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Updated: June 17, 2025
Instead, he had gone straight to the morning-room, an apartment immediately behind that in which the elder Mr. Bawdrey's collection was housed, and from which a broad French window opened out upon the grounds, and it might have caused a scandal had it been known that Mrs. Bawdrey joined him there one minute after leaving the drawing-room.
At first glance, the hand was no different from any other skeleton hand one might see any day in any place where they sold anatomical specimens for the use of members of the medical profession; but as Mr. Bawdrey, holding it on the palm of his right hand, flattened it out with the fingers of his left, the abnormality at once became apparent.
Michael Bawdrey, a retired brewer, thirsting for something more enduring than malt to carry his name down the ages became fired with enthusiasm upon the subject, and set forth for Java 'hot foot, as one might say.
Besides, as I have said, it was once the property of her late father, a most learned man, sir, most learned, and as it was of sufficient interest for him to retain it oh, well, we collectors are faddists, you know, so I easily persuaded Mrs. Bawdrey to allow me to bring it over to England with me when we took our leave of Java.
The sight was not inspiring the freaks of Mother Nature rarely are. No one but a doctor would have cared to accept the thing as a gift, and no one but a man as mad on the subject of curiosities and with as little sense of discrimination as Mr. Bawdrey would have dreamt for a moment of adding it to a collection. "It's rather uncanny," said Cleek, who had no palate for the abnormal in Nature.
"So is the man, Mrs. Bawdrey," answered a low voice from the outer darkness; then a figure lifted itself above the screening shrubs just beyond the ledge of the open window, and Cleek stepped into the room. She gave a little hysterical cry and reached out her hands to him. "Oh, I am so glad to see you, even though you hint at such awful things, I am so glad, so glad!" she said.
I think I should go off my head with rapture if I owned an antique like that. But, pardon me, have you met with an accident, Mr. Bawdrey? That's an ugly place you have on your palm." "That? Oh, that's nothing," he answered, gaily. "It itches a great deal at times, but otherwise it isn't troublesome. I can't think how in the world I got it, to tell the truth.
It is true, if you have not heard it, that once upon a time there was bad blood between Mr. Murdock and him; that Mr. Murdock is a family connection; but even he, oh, even he Tell me tell me, Mr. Cleek?" "Mrs. Bawdrey, I can't just yet," he made reply.
It was, perhaps, twenty minutes later that young Bawdrey came down and found him all alone in the smoking-room, bending over the table whereon the butler had set the salver containing the whisky decanter, the soda siphon, and the glasses that were always laid out there that the gentlemen might help themselves to the regulation "night-cap" before going to bed.
"A little a very little indeed. I know that your father went to Java, and married a second wife there; and I know, too, that you yourself were rather taken with the lady at one time, and that she threw you over as soon as Mr. Bawdrey senior became a possibility." "That's a mistake," he replied. "She never threw me over, Mr. Headland; she never had the chance.
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