[Illustration]
Trent’s Last Case
THE WOMAN IN BLACK
By E.C. Bentley
To
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON.
My dear Gilbert,
I dedicate this story to you. First: because the only really noble
motive I had in writing it was the hope that you would enjoy it.
Second: because I owe you a book in return for “The Man Who Was
Thursday.” Third: because I said I would when I unfolded the plan of it
to you, surrounded by Frenchmen, two years ago. Fourth: because I
remember the past.
I have been thinking again to-day of those astonishing times when
neither of us ever looked at a newspaper; when we were purely happy in
the boundless consumption of paper, pencils, tea, and our elders’
patience; when we embraced the most severe literature, and ourselves
produced such light reading as was necessary; when (in the words of
Canada’s poet) we studied the works of nature, also those little frogs;
when, in short, we were extremely young. For the sake of that age I
offer you this book.
Yours always,
E. C. BENTLEY
Contents
I. Bad News
II. Knocking the Town Endways
III. Breakfast
IV. Handcuffs in the Air
V. Poking About
VI. Mr. Bunner on the Case
VII. The Lady in Black
VIII. The Inquest
IX. A Hot Scent
X. The Wife of Dives
XI. Hitherto Unpublished
XII. Evil Days
XIII. Eruption
XIV. Writing a Letter
XV. Double Cunning
XVI. The Last Straw
[Illustration]
Chapter I.
Bad News
Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we
know judge wisely?
When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered
by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single
tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity
of such wealth as this dead man had piled up—without making one loyal
friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to
the least honour. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to those
living in the great vortices of business as if the earth too shuddered
under a blow.
In all the lurid commercial history of his country there had been no
figure that had so imposed itself upon the mind of the trading world.
He had a niche apart in its temples. Financial giants, strong to direct
and augment the forces of capital, and taking an approved toll in
millions for their labour, had existed before; but in the case of
Manderson there had been this singularity, that a pale halo of
piratical romance, a thing especially dear to the hearts of his
countrymen, had remained incongruously about his head through the years
when he stood in every eye as the unquestioned guardian of stability,
the stamper-out of manipulated crises, the foe of the raiding
chieftains that infest the borders of Wall Street.
The fortune left by his grandfather, who had been one of those
chieftains on the smaller scale of his day, had descended to him with
accretion through his father, who during a long life had quietly
continued to lend money and never had margined a stock. Manderson, who
had at no time known what it was to be without large sums to his hand,
should have been altogether of that newer American plutocracy which is
steadied by the tradition and habit of great wealth. But it was not so.
While his nurture and education had taught him European ideas of a rich
man’s proper external circumstance; while they had rooted in him an
instinct for quiet magnificence, the larger costliness which does not
shriek of itself with a thousand tongues; there had been handed on to
him nevertheless much of the Forty-Niner and financial buccaneer, his
forbear. During that first period of his business career which had been
called his early bad manner, he had been little more than a gambler of
genius, his hand against every man’s—an infant prodigy—who brought to
the enthralling pursuit of speculation a brain better endowed than any
opposed to it. At St Helena it was laid down that war is _une belle
occupation;_ and so the young Manderson had found the multitudinous and
complicated dog-fight of the Stock Exchange of New York.
Then came his change. At his father’s death, when Manderson was thirty
years old, some new revelation of the power and the glory of the god he
served seemed to have come upon him. With the sudden, elastic
adaptability of his nation he turned to steady labour in his father’s
banking business, closing his ears to the sound of the battles of the
Street. In a few years he came to control all the activity of the great
firm whose unimpeached conservatism, safety, and financial weight
lifted it like a cliff above the angry sea of the markets. All mistrust
founded on the performances of his youth had vanished. He was quite
plainly a different man. How the change came about none could with
authority say, but there was a story of certain last words spoken by
his father, whom alone he had respected and perhaps loved.
He began to tower above the financial situation. Soon his name was
current in the bourses of the world. One who spoke the name of
Manderson called up a vision of all that was broad-based and firm in
the vast wealth of the United States. He planned great combinations of
capital, drew together and centralized industries of continental scope,
financed with unerring judgement the large designs of state or of
private enterprise. Many a time when he “took hold” to smash a strike,
or to federate the ownership of some great field of labour, he sent
ruin upon a multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or steelworkers or
cattlemen defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and
ruthless than they. But this was done in the pursuit of legitimate
business ends. Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but
the financier and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a
hand to protect or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of
the country. Forcible, cold, and unerring, in all he did he ministered
to the national lust for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him
the Colossus.
But there was an aspect of Manderson in this later period that lay long
unknown and unsuspected save by a few, his secretaries and lieutenants
and certain of the associates of his bygone hurling time. This little
circle knew that Manderson, the pillar of sound business and stability
in the markets, had his hours of nostalgia for the lively times when
the Street had trembled at his name. It was, said one of them, as if
Blackbeard had settled down as a decent merchant in Bristol on the
spoils of the Main. Now and then the pirate would glare suddenly out,
the knife in his teeth and the sulphur matches sputtering in his
hatband. During such spasms of reversion to type a score of tempestuous
raids upon the market had been planned on paper in the inner room of
the offices of Manderson, Colefax and Company. But they were never
carried out. Blackbeard would quell the mutiny of his old self within
him and go soberly down to his counting-house—humming a stave or two of
“Spanish Ladies”, perhaps, under his breath. Manderson would allow
himself the harmless satisfaction, as soon as the time for action had
gone by, of pointing out to some Rupert of the markets a coup worth a
million to the depredator might have been made. “Seems to me,” he would
say almost wistfully, “the Street is getting to be a mighty dull place
since I quit.” By slow degrees this amiable weakness of the Colossus
became known to the business world, which exulted greatly in the
knowledge.
At the news of his death panic went through the markets like a
hurricane; for it came at a luckless time. Prices tottered and crashed
like towers in an earthquake. For two days Wall Street was a clamorous
inferno of pale despair. All over the United States, wherever
speculation had its devotees, went a waft of ruin, a plague of suicide.
In Europe also not a few took with their own hands lives that had
become pitiably linked to the destiny of a financier whom most of them
had never seen. In Paris a well-known banker walked quietly out of the
Bourse and fell dead upon the broad steps among the raving crowd of
Jews, a phial crushed in his hand. In Frankfort one leapt from the
Cathedral top, leaving a redder stain where he struck the red tower.
Men stabbed and shot and strangled themselves, drank death or breathed
it as the air, because in a lonely corner of England the life had
departed from one cold heart vowed to the service of greed.
The blow could not have fallen at a more disastrous moment. It came
when Wall Street was in a condition of suppressed “scare”—suppressed,
because for a week past the great interests known to act with or to be
actually controlled by the Colossus had been desperately combating the
effects of the sudden arrest of Lucas Hahn, and the exposure of his
plundering of the Hahn banks. This bombshell, in its turn, had fallen
at a time when the market had been “boosted” beyond its real strength.
In the language of the place, a slump was due. Reports from the
corn-lands had not been good, and there had been two or three railway
statements which had been expected to be much better than they were.
But at whatever point in the vast area of speculation the shudder of
the threatened break had been felt, “the Manderson crowd” had stepped
in and held the market up. All through the week the speculator’s mind,
as shallow as it is quick-witted, as sentimental as greedy, had seen in
this the hand of the giant stretched out in protection from afar.
Manderson, said the newspapers in chorus, was in hourly communication
with his lieutenants in the Street. One journal was able to give in
round figures the sum spent on cabling between New York and Marlstone
in the past twenty-four hours; it told how a small staff of expert
operators had been sent down by the Post Office authorities to
Marlstone to deal with the flood of messages. Another revealed that
Manderson, on the first news of the Hahn crash, had arranged to abandon
his holiday and return home by the _Lusitania;_ but that he soon had
the situation so well in hand that he had determined to remain where he
was.
All this was falsehood, more or less consciously elaborated by the
“finance editors”, consciously initiated and encouraged by the shrewd
business men of the Manderson group, who knew that nothing could better
help their plans than this illusion of hero-worship—knew also that no
word had come from Manderson in answer to their messages, and that
Howard B. Jeffrey, of Steel and Iron fame, was the true organizer of
victory. So they fought down apprehension through four feverish days,
and minds grew calmer. On Saturday, though the ground beneath the feet
of Mr. Jeffrey yet rumbled now and then with Etna-mutterings of
disquiet, he deemed his task almost done. The market was firm, and
slowly advancing. Wall Street turned to its sleep of Sunday, worn out
but thankfully at peace.
In the first trading hour of Monday a hideous rumour flew round the
sixty acres of the financial district. It came into being as the
lightning comes—a blink that seems to begin nowhere; though it is to be
suspected that it was first whispered over the telephone—together with
an urgent selling order by some employee in the cable service. A sharp
spasm convulsed the convalescent share-list. In five minutes the dull
noise of the kerbstone market in Broad Street had leapt to a high note
of frantic interrogation. From within the hive of the Exchange itself
could be heard a droning hubbub of fear, and men rushed hatless in and
out. Was it true? asked every man; and every man replied, with
trembling lips, that it was a lie put out by some unscrupulous “short”
interest seeking to cover itself. In another quarter of an hour news
came of a sudden and ruinous collapse of “Yankees” in London at the
close of the Stock Exchange day. It was enough. New York had still four
hours’ trading in front of her. The strategy of pointing to Manderson
as the saviour and warden of the markets had recoiled upon its authors
with annihilating force, and Jeffrey, his ear at his private telephone,
listened to the tale of disaster with a set jaw. The new Napoleon had
lost his Marengo. He saw the whole financial landscape sliding and
falling into chaos before him. In half an hour the news of the finding
of Manderson’s body, with the inevitable rumour that it was suicide,
was printing in a dozen newspaper offices; but before a copy reached
Wall Street the tornado of the panic was in full fury, and Howard B.
Jeffrey and his collaborators were whirled away like leaves before its
breath.
All this sprang out of nothing.
Nothing in the texture of the general life had changed. The corn had
not ceased to ripen in the sun. The rivers bore their barges and gave
power to a myriad engines. The flocks fattened on the pastures, the
herds were unnumbered. Men laboured everywhere in the various
servitudes to which they were born, and chafed not more than usual in
their bonds. Bellona tossed and murmured as ever, yet still slept her
uneasy sleep. To all mankind save a million or two of half-crazed
gamblers, blind to all reality, the death of Manderson meant nothing;
the life and work of the world went on. Weeks before he died strong
hands had been in control of every wire in the huge network of commerce
and industry that he had supervised. Before his corpse was buried his
countrymen had made a strange discovery—that the existence of the
potent engine of monopoly that went by the name of Sigsbee Manderson
had not been a condition of even material prosperity. The panic blew
itself out in two days, the pieces were picked up, the bankrupts
withdrew out of sight; the market “recovered a normal tone”.
While the brief delirium was yet subsiding there broke out a domestic
scandal in England that suddenly fixed the attention of two continents.
Next morning the Chicago Limited was wrecked, and the same day a
notable politician was shot down in cold blood by his wife’s brother in
the streets of New Orleans. Within a week of its rising, “the Manderson
story”, to the trained sense of editors throughout the Union, was
“cold”. The tide of American visitors pouring through Europe made
eddies round the memorial or statue of many a man who had died in
poverty; and never thought of their most famous plutocrat. Like the
poet who died in Rome, so young and poor, a hundred years ago, he was
buried far away from his own land; but for all the men and women of
Manderson’s people who flock round the tomb of Keats in the cemetery
under the Monte Testaccio, there is not one, nor ever will be, to stand
in reverence by the rich man’s grave beside the little church of
Marlstone.
Chapter II.
Knocking the Town Endways
In the only comfortably furnished room in the offices of the _Record,_
the telephone on Sir James Molloy’s table buzzed. Sir James made a
motion with his pen, and Mr. Silver, his secretary, left his work and
came over to the instrument.
“Who is that?” he said. “Who?... I can’t hear you.... Oh, it’s Mr.
Bunner, is it?... Yes, but... I know, but he’s fearfully busy this
afternoon. Can’t you... Oh, really? Well, in that case—just hold on,
will you?”
He placed the receiver before Sir James. “It’s Calvin Bunner, Sigsbee
Manderson’s right-hand man,” he said concisely. “He insists on speaking
to you personally. Says it is the gravest piece of news. He is talking
from the house down by Bishopsbridge, so it will be necessary to speak
clearly.”
Sir James looked at the telephone, not affectionately, and took up the
receiver. “Well?” he said in his strong voice, and listened. “Yes,” he
said. The next moment Mr. Silver, eagerly watching him, saw a look of
amazement and horror. “Good God!” murmured Sir James. Clutching the
instrument, he slowly rose to his feet, still bending ear intently. At
intervals he repeated “Yes.” Presently, as he listened, he glanced at
the clock, and spoke quickly to Mr. Silver over the top of the
transmitter. “Go and hunt up Figgis and young Williams. Hurry.” Mr.
Silver darted from the room.
The great journalist was a tall, strong, clever Irishman of fifty,
swart and black-moustached, a man of untiring business energy, well
known in the world, which he understood very thoroughly, and played
upon with the half-cynical competence of his race. Yet was he without a
touch of the charlatan: he made no mysteries, and no pretences of
knowledge, and he saw instantly through these in others. In his
handsome, well-bred, well-dressed appearance there was something a
little sinister when anger or intense occupation put its imprint about
his eyes and brow; but when his generous nature was under no restraint
he was the most cordial of men. He was managing director of the company
which owned that most powerful morning paper, the _Record,_ and also
that most indispensable evening paper, the _Sun,_ which had its offices
on the other side of the street. He was, moreover, editor-in-chief of
the _Record,_ to which he had in the course of years attached the most
variously capable personnel in the country. It was a maxim of his that
where you could not get gifts, you must do the best you could with
solid merit; and he employed a great deal of both. He was respected by
his staff as few are respected in a profession not favourable to the
growth of the sentiment of reverence.
“You’re sure that’s all?” asked Sir James, after a few minutes of
earnest listening and questioning. “And how long has this been
known?... Yes, of course, the police are; but the servants? Surely it’s
all over the place down there by now.... Well, we’ll have a try....
Look here, Bunner, I’m infinitely obliged to you about this. I owe you
a good turn. You know I mean what I say. Come and see me the first day
you get to town.... All right, that’s understood. Now I must act on
your news. Goodbye.”
Sir James hung up the receiver, and seized a railway timetable from the
rack before him. After a rapid consultation of this oracle, he flung it
down with a forcible word as Mr. Silver hurried into the room, followed
by a hard-featured man with spectacles, and a youth with an alert eye.
“I want you to jot down some facts, Figgis,” said Sir James, banishing
all signs of agitation and speaking with a rapid calmness. “When you
have them, put them into shape just as quick as you can for a special
edition of the _Sun_.” The hard-featured man nodded and glanced at the
clock, which pointed to a few minutes past three; he pulled out a
notebook and drew a chair up to the big writing-table. “Silver,” Sir
James went on, “go and tell Jones to wire our local correspondent very
urgently, to drop everything and get down to Marlstone at once. He is
not to say why in the telegram. There must not be an unnecessary word
about this news until the _Sun_ is on the streets with it—you all
understand. Williams, cut across the way and tell Mr. Anthony to hold
himself ready for a two-column opening that will knock the town
endways. Just tell him that he must take all measures and precautions
for a scoop. Say that Figgis will be over in five minutes with the
facts, and that he had better let him write up the story in his private
room. As you go, ask Miss Morgan to see me here at once, and tell the
telephone people to see if they can get Mr. Trent on the wire for me.
After seeing Mr. Anthony, return here and stand by.” The alert-eyed
young man vanished like a spirit.
Sir James turned instantly to Mr. Figgis, whose pencil was poised over
the paper. “Sigsbee Manderson has been murdered,” he began quickly and
clearly, pacing the floor with his hands behind him. Mr. Figgis
scratched down a line of shorthand with as much emotion as if he had
been told that the day was fine—the pose of his craft. “He and his wife
and two secretaries have been for the past fortnight at the house
called White Gables, at Marlstone, near Bishopsbridge. He bought it
four years ago. He and Mrs. Manderson have since spent a part of each
summer there. Last night he went to bed about half-past eleven, just as
usual. No one knows when he got up and left the house. He was not
missed until this morning. About ten o’clock his body was found by a
gardener. It was lying by a shed in the grounds. He was shot in the
head, through the left eye. Death must have been instantaneous. The
body was not robbed, but there were marks on the wrists which pointed
to a struggle having taken place. Dr Stock, of Marlstone, was at once
sent for, and will conduct the post-mortem examination. The police from
Bishopsbridge, who were soon on the spot, are reticent, but it is
believed that they are quite without a clue to the identity of the
murderer. There you are, Figgis. Mr. Anthony is expecting you. Now I
must telephone him and arrange things.”
Mr. Figgis looked up. “One of the ablest detectives at Scotland Yard,”
he suggested, “has been put in charge of the case. It’s a safe
statement.”
“If you like,” said Sir James.
“And Mrs. Manderson? Was she there?”
“Yes. What about her?”
“Prostrated by the shock,” hinted the reporter, “and sees nobody. Human
interest.”
“I wouldn’t put that in, Mr. Figgis,” said a quiet voice. It belonged
to Miss Morgan, a pale, graceful woman, who had silently made her
appearance while the dictation was going on. “I have seen Mrs.
Manderson,” she proceeded, turning to Sir James. “She looks quite
healthy and intelligent. Has her husband been murdered? I don’t think
the shock would prostrate her. She is more likely to be doing all she
can to help the police.”
“Something in your own style, then, Miss Morgan,” he said with a
momentary smile. Her imperturbable efficiency was an office proverb.
“Cut it out, Figgis. Off you go! Now, madam, I expect you know what I
want.”
“Our Manderson biography happens to be well up to date,” replied Miss
Morgan, drooping her dark eyelashes as she considered the position. “I
was looking over it only a few months ago. It is practically ready for
tomorrow’s paper. I should think the _Sun_ had better use the sketch of
his life they had about two years ago, when he went to Berlin and
settled the potash difficulty. I remember it was a very good sketch,
and they won’t be able to carry much more than that. As for our paper,
of course we have a great quantity of cuttings, mostly rubbish. The
sub-editors shall have them as soon as they come in. Then we have two
very good portraits that are our own property; the best is a drawing
Mr. Trent made when they were both on the same ship somewhere. It is
better than any of the photographs; but you say the public prefers a
bad photograph to a good drawing. I will send them down to you at once,
and you can choose. As far as I can see, the Record is well ahead of
the situation, except that you will not be able to get a special man
down there in time to be of any use for tomorrow’s paper.”
Sir James sighed deeply. “What are we good for, anyhow?” he enquired
dejectedly of Mr. Silver, who had returned to his desk. “She even knows
Bradshaw by heart.”
Miss Morgan adjusted her cuffs with an air of patience. “Is there
anything else?” she asked, as the telephone bell rang.
“Yes, one thing,” replied Sir James, as he took up the receiver. “I
want you to make a bad mistake some time, Miss Morgan—an everlasting
bloomer—just to put us in countenance.” She permitted herself the
fraction of what would have been a charming smile as she went out.
“Anthony?” asked Sir James, and was at once deep in consultation with
the editor on the other side of the road. He seldom entered the _Sun_
building in person; the atmosphere of an evening paper, he would say,
was all very well if you liked that kind of thing. Mr. Anthony, the
Murat of Fleet Street, who delighted in riding the whirlwind and
fighting a tumultuous battle against time, would say the same of a
morning paper.
It was some five minutes later that a uniformed boy came in to say that
Mr. Trent was on the wire. Sir James abruptly closed his talk with Mr.
Anthony.
“They can put him through at once,” he said to the boy.
“Hullo!” he cried into the telephone after a few moments.
A voice in the instrument replied, “Hullo be blowed! What do you want?”
“This is Molloy,” said Sir James.
“I know it is,” the voice said. “This is Trent. He is in the middle of
painting a picture, and he has been interrupted at a critical moment.
Well, I hope it’s something important, that’s all!”
“Trent,” said Sir James impressively, “it is important. I want you to
do some work for us.”
“Some play, you mean,” replied the voice. “Believe me, I don’t want a
holiday. The working fit is very strong. I am doing some really decent
things. Why can’t you leave a man alone?”
“Something very serious has happened.”
“What?”
“Sigsbee Manderson has been murdered—shot through the brain—and they
don’t know who has done it. They found the body this morning. It
happened at his place near Bishopsbridge.” Sir James proceeded to tell
his hearer, briefly and clearly, the facts that he had communicated to
Mr. Figgis. “What do you think of it?” he ended. A considering grunt
was the only answer. “Come now,” urged Sir James.
“Tempter!”
“You will go down?”
There was a brief pause.
“Are you there?” said Sir James.
