The Beetle: a Mystery
Copyright© 2025 by Richard Marsh
Chapter 43: The Murder at Mrs ‘Enderson’s
It is something of a drive from Waterloo to Limehouse, —it seems longer when all your nerves are tingling with anxiety to reach your journey’s end; and the cab I had hit upon proved to be not the fastest I might have chosen. For some time after our start, we were silent. Each was occupied with his own thoughts.
Then Lessingham, who was sitting at my side, said to me,
‘Mr Champnell, you have that report.’
‘I have.’
‘Will you let me see it once more?’
I gave it to him. He read it once, twice, —and I fancy yet again. I purposely avoided looking at him as he did so. Yet all the while I was conscious of his pallid cheeks, the twitched muscles of his mouth, the feverish glitter of his eyes, —this Leader of Men, whose predominate characteristic in the House of Commons was immobility, was rapidly approximating to the condition of a hysterical woman. The mental strain which he had been recently undergoing was proving too much for his physical strength. This disappearance of the woman he loved bade fair to be the final straw. I felt convinced that unless something was done quickly to relieve the strain upon his mind he was nearer to a state of complete mental and moral collapse than he himself imagined. Had he been under my orders I should have commanded him to at once return home, and not to think; but conscious that, as things were, such a direction would be simply futile, I decided to do something else instead. Feeling that suspense was for him the worst possible form of suffering I resolved to explain, so far as I was able, precisely what it was I feared, and how I proposed to prevent it.
Presently there came the question for which I had been waiting, in a harsh, broken voice which no one who had heard him speak on a public platform, or in the House of Commons, would have recognised as his.
‘Mr Champnell, —who do you think this person is of whom the report from Vauxhall Station speaks as being all in rags and tatters?’
He knew perfectly well, —but I understood the mental attitude which induced him to prefer that the information should seem to come from me.
‘I hope that it will prove to be Miss Lindon.’
‘Hope!’ He gave a sort of gasp.
‘Yes, hope, —because if it is I think it possible, nay probable, that within a few hours you will have her again enfolded in your arms.’
‘Pray God that it may be so! pray God!—pray the good God!’
I did not dare to look round for, from the tremor which was in his tone, I was persuaded that in the speaker’s eyes were tears. Atherton continued silent. He was leaning half out of the cab, staring straight ahead, as if he saw in front a young girl’s face, from which he could not remove his glance, and which beckoned him on.
After a while Lessingham spoke again, as if half to himself and half to me.
‘This mention of the shrieks on the railway, and of the wailing noise in the cab, —what must this wretch have done to her? How my darling must have suffered!’
That was a theme on which I myself scarcely ventured to allow my thoughts to rest. The notion of a gently-nurtured girl being at the mercy of that fiend incarnate, possessed—as I believed that so-called Arab to be possessed—of all the paraphernalia of horror and of dread, was one which caused me tangible shrinkings of the body. Whence had come those shrieks and yells, of which the writer of the report spoke, which had caused the Arab’s fellow-passengers to think that murder was being done? What unimaginable agony had caused them? what speechless torture? And the ‘wailing noise,’ which had induced the prosaic, indurated London cabman to get twice off his box to see what was the matter, what anguish had been provocative of that? The helpless girl who had already endured so much, endured, perhaps, that to which death would have been preferred!—shut up in that rattling, jolting box on wheels, alone with that diabolical Asiatic, with the enormous bundle, which was but the lurking place of nameless terrors, —what might she not, while being borne through the heart of civilised London, have been made to suffer? What had she not been made to suffer to have kept up that continued ‘wailing noise’?
It was not a theme on which it was wise to permit one’s thoughts to linger, —and particularly was it clear that it was one from which Lessingham’s thoughts should have been kept as far as possible away.
‘Come, Mr Lessingham, neither you nor I will do himself any good by permitting his reflections to flow in a morbid channel. Let us talk of something else. By the way, weren’t you due to speak in the House to-night?’
‘Due!—Yes, I was due, —but what does it matter?’
‘But have you acquainted no one with the cause of your non-attendance?’
‘Acquaint!—whom should I acquaint?’
‘My good sir! Listen to me, Mr Lessingham. Let me entreat you very earnestly, to follow my advice. Call another cab, —or take this! and go at once to the House. It is not too late. Play the man, deliver the speech you have undertaken to deliver, perform your political duties. By coming with me you will be a hindrance rather than a help, and you may do your reputation an injury from which it never may recover. Do as I counsel you, and I will undertake to do my very utmost to let you have good news by the time your speech is finished.’
