer sowl ye, and off wid it." Thus the crowd.

So encouraged, the blacksmith stepped forward. Without much difficulty he burst the insecure fastenings and removed the lid.

The constables turned their bull's-eyes on the inside of the coffin. The crowd pressed forward, Gerald in the front rank.

There was an occupant. A young girl, white with the pallor of death, lay under the light of the lanterns. The face was as placid and composed as if she had just fallen asleep, and it was a handsome face with regular features and strongly defined black eyebrows. The form was fully dressed, and the clothes seemed expensive and fas.h.i.+onable. A few raven locks straggled out from beneath a lace scarf which was tied around the head. The hands, crossed below the breast, were neatly gloved. There she lay, a mystery, for not one of those present had ever seen her face before.

Murmurs of wonder and sympathy went up from the bystanders. "Ah, the poor thing!" "Isn't she purty?" "So young, too!" "Musha, it's the beautiful angel she is be this time."

"Does anyone know her?" asked the rector; and then, as there was no reply, he put a question that was destined for many a day to agitate the neighborhood of Drim, and ring through the length and breadth of Ireland--"How did she come here?"

The investigation made at the moment was unsatisfactory. The gra.s.s on all sides had been trampled and pressed down by the curious throng, and such tracks as the coffin-bearers had made were completely obliterated. It was clearly a case for the coroner, and when that official arrived and took charge the crowd slowly dispersed.

The inquest furnished no new light. Medical testimony swept away the theory of murder, for death was proved to have resulted from organic disease of the heart. The coffin might have been placed where it was found at any time within thirty-six hours, for it could not be shown that anyone had crossed the churchyard path since the morning previous, and indeed a dozen might have pa.s.sed that way without noticing that which Gerald only discovered through the accident of having looked back at the moment that he mounted the wall. Still, it did not seem likely that an object of such size could have lain long unnoticed, and the doctors were of opinion that the woman had been alive twenty-four hours before her body was found.

In the absence of suspicion of any crime--and the medical examination furnished none--interest centered in the question of ident.i.ty; and this was sufficiently puzzling.

The story got into the newspapers--into the Dublin papers; afterwards into the great London journals, and was widely discussed under the t.i.tle of "The Drim Churchyard Mystery," but all this publicity and a thorough investigation of the few available clues led to nothing. No one was missing; widely distributed photographs of the deceased found no recognition; and the quest was finally abandoned even in the immediate neighborhood. The unknown dead slept beneath the very sod on which they had found her.

Gerald Ffrench, who, like most good journalists, had a strongly developed detective instinct, alone kept the mystery in mind and worked at it incessantly. He devoted the few remaining days of his stay in Ireland to a patient, systematic inquiry, starting from the clues that had developed at the inquest. He had provided himself with a good photograph of the dead girl, and a minute, carefully written description of her apparel, from the lace scarf which had been wound round her head to the dainty little French boots on her feet. The first examination had produced no result. Railway officials and hotel-keepers, supplied with the photographs, could not say that they had ever seen the original in life. Even the coffin, a cheap, ready-made affair, could be traced to no local dealer in such wares. A chatelaine bag, slung round the waist of the dead girl, had evidently been marked with initials, for the leather showed the holes in which the letters had been fastened, and the traces of the knife employed in their hurried removal. But the pretty feminine trifle was empty, and in its present condition had nothing to suggest save that a determined effort had been made to hide the ident.i.ty of the dead. The linen on the corpse was new and of good material, but utterly without mark. Only a handkerchief which was found in the pocket bore a coat of arms exquisitely embroidered on the corner.

The s.h.i.+eld showed the head and shoulders of a knight with visor closed, party per fess on counter-vair. Gerald, whose smattering of heraldry told him so much, could not be sure that the lines of the embroidery properly indicated the colors of the s.h.i.+eld; but he was sanguine that a device so unusual would be recognized by the learned in such matters, and, having carefully sketched it, he sent a copy to the Heralds' College, preserving the original drawing for his own use. The handkerchief itself, with the other things found on the body, was of course beyond his reach.

The answer from the Heralds' College arrived a day or two before the approaching close of his vacation forced Gerald to leave Ireland, but the information furnished served only to make the mystery deeper.

The arms had been readily recognized from his sketch, and the college, in return for his fee, had furnished him with an illuminated drawing, showing that the embroidery had been accurate.

The s.h.i.+eld was party per fess, argent above, azure below, and from this Gerald concluded that the handkerchief had been marked by someone accustomed to blazonries; he thought it likely that the work had been done in a French convent. The motto, Nemo me impune lacessit, appeared below. The bearings and cognizance were those of the n.o.ble family of Costello, which had left Ireland about the middle of the seventeenth century and had settled in Spain. The last representative had fallen some sixty years ago at the battle of Vittoria, in the Peninsular war, and the name was now extinct.

So p.r.o.nounced the unimpeachable authority of the Heralds' College.

And yet Gerald had seen those very arms embroidered on a handkerchief which had been found in the pocket of a nameless girl, whose corpse he himself had been the first to discover some two weeks before, in the lonely little burying-ground at Drim. What was he to think? Through what strange, undreamed-of ramifications was this affair to be pursued?