“Look here, Molloy,” the voice broke out querulously, “the thing may be
a case for me, or it may not. We can’t possibly tell. It may be a
mystery; it may be as simple as bread and cheese. The body not being
robbed looks interesting, but he may have been outed by some wretched
tramp whom he found sleeping in the grounds and tried to kick out. It’s
the sort of thing he would do. Such a murderer might easily have sense
enough to know that to leave the money and valuables was the safest
thing. I tell you frankly, I wouldn’t have a hand in hanging a poor
devil who had let daylight into a man like Sig Manderson as a measure
of social protest.”
Sir James smiled at the telephone—a smile of success. “Come, my boy,
you’re getting feeble. Admit you want to go and have a look at the
case. You know you do. If it’s anything you don’t want to handle,
you’re free to drop it. By the by, where are you?”
“I am blown along a wandering wind,” replied the voice irresolutely,
“and hollow, hollow, hollow all delight.”
“Can you get here within an hour?” persisted Sir James.
“I suppose I can,” the voice grumbled. “How much time have I?”
“Good man! Well, there’s time enough—that’s just the worst of it. I’ve
got to depend on our local correspondent for tonight. The only good
train of the day went half an hour ago. The next is a slow one, leaving
Paddington at midnight. You could have the Buster, if you like”—Sir
James referred to a very fast motor car of his—“but you wouldn’t get
down in time to do anything tonight.”
“And I’d miss my sleep. No, thanks. The train for me. I am quite fond
of railway travelling, you know; I have a gift for it. I am the stoker
and the stoked. I am the song the porter sings.”
“What’s that you say?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the voice sadly. “I say,” it continued, “will
your people look out a hotel near the scene of action, and telegraph
for a room?”
“At once,” said Sir James. “Come here as soon as you can.”
He replaced the receiver. As he turned to his papers again a shrill
outcry burst forth in the street below. He walked to the open window. A
band of excited boys was rushing down the steps of the _Sun_ building
and up the narrow thoroughfare toward Fleet Street. Each carried a
bundle of newspapers and a large broadsheet with the simple legend:
MURDER OF SIGSBEE MANDERSON
Sir James smiled and rattled the money in his pockets cheerfully. “It
makes a good bill,” he observed to Mr. Silver, who stood at his elbow.
Such was Manderson’s epitaph.
Chapter III.
Breakfast
At about eight o’clock in the morning of the following day Mr.
Nathaniel Burton Cupples stood on the veranda of the hotel at
Marlstone. He was thinking about breakfast. In his case the
colloquialism must be taken literally: he really was thinking about
breakfast, as he thought about every conscious act of his life when
time allowed deliberation. He reflected that on the preceding day the
excitement and activity following upon the discovery of the dead man
had disorganized his appetite, and led to his taking considerably less
nourishment than usual. This morning he was very hungry, having already
been up and about for an hour; and he decided to allow himself a third
piece of toast and an additional egg; the rest as usual. The remaining
deficit must be made up at luncheon, but that could be gone into later.
So much being determined, Mr. Cupples applied himself to the enjoyment
of the view for a few minutes before ordering his meal. With a
connoisseur’s eye he explored the beauty of the rugged coast, where a
great pierced rock rose from a glassy sea, and the ordered loveliness
of the vast tilted levels of pasture and tillage and woodland that
sloped gently up from the cliffs toward the distant moor. Mr. Cupples
delighted in landscape.
He was a man of middle height and spare figure, nearly sixty years old,
by constitution rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his
age. A sparse and straggling beard and moustache did not conceal a thin
but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and
narrow jaw gave him very much of a clerical air, and this impression
was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. The
whole effect of him, indeed, was priestly. He was a man of unusually
conscientious, industrious, and orderly mind, with little imagination.
His father’s household had been used to recruit its domestic
establishment by means of advertisements in which it was truthfully
described as a serious family. From that fortress of gloom he had
escaped with two saintly gifts somehow unspoiled: an inexhaustible
kindness of heart, and a capacity for innocent gaiety which owed
nothing to humour. In an earlier day and with a clerical training he
might have risen to the scarlet hat. He was, in fact, a highly regarded
member of the London Positivist Society, a retired banker, a widower
without children. His austere but not unhappy life was spent largely
among books and in museums; his profound and patiently accumulated
knowledge of a number of curiously disconnected subjects which had
stirred his interest at different times had given him a place in the
quiet, half-lit world of professors and curators and devotees of
research; at their amiable, unconvivial dinner parties he was most
himself. His favourite author was Montaigne.
Just as Mr. Cupples was finishing his meal at a little table on the
veranda, a big motor car turned into the drive before the hotel. “Who
is this?” he enquired of the waiter. “Id is der manager,” said the
young man listlessly. “He have been to meed a gendleman by der train.”
The car drew up and the porter hurried from the entrance. Mr. Cupples
uttered an exclamation of pleasure as a long, loosely built man, much
younger than himself, stepped from the car and mounted the veranda,
flinging his hat on a chair. His high-boned, quixotic face wore a
pleasant smile; his rough tweed clothes, his hair and short moustache
were tolerably untidy.
“Cupples, by all that’s miraculous!” cried the man, pouncing upon Mr.
Cupples before he could rise, and seizing his outstretched hand in a
hard grip. “My luck is serving me today,” the newcomer went on
spasmodically. “This is the second slice within an hour. How are you,
my best of friends? And why are you here? Why sit’st thou by that
ruined breakfast? Dost thou its former pride recall, or ponder how it
passed away? I _am_ glad to see you!”
“I was half expecting you, Trent,” Mr. Cupples replied, his face
wreathed in smiles. “You are looking splendid, my dear fellow. I will
tell you all about it. But you cannot have had your own breakfast yet.
Will you have it at my table here?”
“Rather!” said the man. “An enormous great breakfast, too—with refined
conversation and tears of recognition never dry. Will you get young
Siegfried to lay a place for me while I go and wash? I shan’t be three
minutes.” He disappeared into the hotel, and Mr. Cupples, after a
moment’s thought, went to the telephone in the porter’s office.
He returned to find his friend already seated, pouring out tea, and
showing an unaffected interest in the choice of food. “I expect this to
be a hard day for me,” he said, with the curious jerky utterance which
seemed to be his habit. “I shan’t eat again till the evening, very
likely. You guess why I’m here, don’t you?”
“Undoubtedly,” said Mr. Cupples. “You have come down to write about the
murder.”
“That is rather a colourless way of stating it,” the man called Trent
replied, as he dissected a sole. “I should prefer to put it that I have
come down in the character of avenger of blood, to hunt down the
guilty, and vindicate the honour of society. That is my line of
business. Families waited on at their private residences. I say,
Cupples, I have made a good beginning already. Wait a bit, and I’ll
tell you.” There was a silence, during which the newcomer ate swiftly
and abstractedly, while Mr. Cupples looked on happily.
“Your manager here,” said the tall man at last, “is a fellow of
remarkable judgement. He is an admirer of mine. He knows more about my
best cases than I do myself. The _Record_ wired last night to say I was
coming, and when I got out of the train at seven o’clock this morning,
there he was waiting for me with a motor car the size of a haystack. He
is beside himself with joy at having me here. It is fame.” He drank a
cup of tea and continued: “Almost his first words were to ask me if I
would like to see the body of the murdered man—if so, he thought he
could manage it for me. He is as keen as a razor. The body lies in Dr
Stock’s surgery, you know, down in the village, exactly as it was when
found. It’s to be post-mortem’d this morning, by the way, so I was only
just in time. Well, he ran me down here to the doctor’s, giving me full
particulars about the case all the way. I was pretty well _au fait_ by
the time we arrived. I suppose the manager of a place like this has
some sort of a pull with the doctor. Anyhow, he made no difficulties,
nor did the constable on duty, though he was careful to insist on my
not giving him away in the paper.”
“I saw the body before it was removed,” remarked Mr. Cupples. “I should
not have said there was anything remarkable about it, except that the
shot in the eye had scarcely disfigured the face at all, and caused
scarcely any effusion of blood, apparently. The wrists were scratched
and bruised. I expect that, with your trained faculties, you were able
to remark other details of a suggestive nature.”
“Other details, certainly; but I don’t know that they suggest anything.
They are merely odd. Take the wrists, for instance. How was it you
could see bruises and scratches on them? I dare say you saw something
of Manderson down here before the murder.”
“Certainly,” Mr. Cupples said.
“Well, did you ever see his wrists?”
Mr. Cupples reflected. “No. Now you raise the point, I am reminded that
when I interviewed Manderson here he was wearing stiff cuffs, coming
well down over his hands.”
“He always did,” said Trent. “My friend the manager says so. I pointed
out to him the fact you didn’t observe, that there were no cuffs
visible, and that they had, indeed, been dragged up inside the
coat-sleeves, as yours would be if you hurried into a coat without
pulling your cuffs down. That was why you saw his wrists.”
“Well, I call that suggestive,” observed Mr. Cupples mildly. “You might
infer, perhaps, that when he got up he hurried over his dressing.”
“Yes, but did he? The manager said just what you say. ‘He was always a
bit of a swell in his dress,’ he told me, and he drew the inference
that when Manderson got up in that mysterious way, before the house was
stirring, and went out into the grounds, he was in a great hurry. ‘Look
at his shoes,’ he said to me: ‘Mr. Manderson was always specially neat
about his footwear. But those shoe-laces were tied in a hurry.’ I
agreed. ‘And he left his false teeth in his room,’ said the manager.
‘Doesn’t _that_ prove he was flustered and hurried?’ I allowed that it
looked like it. But I said, ‘Look here: if he was so very much pressed,
why did he part his hair so carefully? That parting is a work of art.
Why did he put on so much? for he had on a complete outfit of
underclothing, studs in his shirt, sock-suspenders, a watch and chain,
money and keys and things in his pockets. That’s what I said to the
manager. He couldn’t find an explanation. Can you?’
Mr. Cupples considered. “Those facts might suggest that he was hurried
only at the end of his dressing. Coat and shoes would come last.”
“But not false teeth. You ask anybody who wears them. And besides, I’m
told he hadn’t washed at all on getting up, which in a neat man looks
like his being in a violent hurry from the beginning. And here’s
another thing. One of his waistcoat pockets was lined with wash-leather
for the reception of his gold watch. But he had put his watch into the
pocket on the other side. Anybody who has settled habits can see how
odd that is. The fact is, there are signs of great agitation and haste,
and there are signs of exactly the opposite. For the present I am not
guessing. I must reconnoitre the ground first, if I can manage to get
the right side of the people of the house.” Trent applied himself again
to his breakfast.
Mr. Cupples smiled at him benevolently. “That is precisely the point,”
he said, “on which I can be of some assistance to you.” Trent glanced
up in surprise. “I told you I half expected you. I will explain the
situation. Mrs. Manderson, who is my niece—”
“What!” Trent laid down his knife and fork with a clash. “Cupples, you
are jesting with me.”
“I am perfectly serious, Trent, really,” returned Mr. Cupples
earnestly. “Her father, John Peter Domecq, was my wife’s brother. I
never mentioned my niece or her marriage to you before, I suppose. To
tell the truth, it has always been a painful subject to me, and I have
avoided discussing it with anybody. To return to what I was about to
say: last night, when I was over at the house—by the way, you can see
it from here. You passed it in the car.” He indicated a red roof among
poplars some three hundred yards away, the only building in sight that
stood separate from the tiny village in the gap below them.
“Certainly I did,” said Trent. “The manager told me all about it, among
other things, as he drove me in from Bishopsbridge.”
“Other people here have heard of you and your performances,” Mr.
Cupples went on. “As I was saying, when I was over there last night,
Mr. Bunner, who is one of Manderson’s two secretaries, expressed a hope
that the _Record_ would send you down to deal with the case, as the
police seemed quite at a loss. He mentioned one or two of your past
successes, and Mabel—my niece—was interested when I told her
afterwards. She is bearing up wonderfully well, Trent; she has
remarkable fortitude of character. She said she remembered reading your
articles about the Abinger case. She has a great horror of the
newspaper side of this sad business, and she had entreated me to do
anything I could to keep journalists away from the place—I’m sure you
can understand her feeling, Trent; it isn’t really any reflection on
that profession. But she said you appeared to have great powers as a
detective, and she would not stand in the way of anything that might
clear up the crime. Then I told her you were a personal friend of mine,
and gave you a good character for tact and consideration of others’
feelings; and it ended in her saying that, if you should come, she
would like you to be helped in every way.”
Trent leaned across the table and shook Mr. Cupples by the hand in
silence. Mr. Cupples, much delighted with the way things were turning
out, resumed:
“I spoke to my niece on the telephone only just now, and she is glad
you are here. She asks me to say that you may make any enquiries you
like, and she puts the house and grounds at your disposal. She had
rather not see you herself; she is keeping to her own sitting-room. She
has already been interviewed by a detective officer who is there, and
she feels unequal to any more. She adds that she does not believe she
could say anything that would be of the smallest use. The two
secretaries and Martin, the butler (who is a most intelligent man),
could tell you all you want to know, she thinks.”
Trent finished his breakfast with a thoughtful brow. He filled a pipe
slowly, and seated himself on the rail of the veranda. “Cupples,” he
said quietly, “is there anything about this business that you know and
would rather not tell me?”
Mr. Cupples gave a slight start, and turned an astonished gaze on the
questioner. “What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean about the Mandersons. Look here! Shall I tell you a thing that
strikes me about this affair at the very beginning? Here’s a man
suddenly and violently killed, and nobody’s heart seems to be broken
about it, to say the least. The manager of this hotel spoke to me about
him as coolly as if he’d never set eyes on him, though I understand
they’ve been neighbours every summer for some years. Then you talk
about the thing in the coldest of blood. And Mrs. Manderson—well, you
won’t mind my saying that I have heard of women being more cut up about
their husbands being murdered than she seems to be. Is there something
in this, Cupples, or is it my fancy? Was there something queer about
Manderson? I travelled on the same boat with him once, but never spoke
to him. I only know his public character, which was repulsive enough.
You see, this may have a bearing on the case; that’s the only reason
why I ask.”
Mr. Cupples took time for thought. He fingered his sparse beard and
looked out over the sea. At last he turned to Trent. “I see no reason,”
he said, “why I shouldn’t tell you as between ourselves, my dear
fellow. I need not say that this must not be referred to, however
distantly. The truth is that nobody really liked Manderson; and I think
those who were nearest to him liked him least.”
“Why?” the other interjected.
“Most people found a difficulty in explaining why. In trying to account
to myself for my own sensations, I could only put it that one felt in
the man a complete absence of the sympathetic faculty. There was
nothing outwardly repellent about him. He was not ill-mannered, or
vicious, or dull—indeed, he could be remarkably interesting. But I
received the impression that there could be no human creature whom he
would not sacrifice in the pursuit of his schemes, in his task of
imposing himself and his will upon the world. Perhaps that was
fanciful, but I think not altogether so. However, the point is that
Mabel, I am sorry to say, was very unhappy. I am nearly twice your age,
my dear boy, though you always so kindly try to make me feel as if we
were contemporaries—I am getting to be an old man, and a great many
people have been good enough to confide their matrimonial troubles to
me; but I never knew another case like my niece’s and her husband’s. I
have known her since she was a baby, Trent, and I know—you understand,
I think, that I do not employ that word lightly—I _know_ that she is as
amiable and honourable a woman, to say nothing of her other good gifts,
as any man could wish. But Manderson, for some time past, had made her
miserable.”
“What did he do?” asked Trent, as Mr. Cupples paused.
“When I put that question to Mabel, her words were that he seemed to
nurse a perpetual grievance. He maintained a distance between them, and
he would say nothing. I don’t know how it began or what was behind it;
and all she would tell me on that point was that he had no cause in the
world for his attitude. I think she knew what was in his mind, whatever
it was; but she is full of pride. This seems to have gone on for
months. At last, a week ago, she wrote to me. I am the only near
relative she has. Her mother died when she was a child; and after John
Peter died I was something like a father to her until she married—that
was five years ago. She asked me to come and help her, and I came at
once. That is why I am here now.”
Mr. Cupples paused and drank some tea. Trent smoked and stared out at
the hot June landscape.
“I would not go to White Gables,” Mr. Cupples resumed. “You know my
views, I think, upon the economic constitution of society, and the
proper relationship of the capitalist to the employee, and you know, no
doubt, what use that person made of his vast industrial power upon
several very notorious occasions. I refer especially to the trouble in
the Pennsylvania coal-fields, three years ago. I regarded him, apart
from an all personal dislike, in the light of a criminal and a disgrace
to society. I came to this hotel, and I saw my niece here. She told me
what I have more briefly told you. She said that the worry and the
humiliation of it, and the strain of trying to keep up appearances
before the world, were telling upon her, and she asked for my advice. I
said I thought she should face him and demand an explanation of his way
of treating her. But she would not do that. She had always taken the
line of affecting not to notice the change in his demeanour, and
nothing, I knew, would persuade her to admit to him that she was
injured, once pride had led her into that course. Life is quite full,
my dear Trent,” said Mr. Cupples with a sigh, “of these obstinate
silences and cultivated misunderstandings.”
“Did she love him?” Trent enquired abruptly. Mr. Cupples did not reply
at once. “Had she any love left for him?” Trent amended.
Mr. Cupples played with his teaspoon. “I am bound to say,” he answered
slowly, “that I think not. But you must not misunderstand the woman,
Trent. No power on earth would have persuaded her to admit that to any
one—even to herself, perhaps—so long as she considered herself bound to
him. And I gather that, apart from this mysterious sulking of late, he
had always been considerate and generous.”
“You were saying that she refused to have it out with him.”
“She did,” replied Mr. Cupples. “And I knew by experience that it was
quite useless to attempt to move a Domecq where the sense of dignity
was involved. So I thought it over carefully, and next day I watched my
opportunity and met Manderson as he passed by this hotel. I asked him
to favour me with a few minutes’ conversation, and he stepped inside
the gate down there. We had held no communication of any kind since my
niece’s marriage, but he remembered me, of course. I put the matter to
him at once and quite definitely. I told him what Mabel had confided to
me. I said that I would neither approve nor condemn her action in
bringing me into the business, but that she was suffering, and I
considered it my right to ask how he could justify himself in placing
her in such a position.”
“And how did he take that?” said Trent, smiling secretly at the
landscape. The picture of this mildest of men calling the formidable
Manderson to account pleased him.
“Not very well,” Mr. Cupples replied sadly. “In fact, far from well. I
can tell you almost exactly what he said—it wasn’t much. He said, ‘See
here, Cupples, you don’t want to butt in. My wife can look after
herself. I’ve found that out, along with other things.’ He was
perfectly quiet—you know he was said never to lose control of
himself—though there was a light in his eyes that would have frightened
a man who was in the wrong, I dare say. But I had been thoroughly
roused by his last remark, and the tone of it, which I cannot
reproduce. You see,” said Mr. Cupples simply, “I love my niece. She is
the only child that there has been in our—in my house. Moreover, my
wife brought her up as a girl, and any reflection on Mabel I could not
help feeling, in the heat of the moment, as an indirect reflection upon
one who is gone.”
“You turned upon him,” suggested Trent in a low tone. “You asked him to
explain his words.”
“That is precisely what I did,” said Mr. Cupples. “For a moment he only
stared at me, and I could see a vein on his forehead swelling—an
unpleasant sight. Then he said quite quietly, ‘This thing has gone far
enough, I guess,’ and turned to go.”
“Did he mean your interview?” Trent asked thoughtfully.
“From the words alone you would think so,” Mr. Cupples answered. “But
the way in which he uttered them gave me a strange and very
apprehensive feeling. I received the impression that the man had formed
some sinister resolve. But I regret to say I had lost the power of
dispassionate thought. I fell into a great rage”—Mr. Cupples’s tone was
mildly apologetic—“and said a number of foolish things. I reminded him
that the law allowed a measure of freedom to wives who received
intolerable treatment. I made some utterly irrelevant references to his
public record, and expressed the view that such men as he were unfit to
live. I said these things, and others as ill-considered, under the
eyes, and very possibly within earshot, of half a dozen persons sitting
on this veranda. I noticed them, in spite of my agitation, looking at
me as I walked up to the hotel again after relieving my mind for it
undoubtedly did relieve it,” sighed Mr. Cupples, lying back in his
chair.
“And Manderson? Did he say no more?”
“Not a word. He listened to me with his eyes on my face, as quiet as
before. When I stopped he smiled very slightly, and at once turned away
and strolled through the gate, making for White Gables.”
“And this happened—?”
“On the Sunday morning.”
“Then I suppose you never saw him alive again?”
“No,” said Mr. Cupples. “Or rather yes—once. It was later in the day,
on the golf-course. But I did not speak to him. And next morning he was
found dead.”
The two regarded each other in silence for a few moments. A party of
guests who had been bathing came up the steps and seated themselves,
with much chattering, at a table near them. The waiter approached. Mr.
Cupples rose, and, taking Trent’s arm, led him to a long tennis-lawn at
the side of the hotel.
“I have a reason for telling you all this,” began Mr. Cupples as they
paced slowly up and down.
“Trust you for that,” rejoined Trent, carefully filling his pipe again.
He lit it, smoked a little, and then said, “I’ll try and guess what
your reason is, if you like.”