He turned on me with a bitterness for which I was unprepared.
‘If I were to go down to the House, and try to speak in the state in which I am now, they would laugh at me, I should be ruined.’
‘Do you not run an equally great risk of being ruined by staying away?’
He gripped me by the arm.
‘Mr Champnell, do you know that I am on the verge of madness? Do you know that as I am sitting here by your side I am living in a dual world? I am going on and on to catch that—that fiend, and I am back again in that Egyptian den, upon that couch of rugs, with the Woman of the Songs beside me, and Marjorie is being torn and tortured, and burnt before my eyes! God help me! Her shrieks are ringing in my ears!’
He did not speak loudly, but his voice was none the less impressive on that account. I endeavoured my hardest to be stern.
‘I confess that you disappoint me, Mr Lessingham. I have always understood that you were a man of unusual strength; you appear instead, to be a man of extraordinary weakness; with an imagination so ill-governed that its ebullitions remind me of nothing so much as feminine hysterics. Your wild language is not warranted by circumstances. I repeat that I think it quite possible that by to-morrow morning she will be returned to you.’
‘Yes, —but how? as the Marjorie I have known, as I saw her last, —or how?’
That was the question which I had already asked myself, in what condition would she be when we had succeeded in snatching her from her captor’s grip? It was a question to which I had refused to supply an answer. To him I lied by implication.
‘Let us hope that, with the exception of being a trifle scared, she will be as sound and hale and hearty as ever in her life.’
‘Do you yourself believe that she’ll be like that, —untouched, unchanged, unstained?’
Then I lied right out, —it seemed to me necessary to calm his growing excitement.
‘I do.’
‘You don’t!’
‘Mr Lessingham!’
‘Do you think that I can’t see your face and read in it the same thoughts which trouble me? As a man of honour do you care to deny that when Marjorie Lindon is restored to me, —if she ever is!—you fear she will be but the mere soiled husk of the Marjorie whom I knew and loved?’
‘Even supposing that there may be a modicum of truth in what you say, —which I am far from being disposed to admit—what good purpose do you propose to serve by talking in such a strain?’
‘None, —no good purpose, —unless it be the desire of looking the truth in the face. For, Mr Champnell, you must not seek to play with me the hypocrite, nor try to hide things from me as if I were a child. If my life is ruined—it is ruined, —let me know it, and look the knowledge in the face. That, to me, is to play the man.’
I was silent.
The wild tale he had told me of that Cairene inferno, oddly enough—yet why oddly, for the world is all coincidence!—had thrown a flood of light on certain events which had happened some three years previously and which ever since had remained shrouded in mystery. The conduct of the business afterwards came into my hands, —and briefly, what had occurred was this:
Three persons, —two sisters and their brother, who was younger than themselves, members of a decent English family, were going on a trip round the world. They were young, adventurous, and—not to put too fine a point on it—foolhardy. The evening after their arrival in Cairo, by way of what is called ‘a lark,’ in spite of the protestations of people who were better informed than themselves, they insisted on going, alone, for a ramble through the native quarter.
They went, —but they never returned. Or, rather the two girls never returned. After an interval the young man was found again, —what was left of him. A fuss was made when there were no signs of their re-appearance, but as there were no relations, nor even friends of theirs, but only casual acquaintances on board the ship by which they had travelled, perhaps not so great a fuss as might have been was made. Anyhow, nothing was discovered. Their widowed mother, alone in England, wondering how it was that beyond the receipt of a brief wire, acquainting her with their arrival at Cairo, she had heard nothing further of their wanderings, placed herself in communication with the diplomatic people over there, —to learn that, to all appearances, her three children had vanished from off the face of the earth.
Then a fuss was made, —with a vengeance. So far as one can judge the whole town and neighbourhood was turned pretty well upside down. But nothing came of it, —so far as any results were concerned, the authorities might just as well have left the mystery of their vanishment alone. It continued where it was in spite of them.
However, some three months afterwards a youth was brought to the British Embassy by a party of friendly Arabs who asserted that they had found him naked and nearly dying in some remote spot in the Wady Halfa desert. It was the brother of the two lost girls. He was as nearly dying as he very well could be without being actually dead when they brought him to the Embassy, —and in a state of indescribable mutilation. He seemed to rally for a time under careful treatment, but he never again uttered a coherent word. It was only from his delirious ravings that any idea was formed of what had really occurred.
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