The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley

Does an evil deed cast a shadow in advance? Does premeditated crime spread a baleful aura that affects certain highly-strung temperaments just as the sensation of a wave of cold air rising from the spine to the head may be a forewarning of epilepsy or hysteria? John Trenholme had cause to think so one bright June morning in 1912, and he has never ceased to believe it. However, the events which made him an outstanding figure in the “Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley,” as the murder of a prominent man in the City of London came to be known, have long since been swept into oblivion by nearly five years of war. Even the sun became a prime agent of the occult that morning. It found a chink in a blind and threw a bar of vivid light across the face of a young man lying asleep in the front bedroom of the “White Horse Inn” at Roxton. It crept from a firm, well-moulded chin to lips now tight set, though not lacking signs that they would open readily in a smile and perhaps reveal two rows of strong, white, even teeth. Indeed, when that strip of sunshine touched and warmed them, the smile came, so the sleeper was dreaming pleasantly.

But the earth stays not for men, no matter what their dreams. The radiant line reached the sleeper’s eyes in a few minutes, and he awoke. Naturally, he stared straight at the disturber of his slumbers and was routed at first glance as a mere man who emulated not the ways of eagles.

More than that, he was thoroughly aroused and sprang out of bed with a celerity that would have given many another young man a headache during the remainder of the day.

But John Trenholme, artist by profession, was somewhat of a light-hearted vagabond by instinct; if the artist was ready to be annoyed because of an imaginary loss of precious daylight, the vagabond laughed cheerily when he blinked at a clock and learned that the hour still lacked some minutes of half past five in the morning.

“By gad,” he grinned, pulling up the blind, “I was scared stiff. I thought the blessed alarm had missed fire, and I had been lying here like a hog during the best part of England’s finest day this year.”

He was still young enough to deal in superlatives, for there had been other fine days that Summer; moreover, in likening himself to a pig, he was ridiculously unfair to six feet of athletic symmetry in which it would be difficult to detect any marked resemblance to the animal whose name is a synonym for laziness.

On the way to the bathroom, he stopped to listen for sounds of an aroused household, but the inmates of the White Horse Inn were still taking life quickly.

“Eliza vows she can hear that alarm in her room,” he communed. “Well, suppose we assist nature, which is always a laudable thing and peculiarly excellent when breakfast is advanced by a quarter of an hour.”

Eliza was the inn’s stout and voluble cook-housekeeper, and her attic lay directly above Trenholme’s room. He went back for the clock, crept swiftly upstairs, opened a door a few inches, and put the infernal machine inside, close to the wall. He was splashing in the bath when a harsh and penetrating din jarred through the house, and a slight scream showed that Eliza had been duly “alarmed.”