Mr. Cupples’s face of solemnity relaxed into a slight smile. He said
nothing.
“You thought it possible,” said Trent meditatively—“may I say you
thought it practically certain?—that I should find out for myself that
there had been something deeper than a mere conjugal tiff between the
Mandersons. You thought that my unwholesome imagination would begin at
once to play with the idea of Mrs. Manderson having something to do
with the crime. Rather than that I should lose myself in barren
speculations about this, you decided to tell me exactly how matters
stood, and incidentally to impress upon me, who know how excellent your
judgement is, your opinion of your niece. Is that about right?”
“It is perfectly right. Listen to me, my dear fellow,” said Mr. Cupples
earnestly, laying his hand on the other’s arm. “I am going to be very
frank. I am extremely glad that Manderson is dead. I believe him to
have done nothing but harm in the world as an economic factor. I know
that he was making a desert of the life of one who was like my own
child to me. But I am under an intolerable dread of Mabel being
involved in suspicion with regard to the murder. It is horrible to me
to think of her delicacy and goodness being in contact, if only for a
time, with the brutalities of the law. She is not fitted for it. It
would mark her deeply. Many young women of twenty-six in these days
could face such an ordeal, I suppose. I have observed a sort of
imitative hardness about the products of the higher education of women
today which would carry them through anything, perhaps.
“I am not prepared to say it is a bad thing in the conditions of
feminine life prevailing at present. Mabel, however, is not like that.
She is as unlike that as she is unlike the simpering misses that used
to surround me as a child. She has plenty of brains; she is full of
character; her mind and her tastes are cultivated; but it is all mixed
up”—Mr. Cupples waved his hands in a vague gesture—“with ideals of
refinement and reservation and womanly mystery. I fear she is not a
child of the age. You never knew my wife, Trent. Mabel is my wife’s
child.”
The younger man bowed his head. They paced the length of the lawn
before he asked gently, “Why did she marry him?”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Cupples briefly.
“Admired him, I suppose,” suggested Trent.
Mr. Cupples shrugged his shoulders. “I have been told that a woman will
usually be more or less attracted by the most successful man in her
circle. Of course we cannot realize how a wilful, dominating
personality like his would influence a girl whose affections were not
bestowed elsewhere; especially if he laid himself out to win her. It is
probably an overwhelming thing to be courted by a man whose name is
known all over the world. She had heard of him, of course, as a
financial great power, and she had no idea—she had lived mostly among
people of artistic or literary propensities—how much soulless
inhumanity that might involve. For all I know, she has no adequate idea
of it to this day. When I first heard of the affair the mischief was
done, and I knew better than to interpose my unsought opinions. She was
of age, and there was absolutely nothing against him from the
conventional point of view. Then I dare say his immense wealth would
cast a spell over almost any woman. Mabel had some hundreds a year of
her own; just enough, perhaps, to let her realize what millions really
meant. But all this is conjecture. She certainly had not wanted to
marry some scores of young fellows who to my knowledge had asked her;
and though I don’t believe, and never did believe, that she really
loved this man of forty-five, she certainly did want to marry him. But
if you ask me why, I can only say I don’t know.”
Trent nodded, and after a few more paces looked at his watch. “You’ve
interested me so much,” he said, “that I had quite forgotten my main
business. I mustn’t waste my morning. I am going down the road to White
Gables at once, and I dare say I shall be poking about there until
midday. If you can meet me then, Cupples, I should like to talk over
anything I find out with you, unless something detains me.”
“I am going for a walk this morning,” Mr. Cupples replied. “I meant to
have luncheon at a little inn near the golf-course, The Three Tuns. You
had better join me there. It’s further along the road, about a quarter
of a mile beyond White Gables. You can just see the roof between those
two trees. The food they give one there is very plain, but good.”
“So long as they have a cask of beer,” said Trent, “they are all right.
We will have bread and cheese, and oh, may Heaven our simple lives
prevent from luxury’s contagion, weak and vile! Till then, goodbye.” He
strode off to recover his hat from the veranda, waved it to Mr.
Cupples, and was gone.
The old gentleman, seating himself in a deck-chair on the lawn, clasped
his hands behind his head and gazed up into the speckless blue sky. “He
is a dear fellow,” he murmured. “The best of fellows. And a terribly
acute fellow. Dear me! How curious it all is!”
Chapter IV.
Handcuffs in the Air
A painter and the son of a painter, Philip Trent had while yet in his
twenties achieved some reputation within the world of English art.
Moreover, his pictures sold. An original, forcible talent and a habit
of leisurely but continuous working, broken by fits of strong creative
enthusiasm, were at the bottom of it. His father’s name had helped; a
patrimony large enough to relieve him of the perilous imputation of
being a struggling man had certainly not hindered. But his best aid to
success had been an unconscious power of getting himself liked. Good
spirits and a lively, humorous fancy will always be popular. Trent
joined to these a genuine interest in others that gained him something
deeper than popularity. His judgement of persons was penetrating, but
its process was internal; no one felt on good behaviour with a man who
seemed always to be enjoying himself. Whether he was in a mood for
floods of nonsense or applying himself vigorously to a task, his face
seldom lost its expression of contained vivacity. Apart from a sound
knowledge of his art and its history, his culture was large and loose,
dominated by a love of poetry. At thirty-two he had not yet passed the
age of laughter and adventure.
His rise to a celebrity a hundred times greater than his proper work
had won for him came of a momentary impulse. One day he had taken up a
newspaper to find it chiefly concerned with a crime of a sort curiously
rare in our country—a murder done in a railway train. The circumstances
were puzzling; two persons were under arrest upon suspicion. Trent, to
whom an interest in such affairs was a new sensation, heard the thing
discussed among his friends, and set himself in a purposeless mood to
read up the accounts given in several journals. He became intrigued;
his imagination began to work, in a manner strange to him, upon facts;
an excitement took hold of him such as he had only known before in his
bursts of art-inspiration or of personal adventure. At the end of the
day he wrote and dispatched a long letter to the editor of the
_Record_, which he chose only because it had contained the fullest and
most intelligent version of the facts.
In this letter he did very much what Poe had done in the case of the
murder of Mary Rogers. With nothing but the newspapers to guide him, he
drew attention to the significance of certain apparently negligible
facts, and ranged the evidence in such a manner as to throw grave
suspicion upon a man who had presented himself as a witness. Sir James
Molloy had printed this letter in leaded type. The same evening he was
able to announce in the Sun the arrest and full confession of the
incriminated man.
Sir James, who knew all the worlds of London, had lost no time in
making Trent’s acquaintance. The two men got on well, for Trent
possessed some secret of native tact which had the effect of almost
abolishing differences of age between himself and others. The great
rotary presses in the basement of the _Record_ building had filled him
with a new enthusiasm. He had painted there, and Sir James had bought
at sight, what he called a machinery-scape in the manner of Heinrich
Kley.
Then a few months later came the affair known as the Ilkley mystery.
Sir James had invited Trent to an emollient dinner, and thereafter
offered him what seemed to the young man a fantastically large sum for
his temporary services as special representative of the _Record_ at
Ilkley.
“You could do it,” the editor had urged. “You can write good stuff, and
you know how to talk to people, and I can teach you all the
technicalities of a reporter’s job in half an hour. And you have a head
for a mystery; you have imagination and cool judgement along with it.
Think how it would feel if you pulled it off!”
Trent had admitted that it would be rather a lark. He had smoked,
frowned, and at last convinced himself that the only thing that held
him back was fear of an unfamiliar task. To react against fear had
become a fixed moral habit with him, and he had accepted Sir James’s
offer.
He had pulled it off. For the second time he had given the authorities
a start and a beating, and his name was on all tongues. He withdrew and
painted pictures. He felt no leaning towards journalism, and Sir James,
who knew a good deal about art, honourably refrained—as other editors
did not—from tempting him with a good salary. But in the course of a
few years he had applied to him perhaps thirty times for his services
in the unravelling of similar problems at home and abroad. Sometimes
Trent, busy with work that held him, had refused; sometimes he had been
forestalled in the discovery of the truth. But the result of his
irregular connection with the _Record_ had been to make his name one of
the best known in England. It was characteristic of him that his name
was almost the only detail of his personality known to the public. He
had imposed absolute silence about himself upon the Molloy papers; and
the others were not going to advertise one of Sir James’s men.
The Manderson case, he told himself as he walked rapidly up the sloping
road to White Gables, might turn out to be terribly simple. Cupples was
a wise old boy, but it was probably impossible for him to have an
impartial opinion about his niece. But it was true that the manager of
the hotel, who had spoken of her beauty in terms that aroused his
attention, had spoken even more emphatically of her goodness. Not an
artist in words, the manager had yet conveyed a very definite idea to
Trent’s mind. “There isn’t a child about here that don’t brighten up at
the sound of her voice,” he had said, “nor yet a grown-up, for the
matter of that. Everybody used to look forward to her coming over in
the summer. I don’t mean that she’s one of those women that are all
kind heart and nothing else. There’s backbone with it, if you know what
I mean—pluck— any amount of go. There’s nobody in Marlstone that isn’t
sorry for the lady in her trouble—not but what some of us may think
she’s lucky at the last of it.” Trent wanted very much to meet Mrs.
Manderson.
He could see now, beyond a spacious lawn and shrubbery, the front of
the two-storied house of dull-red brick, with the pair of great gables
from which it had its name. He had had but a glimpse of it from the car
that morning. A modern house, he saw; perhaps ten years old. The place
was beautifully kept, with that air of opulent peace that clothes even
the smallest houses of the well-to-do in an English countryside. Before
it, beyond the road, the rich meadow-land ran down to the edge of the
cliffs; behind it a woody landscape stretched away across a broad vale
to the moors. That such a place could be the scene of a crime of
violence seemed fantastic; it lay so quiet and well ordered, so
eloquent of disciplined service and gentle living. Yet there beyond the
house, and near the hedge that rose between the garden and the hot,
white road, stood the gardener’s toolshed, by which the body had been
found, lying tumbled against the wooden wall, Trent walked past the
gate of the drive and along the road until he was opposite this shed.
Some forty yards further along the road turned sharply away from the
house, to run between thick plantations; and just before the turn the
grounds of the house ended, with a small white gate at the angle of the
boundary hedge. He approached the gate, which was plainly for the use
of gardeners and the service of the establishment. It swung easily on
its hinges, and he passed slowly up a path that led towards the back of
the house, between the outer hedge and a tall wall of rhododendrons.
Through a gap in this wall a track led him to the little neatly built
erection of wood, which stood among trees that faced a corner of the
front. The body had lain on the side away from the house; a servant, he
thought, looking out of the nearer windows in the earlier hours of the
day before, might have glanced unseeing at the hut, as she wondered
what it could be like to be as rich as the master.
He examined the place carefully and ransacked the hut within, but he
could note no more than the trodden appearance of the uncut grass where
the body had lain. Crouching low, with keen eyes and feeling fingers,
he searched the ground minutely over a wide area; but the search was
fruitless.
It was interrupted by the sound—the first he had heard from the
house—of the closing of the front door. Trent unbent his long legs and
stepped to the edge of the drive. A man was walking quickly away from
the house in the direction of the great gate.
At the noise of a footstep on the gravel, the man wheeled with nervous
swiftness and looked earnestly at Trent. The sudden sight of his face
was almost terrible, so white and worn it was. Yet it was a young man’s
face. There was not a wrinkle about the haggard blue eyes, for all
their tale of strain and desperate fatigue. As the two approached each
other, Trent noted with admiration the man’s breadth of shoulder and
lithe, strong figure. In his carriage, inelastic as weariness had made
it; in his handsome, regular features; in his short, smooth, yellow
hair; and in his voice as he addressed Trent, the influence of a
special sort of training was confessed. “Oxford was your playground, I
think, my young friend,” said Trent to himself.
“If you are Mr. Trent,” said the young man pleasantly, “you are
expected. Mr. Cupples telephoned from the hotel. My name is Marlowe.”
“You were secretary to Mr. Manderson, I believe,” said Trent. He was
much inclined to like young Mr. Marlowe. Though he seemed so near a
physical breakdown, he gave out none the less that air of clean living
and inward health that is the peculiar glory of his social type at his
years. But there was something in the tired eyes that was a challenge
to Trent’s penetration; an habitual expression, as he took it to be, of
meditating and weighing things not present to their sight. It was a
look too intelligent, too steady and purposeful, to be called dreamy.
Trent thought he had seen such a look before somewhere. He went on to
say: “It is a terrible business for all of you. I fear it has upset you
completely, Mr. Marlowe.”
“A little limp, that’s all,” replied the young man wearily. “I was
driving the car all Sunday night and most of yesterday, and I didn’t
sleep last night after hearing the news—who would? But I have an
appointment now, Mr. Trent, down at the doctor’s—arranging about the
inquest. I expect it’ll be tomorrow. If you will go up to the house and
ask for Mr. Bunner, you’ll find him expecting you; he will tell you all
about things and show you round. He’s the other secretary; an American,
and the best of fellows; he’ll look after you. There’s a detective
here, by the way—Inspector Murch, from Scotland Yard. He came
yesterday.”
“Murch!” Trent exclaimed. “But he and I are old friends. How under the
sun did he get here so soon?”
“I have no idea,” Mr. Marlowe answered. “But he was here last evening,
before I got back from Southampton, interviewing everybody, and he’s
been about here since eight this morning. He’s in the library
now—that’s where the open French window is that you see at the end of
the house there. Perhaps you would like to step down there and talk
about things.”
“I think I will,” said Trent. Marlowe nodded and went on his way. The
thick turf of the lawn round which the drive took its circular sweep
made Trent’s footsteps as noiseless as a cat’s. In a few moments he was
looking in through the open leaves of the window at the southward end
of the house, considering with a smile a very broad back and a bent
head covered with short grizzled hair. The man within was stooping over
a number of papers laid out on the table.
“’Twas ever thus,” said Trent in a melancholy tone, at the first sound
of which the man within turned round with startling swiftness. “From
childhood’s hour I’ve seen my fondest hopes decay. I did think I was
ahead of Scotland Yard this time, and now here is the hugest officer in
the entire Metropolitan force already occupying the position.”
The detective smiled grimly and came to the window. “I was expecting
you, Mr. Trent,” he said. “This is the sort of case that you like.”
“Since my tastes were being considered,” Trent replied, stepping into
the room, “I wish they had followed up the idea by keeping my hated
rival out of the business. You have got a long start, too—I know all
about it.” His eyes began to wander round the room. “How did you manage
it? You are a quick mover, I know; the dun deer’s hide on fleeter foot
was never tied; but I don’t see how you got here in time to be at work
yesterday evening. Has Scotland Yard secretly started an aviation
corps? Or is it in league with the infernal powers? In either case the
Home Secretary should be called upon to make a statement.”
“It’s simpler than that,” said Mr. Murch with professional stolidity.
“I happened to be on leave with the missus at Havley, which is only
twelve miles or so along the coast. As soon as our people there heard
of the murder they told me. I wired to the Chief, and was put in charge
of the case at once. I bicycled over yesterday evening, and have been
at it since then.”
“Arising out of that reply,” said Trent inattentively, “how is Mrs.
Inspector Murch?”
“Never better, thank you,” answered the inspector, “and frequently
speaks of you and the games you used to have with our kids. But you’ll
excuse me saying, Mr. Trent, that you needn’t trouble to talk your
nonsense to me while you’re using your eyes. I know your ways by now. I
understand you’ve fallen on your feet as usual, and have the lady’s
permission to go over the place and make enquiries.”
“Such is the fact,” said Trent. “I am going to cut you out again,
inspector. I owe you one for beating me over the Abinger case, you old
fox. But if you really mean that you’re not inclined for the social
amenities just now, let us leave compliments and talk business.” He
stepped to the table, glanced through the papers arranged there in
order, and then turned to the open roll-top desk. He looked into the
drawers swiftly. “I see this has been cleared out. Well now, inspector,
I suppose we play the game as before.”
Trent had found himself on a number of occasions in the past thrown
into the company of Inspector Murch, who stood high in the councils of
the Criminal Investigation Department. He was a quiet, tactful, and
very shrewd officer, a man of great courage, with a vivid history in
connection with the more dangerous class of criminals. His humanity was
as broad as his frame, which was large even for a policeman. Trent and
he, through some obscure working of sympathy, had appreciated one
another from the beginning, and had formed one of those curious
friendships with which it was the younger man’s delight to adorn his
experience. The inspector would talk more freely to him than to any
one, under the rose, and they would discuss details and possibilities
of every case, to their mutual enlightenment. There were necessarily
rules and limits. It was understood between them that Trent made no
journalistic use of any point that could only have come to him from an
official source. Each of them, moreover, for the honour and prestige of
the institution he represented, openly reserved the right to withhold
from the other any discovery or inspiration that might come to him
which he considered vital to the solution of the difficulty. Trent had
insisted on carefully formulating these principles of what he called
detective sportsmanship. Mr. Murch, who loved a contest, and who only
stood to gain by his association with the keen intelligence of the
other, entered very heartily into “the game”. In these strivings for
the credit of the press and of the police, victory sometimes attended
the experience and method of the officer, sometimes the quicker brain
and livelier imagination of Trent, his gift of instinctively
recognizing the significant through all disguises.
The inspector then replied to Trent’s last words with cordial
agreement. Leaning on either side of the French window, with the deep
peace and hazy splendor of the summer landscape before them, they
reviewed the case.
Trent had taken out a thin notebook, and as they talked he began to
make, with light, secure touches, a rough sketch plan of the room. It
was a thing he did habitually on such occasions, and often quite idly,
but now and then the habit had served him to good purpose.
This was a large, light apartment at the corner of the house, with
generous window-space in two walls. A broad table stood in the middle.
As one entered by the window the roll-top desk stood just to the left
of it against the wall. The inner door was in the wall to the left, at
the farther end of the room; and was faced by a broad window divided
into openings of the casement type. A beautifully carved old
corner-cupboard rose high against the wall beyond the door, and another
cupboard filled a recess beside the fireplace. Some coloured prints of
Harunobu, with which Trent promised himself a better acquaintance, hung
on what little wall-space was unoccupied by books. These had a very
uninspiring appearance of having been bought by the yard and never
taken from their shelves. Bound with a sober luxury, the great English
novelists, essayists, historians, and poets stood ranged like an army
struck dead in its ranks. There were a few chairs made, like the
cupboard and table, of old carved oak; a modern armchair and a swivel
office-chair before the desk. The room looked costly but very bare.
Almost the only portable objects were a great porcelain bowl of a
wonderful blue on the table, a clock and some cigar boxes on the
mantelshelf, and a movable telephone standard on the top of the desk.
“Seen the body?” enquired the inspector.
Trent nodded. “And the place where it lay,” he said.
“First impressions of this case rather puzzle me,” said the inspector.
“From what I heard at Halvey I guessed it might be common robbery and
murder by some tramp, though such a thing is very far from common in
these parts. But as soon as I began my enquiries I came on some curious
points, which by this time I dare say you’ve noted for yourself. The
man is shot in his own grounds, quite near the house, to begin with.
Yet there’s not the slightest trace of any attempt at burglary. And the
body wasn’t robbed. In fact, it would be as plain a case of suicide as
you could wish to see, if it wasn’t for certain facts. Here’s another
thing: for a month or so past, they tell me, Manderson had been in a
queer state of mind. I expect you know already that he and his wife had
some trouble between them. The servants had noticed a change in his
manner to her for a long time, and for the past week he had scarcely
spoken to her. They say he was a changed man, moody and silent—whether
on account of that or something else. The lady’s maid says he looked as
if something was going to arrive. It’s always easy to remember that
people looked like that, after something has happened to them. Still,
that’s what they say. There you are again, then: suicide! Now, why
wasn’t it suicide, Mr. Trent?”
“The facts so far as I know them are really all against it,” Trent
replied, sitting on the threshold of the window and clasping his knees.
“First, of course, no weapon is to be found. I’ve searched, and you’ve
searched, and there’s no trace of any firearm anywhere within a stone’s
throw of where the body lay. Second, the marks on the wrists, fresh
scratches and bruises, which we can only assume to have been done in a
struggle with somebody. Third, who ever heard of anybody shooting
himself in the eye? Then I heard from the manager of the hotel here
another fact, which strikes me as the most curious detail in this
affair. Manderson had dressed himself fully before going out there, but
he forgot his false teeth. Now how could a suicide who dressed himself
to make a decent appearance as a corpse forget his teeth?”
“That last argument hadn’t struck me,” admitted Mr. Murch. “There’s
something in it. But on the strength of the other points, which had
occurred to me, I am not considering suicide. I have been looking about
for ideas in this house, this morning. I expect you were thinking of
doing the same.”
“That is so. It is a case for ideas, it seems to me. Come, Murch, let
us make an effort; let us bend our spirits to a temper of general
suspicion. Let us suspect everybody in the house, to begin with.