The day before his departure, Ffrench walked over to the rectory to say good-bye to Dr. Lynn. Gerald knew that the rector was an authority in county history, and thought it possible that the old gentleman could tell him something about the Costellos, a name linked with many a Westmeath tradition. He was not disappointed, and the mystery he was investigating took on a new interest from what he heard. The Costellos had been one of the midland chieftains in Cromwell's time; the clan had offered the most determined resistance, and it had been extirpated root and branch by the Protector. The Ffrench estate of Ballyvore had once formed portion of the Costello property, and had been purchased by Gerald's ancestor from the Cromwellian Puritan to whom it had been granted on confiscation.

The young man was now deeply interested in the inquiry, and to it he devoted every movement of the time he could still call his own.

But the last day of Gerald's visit slipped away without result, and one fine morning Larry, his brother's servant, drove him into Athlone to take the train for Queenstown.

"Ye'll not be lettin' another six years go by without comin' home agen, will ye, sir?" said the groom, who was really concerned at Gerald's departure.

"I don't know," answered Gerald; "it all depends. Say, Larry!"

"Sir."

"Keep an eye out, and if anything turns up about that dead girl, let me know, won't you?" Ffrench had already made a similar request of his brother, but he was determined to leave no chance untried.

"An' are ye thinkin' of that yet, an' you goin' to America?" said Larry with admiring wonder.

"Of course I'm thinking of it. I can't get it out of my head,"

replied Gerald impatiently.

"Well, well d'ye mind that now?" said the groom meditatively.

"Well, sir, if anything does turn up, I'll let ye know, never fear; but sure she's underground now, an' if we'd been goin' to larn anything about the matter, we'd ha' had it long ago."

Gerald shook hands with the faithful Larry at parting, and left a sovereign in his palm.

The groom watched the train moving slowly out of the station.

"It's a mortal pity to see a fine young jintleman like that so far gone in love with a dead girl."

This was Larry's comment on his young master's detective tastes.

At Queenstown Ffrench bought a paper and looked over it while the tender was carrying him, in company with many a weeping emigrant, to the great steamer out in the bay. From time to time the journals still contained references to the subject which was uppermost in Gerald's thoughts. The familiar words, "The Drim Churchyard Mystery," caught his eye, and he read a brief paragraph, which had nothing to say except that all investigations had failed to throw any light on the strange business.

"Ay, and will fail," he mused, as the tender came alongside the steamer; "at any rate, if anything is found out it won't be by me, for I shall be in California, and I can scarcely run across any clues there."

And yet, as Gerald paced the deck, and watched the bleak sh.o.r.es of Cork fading in the distance, his thoughts were full of the banished Costellos, and he wondered with what eyes those exiles had looked their last on the Old Head of Kinsale a quarter of a millennium ago. Those fierce old chieftains, to whom the Ffrenches--proud county family as they esteemed themselves--were but as mushrooms; what lives had they lived, what deaths had they died, and how came their haughty cognizance, so well expressing its defiant motto, on the handkerchief of the nameless stranger who slept in Drim churchyard--Drim, the old, old graveyard; Drim, that had been fenced in as G.o.d's acre in the days of the Costellos themselves?

Was it mere chance that had selected this spot as the last resting- place of one who bore the arms of the race? Was it possible the girl had shared the Costello blood?

Gerald glanced over his letter from the Heralds' College and shook his head. The family had been extinct for more than sixty years.

About two months after Gerald's return to California a despatch was received from the Evening Mail's regular correspondent in Marysville, relating the particulars of an encounter between the Mexican holders of a large ranch in Yuba County and certain American land-grabbers who had set up a claim to a portion of the estate. The matter was in course of adjudication in the Marysville courts, but the claimants, impatient at the slow process of the law, had endeavored to seize the disputed land by force. Shots had been fired, blood had been spilled, and the whole affair added nothing to Yuba County's reputation for law and order. The matter created some talk in San Francisco, and the Evening Mail, among other papers, expressed its opinion in one of those trenchant personal articles which are the spice of Western journalism. Two or three days later, when the incident had been almost forgotten in the office, the city editor sent for Gerald Ffrench.

"Ffrench," said that gentleman, as the young man approached his desk, "I've just received a letter from Don Miguel y--y--something or other. I can't read his whole name, and it don't matter much.

It's Vincenza, you know, the owner of that ranch where they had the shooting sc.r.a.pe the other day. He is anxious to make a statement of the matter for publication, and has come down to the Bay on purpose. Suppose you go and see what he has to say? He's staying at the Lick."

The same morning Gerald sent up his card and was ushered into the apartment of Don Miguel Vincenza at the Lick House.

The senor was a young man, not much older than Gerald himself. He had the appearance and manners of a gentleman, as Ffrench quickly discovered, and he spoke fluent, well-chosen English with scarcely a trace of accent, a circ.u.mstance for which the interviewer felt he could not be sufficiently grateful.

"Ah, you are from the Evening Mail," said the young Spaniard, rising as Gerald entered; "most kind of you to come, and to come so promptly. Won't you be seated? Try a cigar. No? You'll excuse me if I light a cigarette. I want to make myself clear, and I'm always clearest when I'm in a cloud." He gave a little laugh, and with one twirl of his slender fingers he converted a morsel of tissue paper and a pinch of tobacco into a compact roll, which he lighted, and exhausted in half-a-dozen puffs as he spoke.