Listen: I will tell you whom I suspect. I suspect Mrs. Manderson, of
course. I also suspect both the secretaries—I hear there are two, and I
hardly know which of them I regard as more thoroughly open to
suspicion. I suspect the butler and the lady’s maid. I suspect the
other domestics, and especially do I suspect the boot-boy. By the way,
what domestics are there? I have more than enough suspicion to go
round, whatever the size of the establishment; but as a matter of
curiosity I should like to know.”
“All very well to laugh,” replied the inspector, “but at the first
stage of affairs it’s the only safe principle, and you know that as
well as I do, Mr. Trent. However, I’ve seen enough of the people here,
last night and today, to put a few of them out of my mind for the
present at least. You will form your own conclusions. As for the
establishment, there’s the butler and lady’s maid, cook, and three
other maids, one a young girl. One chauffeur, who’s away with a broken
wrist. No boy.”
“What about the gardener? You say nothing about that shadowy and
sinister figure, the gardener. You are keeping him in the background,
Murch. Play the game. Out with him—or I report you to the Rules
Committee.”
“The garden is attended to by a man in the village, who comes twice a
week. I’ve talked to him. He was here last on Friday.”
“Then I suspect him all the more,” said Trent. “And now as to the house
itself. What I propose to do, to begin with, is to sniff about a little
in this room, where I am told Manderson spent a great deal of his time,
and in his bedroom; especially the bedroom. But since we’re in this
room, let’s start here. You seem to be at the same stage of the
inquiry. Perhaps you’ve done the bedrooms already?”
The inspector nodded. “I’ve been over Manderson’s and his wife’s.
Nothing to be got there, I think. His room is very simple and bare, no
signs of any sort—that _I_ could see. Seems to have insisted on the
simple life, does Manderson. Never employed a valet. The room’s almost
like a cell, except for the clothes and shoes. You’ll find it all
exactly as I found it; and they tell me that’s exactly as Manderson
left it, at we don’t know what o’clock yesterday morning. Opens into
Mrs. Manderson’s bedroom—not much of the cell about that, I can tell
you. I should say the lady was as fond of pretty things as most. But
she cleared out of it on the morning of the discovery—told the maid she
could never sleep in a room opening into her murdered husband’s room.
Very natural feeling in a woman, Mr. Trent. She’s camping out, so to
say, in one of the spare bedrooms now.”
“Come, my friend,” Trent was saying to himself, as he made a few notes
in his little book. “Have you got your eye on Mrs. Manderson? Or
haven’t you? I know that colourless tone of the inspectorial voice. I
wish I had seen her. Either you’ve got something against her and you
don’t want me to get hold of it; or else you’ve made up your mind she’s
innocent, but have no objection to my wasting my time over her. Well,
it’s all in the game; which begins to look extremely interesting as we
go on.” To Mr. Murch he said aloud: “Well, I’ll draw the bedroom later
on. What about this?”
“They call it the library,” said the inspector. “Manderson used to do
his writing and that in here; passed most of the time he spent indoors
here. Since he and his wife ceased to hit it off together, he had taken
to spending his evenings alone, and when at this house he always spent
’em in here. He was last seen alive, as far as the servants are
concerned, in this room.”
Trent rose and glanced again through the papers set out on the table.
“Business letters and documents, mostly,” said Mr. Murch. “Reports,
prospectuses, and that. A few letters on private matters, nothing in
them that I can see. The American secretary—Bunner his name is, and a
queerer card I never saw turned—he’s been through this desk with me
this morning. He had got it into his head that Manderson had been
receiving threatening letters, and that the murder was the outcome of
that. But there’s no trace of any such thing; and we looked at every
blessed paper. The only unusual things we found were some packets of
banknotes to a considerable amount, and a couple of little bags of
unset diamonds. I asked Mr. Bunner to put them in a safer place. It
appears that Manderson had begun buying diamonds lately as a
speculation—it was a new game to him, the secretary said, and it seemed
to amuse him.”
“What about these secretaries?” Trent enquired. “I met one called
Marlowe just now outside; a nice-looking chap with singular eyes,
unquestionably English. The other, it seems, is an American. What did
Manderson want with an English secretary?”
“Mr. Marlowe explained to me how that was. The American was his
right-hand business man, one of his office staff, who never left him.
Mr. Marlowe had nothing to do with Manderson’s business as a financier,
knew nothing of it. His job was to look after Manderson’s horses and
motors and yacht and sporting arrangements and that—make himself
generally useful, as you might say. He had the spending of a lot of
money, I should think. The other was confined entirely to the office
affairs, and I dare say he had his hands full. As for his being
English, it was just a fad of Manderson’s to have an English secretary.
He’d had several before Mr. Marlowe.”
“He showed his taste,” observed Trent. “It might be more than
interesting, don’t you think, to be minister to the pleasures of a
modern plutocrat with a large P. Only they say that Manderson’s were
exclusively of an innocent kind. Certainly Marlowe gives me the
impression that he would be weak in the part of Petronius. But to
return to the matter in hand.” He looked at his notes. “You said just
now that he was last seen alive here, ‘so far as the servants were
concerned’. That meant—?”
“He had a conversation with his wife on going to bed. But for that, the
manservant, Martin by name, last saw him in this room. I had his story
last night, and very glad he was to tell it. An affair like this is
meat and drink to the servants of the house.”
Trent considered for some moments, gazing through the open window over
the sun-flooded slopes. “Would it bore you to hear what he has to say
again?” he asked at length. For reply, Mr. Murch rang the bell. A
spare, clean-shaven, middle-aged man, having the servant’s manner in
its most distinguished form, answered it.
“This is Mr. Trent, who is authorized by Mrs. Manderson to go over the
house and make enquiries,” explained the detective. “He would like to
hear your story.” Martin bowed distantly. He recognized Trent for a
gentleman. Time would show whether he was what Martin called a
gentleman in every sense of the word.
“I observed you approaching the house, sir,” said Martin with impassive
courtesy. He spoke with a slow and measured utterance. “My instructions
are to assist you in every possible way. Should you wish me to recall
the circumstances of Sunday night?”
“Please,” said Trent with ponderous gravity. Martin’s style was making
clamorous appeal to his sense of comedy. He banished with an effort all
vivacity of expression from his face.
“I last saw Mr. Manderson—”
“No, not that yet,” Trent checked him quietly. “Tell me all you saw of
him that evening—after dinner, say. Try to recollect every little
detail.”
“After dinner, sir?—yes. I remember that after dinner Mr. Manderson and
Mr. Marlowe walked up and down the path through the orchard, talking.
If you ask me for details, it struck me they were talking about
something important, because I heard Mr. Manderson say something when
they came in through the back entrance. He said, as near as I can
remember, ‘If Harris is there, every minute is of importance. You want
to start right away. And not a word to a soul.’ Mr. Marlowe answered,
‘Very well. I will just change out of these clothes and then I am
ready’—or words to that effect. I heard this plainly as they passed the
window of my pantry. Then Mr. Marlowe went up to his bedroom, and Mr.
Manderson entered the library and rang for me. He handed me some
letters for the postman in the morning and directed me to sit up, as
Mr. Marlowe had persuaded him to go for a drive in the car by
moonlight.”
“That was curious,” remarked Trent.
“I thought so, sir. But I recollected what I had heard about ‘not a
word to a soul’, and I concluded that this about a moonlight drive was
intended to mislead.”
“What time was this?”
“It would be about ten, sir, I should say. After speaking to me, Mr.
Manderson waited until Mr. Marlowe had come down and brought round the
car. He then went into the drawing-room, where Mrs. Manderson was.”
“Did that strike you as curious?”
Martin looked down his nose. “If you ask me the question, sir,” he said
with reserve, “I had not known him enter that room since we came here
this year. He preferred to sit in the library in the evenings. That
evening he only remained with Mrs. Manderson for a few minutes. Then he
and Mr. Marlowe started immediately.”
“You saw them start?”
“Yes, sir. They took the direction of Bishopsbridge.”
“And you saw Mr. Manderson again later?”
“After an hour or thereabouts, sir, in the library. That would have
been about a quarter past eleven, I should say; I had noticed eleven
striking from the church. I may say I am peculiarly quick of hearing,
sir.”
“Mr. Manderson had rung the bell for you, I suppose. Yes? And what
passed when you answered it?”
“Mr. Manderson had put out the decanter of whisky and a syphon and
glass, sir, from the cupboard where he kept them—”
Trent held up his hand. “While we are on that point, Martin, I want to
ask you plainly, did Mr. Manderson drink very much? You understand this
is not impertinent curiosity on my part. I want you to tell me, because
it may possibly help in the clearing up of this case.”
“Perfectly, sir,” replied Martin gravely. “I have no hesitation in
telling you what I have already told the inspector. Mr. Manderson was,
considering his position in life, a remarkably abstemious man. In my
four years of service with him I never knew anything of an alcoholic
nature pass his lips, except a glass or two of wine at dinner, very
rarely a little at luncheon, and from time to time a whisky and soda
before going to bed. He never seemed to form a habit of it. Often I
used to find his glass in the morning with only a little soda water in
it; sometimes he would have been having whisky with it, but never much.
He never was particular about his drinks; ordinary soda was what he
preferred, though I had ventured to suggest some of the natural
minerals, having personally acquired a taste for them in my previous
service. He used to keep them in the cupboard here, because he had a
great dislike of being waited on more than was necessary. It was an
understood thing that I never came near him after dinner unless sent
for. And when he sent for anything, he liked it brought quick, and to
be left alone again at once. He hated to be asked if he required
anything more. Amazingly simple in his tastes, sir, Mr. Manderson was.”
“Very well; and he rang for you that night about a quarter past eleven.
Now can you remember exactly what he said?”
“I think I can tell you with some approach to accuracy, sir. It was not
much. First he asked me if Mr. Bunner had gone to bed, and I replied
that he had been gone up some time. He then said that he wanted some
one to sit up until 12.30, in case an important message should come by
telephone, and that Mr. Marlowe having gone to Southampton for him in
the motor, he wished me to do this, and that I was to take down the
message if it came, and not disturb him. He also ordered a fresh syphon
of soda water. I believe that was all, sir.”
“You noticed nothing unusual about him, I suppose?”
“No, sir, nothing unusual. When I answered the ring, he was seated at
the desk listening at the telephone, waiting for a number, as I
supposed. He gave his orders and went on listening at the same time.
“When I returned with the syphon he was engaged in conversation over
the wire.”
“Do you remember anything of what he was saying?”
“Very little, sir; it was something about somebody being at some
hotel—of no interest to me. I was only in the room just time enough to
place the syphon on the table and withdraw. As I closed the door he was
saying, ‘You’re sure he isn’t in the hotel?’ or words to that effect.”
“And that was the last you saw and heard of him alive?”
“No, sir. A little later, at half-past eleven, when I had settled down
in my pantry with the door ajar, and a book to pass the time, I heard
Mr. Manderson go upstairs to bed. I immediately went to close the
library window, and slipped the lock of the front door. I did not hear
anything more.”
Trent considered. “I suppose you didn’t doze at all,” he said
tentatively, “while you were sitting up waiting for the telephone
message?”
“Oh no, sir. I am always very wakeful about that time. I’m a bad
sleeper, especially in the neighbourhood of the sea, and I generally
read in bed until somewhere about midnight.”
“And did any message come?”
“No, sir.”
“No. And I suppose you sleep with your window open, these warm nights?”
“It is never closed at night, sir.”
Trent added a last note; then he looked thoughtfully through those he
had taken. He rose and paced up and down the room for some moments with
a downcast eye. At length he paused opposite Martin.
“It all seems perfectly ordinary and simple,” he said. “I just want to
get a few details clear. You went to shut the windows in the library
before going to bed. Which windows?”
“The French window, sir. It had been open all day. The windows opposite
the door were seldom opened.”
“And what about the curtains? I am wondering whether any one outside
the house could have seen into the room.”
“Easily, sir, I should say, if he had got into the grounds on that
side. The curtains were never drawn in the hot weather. Mr. Manderson
would often sit right in the doorway at nights, smoking and looking out
into the darkness. But nobody could have seen him who had any business
to be there.”
“I see. And now tell me this. Your hearing is very acute, you say, and
you heard Mr. Manderson enter the house when he came in after dinner
from the garden. Did you hear him re-enter it after returning from the
motor drive?”
Martin paused. “Now you mention it, sir, I remember that I did not. His
ringing the bell in this room was the first I knew of his being back. I
should have heard him come in, if he had come in by the front. I should
have heard the door go. But he must have come in by the window.” The
man reflected for a moment, then added, “As a general rule, Mr.
Manderson would come in by the front, hang up his hat and coat in the
hall, and pass down the hall into the study. It seems likely to me that
he was in a great hurry to use the telephone, and so went straight
across the lawn to the window. He was like that, sir, when there was
anything important to be done. He had his hat on, now I remember, and
had thrown his greatcoat over the end of the table. He gave his order
very sharp, too, as he always did when busy. A very precipitate man
indeed was Mr. Manderson; a hustler, as they say.”
“Ah! he appeared to be busy. But didn’t you say just now that you
noticed nothing unusual about him?”
A melancholy smile flitted momentarily over Martin’s face. “That
observation shows that you did not know Mr. Manderson, sir, if you will
pardon my saying so. His being like that was nothing unusual; quite the
contrary. It took me long enough to get used to it. Either he would be
sitting quite still and smoking a cigar, thinking or reading, or else
he would be writing, dictating, and sending off wires all at the same
time, till it almost made one dizzy to see it, sometimes for an hour or
more at a stretch. As for being in a hurry over a telephone message, I
may say it wasn’t in him to be anything else.”
Trent turned to the inspector, who met his eye with a look of answering
intelligence. Not sorry to show his understanding of the line of
inquiry opened by Trent, Mr. Murch for the first time put a question.
“Then you left him telephoning by the open window, with the lights on,
and the drinks on the table; is that it?” “That is so, Mr. Murch.” The
delicacy of the change in Martin’s manner when called upon to answer
the detective momentarily distracted Trent’s appreciative mind. But the
big man’s next question brought it back to the problem at once.
“About those drinks. You say Mr. Manderson often took no whisky before
going to bed. Did he have any that night?”
“I could not say. The room was put to rights in the morning by one of
the maids, and the glass washed, I presume, as usual. I know that the
decanter was nearly full that evening. I had refilled it a few days
before, and I glanced at it when I brought the fresh syphon, just out
of habit, to make sure there was a decent-looking amount.”
The inspector went to the tall corner-cupboard and opened it. He took
out a decanter of cut glass and set it on the table before Martin. “Was
it fuller than that?” he asked quietly. “That’s how I found it this
morning.” The decanter was more than half empty.
For the first time Martin’s self-possession wavered. He took up the
decanter quickly, tilted it before his eyes, and then stared amazedly
at the others. He said slowly: “There’s not much short of half a bottle
gone out of this since I last set eyes on it—and that was that Sunday
night.”
“Nobody in the house, I suppose?” suggested Trent discreetly.
“Out of the question!” replied Martin briefly; then he added, “I beg
pardon, sir, but this is a most extraordinary thing to me. Such a thing
never happened in all my experience of Mr. Manderson. As for the
women-servants, they never touch anything, I can answer for it; and as
for me, when I want a drink I can help myself without going to the
decanters.” He took up the decanter again and aimlessly renewed his
observation of the contents, while the inspector eyed him with a look
of serene satisfaction, as a master contemplates his handiwork.
Trent turned to a fresh page of his notebook, and tapped it
thoughtfully with his pencil. Then he looked up and said, “I suppose
Mr. Manderson had dressed for dinner that night?”
“Certainly, sir. He had on a suit with a dress-jacket, what he used to
refer to as a Tuxedo, which he usually wore when dining at home.”
“And he was dressed like that when you saw him last?”
“All but the jacket, sir. When he spent the evening in the library, as
usually happened, he would change it for an old shooting-jacket after
dinner, a light-coloured tweed, a little too loud in pattern for
English tastes, perhaps. He had it on when I saw him last. It used to
hang in this cupboard here”—Martin opened the door of it as he
spoke—“along with Mr. Manderson’s fishing-rods and such things, so that
he could slip it on after dinner without going upstairs.”
“Leaving the dinner-jacket in the cupboard?”
“Yes, sir. The housemaid used to take it upstairs in the morning.”
“In the morning,” Trent repeated slowly. “And now that we are speaking
of the morning, will you tell me exactly what you know about that? I
understand that Mr. Manderson was not missed until the body was found
about ten o’clock.”
“That is so, sir. Mr. Manderson would never be called, or have anything
brought to him in the morning. He occupied a separate bedroom. Usually
he would get up about eight and go round to the bathroom, and he would
come down some time before nine. But often he would sleep till nine or
ten o’clock. Mrs. Manderson was always called at seven. The maid would
take in tea to her. Yesterday morning Mrs. Manderson took breakfast
about eight in her sitting-room as usual, and every one supposed that
Mr. Manderson was still in bed and asleep, when Evans came rushing up
to the house with the shocking intelligence.”
“I see,” said Trent. “And now another thing. You say you slipped the
lock of the front door before going to bed. Was that all the locking-up
you did?”
“To the front door, sir, yes; I slipped the lock. No more is considered
necessary in these parts. But I had locked both the doors at the back,
and seen to the fastenings of all the windows on the ground floor. In
the morning everything was as I had left it.”
“As you had left it. Now here is another point—the last, I think. Were
the clothes in which the body was found the clothes that Mr. Manderson
would naturally have worn that day?”
Martin rubbed his chin. “You remind me how surprised I was when I first
set eyes on the body, sir. At first I couldn’t make out what was
unusual about the clothes, and then I saw what it was. The collar was a
shape of collar Mr. Manderson never wore except with evening dress.
Then I found that he had put on all the same things that he had worn
the night before—large fronted shirt and all—except just the coat and
waistcoat and trousers, and the brown shoes, and blue tie. As for the
suit, it was one of half a dozen he might have worn. But for him to
have simply put on all the rest just because they were there, instead
of getting out the kind of shirt and things he always wore by day;
well, sir, it was unprecedented. It shows, like some other things, what
a hurry he must have been in when getting up.”
“Of course,” said Trent. “Well, I think that’s all I wanted to know.
You have put everything with admirable clearness, Martin. If we want to
ask any more questions later on, I suppose you will be somewhere
about.”
“I shall be at your disposal, sir.” Martin bowed, and went out quietly.
Trent flung himself into the armchair and exhaled a long breath.
“Martin is a great creature,” he said. “He is far, far better than a
play. There is none like him, none, nor will be when our summers have
deceased. Straight, too; not an atom of harm in dear old Martin. Do you
know, Murch, you are wrong in suspecting that man.”
“I never said a word about suspecting him.” The inspector was taken
aback. “You know, Mr. Trent, he would never have told his story like
that if he thought I suspected him.”
“I dare say he doesn’t think so. He is a wonderful creature, a great
artist; but, in spite of that, he is not at all a sensitive type. It
has never occurred to his mind that you, Murch, could suspect him,
Martin, the complete, the accomplished. But I know it. You must
understand, inspector, that I have made a special study of the
psychology of officers of the law. It is a grossly neglected branch of
knowledge. They are far more interesting than criminals, and not nearly
so easy. All the time I was questioning him I saw handcuffs in your
eye. Your lips were mutely framing the syllables of those tremendous
words: ‘It is my duty to tell you that anything you now say will be
taken down and used in evidence against you.’ Your manner would have
deceived most men, but it could not deceive me.”
Mr. Murch laughed heartily. Trent’s nonsense never made any sort of
impression on his mind, but he took it as a mark of esteem, which
indeed it was; so it never failed to please him. “Well, Mr. Trent,” he
said, “you’re perfectly right. There’s no point in denying it, I have
got my eye on him. Not that there’s anything definite; but you know as
well as I do how often servants are mixed up in affairs of this kind,
and this man is such a very quiet customer. You remember the case of
Lord William Russell’s valet, who went in as usual, in the morning, to
draw up the blinds in his master’s bedroom, as quiet and starchy as you
please, a few hours after he had murdered him in his bed. I’ve talked
to all the women of the house, and I don’t believe there’s a morsel of
harm in one of them. But Martin’s not so easy set aside. I don’t like
his manner; I believe he’s hiding something. If so, I shall find it
out.”
“Cease!” said Trent. “Drain not to its dregs the urn of bitter
prophecy. Let us get back to facts. Have you, as a matter of evidence,
anything at all to bring against Martin’s story as he has told it to
us?”
“Nothing whatever at present. As for his suggestion that Manderson came
in by way of the window after leaving Marlowe and the car, that’s right
enough, I should say. I questioned the servant who swept the room next
morning, and she tells me there were gravelly marks near the window, on
this plain drugget that goes round the carpet. And there’s a footprint
in this soft new gravel just outside.” The inspector took a folding
rule from his pocket and with it pointed out the traces. “One of the
patent shoes Manderson was wearing that night exactly fits that print;
you’ll find them,” he added, “on the top shelf in the bedroom, near the
window end, the only patents in the row. The girl who polished them in
the morning picked them out for me.”
Trent bent down and studied the faint marks keenly. “Good!” he said.
“You have covered a lot of ground, Murch, I must say. That was
excellent about the whisky; you made your point finely. I felt inclined
to shout ‘Encore!’ It’s a thing that I shall have to think over.”
“I thought you might have fitted it in already,” said Mr. Murch. “Come,
Mr. Trent, we’re only at the beginning of our enquiries, but what do
you say to this for a preliminary theory? There’s a plan of burglary,
say a couple of men in it and Martin squared. They know where the plate
is, and all about the handy little bits of stuff in the drawing-room
and elsewhere. They watch the house; see Manderson off to bed; Martin
comes to shut the window, and leaves it ajar, accidentally on purpose.
They wait till Martin goes to bed at twelve-thirty; then they just walk
into the library, and begin to sample the whisky first thing. Now
suppose Manderson isn’t asleep, and suppose they make a noise opening
the window, or however it might be. He hears it; thinks of burglars;
gets up very quietly to see if anything’s wrong; creeps down on them,
perhaps, just as they’re getting ready for work. They cut and run; he
chases them down to the shed, and collars one; there’s a fight; one of
them loses his temper and his head, and makes a swinging job of it.
Now, Mr. Trent, pick that to pieces.”
“Very well,” said Trent; “just to oblige you, Murch, especially as I
know you don’t believe a word of it. First: no traces of any kind left
by your burglar or burglars, and the window found fastened in the
morning, according to Martin. Not much force in that, I allow. Next:
nobody in the house hears anything of this stampede through the
library, nor hears any shout from Manderson either inside the house or
outside. Next: Manderson goes down without a word to anybody, though
Bunner and Martin are both at hand. Next: did you ever hear, in your
long experience, of a householder getting up in the night to pounce on
burglars, who dressed himself fully, with underclothing, shirt; collar
and tie, trousers, waistcoat and coat, socks and hard leather shoes;
and who gave the finishing touches to a somewhat dandified toilet by
doing his hair, and putting on his watch and chain? Personally, I call
that over-dressing the part. The only decorative detail he seems to
have forgotten is his teeth.”
The inspector leaned forward thinking, his large hands clasped before
him. “No,” he said at last. “Of course there’s no help in that theory.
I rather expect we have some way to go before we find out why a man
gets up before the servants are awake, dresses himself awry, and is
murdered within sight of his house early enough to be “cold and stiff
by ten in the morning.”
Trent shook his head. “We can’t build anything on that last
consideration. I’ve gone into the subject with people who know. I
shouldn’t wonder,” he added, “if the traditional notions about loss of
temperature and rigour after death had occasionally brought an innocent
man to the gallows, or near it. Dr. Stock has them all, I feel sure;
most general practitioners of the older generation have. That Dr. Stock
will make an ass of himself at the inquest, is almost as certain as
that tomorrow’s sun will rise. I’ve seen him. He will say the body must
have been dead about so long, because of the degree of coldness and
_rigor mortis_. I can see him nosing it all out in some textbook that
was out of date when he was a student. Listen, Murch, and I will tell
you some facts which will be a great hindrance to you in your
professional career. There are many things that may hasten or retard
the cooling of the body. This one was lying in the long dewy grass on
the shady side of the shed. As for rigidity, if Manderson died in a
struggle, or labouring under sudden emotion, his corpse might stiffen
practically instantaneously; there are dozens of cases noted,
particularly in cases of injury to the skull, like this one. On the
other hand, the stiffening might not have begun until eight or ten
hours after death. You can’t hang anybody on _rigor mortis_ nowadays,
inspector, much as you may resent the limitation. No, what we _can_ say
is this. If he had been shot after the hour at which the world begins
to get up and go about its business, it would have been heard, and very
likely seen too. In fact, we must reason, to begin with, at any rate,
on the assumption that he wasn’t shot at a time when people might be
awake; it isn’t done in these parts. Put that time at 6.30 a.m.
Manderson went up to bed at 11 p.m., and Martin sat up till 12.30.
Assuming that he went to sleep at once on turning in, that leaves us
something like six hours for the crime to be committed in; and that is
a long time. But whenever it took place, I wish you would suggest a
reason why Manderson, who was a fairly late riser, was up and dressed
at or before 6.30; and why neither Martin, who sleeps lightly, nor
Bunner, nor his wife heard him moving about, or letting himself out of
the house. He must have been careful. He must have crept about like a
cat. Do you feel as I do, Murch, about all this; that it is very, very
strange and baffling?”
“That’s how it looks,” agreed the inspector.
“And now,” said Trent, rising to his feet, “I’ll leave you to your
meditations, and take a look at the bedrooms. Perhaps the explanation
of all this will suddenly burst upon you while I am poking about up
there. But,” concluded Trent in a voice of sudden exasperation, turning
round in the doorway, “if you can tell me at any time, how under the
sun a man who put on all those clothes could forget to put in his
teeth, you may kick me from here to the nearest lunatic asylum, and
hand me over as an incipient dement.”
Chapter V.
Poking About
There are moments in life, as one might think, when that which is
within us, busy about its secret affair, lets escape into consciousness
some hint of a fortunate thing ordained. Who does not know what it is
to feel at times a wave of unaccountable persuasion that it is about to
go well with him?—not the feverish confidence of men in danger of a
blow from fate, not the persistent illusion of the optimist, but an
unsought conviction, springing up like a bird from the heather, that
success is at hand in some great or fine thing. The general suddenly
knows at dawn that the day will bring him victory; the man on the green
suddenly knows that he will put down the long putt. As Trent mounted
the stairway outside the library door he seemed to rise into certainty
of achievement. A host of guesses and inferences swarmed apparently
unsorted through his mind; a few secret observations that he had made,
and which he felt must have significance, still stood unrelated to any
plausible theory of the crime; yet as he went up he seemed to know
indubitably that light was going to appear.
The bedrooms lay on either side of a broad carpeted passage, lighted by
a tall end window. It went the length of the house until it ran at
right angles into a narrower passage, out of which the servants’ rooms
opened. Martin’s room was the exception: it opened out of a small
landing half-way to the upper floor. As Trent passed it he glanced
within. A little square room, clean and commonplace. In going up the
rest of the stairway he stepped with elaborate precaution against
noise, hugging the wall closely and placing each foot with care; but a
series of very audible creaks marked his passage.
He knew that Manderson’s room was the first on the right hand when the
bedroom floor was reached, and he went to it at once. He tried the
latch and the lock, which worked normally, and examined the wards of
the key. Then he turned to the room.
It was a small apartment, strangely bare. The plutocrat’s toilet
appointments were of the simplest. All remained just as it had been on
the morning of the ghastly discovery in the grounds. The sheets and
blankets of the unmade bed lay tumbled over a narrow wooden bedstead,
and the sun shone brightly through the window upon them. It gleamed,
too, upon the gold parts of the delicate work of dentistry that lay in
water in a shallow bowl of glass placed on a small, plain table by the
bedside. On this also stood a wrought-iron candlestick. Some clothing
lay untidily over one of the two rush-bottomed chairs. Various objects
on the top of a chest of drawers, which had been used as a
dressing-table, lay in such disorder as a hurried man might make. Trent
looked them over with a questing eye. He noted also that the occupant
of the room had neither washed nor shaved. With his finger he turned
over the dental plate in the bowl, and frowned again at its
incomprehensible presence.
The emptiness and disarray of the little room, flooded by the sunbeams,
were producing in Trent a sense of gruesomeness. His fancy called up a
picture of a haggard man dressing himself in careful silence by the
first light of dawn, glancing constantly at the inner door behind which
his wife slept, his eyes full of some terror.
Trent shivered, and to fix his mind again on actualities, opened two
tall cupboards in the wall on either side of the bed. They contained
clothing, a large choice of which had evidently been one of the very
few conditions of comfort for the man who had slept there.
In the matter of shoes, also, Manderson had allowed himself the
advantage of wealth. An extraordinary number of these, treed and
carefully kept, was ranged on two long low shelves against the wall. No
boots were among them. Trent, himself an amateur of good shoe-leather,
now turned to these, and glanced over the collection with an
appreciative eye. It was to be seen that Manderson had been inclined to
pride himself on a rather small and well-formed foot. The shoes were of
a distinctive shape, narrow and round-toed, beautifully made; all were
evidently from the same last.
Suddenly his eyes narrowed themselves over a pair of patent-leather
shoes on the upper shelf.
These were the shoes of which the inspector had already described the
position to him; the shoes worn by Manderson the night before his
death. They were a well-worn pair, he saw at once; he saw, too, that
they had been very recently polished. Something about the uppers of
these shoes had seized his attention. He bent lower and frowned over
them, comparing what he saw with the appearance of the neighbouring
shoes. Then he took them up and examined the line of junction of the
uppers with the soles.
As he did this, Trent began unconsciously to whistle faintly, and with
great precision, an air which Inspector Murch, if he had been present,
would have recognized.
Most men who have the habit of self-control have also some involuntary
trick which tells those who know them that they are suppressing
excitement. The inspector had noted that when Trent had picked up a
strong scent he whistled faintly a certain melodious passage; though
the inspector could not have told you that it was in fact the opening
movement of Mendelssohn’s _Lied ohne Worter_ in A Major.
He turned the shoes over, made some measurements with a marked tape,
and looked minutely at the bottoms. On each, in the angle between the
heel and the instep, he detected a faint trace of red gravel.
Trent placed the shoes on the floor, and walked with his hands behind
him to the window, out of which, still faintly whistling, he gazed with
eyes that saw nothing. Once his lips opened to emit mechanically the
Englishman’s expletive of sudden enlightenment. At length he turned to
the shelves again, and swiftly but carefully examined every one of the
shoes there.
This done, he took up the garments from the chair, looked them over
closely and replaced them. He turned to the wardrobe cupboards again,
and hunted through them carefully. The litter on the dressing-table now
engaged his attention for the second time. Then he sat down on the
empty chair, took his head in his hands, and remained in that attitude,
staring at the carpet, for some minutes. He rose at last and opened the
inner door leading to Mrs. Manderson’s room.
It was evident at a glance that the big room had been hurriedly put
down from its place as the lady’s bower. All the array of objects that
belong to a woman’s dressing-table had been removed; on bed and chairs
and smaller tables there were no garments or hats, bags or boxes; no
trace remained of the obstinate conspiracy of gloves and veils,
handkerchiefs and ribbons, to break the captivity of the drawer. The
room was like an unoccupied guest-chamber. Yet in every detail of
furniture and decoration it spoke of an unconventional but exacting
taste. Trent, as his expert eye noted the various perfection of colour
and form amid which the ill-mated lady dreamed her dreams and thought
her loneliest thoughts, knew that she had at least the resources of an
artistic nature. His interest in this unknown personality grew
stronger; and his brows came down heavily as he thought of the burdens
laid upon it, and of the deed of which the history was now shaping
itself with more and more of substance before his busy mind.
He went first to the tall French window in the middle of the wall that
faced the door, and opening it, stepped out upon a small balcony with
an iron railing. He looked down on a broad stretch of lawn that began
immediately beneath him, separated from the house-wall only by a narrow
flower-bed, and stretched away, with an abrupt dip at the farther end,
toward the orchard. The other window opened with a sash above the
garden-entrance of the library. In the farther inside corner of the
room was a second door giving upon the passage; the door by which the
maid was wont to come in, and her mistress to go out, in the morning.
Trent, seated on the bed, quickly sketched in his notebook a plan of
the room and its neighbour. The bed stood in the angle between the
communicating-door and the sash-window, its head against the wall
dividing the room from Manderson’s. Trent stared at the pillows; then
he lay down with deliberation on the bed and looked through the open
door into the adjoining room.
This observation taken, he rose again and proceeded to note on his plan
that on either side of the bed was a small table with a cover. Upon
that furthest from the door was a graceful electric-lamp standard of
copper connected by a free wire with the wall. Trent looked at it
thoughtfully, then at the switches connected with the other lights in
the room. They were, as usual, on the wall just within the door, and
some way out of his reach as he sat on the bed. He rose, and satisfied
himself that the lights were all in order. Then he turned on his heel,
walked quickly into Manderson’s room, and rang the bell.
“I want your help again, Martin,” he said, as the butler presented
himself, upright and impassive, in the doorway. “I want you to prevail
upon Mrs. Manderson’s maid to grant me an interview.”
“Certainly, sir,” said Martin.
“What sort of a woman is she? Has she her wits about her?”
“She’s French, sir,” replied Martin succinctly; adding after a pause:
“She has not been with us long, sir, but I have formed the impression
that the young woman knows as much of the world as is good for
her—since you ask me.”
“You think butter might possibly melt in her mouth, do you?” said
Trent. “Well, I am not afraid. I want to put some questions to her.”
“I will send her up immediately, sir.” The butler withdrew, and Trent
wandered round the little room with his hands at his back. Sooner than
he had expected, a small neat figure in black appeared quietly before
him.
The lady’s maid, with her large brown eyes, had taken favourable notice
of Trent from a window when he had crossed the lawn, and had been
hoping desperately that the resolver of mysteries (whose reputation was
as great below-stairs as elsewhere) would send for her. For one thing,
she felt the need to make a scene; her nerves were overwrought. But her
scenes were at a discount with the other domestics, and as for Mr.
Murch, he had chilled her into self-control with his official manner.
Trent, her glimpse of him had told her, had not the air of a policeman,
and at a distance he had appeared _sympathique_.
As she entered the room, however, instinct decided for her that any
approach to coquetry would be a mistake, if she sought to make a good
impression at the beginning. It was with an air of amiable candour,
then, that she said, “Monsieur desire to speak with me.” She added
helpfully, “I am called Célestine.”
“Naturally,” said Trent with businesslike calm. “Now what I want you to
tell me, Célestine, is this. When you took tea to your mistress
yesterday morning at seven o’clock, was the door between the two
bedrooms—this door here—open?”
Célestine became intensely animated in an instant. “Oh yes!” she said,
using her favourite English idiom. “The door was open as always,
monsieur, and I shut it as always. But it is necessary to explain.
Listen! When I enter the room of madame from the other door in
there—ah! but if monsieur will give himself the pain to enter the other
room, all explains itself.” She tripped across to the door, and urged
Trent before her into the larger bedroom with a hand on his arm. “See!
I enter the room with the tea like this. I approach the bed. Before I
come quite near the bed, here is the door to my right hand—open
always—so! But monsieur can perceive that I see nothing in the room of
Monsieur Manderson. The door opens to the bed, not to me who approach
from down there. I shut it without seeing in. It is the order.
Yesterday it was as ordinary. I see nothing of the next room. Madame
sleep like an angel—she see nothing. I shut the door. I place the
_plateau_—I open the curtains—I prepare the toilette—I retire—voilà!”
Célestine paused for breath and spread her hands abroad.
Trent, who had followed her movements and gesticulations with deepening
gravity, nodded his head. “I see exactly how it was now,” he said.
“Thank you, Célestine. So Mr. Manderson was supposed to be still in his
room while your mistress was getting up, and dressing, and having
breakfast in her boudoir?”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“Nobody missed him, in fact,” remarked Trent. “Well, Célestine, I am
very much obliged to you.” He reopened the door to the outer bedroom.
“It is nothing, monsieur,” said Célestine, as she crossed the small
room. “I hope that monsieur will catch the assassin of Monsieur
Manderson. But I not regret him too much,” she added with sudden and
amazing violence, turning round with her hand on the knob of the outer
door. She set her teeth with an audible sound, and the colour rose in
her small dark face. English departed from her. “Je ne le regrette pas
du tout, du tout!” she cried with a flood of words. “Madame—ah! je me
jetterais au feu pour madame—une femme si charmante, si adorable! Mais
un homme comme monsieur—maussade, boudeur, impassible! Ah, non!—de ma
vie! J’en avais par-dessus la tête, de monsieur! Ah! vrai! Est-ce
insupportable, tout de même, qu’il existe des types comme ça? Je vous
jure que—”
“Finissez ce chahut, Célestine!” Trent broke in sharply. Célestine’s
tirade had brought back the memory of his student days with a rush. “En
voilà une scène! C’est rasant, vous savez. Faut rentret ça,
mademoiselle. Du reste, c’est bien imprudent, croyez-moi. Hang it! Have
some common sense! If the inspector downstairs heard you saying that
kind of thing, you would get into trouble. And don’t wave your fists
about so much; you might hit something. You seem,” he went on more
pleasantly, as Célestine grew calmer under his authoritative eye, “to
be even more glad than other people that Mr. Manderson is out of the
way. I could almost suspect, Célestine, that Mr. Manderson did not take
as much notice of you as you thought necessary and right.”
“A peine s’il m’avait regardé!” Célestine answered simply.
“Ça, c’est un comble!” observed Trent. “You are a nice young woman for
a small tea-party, I don’t think. A star upon your birthday burned,
whose fierce, serene, red, pulseless planet never yearned in heaven,
Célestine. Mademoiselle, I am busy. Bon jour. You certainly are a
beauty!”
Célestine took this as a scarcely expected compliment. The surprise
restored her balance. With a sudden flash of her eyes and teeth at
Trent over her shoulder, the lady’s maid opened the door and swiftly
disappeared.
Trent, left alone in the little bedroom, relieved his mind with two
forcible descriptive terms in Célestine’s language, and turned to his
problem. He took the pair of shoes which he had already examined, and
placed them on one of the two chairs in the room, then seated himself
on the other opposite to this. With his hands in his pockets he sat
with eyes fixed upon those two dumb witnesses. Now and then he
whistled, almost inaudibly, a few bars. It was very still in the room.
A subdued twittering came from the trees through the open window. From
time to time a breeze rustled in the leaves of the thick creeper about
the sill. But the man in the room, his face grown hard and sombre now
with his thoughts, never moved.
So he sat for the space of half an hour. Then he rose quickly to his
feet. He replaced the shoes on their shelf with care, and stepped out
upon the landing.
Two bedroom doors faced him on the other side of the passage. He opened
that which was immediately opposite, and entered a bedroom by no means
austerely tidy. Some sticks and fishing-rods stood confusedly in one
corner, a pile of books in another. The housemaid’s hand had failed to
give a look of order to the jumble of heterogeneous objects left on the
dressing-table and on the mantelshelf—pipes, penknives, pencils, keys,
golf-balls, old letters, photographs, small boxes, tins, and bottles.
Two fine etchings and some water-colour sketches hung on the walls;
leaning against the end of the wardrobe, unhung, were a few framed
engravings. A row of shoes and boots was ranged beneath the window.
Trent crossed the room and studied them intently; then he measured some
of them with his tape, whistling very softly. This done, he sat on the
side of the bed, and his eyes roamed gloomily about the room.
The photographs on the mantelshelf attracted him presently. He rose and
examined one representing Marlowe and Manderson on horseback. Two
others were views of famous peaks in the Alps. There was a faded print
of three youths—one of them unmistakably his acquaintance of the
haggard blue eyes—clothed in tatterdemalion soldier’s gear of the
sixteenth century. Another was a portrait of a majestic old lady,
slightly resembling Marlowe. Trent, mechanically taking a cigarette
from an open box on the mantel-shelf, lit it and stared at the
photographs. Next he turned his attention to a flat leathern case that
lay by the cigarette-box.
It opened easily. A small and light revolver, of beautiful workmanship,
was disclosed, with a score or so of loose cartridges. On the stock
were engraved the initials “J. M.”
A step was heard on the stairs, and as Trent opened the breech and
peered into the barrel of the weapon, Inspector Murch appeared at the
open door of the room. “I was wondering—” he began; then stopped as he
saw what the other was about. His intelligent eyes opened slightly.
“Whose is the revolver, Mr. Trent?” he asked in a conversational tone.
“Evidently it belongs to the occupant of the room, Mr. Marlowe,”
replied Trent with similar lightness, pointing to the initials. “I
found this lying about on the mantelpiece. It seems a handy little
pistol to me, and it has been very carefully cleaned, I should say,
since the last time it was used. But I know little about firearms.”
“Well, I know a good deal,” rejoined the inspector quietly, taking the
revolver from Trent’s outstretched hand. “It’s a bit of a speciality
with me, is firearms, as I think you know, Mr. Trent. But it don’t
require an expert to tell one thing.” He replaced the revolver in its
case on the mantel-shelf, took out one of the cartridges, and laid it
on the spacious palm of one hand; then, taking a small object from his
waistcoat pocket, he laid it beside the cartridge. It was a little
leaden bullet, slightly battered about the nose, and having upon it
some bright new scratches.
“Is that _the_ one?” Trent murmured as he bent over the inspector’s
hand.
“That’s him,” replied Mr. Murch. “Lodged in the bone at the back of the
skull. Dr Stock got it out within the last hour, and handed it to the
local officer, who has just sent it on to me. These bright scratches
you see were made by the doctor’s instruments. These other marks were
made by the rifling of the barrel—a barrel like this one.” He tapped
the revolver. “Same make, same calibre. There is no other that marks
the bullet just like this.”
With the pistol in its case between them, Trent and the inspector
looked into each other’s eyes for some moments. Trent was the first to
speak. “This mystery is all wrong,” he observed. “It is insanity. The
symptoms of mania are very marked. Let us see how we stand. We were not
in any doubt, I believe, about Manderson having dispatched Marlowe in
the car to Southampton, or about Marlowe having gone, returning late
last night, many hours after the murder was committed.”
“There _is_ no doubt whatever about all that,” said Mr. Murch, with a
slight emphasis on the verb.
“And now,” pursued Trent, “we are invited by this polished and
insinuating firearm to believe the following line of propositions: that
Marlowe never went to Southampton; that he returned to the house in the
night; that he somehow, without waking Mrs. Manderson or anybody else,
got Manderson to get up, dress himself, and go out into the grounds;
that he then and there shot the said Manderson with his incriminating
pistol; that he carefully cleaned the said pistol, returned to the
house and, again without disturbing any one, replaced it in its case in
a favourable position to be found by the officers of the law; that he
then withdrew and spent the rest of the day in hiding—_with_ a large
motor car; and that he turned up, feigning ignorance of the whole
affair, at—what time was it?”
“A little after 9 p.m.” The inspector still stared moodily at Trent.
“As you say, Mr. Trent, that is the first theory suggested by this
find, and it seems wild enough—at least it would do if it didn’t fall
to pieces at the very start. When the murder was done Marlowe must have
been fifty to a hundred miles away. He _did_ go to Southampton.”
“How do you know?”
“I questioned him last night, and took down his story. He arrived in
Southampton about 6.30 on the Monday morning.”
“Come off” exclaimed Trent bitterly. “What do I care about his story?
What do you care about his story? I want to know how you _know_ he went
to Southampton.”
Mr. Murch chuckled. “I thought I should take a rise out of you, Mr.
Trent,” he said. “Well, there’s no harm in telling you. After I arrived
yesterday evening, as soon as I had got the outlines of the story from
Mrs. Manderson and the servants, the first thing I did was to go to the
telegraph office and wire to our people in Southampton. Manderson had
told his wife when he went to bed that he had changed his mind, and
sent Marlowe to Southampton to get some important information from some
one who was crossing by the next day’s boat. It seemed right enough,
but, you see, Marlowe was the only one of the household who wasn’t
under my hand, so to speak. He didn’t return in the car until later in
the evening; so before thinking the matter out any further, I wired to
Southampton making certain enquiries. Early this morning I got this
reply.” He handed a series of telegraph slips to Trent, who read:
Person answering description in motor answering description arrived
Bedford Hotel here 6.30 this morning gave name Marlowe left car hotel
garage told attendant car belonged Manderson had bath and breakfast
went out heard of later at docks inquiring for passenger name Harris on
Havre boat inquired repeatedly until boat left at noon next heard of at
hotel where he lunched about 1.15 left soon afterwards in car company’s
agents inform berth was booked name Harris last week but Harris did not
travel by boat Burke Inspector.
“Simple and satisfactory,” observed Mr. Murch as Trent, after twice
reading the message, returned it to him. “His own story corroborated in
every particular. He told me he hung about the dock for half an hour or
so on the chance of Harris turning up late, then strolled back,
lunched, and decided to return at once. He sent a wire to
Manderson—‘Harris not turned up missed boat returning Marlowe,’ which
was duly delivered here in the afternoon, and placed among the dead
man’s letters. He motored back at a good rate, and arrived dog-tired.
When he heard of Manderson’s death from Martin, he nearly fainted. What
with that and the being without sleep for so long, he was rather a
wreck when I came to interview him last night; but he was perfectly
coherent.”
Trent picked up the revolver and twirled the cylinder idly for a few
moments. “It was unlucky for Manderson that Marlowe left his pistol and
cartridges about so carelessly,” he remarked at length, as he put it
back in the case. “It was throwing temptation in somebody’s way, don’t
you think?”
Mr. Murch shook his head. “There isn’t really much to lay hold of about
the revolver, when you come to think. That particular make of revolver
is common enough in England. It was introduced from the States. Half
the people who buy a revolver today for self-defence or mischief
provide themselves with that make, of that calibre. It is very
reliable, and easily carried in the hip-pocket. There must be thousands
of them in the possession of crooks and honest men. For instance,”
continued the inspector with an air of unconcern, “Manderson himself
had one, the double of this. I found it in one of the top drawers of
the desk downstairs, and it’s in my overcoat pocket now.”
“Aha! so you were going to keep that little detail to yourself.”
“I was,” said the inspector; “but as you’ve found one revolver, you may
as well know about the other. As I say, neither of them may do us any
good. The people in the house—”
Both men started, and the inspector checked his speech abruptly, as the
half-closed door of the bedroom was slowly pushed open, and a man stood
in the doorway. His eyes turned from the pistol in its open case to the
faces of Trent and the inspector. They, who had not heard a sound to
herald this entrance, simultaneously looked at his long, narrow feet.
He wore rubber-soled tennis shoes.
“You must be Mr. Bunner,” said Trent.
Chapter VI.
Mr. Bunner on the Case
“Calvin C. Bunner, at your service,” amended the newcomer, with a touch
of punctilio, as he removed an unlighted cigar from his mouth. He was
used to finding Englishmen slow and ceremonious with strangers, and
Trent’s quick remark plainly disconcerted him a little. “You are Mr.
Trent, I expect,” he went on. “Mrs. Manderson was telling me a while
ago. Captain, good-morning.” Mr. Murch acknowledged the outlandish
greeting with a nod. “I was coming up to my room, and I heard a strange
voice in here, so I thought I would take a look in.” Mr. Bunner laughed
easily. “You thought I might have been eavesdropping, perhaps,” he
said. “No, sir; I heard a word or two about a pistol—this one, I
guess—and that’s all.”
Mr. Bunner was a thin, rather short young man with a shaven, pale,
bony, almost girlish face, and large, dark, intelligent eyes. His
waving dark hair was parted in the middle. His lips, usually occupied
with a cigar, in its absence were always half open with a curious
expression as of permanent eagerness. By smoking or chewing a cigar
this expression was banished, and Mr. Bunner then looked the
consummately cool and sagacious Yankee that he was.
Born in Connecticut, he had gone into a broker’s office on leaving
college, and had attracted the notice of Manderson, whose business with
his firm he had often handled. The Colossus had watched him for some
time, and at length offered him the post of private secretary. Mr.
Bunner was a pattern business man, trustworthy, long-headed,
methodical, and accurate. Manderson could have found many men with
those virtues; but he engaged Mr Bunner because he was also swift and
secret, and had besides a singular natural instinct in regard to the
movements of the stock market.
Trent and the American measured one another coolly with their eyes.
Both appeared satisfied with what they saw. “I was having it explained
to me,” said Trent pleasantly, “that my discovery of a pistol that
might have shot Manderson does not amount to very much. I am told it is
a favourite weapon among your people, and has become quite popular over
here.”
Mr. Bunner stretched out a bony hand and took the pistol from its case.
“Yes, sir,” he said, handling it with an air of familiarity; “the
captain is right. This is what we call out home a Little Arthur, and I
dare say there are duplicates of it in a hundred thousand hip-pockets
this minute. I consider it too light in the hand myself,” Mr. Bunner
went on, mechanically feeling under the tail of his jacket, and
producing an ugly looking weapon. “Feel of that, now, Mr. Trent—it’s
loaded, by the way. Now this Little Arthur—Marlowe bought it just
before we came over this year to please the old man. Manderson said it
was ridiculous for a man to be without a pistol in the twentieth
century. So he went out and bought what they offered him, I guess—never
consulted me. Not but what it’s a good gun,” Mr. Bunner conceded,
squinting along the sights. “Marlowe was poor with it at first, but
I’ve coached him some in the last month or so, and he’s practised until
he is pretty good. But he never could get the habit of carrying it
around. Why, it’s as natural to me as wearing my pants. I have carried
one for some years now, because there was always likely to be somebody
laying for Manderson. And now,” Mr. Bunner concluded sadly, “they got
him when I wasn’t around. Well, gentlemen, you must excuse me. I am
going into Bishopsbridge. There is a lot to do these days, and I have
to send off a bunch of cables big enough to choke a cow.”
“I must be off too,” said Trent. “I have an appointment at the ‘Three
Tuns’ inn.”
“Let me give you a lift in the automobile,” said Mr. Bunner cordially.
“I go right by that joint. Say, cap., are you coming my way too? No?
Then come along, Mr. Trent, and help me get out the car. The chauffeur
is out of action, and we have to do ’most everything ourselves except
clean the dirt off her.”
Still tirelessly talking in his measured drawl, Mr. Bunner led Trent
downstairs and through the house to the garage at the back. It stood at
a little distance from the house, and made a cool retreat from the
blaze of the midday sun.
Mr. Bunner seemed to be in no hurry to get out the car. He offered
Trent a cigar, which was accepted, and for the first time lit his own.
Then he seated himself on the footboard of the car, his thin hands
clasped between his knees, and looked keenly at the other.
“See here, Mr. Trent,” he said, after a few moments. “There are some
things I can tell you that may be useful to you. I know your record.
You are a smart man, and I like dealing with smart men. I don’t know if
I have that detective sized up right, but he strikes me as a mutt. I
would answer any questions he had the gumption to ask me—I have done
so, in fact—but I don’t feel encouraged to give him any notions of mine
without his asking. See?”
Trent nodded. “That is a feeling many people have in the presence of
our police,” he said. “It’s the official manner, I suppose. But let me
tell you, Murch is anything but what you think. He is one of the
shrewdest officers in Europe. He is not very quick with his mind, but
he is very sure. And his experience is immense. My forte is
imagination, but I assure you in police work experience outweighs it by
a great deal.”
“Outweigh nothing!” replied Mr. Bunner crisply. “This is no ordinary
case, Mr. Trent. I will tell you one reason why. I believe the old man
knew there was something coming to him. Another thing: I believe it was
something he thought he couldn’t dodge.”
Trent pulled a crate opposite to Mr. Bunner’s place on the footboard
and seated himself. “This sounds like business,” he said. “Tell me your
ideas.”
“I say what I do because of the change in the old man’s manner this
last few weeks. I dare say you have heard, Mr. Trent, that he was a man
who always kept himself well in hand. That was so. I have always
considered him the coolest and hardest head in business. That man’s
calm was just deadly—I never saw anything to beat it. And I knew
Manderson as nobody else did. I was with him in the work he really
lived for. I guess I knew him a heap better than his wife did, poor
woman. I knew him better than Marlowe could—he never saw Manderson in
his office when there was a big thing on. I knew him better than any of
his friends.”
“Had he any friends?” interjected Trent.
Mr. Bunner glanced at him sharply. “Somebody has been putting you next,
I see that,” he remarked. “No: properly speaking, I should say not. He
had many acquaintances among the big men, people he saw, most every
day; they would even go yachting or hunting together. But I don’t
believe there ever was a man that Manderson opened a corner of his
heart to. But what I was going to say was this. Some months ago the old
man began to get like I never knew him before—gloomy and sullen, just
as if he was everlastingly brooding over something bad, something that
he couldn’t fix. This went on without any break; it was the same down
town as it was up home, he acted just as if there was something lying
heavy on his mind. But it wasn’t until a few weeks back that his
self-restraint began to go; and let me tell you this, Mr. Trent”—the
American laid his bony claw on the other’s knee—“I’m the only man that
knows it. With every one else he would be just morose and dull; but
when he was alone with me in his office, or anywhere where we would be
working together, if the least little thing went wrong, by George! he
would fly off the handle to beat the Dutch. In this library here I have
seen him open a letter with something that didn’t just suit him in it,
and he would rip around and carry on like an Indian, saying he wished
he had the man that wrote it here, he wouldn’t do a thing to him, and
so on, till it was just pitiful. I never saw such a change. And here’s
another thing. For a week before he died Manderson neglected his work,
for the first time in my experience. He wouldn’t answer a letter or a
cable, though things looked like going all to pieces over there. I
supposed that this anxiety of his, whatever it was, had got on to his
nerves till they were worn out. Once I advised him to see a doctor, and
he told me to go to hell. But nobody saw this side of him but me. If he
was having one of these rages in the library here, for example, and
Mrs. Manderson would come into the room, he would be all calm and cold
again in an instant.”
“And you put this down to some secret anxiety, a fear that somebody had
designs on his life?” asked Trent.
The American nodded.
“I suppose,” Trent resumed, “you had considered the idea of there being
something wrong with his mind—a break-down from overstrain, say. That
is the first thought that your account suggests to me. Besides, it is
what is always happening to your big business men in America, isn’t it?
That is the impression one gets from the newspapers.”
“Don’t let them slip you any of that bunk,” said Mr. Bunner earnestly.
“It’s only the ones who have got rich too quick, and can’t make good,
who go crazy. Think of all our really big men—the men anywhere near
Manderson’s size: did you ever hear of any one of them losing his
senses? They don’t do it—believe _me_. I know they say every man has
his loco point,” Mr. Bunner added reflectively, “but that doesn’t mean
genuine, sure-enough craziness; it just means some personal
eccentricity in a man ... like hating cats ... or my own weakness of
not being able to touch any kind of fish-food.”
“Well, what was Manderson’s?”
“He was full of them—the old man. There was his objection to all the
unnecessary fuss and luxury that wealthy people don’t kick at much, as
a general rule. He didn’t have any use for expensive trifles and
ornaments. He wouldn’t have anybody do little things for him; he hated
to have servants tag around after him unless he wanted them. And
although Manderson was as careful about his clothes as any man I ever
knew, and his shoes—well, sir, the amount of money he spent on shoes
was sinful—in spite of that, I tell you, he never had a valet. He never
liked to have anybody touch him. All his life nobody ever shaved him.”
“I’ve heard something of that,” Trent remarked. “Why was it, do you
think?”
“Well,” Mr. Bunner answered slowly, “it was the Manderson habit of
mind, I guess; a sort of temper of general suspicion and jealousy.
“They say his father and grandfather were just the same.... Like a dog
with a bone, you know, acting as if all the rest of creation was laying
for a chance to steal it. He didn’t really _think_ the barber would
start in to saw his head off; he just felt there was a possibility that
he _might_, and he was taking no risks. Then again in business he was
always convinced that somebody else was after his bone—which was true
enough a good deal of the time; but not all the time. The consequence
of that was that the old man was the most cautious and secret worker in
the world of finance; and that had a lot to do with his success,
too.... But that doesn’t amount to being a lunatic, Mr. Trent; not by a
long way. You ask me if Manderson was losing his mind before he died. I
say I believe he was just worn out with worrying over something, and
was losing his nerve.”
Trent smoked thoughtfully. He wondered how much Mr. Bunner knew of the
domestic difficulty in his chief’s household, and decided to put out a
feeler. “I understood that he had trouble with his wife.”
“Sure,” replied Mr. Bunner. “But do you suppose a thing like that was
going to upset Sig Manderson that way? No, sir! He was a sight too big
a man to be all broken up by any worry of that kind.”
Trent looked half-incredulously into the eyes of the young man. But
behind all their shrewdness and intensity he saw a massive innocence.
Mr. Bunner really believed a serious breach between husband and wife to
be a minor source of trouble for a big man.
“What _was_ the trouble between them, anyhow?” Trent inquired.
“You can search me,” Mr. Bunner replied briefly. He puffed at his
cigar. “Marlowe and I have often talked about it, and we could never
make out a solution. I had a notion at first,” said Mr. Bunner in a
lower voice, leaning forward, “that the old man was disappointed and
vexed because he had expected a child; but Marlowe told me that the
disappointment on that score was the other way around, likely as not.
His idea was all right, I guess; he gathered it from something said by
Mrs. Manderson’s French maid.”
Trent looked up at him quickly. “Célestine!” he said; and his thought
was, “So that was what she was getting at!”
Mr. Bunner misunderstood his glance. “Don’t you think I’m giving a man
away, Mr. Trent,” he said. “Marlowe isn’t that kind. Célestine just
took a fancy to him because he talks French like a native, and she
would always be holding him up for a gossip. French servants are quite
unlike English that way. And servant or no servant,” added Mr. Bunner
with emphasis, “I don’t see how a woman could mention such a subject to
a man. But the French beat me.” He shook his head slowly.
“But to come back to what you were telling me just now,” Trent said.
“You believe that Manderson was going in terror of his life for some
time. Who should threaten it? I am quite in the dark.”
“Terror—I don’t know,” replied Mr. Bunner meditatively. “Anxiety, if
you like. Or suspense—that’s rather my idea of it. The old man was hard
to terrify, anyway; and more than that, he wasn’t taking any
precautions—he was actually avoiding them. It looked more like he was
asking for a quick finish—supposing there’s any truth in my idea. Why,
he would sit in that library window, nights, looking out into the dark,
with his white shirt just a target for anybody’s gun. As for who should
threaten his life well, sir,” said Mr. Bunner with a faint smile, “it’s
certain you have not lived in the States. To take the Pennsylvania coal
hold-up alone, there were thirty thousand men, with women and children
to keep, who would have jumped at the chance of drilling a hole through
the man who fixed it so that they must starve or give in to his terms.
Thirty thousand of the toughest aliens in the country, Mr. Trent.
There’s a type of desperado you find in that kind of push who has been
known to lay for a man for years, and kill him when he had forgotten
what he did. They have been known to dynamite a man in Idaho who had
done them dirt in New Jersey ten years before. Do you suppose the
Atlantic is going to stop them?... It takes some sand, I tell you, to
be a big business man in our country. No, sir: the old man knew—had
always known—that there was a whole crowd of dangerous men scattered up
and down the States who had it in for him. My belief is that he had
somehow got to know that some of them were definitely after him at
last. What licks me altogether is why he should have just laid himself
open to them the way he did—why he never tried to dodge, but walked
right down into the garden yesterday morning to be shot at.”
Mr. Bunner ceased to speak, and for a little while both men sat with
wrinkled brows, faint blue vapours rising from their cigars. Then Trent
rose. “Your theory is quite fresh to me,” he said. “It’s perfectly
rational, and it’s only a question of whether it fits all the facts. I
mustn’t give away what I’m doing for my newspaper, Mr. Bunner, but I
will say this: I have already satisfied myself that this was a
premeditated crime, and an extraordinarily cunning one at that. I’m
deeply obliged to you. We must talk it over again.” He looked at his
watch. “I have been expected for some time by my friend. Shall we make
a move?”
“Two o’clock,” said Mr. Bunner, consulting his own, as he got up from
the foot-board. “Ten a.m. in little old New York. You don’t know Wall
Street, Mr. Trent. Let’s you and I hope we never see anything nearer
hell than what’s loose in the Street this minute.”
Chapter VII.
The Lady in Black
The sea broke raging upon the foot of the cliff under a good breeze;
the sun flooded the land with life from a dappled blue sky. In this
perfection of English weather Trent, who had slept ill, went down
before eight o’clock to a pool among the rocks, the direction of which
had been given him, and dived deep into clear water. Between vast grey
boulders he swam out to the tossing open, forced himself some little
way against a coast-wise current, and then returned to his refuge
battered and refreshed. Ten minutes later he was scaling the cliff
again, and his mind, cleared for the moment of a heavy disgust for the
affair he had in hand, was turning over his plans for the morning.
It was the day of the inquest, the day after his arrival in the place.
He had carried matters not much further after parting with the American
on the road to Bishopsbridge. In the afternoon he had walked from the
inn into the town, accompanied by Mr. Cupples, and had there made
certain purchases at a chemist’s shop, conferred privately for some
time with a photographer, sent off a reply-paid telegram, and made an
enquiry at the telephone exchange. He had said but little about the
case to Mr. Cupples, who seemed incurious on his side, and nothing at
all about the results of his investigation or the steps he was about to
take. After their return from Bishopsbridge, Trent had written a long
dispatch for the _Record_ and sent it to be telegraphed by the proud
hands of the paper’s local representative. He had afterwards dined with
Mr. Cupples, and had spent the rest of the evening in meditative
solitude on the veranda.
This morning as he scaled the cliff he told himself that he had never
taken up a case he liked so little, or which absorbed him so much. The
more he contemplated it in the golden sunshine of this new day, the
more evil and the more challenging it appeared. All that he suspected
and all that he almost knew had occupied his questing brain for hours
to the exclusion of sleep; and in this glorious light and air, though
washed in body and spirit by the fierce purity of the sea, he only saw
the more clearly the darkness of the guilt in which he believed, and
was more bitterly repelled by the motive at which he guessed. But now
at least his zeal was awake again, and the sense of the hunt quickened.
He would neither slacken nor spare; here need be no compunction. In the
course of the day, he hoped, his net would be complete. He had work to
do in the morning; and with very vivid expectancy, though not much
serious hope, he awaited the answer to the telegram which he had shot
into the sky, as it were, the day before.
The path back to the hotel wound for some way along the top of the
cliff, and on nearing a spot he had marked from the sea level, where
the face had fallen away long ago, he approached the edge and looked
down, hoping to follow with his eyes the most delicately beautiful of
all the movements of water—the wash of a light sea over broken rock.
But no rock was there. A few feet below him a broad ledge stood out, a
rough platform as large as a great room, thickly grown with wiry grass
and walled in steeply on three sides. There, close to the verge where
the cliff at last dropped sheer, a woman was sitting, her arms about
her drawn-up knees, her eyes fixed on the trailing smoke of a distant
liner, her face full of some dream.
This woman seemed to Trent, whose training had taught him to live in
his eyes, to make the most beautiful picture he had ever seen. Her face
of southern pallor, touched by the kiss of the wind with colour on the
cheek, presented to him a profile of delicate regularity in which there
was nothing hard; nevertheless the black brows bending down toward the
point where they almost met gave her in repose a look of something like
severity, strangely redeemed by the open curves of the mouth. Trent
said to himself that the absurdity or otherwise of a lover writing
sonnets to his mistress’s eyebrow depended after all on the quality of
the eyebrow. Her nose was of the straight and fine sort, exquisitely
escaping the perdition of too much length, which makes a conscientious
mind ashamed that it cannot help, on occasion, admiring the tip-tilted.
Her hat lay pinned to the grass beside her, and the lively breeze
played with her thick dark hair, blowing backward the two broad
bandeaux that should have covered much of her forehead, and agitating a
hundred tiny curls from the mass gathered at her nape. Everything about
this lady was black, from her shoes of suede to the hat that she had
discarded; lustreless black covered her to her bare throat. All she
wore was fine and well put on. Dreamy and delicate of spirit as her
looks declared her, it was very plain that she was long-practised as
only a woman grown can be in dressing well, the oldest of the arts, and
had her touch of primal joy in the excellence of the body that was so
admirably curved now in the attitude of embraced knees. With the
suggestion of French taste in her clothes, she made a very modern
figure seated there, until one looked at her face and saw the glow and
triumph of all vigorous beings that ever faced sun and wind and sea
together in the prime of the year. One saw, too, a womanhood so unmixed
and vigorous, so unconsciously sure of itself, as scarcely to be
English, still less American.
Trent, who had halted only for a moment in the surprise of seeing the
woman in black, had passed by on the cliff above her, perceiving and
feeling as he went the things set down. At all times his keen vision
and active brain took in and tasted details with an easy swiftness that
was marvellous to men of slower chemistry; the need to stare, he held,
was evidence of blindness. Now the feeling of beauty was awakened and
exultant, and doubled the power of his sense. In these instants a
picture was printed on his memory that would never pass away.
As he went by unheard on the turf the woman, still alone with her
thoughts, suddenly moved. She unclasped her long hands from about her
knees, stretched her limbs and body with feline grace, then slowly
raised her head and extended her arms with open, curving fingers, as if
to gather to her all the glory and overwhelming sanity of the morning.
This was a gesture not to be mistaken: it was a gesture of freedom, the
movement of a soul’s resolution to be, to possess, to go forward,
perhaps to enjoy.
So he saw her for an instant as he passed, and he did not turn. He knew
suddenly who the woman must be, and it was as if a curtain of gloom
were drawn between him and the splendour of the day.
During breakfast at the hotel Mr. Cupples found Trent little inclined
to talk. He excused himself on the plea of a restless night. Mr.
Cupples, on the other hand, was in a state of bird-like alertness. The
prospect of the inquest seemed to enliven him. He entertained Trent
with a disquisition upon the history of that most ancient and once busy
tribunal, the coroner’s court, and remarked upon the enviable freedom
of its procedure from the shackles of rule and precedent. From this he
passed to the case that was to come before it that morning.
“Young Bunner mentioned to me last night,” he said, “when I went up
there after dinner, the hypothesis which he puts forward in regard to
the crime. A very remarkable young man, Trent. His meaning is
occasionally obscure, but in my opinion he is gifted with a clearheaded
knowledge of the world quite unusual in one of his apparent age.
Indeed, his promotion by Manderson to the position of his principal
lieutenant speaks for itself. He seems to have assumed with perfect
confidence the control at this end of the wire, as he expresses it, of
the complicated business situation caused by the death of his
principal, and he has advised very wisely as to the steps I should take
on Mabel’s behalf, and the best course for her to pursue until effect
has been given to the provisions of the will. I was accordingly less
disposed than I might otherwise have been to regard his suggestion of
an industrial vendetta as far-fetched. When I questioned him he was
able to describe a number of cases in which attacks of one sort or
another—too often successful—had been made upon the lives of persons
who had incurred the hostility of powerful labour organizations. This
is a terrible time in which we live, my dear boy. There is none
recorded in history, I think, in which the disproportion between the
material and the moral constituents of society has been so great or so
menacing to the permanence of the fabric. But nowhere, in my judgement,
is the prospect so dark as it is in the United States.”
“I thought,” said Trent listlessly, “that Puritanism was about as
strong there as the money-getting craze.”
“Your remark,” answered Mr. Cupples, with as near an approach to humour
as was possible to him, “is not in the nature of a testimonial to what
you call Puritanism—a convenient rather than an accurate term; for I
need not remind you that it was invented to describe an Anglican party
which aimed at the purging of the services and ritual of their Church
from certain elements repugnant to them. The sense of your observation,
however, is none the less sound, and its truth is extremely well
illustrated by the case of Manderson himself, who had, I believe, the
virtues of purity, abstinence, and self-restraint in their strongest
form. No, Trent, there are other and more worthy things among the moral
constituents of which I spoke; and in our finite nature, the more we
preoccupy ourselves with the bewildering complexity of external
apparatus which science places in our hands, the less vigour have we
left for the development of the holier purposes of humanity within us.
Agricultural machinery has abolished the festival of the Harvest Home.
Mechanical travel has abolished the inn, or all that was best in it. I
need not multiply instances. The view I am expressing to you,” pursued
Mr. Cupples, placidly buttering a piece of toast, “is regarded as
fundamentally erroneous by many of those who think generally as I do
about the deeper concerns of life, but I am nevertheless firmly
persuaded of its truth.”
“It needs epigrammatic expression,” said Trent, rising from the table.
“If only it could be crystallized into some handy formula, like ‘No
Popery’, or ‘Tax the Foreigner’, you would find multitudes to go to the
stake for it. But you were planning to go to White Gables before the
inquest, I think. You ought to be off if you are to get back to the
court in time. I have something to attend to there myself, so we might
walk up together. I will just go and get my camera.”
“By all means,” Mr. Cupples answered; and they set off at once in the
ever-growing warmth of the morning. The roof of White Gables, a surly
patch of dull red against the dark trees, seemed to harmonize with
Trent’s mood; he felt heavy, sinister, and troubled. If a blow must
fall that might strike down that creature radiant of beauty and life
whom he had seen that morning, he did not wish it to come from his
hand. An exaggerated chivalry had lived in Trent since the first
teachings of his mother; but at this moment the horror of bruising
anything so lovely was almost as much the artist’s revulsion as the
gentleman’s. On the other hand, was the hunt to end in nothing? The
quality of the affair was such that the thought of forbearance was an
agony. There never was such a case; and he alone, he was confident,
held the truth of it under his hand. At least, he determined, that day
should show whether what he believed was a delusion. He would trample
his compunction underfoot until he was quite sure that there was any
call for it. That same morning he would know.
As they entered at the gate of the drive they saw Marlowe and the
American standing in talk before the front door. In the shadow of the
porch was the lady in black.
She saw them, and came gravely forward over the lawn, moving as Trent
had known that she would move, erect and balanced, stepping lightly.
When she welcomed him on Mr. Cupples’s presentation her eyes of
golden-flecked brown observed him kindly. In her pale composure, worn
as the mask of distress, there was no trace of the emotion that had
seemed a halo about her head on the ledge of the cliff. She spoke the
appropriate commonplace in a low and even voice. After a few words to
Mr. Cupples she turned her eyes on Trent again.
“I hope you will succeed,” she said earnestly. “Do you think you will
succeed?”
He made his mind up as the words left her lips. He said, “I believe I
shall do so, Mrs. Manderson. When I have the case sufficiently complete
I shall ask you to let me see you and tell you about it. It may be
necessary to consult you before the facts are published.”
She looked puzzled, and distress showed for an instant in her eyes. “If
it is necessary, of course you shall do so,” she said.
On the brink of his next speech Trent hesitated. He remembered that the
lady had not wished to repeat to him the story already given to the
inspector—or to be questioned at all. He was not unconscious that he
desired to hear her voice and watch her face a little longer, if it
might be; but the matter he had to mention really troubled his mind, it
was a queer thing that fitted nowhere into the pattern within whose
corners he had by this time brought the other queer things in the case.
It was very possible that she could explain it away in a breath; it was
unlikely that any one else could. He summoned his resolution.
“You have been so kind,” he said, “in allowing me access to the house
and every opportunity of studying the case, that I am going to ask
leave to put a question or two to yourself—nothing that you would
rather not answer, I think. May I?”
She glanced at him wearily. “It would be stupid of me to refuse. Ask
your questions, Mr. Trent.”
“It’s only this,” said Trent hurriedly. “We know that your husband
lately drew an unusually large sum of ready money from his London
bankers, and was keeping it here. It is here now, in fact. Have you any
idea why he should have done that?”
She opened her eyes in astonishment. “I cannot imagine,” she said. “I
did not know he had done so. I am very much surprised to hear it.”
“Why is it surprising?”
“I thought my husband had very little money in the house. On Sunday
night, just before he went out in the motor, he came into the
drawing-room where I was sitting. He seemed to be irritated about
something, and asked me at once if I had any notes or gold I could let
him have until next day. I was surprised at that, because he was never
without money; he made it a rule to carry a hundred pounds or so about
him always in a note-case. I unlocked my escritoire, and gave him all I
had by me. It was nearly thirty pounds.”
“And he did not tell you why he wanted it?”
“No. He put it in his pocket, and then said that Mr. Marlowe had
persuaded him to go for a run in the motor by moonlight, and he thought
it might help him to sleep. He had been sleeping badly, as perhaps you
know. Then he went off with Mr. Marlowe. I thought it odd he should
need money on Sunday night, but I soon forgot about it. I never
remembered it again until now.”
“It was curious, certainly,” said Trent, staring into the distance. Mr
Cupples began to speak to his niece of the arrangements for the
inquest, and Trent moved away to where Marlowe was pacing slowly upon
the lawn. The young man seemed relieved to talk about the coming
business of the day. Though he still seemed tired out and nervous, he
showed himself not without a quiet humour in describing the pomposities
of the local police and the portentous airs of Dr Stock. Trent turned
the conversation gradually toward the problem of the crime, and all
Marlowe’s gravity returned.
“Bunner has told me what he thinks,” he said when Trent referred to the
American’s theory. “I don’t find myself convinced by it, because it
doesn’t really explain some of the oddest facts. But I have lived long
enough in the United States to know that such a stroke of revenge, done
in a secret, melodramatic way, is not an unlikely thing. It is quite a
characteristic feature of certain sections of the labour movement
there. Americans have a taste and a talent for that sort of business.
Do you know _Huckleberry Finn?_”
“Do I know my own name?” exclaimed Trent.
“Well, I think the most American thing in that great American epic is
Tom Sawyer’s elaboration of an extremely difficult and romantic scheme,
taking days to carry out, for securing the escape of the nigger Jim,
which could have been managed quite easily in twenty minutes. You know
how fond they are of lodges and brotherhoods. Every college club has
its secret signs and handgrips. You’ve heard of the Know-Nothing
movement in politics, I dare say, and the Ku Klux Klan. Then look at
Brigham Young’s penny-dreadful tyranny in Utah, with real blood. The
founders of the Mormon State were of the purest Yankee stock in
America; and you know what they did. It’s all part of the same mental
tendency. Americans make fun of it among themselves. For my part, I
take it very seriously.”
“It can have a very hideous side to it, certainly,” said Trent, “when
you get it in connection with crime—or with vice—or even mere luxury.
But I have a sort of sneaking respect for the determination to make
life interesting and lively in spite of civilization. To return to the
matter in hand, however; has it struck you as a possibility that
Manderson’s mind was affected to some extent by this menace that Bunner
believes in? For instance, it was rather an extraordinary thing to send
you posting off like that in the middle of the night.”
“About ten o’clock, to be exact,” replied Marlowe. “Though, mind you,
if he’d actually roused me out of my bed at midnight I shouldn’t have
been very much surprised. It all chimes in with what we’ve just been
saying. Manderson had a strong streak of the national taste for
dramatic proceedings. He was rather fond of his well-earned reputation
for unexpected strokes and for going for his object with ruthless
directness through every opposing consideration. He had decided
suddenly that he wanted to have word from this man Harris—”
“Who is Harris?” interjected Trent.
“Nobody knows. Even Bunner never heard of him, and can’t imagine what
the business in hand was. All I know is that when I went up to London
last week to attend to various things I booked a deck-cabin, at
Manderson’s request, for a Mr. George Harris on the boat that sailed on
Monday. It seems that Manderson suddenly found he wanted news from
Harris which presumably was of a character too secret for the
telegraph; and there was no train that served; so I was sent off as you
know.”
Trent looked round to make sure that they were not overheard, then
faced the other gravely, “There is one thing I may tell you,” he said
quietly, “that I don’t think you know. Martin the butler caught a few
words at the end of your conversation with Manderson in the orchard
before you started with him in the car. He heard him say, ‘If Harris is
there, every moment is of importance.’ Now, Mr. Marlowe, you know my
business here. I am sent to make enquiries, and you mustn’t take
offence. I want to ask you if, in the face of that sentence, you will
repeat that you know nothing of what the business was.”
Marlowe shook his head. “I know nothing, indeed. I’m not easily
offended, and your question is quite fair. What passed during that
conversation I have already told the detective. Manderson plainly said
to me that he could not tell me what it was all about. He simply wanted
me to find Harris, tell him that he desired to know how matters stood,
and bring back a letter or message from him. Harris, I was further
told, might not turn up. If he did, ‘every moment was of importance’.
And now you know as much as I do.”
“That talk took place _before_ he told his wife that you were taking
him for a moonlight run. Why did he conceal your errand in that way, I
wonder.”
The young man made a gesture of helplessness. “Why? I can guess no
better than you.”
“Why,” muttered Trent as if to himself, gazing on the ground, “did he
conceal it—from Mrs. Manderson?” He looked up at Marlowe.
“And from Martin,” the other amended coolly. “He was told the same
thing.”
With a sudden movement of his head Trent seemed to dismiss the subject.
He drew from his breast-pocket a letter-case, and thence extracted two
small leaves of clean, fresh paper.
“Just look at these two slips, Mr. Marlowe,” he said. “Did you ever see
them before? Have you any idea where they come from?” he added as
Marlowe took one in each hand and examined them curiously.
“They seem to have been cut with a knife or scissors from a small diary
for this year from the October pages,” Marlowe observed, looking them
over on both sides. “I see no writing of any kind on them. Nobody here
has any such diary so far as I know. What about them?”
“There may be nothing in it,” Trent said dubiously. “Any one in the
house, of course, might have such a diary without your having seen it.
But I didn’t much expect you would be able to identify the leaves—in
fact, I should have been surprised if you had.”
He stopped speaking as Mrs. Manderson came towards them. “My uncle
thinks we should be going now,” she said.
“I think I will walk on with Mr. Bunner,” Mr. Cupples said as he joined
them. “There are certain business matters that must be disposed of as
soon as possible. Will you come on with these two gentlemen, Mabel? We
will wait for you before we reach the place.”
Trent turned to her. “Mrs. Manderson will excuse me, I hope,” he said.
“I really came up this morning in order to look about me here for some
indications I thought I might possibly find. I had not thought of
attending the—the court just yet.”
She looked at him with eyes of perfect candour. “Of course, Mr. Trent.
Please do exactly as you wish. We are all relying upon you. If you will
wait a few moments, Mr. Marlowe, I shall be ready.”
She entered the house. Her uncle and the American had already strolled
towards the gate.
Trent looked into the eyes of his companion. “That is a wonderful
woman,” he said in a lowered voice.
“You say so without knowing her,” replied Marlowe in a similar tone.
“She is more than that.”
Trent said nothing to this. He stared out over the fields towards the
sea. In the silence a noise of hobnailed haste rose on the still air. A
little distance down the road a boy appeared trotting towards them from
the direction of the hotel. In his hand was the orange envelope,
unmistakable afar off, of a telegram. Trent watched him with an
indifferent eye as he met and passed the two others. Then he turned to
Marlowe. “A propos of nothing in particular,” he said, “were you at
Oxford?”
“Yes,” said the young man. “Why do you ask?”
“I just wondered if I was right in my guess. It’s one of the things you
can very often tell about a man, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” Marlowe said. “Well, each of us is marked in one way or
another, perhaps. I should have said you were an artist, if I hadn’t
known it.”
“Why? Does my hair want cutting?”
“Oh, no! It’s only that you look at things and people as I’ve seen
artists do, with an eye that moves steadily from detail to
detail—rather looking them over than looking at them.”
The boy came up panting. “Telegram for you, sir,” he said to Trent.
“Just come, sir.”
Trent tore open the envelope with an apology, and his eyes lighted up
so visibly as he read the slip that Marlowe’s tired face softened in a
smile.
“It must be good news,” he murmured half to himself.
Trent turned on him a glance in which nothing could be read. “Not
exactly news,” he said. “It only tells me that another little guess of
mine was a good one.”
Chapter VIII.
The Inquest
The coroner, who fully realized that for that one day of his life as a
provincial solicitor he was living in the gaze of the world, had
resolved to be worthy of the fleeting eminence. He was a large man of
jovial temper, with a strong interest in the dramatic aspects of his
work, and the news of Manderson’s mysterious death within his
jurisdiction had made him the happiest coroner in England. A
respectable capacity for marshalling facts was fortified in him by a
copiousness of impressive language that made juries as clay in his
hands, and sometimes disguised a doubtful interpretation of the rules
of evidence.
The court was held in a long, unfurnished room lately built on to the
hotel, and intended to serve as a ballroom or concert-hall. A regiment
of reporters was entrenched in the front seats, and those who were to
be called on to give evidence occupied chairs to one side of the table
behind which the coroner sat, while the jury, in double row, with
plastered hair and a spurious ease of manner, flanked him on the other
side. An undistinguished public filled the rest of the space, and
listened, in an awed silence, to the opening solemnities. The newspaper
men, well used to these, muttered among themselves. Those of them who
knew Trent by sight assured the rest that he was not in the court.
The identity of the dead man was proved by his wife, the first witness
called, from whom the coroner, after some enquiry into the health and
circumstances of the deceased, proceeded to draw an account of the last
occasion on which she had seen her husband alive. Mrs. Manderson was
taken through her evidence by the coroner with the sympathy which every
man felt for that dark figure of grief. She lifted her thick veil
before beginning to speak, and the extreme paleness and unbroken
composure of the lady produced a singular impression. This was not an
impression of hardness. Interesting femininity was the first thing to
be felt in her presence. She was not even enigmatic. It was only clear
that the force of a powerful character was at work to master the
emotions of her situation. Once or twice as she spoke she touched her
eyes with her handkerchief, but her voice was low and clear to the end.
Her husband, she said, had come up to his bedroom about his usual hour
for retiring on Sunday night. His room was really a dressing-room
attached to her own bedroom, communicating with it by a door which was
usually kept open during the night. Both dressing-room and bedroom were
entered by other doors giving on the passage. Her husband had always
had a preference for the greatest simplicity in his bedroom
arrangements, and liked to sleep in a small room. She had not been
awake when he came up, but had been half-aroused, as usually happened,
when the light was switched on in her husband’s room. She had spoken to
him. She had no clear recollection of what she had said, as she had
been very drowsy at the time; but she had remembered that he had been
out for a moonlight run in the car, and she believed she had asked
whether he had had a good run, and what time it was. She had asked what
the time was because she felt as if she had only been a very short time
asleep, and she had expected her husband to be out very late. In answer
to her question he had told her it was half-past eleven, and had gone
on to say that he had changed his mind about going for a run.
“Did he say why?” the coroner asked.
“Yes,” replied the lady, “he did explain why. I remember very well what
he said, because—” she stopped with a little appearance of confusion.
“Because—” the coroner insisted gently.
“Because my husband was not as a rule communicative about his business
affairs,” answered the witness, raising her chin with a faint touch of
defiance. “He did not—did not think they would interest me, and as a
rule referred to them as little as possible. That was why I was rather
surprised when he told me that he had sent Mr. Marlowe to Southampton
to bring back some important information from a man who was leaving for
Paris by the next day’s boat. He said that Mr. Marlowe could do it
quite easily if he had no accident. He said that he had started in the
car, and then walked back home a mile or so, and felt all the better
for it.”
“Did he say any more?”
“Nothing, as well as I remember,” the witness said. “I was very sleepy,
and I dropped off again in a few moments. I just remember my husband
turning his light out, and that is all. I never saw him again alive.”
“And you heard nothing in the night?”
“No: I never woke until my maid brought my tea in the morning at seven
o’clock. She closed the door leading to my husband’s room, as she
always did, and I supposed him to be still there. He always needed a
great deal of sleep. He sometimes slept until quite late in the
morning. I had breakfast in my sitting-room. It was about ten when I
heard that my husband’s body had been found.” The witness dropped her
head and silently waited for her dismissal.
But it was not to be yet.
“Mrs. Manderson.” The coroner’s voice was sympathetic, but it had a
hint of firmness in it now. “The question I am going to put to you
must, in these sad circumstances, be a painful one; but it is my duty
to ask it. Is it the fact that your relations with your late husband
had not been, for some time past, relations of mutual affection and
confidence? Is it the fact that there was an estrangement between you?”
The lady drew herself up again and faced her questioner, the colour
rising in her cheeks. “If that question is necessary,” she said with
cold distinctness, “I will answer it so that there shall be no
misunderstanding. During the last few months of my husband’s life his
attitude towards me had given me great anxiety and sorrow. He had
changed towards me; he had become very reserved, and seemed
mistrustful. I saw much less of him than before; he seemed to prefer to
be alone. I can give no explanation at all of the change. I tried to
work against it; I did all I could with justice to my own dignity, as I
thought. Something was between us, I did not know what, and he never
told me. My own obstinate pride prevented me from asking what it was in
so many words; I only made a point of being to him exactly as I had
always been, so far as he would allow me. I suppose I shall never know
now what it was.” The witness, whose voice had trembled in spite of her
self-control over the last few sentences, drew down her veil when she
had said this, and stood erect and quiet.
One of the jury asked a question, not without obvious hesitation. “Then
was there never anything of the nature of what they call Words between
you and your husband, ma’am?”
“Never.” The word was colourlessly spoken; but every one felt that a
crass misunderstanding of the possibilities of conduct in the case of a
person like Mrs. Manderson had been visited with some severity.
Did she know, the coroner asked, of any other matter which might have
been preying upon her husband’s mind recently?
Mrs. Manderson knew of none whatever. The coroner intimated that her
ordeal was at an end, and the veiled lady made her way to the door. The
general attention, which followed her for a few moments, was now
eagerly directed upon Martin, whom the coroner had proceeded to call.
It was at this moment that Trent appeared at the doorway and edged his
way into the great room. But he did not look at Martin. He was
observing the well-balanced figure that came quickly toward him along
an opening path in the crowd, and his eye was gloomy. He started, as he
stood aside from the door with a slight bow, to hear Mrs. Manderson
address him by name in a low voice. He followed her a pace or two into
the hall.
“I wanted to ask you,” she said in a voice now weak and oddly broken,
“if you would give me your arm a part of the way to the house. I could
not see my uncle near the door, and I suddenly felt rather faint.... I
shall be better in the air.... No, no; I cannot stay here—please, Mr.
Trent!” she said, as he began to make an obvious suggestion. “I must go
to the house.” Her hand tightened momentarily on his arm as if, for all
her weakness, she could drag him from the place; then again she leaned
heavily upon it, and with that support, and with bent head, she walked
slowly from the hotel and along the oak-shaded path toward White
Gables.
Trent went in silence, his thoughts whirling, dancing insanely to a
chorus of “Fool! fool!” All that he alone knew, all that he guessed and
suspected of this affair, rushed through his brain in a rout; but the
touch of her unnerved hand upon his arm never for an instant left his
consciousness, filling him with an exaltation that enraged and
bewildered him. He was still cursing himself furiously behind the mask
of conventional solicitude that he turned to the lady when he had
attended her to the house and seen her sink upon a couch in the
morning-room. Raising her veil, she thanked him gravely and frankly,
with a look of sincere gratitude in her eyes. She was much better now,
she said, and a cup of tea would work a miracle upon her. She hoped she
had not taken him away from anything important. She was ashamed of
herself; she thought she could go through with it, but she had not
expected those last questions. “I am glad you did not hear me,” she
said when he explained. “But of course you will read it all in the
reports. It shook me so to have to speak of that,” she added simply;
“and to keep from making an exhibition of myself took it out of me. And
all those staring men by the door! Thank you again for helping me when
I asked you.... I thought I might,” she ended queerly, with a little
tired smile; and Trent took himself away, his hand still quivering from
the cool touch of her fingers.
The testimony of the servants and of the finder of the body brought
nothing new to the reporters’ net. That of the police was as colourless
and cryptic as is usual at the inquest stage of affairs of the kind.
Greatly to the satisfaction of Mr. Bunner, his evidence afforded the
sensation of the day, and threw far into the background the interesting
revelation of domestic difficulty made by the dead man’s wife. He told
the court in substance what he had already told Trent. The flying
pencils did not miss a word of the young American’s story, and it
appeared with scarcely the omission of a sentence in every journal of
importance in Great Britain and the United States.
Public opinion next day took no note of the faint suggestion of the
possibility of suicide which the coroner, in his final address to the
jury, had thought it right to make in connection with the lady’s
evidence. The weight of evidence, as the official had indeed pointed
out, was against such a theory. He had referred with emphasis to the
fact that no weapon had been found near the body.
“This question, of course, is all-important, gentlemen,” he had said to
the jury. “It is, in fact, the main issue before you. You have seen the
body for yourselves. You have just heard the medical evidence; but I
think it would be well for me to read you my notes of it in so far as
they bear on this point, in order to refresh your memories. Dr Stock
told you—I am going to omit all technical medical language and repeat
to you merely the plain English of his testimony—that in his opinion
death had taken place six or eight hours previous to the finding of the
body. He said that the cause of death was a bullet wound, the bullet
having entered the left eye, which was destroyed, and made its way to
the base of the brain, which was quite shattered. The external
appearance of the wound, he said, did not support the hypothesis of its
being self-inflicted, inasmuch as there were no signs of the firearm
having been pressed against the eye, or even put very close to it; at
the same time it was not physically impossible that the weapon should
have been discharged by the deceased with his own hand, at some small
distance from the eye. Dr Stock also told us that it was impossible to
say with certainty, from the state of the body, whether any struggle
had taken place at the time of death; that when seen by him, at which
time he understood that it had not been moved since it was found, the
body was lying in a collapsed position such as might very well result
from the shot alone; but that the scratches and bruises upon the wrists
and the lower part of the arms had been very recently inflicted, and
were, in his opinion, marks of violence.
“In connection with this same point, the remarkable evidence given by
Mr Bunner cannot be regarded, I think, as without significance. It may
have come as a surprise to some of you to hear that risks of the
character described by this witness are, in his own country, commonly
run by persons in the position of the deceased. On the other hand, it
may have been within the knowledge of some of you that in the
industrial world of America the discontent of labour often proceeds to
lengths of which we in England happily know nothing. I have
interrogated the witness somewhat fully upon this. At the same time,
gentlemen, I am by no means suggesting that Mr. Bunner’s personal
conjecture as to the cause of death can fitly be adopted by you. That
is emphatically not the case. What his evidence does is to raise two
questions for your consideration. First, can it be said that the
deceased was to any extent in the position of a threatened man—of a man
more exposed to the danger of murderous attack than an ordinary person?
Second, does the recent alteration in his demeanour, as described by
this witness, justify the belief that his last days were overshadowed
by a great anxiety? These points may legitimately be considered by you
in arriving at a conclusion upon the rest of the evidence.”
Thereupon the coroner, having indicated thus clearly his opinion that
Mr Bunner had hit the right nail on the head, desired the jury to
consider their verdict.
Chapter IX.
A Hot Scent
“Come in!” called Trent.
Mr. Cupples entered his sitting-room at the hotel. It was the early
evening of the day on which the coroner’s jury, without leaving the
box, had pronounced the expected denunciation of a person or persons
unknown. Trent, with a hasty glance upward, continued his intent study
of what lay in a photographic dish of enamelled metal, which he moved
slowly about in the light of the window. He looked very pale, and his
movements were nervous.
“Sit on the sofa,” he advised. “The chairs are a job lot bought at the
sale after the suppression of the Holy Inquisition in Spain. This is a
pretty good negative,” he went on, holding it up to the light with his
head at the angle of discriminating judgement. “Washed enough now, I
think. Let us leave it to dry, and get rid of all this mess.”
Mr. Cupples, as the other busily cleared the table of a confusion of
basins, dishes, racks, boxes, and bottles, picked up first one and then
another of the objects and studied them with innocent curiosity.
“That is called hypo-eliminator,” said Trent, as Mr. Cupples uncorked
and smelt at one of the bottles. “Very useful when you’re in a hurry
with a negative. I shouldn’t drink it, though, all the same. It
eliminates sodium hypophosphite, but I shouldn’t wonder if it would
eliminate human beings too.” He found a place for the last of the
litter on the crowded mantel-shelf, and came to sit before Mr. Cupples
on the table. “The great thing about a hotel sitting-room is that its
beauty does not distract the mind from work. It is no place for the
mayfly pleasures of a mind at ease. Have you ever been in this room
before, Cupples? I have, hundreds of times. It has pursued me all over
England for years. I should feel lost without it if, in some fantastic,
far-off hotel, they were to give me some other sitting-room. Look at
this table-cover; there is the ink I spilt on it when I had this room
in Halifax. I burnt that hole in the carpet when I had it in Ipswich.
But I see they have mended the glass over the picture of ‘Silent
Sympathy’, which I threw a boot at in Banbury. I do all my best work
here. This afternoon, for instance, since the inquest, I have finished
several excellent negatives. There is a very good dark room
downstairs.”
“The inquest—that reminds me,” said Mr. Cupples, who knew that this
sort of talk in Trent meant the excitement of action, and was wondering
what he could be about. “I came in to thank you, my dear fellow, for
looking after Mabel this morning. I had no idea she was going to feel
ill after leaving the box; she seemed quite unmoved, and, really, she
is a woman of such extraordinary self-command, I thought I could leave
her to her own devices and hear out the evidence, which I thought it
important I should do. It was a very fortunate thing she found a friend
to assist her, and she is most grateful. She is quite herself again
now.”
Trent, with his hands in his pockets and a slight frown on his brow,
made no reply to this. “I tell you what,” he said after a short pause,
“I was just getting to the really interesting part of the job when you
came in. Come; would you like to see a little bit of high-class police
work? It’s the very same kind of work that old Murch ought to be doing
at this moment. Perhaps he is; but I hope to glory he isn’t.” He sprang
off the table and disappeared into his bedroom. Presently he came out
with a large drawing-board on which a number of heterogeneous objects
was ranged.
“First I must introduce you to these little things,” he said, setting
them out on the table. “Here is a big ivory paper-knife; here are two
leaves cut out of a diary—my own diary; here is a bottle containing
dentifrice; here is a little case of polished walnut. Some of these
things have to be put back where they belong in somebody’s bedroom at
White Gables before night. That’s the sort of man I am—nothing stops
me. I borrowed them this very morning when every one was down at the
inquest, and I dare say some people would think it rather an odd
proceeding if they knew. Now there remains one object on the board. Can
you tell me, without touching it, what it is?”
“Certainly I can,” said Mr. Cupples, peering at it with great interest.
“It is an ordinary glass bowl. It looks like a finger-bowl. I see
nothing odd about it,” he added after some moments of close scrutiny.
“I can’t see much myself,” replied Trent, “and that is exactly where
the fun comes in. Now take this little fat bottle, Cupples, and pull
out the cork. Do you recognize that powder inside it? You have
swallowed pounds of it in your time, I expect. They give it to babies.
Grey powder is its ordinary name—mercury and chalk. It is great stuff.
Now, while I hold the basin sideways over this sheet of paper, I want
you to pour a little powder out of the bottle over this part of the
bowl—just here.... Perfect! Sir Edward Henry himself could not have
handled the powder better. You have done this before, Cupples, I can
see. You are an old hand.”
“I really am not,” said Mr. Cupples seriously, as Trent returned the
fallen powder to the bottle. “I assure you it is all a complete mystery
to me. What did I do then?”
“I brush the powdered part of the bowl lightly with this camel-hair
brush. Now look at it again. You saw nothing odd about it before. Do
you see anything now?”
Mr. Cupples peered again. “How curious!” he said. “Yes, there are two
large grey finger-marks on the bowl. They were not there before.”
“I am Hawkshaw the detective,” observed Trent. “Would it interest you
to hear a short lecture on the subject of glass finger-bowls? When you
take one up with your hand you leave traces upon it, usually
practically invisible, which may remain for days or months. You leave
the marks of your fingers. The human hand, even when quite clean, is
never quite dry, and sometimes—in moments of great anxiety, for
instance, Cupples—it is very moist. It leaves a mark on any cold smooth
surface it may touch. That bowl was moved by somebody with a rather
moist hand quite lately.” He sprinkled the powder again. “Here on the
other side, you see, is the thumb-mark—very good impressions all of
them.” He spoke without raising his voice, but Mr. Cupples could
perceive that he was ablaze with excitement as he stared at the faint
grey marks. “This one should be the index finger. I need not tell a man
of your knowledge of the world that the pattern of it is a
single-spiral whorl, with deltas symmetrically disposed. This, the
print of the second finger, is a simple loop, with a staple core and
fifteen counts. I know there are fifteen, because I have just the same
two prints on this negative, which I have examined in detail. Look!”—he
held one of the negatives up to the light of the declining sun and
demonstrated with a pencil point. “You can see they’re the same. You
see the bifurcation of that ridge. There it is in the other. You see
that little scar near the centre. There it is in the other. There are a
score of ridge-characteristics on which an expert would swear in the
witness-box that the marks on that bowl and the marks I have
photographed on this negative were made by the same hand.”
“And where did you photograph them? What does it all mean?” asked Mr
Cupples, wide-eyed.
“I found them on the inside of the left-hand leaf of the front window
in Mrs. Manderson’s bedroom. As I could not bring the window with me, I
photographed them, sticking a bit of black paper on the other side of
the glass for the purpose. The bowl comes from Manderson’s room. It is
the bowl in which his false teeth were placed at night. I could bring
that away, so I did.”
“But those cannot be Mabel’s finger-marks.”
“I should think not!” said Trent with decision. “They are twice the
size of any print Mrs. Manderson could make.”
“Then they must be her husband’s.”
“Perhaps they are. Now shall we see if we can match them once more? I
believe we can.” Whistling faintly, and very white in the face, Trent
opened another small squat bottle containing a dense black powder.
“Lamp-black,” he explained. “Hold a bit of paper in your hand for a
second or two, and this little chap will show you the pattern of your
fingers.” He carefully took up with a pair of tweezers one of the
leaves cut from his diary, and held it out for the other to examine. No
marks appeared on the leaf. He tilted some of the powder out upon one
surface of the paper, then, turning it over, upon the other; then shook
the leaf gently to rid it of the loose powder. He held it out to Mr.
Cupples in silence. On one side of the paper appeared unmistakably,
clearly printed in black, the same two finger-prints that he had
already seen on the bowl and on the photographic plate. He took up the
bowl and compared them. Trent turned the paper over, and on the other
side was a bold black replica of the thumb-mark that was printed in
grey on the glass in his hand.
“Same man, you see,” Trent said with a short laugh. “I felt that it
must be so, and now I know.” He walked to the window and looked out.
“Now I know,” he repeated in a low voice, as if to himself. His tone
was bitter. Mr. Cupples, understanding nothing, stared at his
motionless back for a few moments.
“I am still completely in the dark,” he ventured presently. “I have
often heard of this fingerprint business, and wondered how the police
went to work about it. It is of extraordinary interest to me, but upon
my life I cannot see how in this case Manderson’s fingerprints are
going—”
“I am very sorry, Cupples,” Trent broke in upon his meditative speech
with a swift return to the table. “When I began this investigation I
meant to take you with me every step of the way. You mustn’t think I
have any doubts about your discretion if I say now that I must hold my
tongue about the whole thing, at least for a time. I will tell you
this: I have come upon a fact that looks too much like having very
painful consequences if it is discovered by any one else.” He looked at
the other with a hard and darkened face, and struck the table with his
hand. “It is terrible for me here and now. Up to this moment I was
hoping against hope that I was wrong about the fact. I may still be
wrong in the surmise that I base upon that fact. There is only one way
of finding out that is open to me, and I must nerve myself to take it.”
He smiled suddenly at Mr. Cupples’s face of consternation. “All
right—I’m not going to be tragic any more, and I’ll tell you all about
it when I can. Look here, I’m not half through my game with the
powder-bottles yet.”
He drew one of the defamed chairs to the table and sat down to test the
broad ivory blade of the paper knife. Mr. Cupples, swallowing his
amazement, bent forward in an attitude of deep interest and handed
Trent the bottle of lamp-black.
Chapter X.
The Wife of Dives
Mrs. Manderson stood at the window of her sitting-room at White Gables
gazing out upon a wavering landscape of fine rain and mist. The weather
had broken as it seldom does in that part in June. White wreathings
drifted up the fields from the sullen sea; the sky was an unbroken grey
deadness shedding pin-point moisture that was now and then blown
against the panes with a crepitation of despair. The lady looked out on
the dim and chilling prospect with a woeful face. It was a bad day for
a woman bereaved, alone, and without a purpose in life.
There was a knock, and she called “Come in,” drawing herself up with an
unconscious gesture that always came when she realized that the
weariness of the world had been gaining upon her spirit. Mr. Trent had
called, the maid said; he apologized for coming at such an early hour,
but hoped that Mrs. Manderson would see him on a matter of urgent
importance. Mrs Manderson would see Mr. Trent. She walked to a mirror,
looked into the olive face she saw reflected there, shook her head at
herself with the flicker of a grimace, and turned to the door as Trent
was shown in.
His appearance, she noted, was changed. He had the jaded look of the
sleepless, and a new and reserved expression, in which her quick
sensibilities felt something not propitious, took the place of his half
smile of fixed good-humour.
“May I come to the point at once?” he said, when she had given him her
hand. “There is a train I ought to catch at Bishopsbridge at twelve
o’clock, but I cannot go until I have settled this thing, which
concerns you only, Mrs. Manderson. I have been working half the night
and thinking the rest; and I know now what I ought to do.”
“You look wretchedly tired,” she said kindly. “Won’t you sit down? This
is a very restful chair. Of course it is about this terrible business
and your work as correspondent. Please ask me anything you think I can
properly tell you, Mr. Trent. I know that you won’t make it worse for
me than you can help in doing your duty here. If you say you must see
me about something, I know it must be because, as you say, you ought to
do it.”
“Mrs. Manderson,” said Trent, slowly measuring his words, “I won’t make
it worse for you than I can help. But I am bound to make it bad for
you—only between ourselves, I hope. As to whether you can properly tell
me what I shall ask you, you will decide that; but I tell you this on
my word of honour: I shall ask you only as much as will decide me
whether to publish or to withhold certain grave things that I have
found out about your husband’s death, things not suspected by any one
else, nor, I think, likely to be so. What I have discovered—what I
believe that I have practically proved—will be a great shock to you in
any case. But it may be worse for you than that; and if you give me
reason to think it would be so, then I shall suppress this manuscript,”
he laid a long envelope on the small table beside him, “and nothing of
what it has to tell shall ever be printed. It consists, I may tell you,
of a short private note to my editor, followed by a long dispatch for
publication in the _Record_. Now you may refuse to say anything to me.
If you do refuse, my duty to my employers, as I see it, is to take this
up to London with me today and leave it with my editor to be dealt with
at his discretion. My view is, you understand, that I am not entitled
to suppress it on the strength of a mere possibility that presents
itself to my imagination. But if I gather from you—and I can gather it
from no other person—that there is substance in that imaginary
possibility I speak of, then I have only one thing to do as a gentleman
and as one who”—he hesitated for a phrase—“wishes you well. I shall not
publish that dispatch of mine. In some directions I decline to assist
the police. Have you followed me so far?” he asked with a touch of
anxiety in his careful coldness; for her face, but for its pallor, gave
no sign as she regarded him, her hands clasped before her, and her
shoulders drawn back in a pose of rigid calm. She looked precisely as
she had looked at the inquest.
“I understand quite well,” said Mrs. Manderson in a low voice. She drew
a deep breath, and went on: “I don’t know what dreadful thing you have
found out, or what the possibility that has occurred to you can be, but
it was good, it was honourable of you to come to me about it. Now will
you please tell me?”
“I cannot do that,” Trent replied. “The secret is my newspaper’s if it
is not yours. If I find it is yours, you shall have my manuscript to
read and destroy. Believe me,” he broke out with something of his old
warmth, “I detest such mystery-making from the bottom of my soul; but
it is not I who have made this mystery. This is the most painful hour
of my life, and you make it worse by not treating me like a hound. The
first thing I ask you to tell me,” he reverted with an effort to his
colourless tone, “is this: is it true, as you stated at the inquest,
that you had no idea at all of the reason why your late husband had
changed his attitude toward you, and become mistrustful and reserved,
during the last few months of his life?”
Mrs. Manderson’s dark brows lifted and her eyes flamed; she quickly
rose from her chair. Trent got up at the same moment, and took his
envelope from the table; his manner said that he perceived the
interview to be at an end. But she held up a hand, and there was colour
in her cheeks and quick breathing in her voice as she said: “Do you
know what you ask, Mr Trent? You ask me if I perjured myself.”
“I do,” he answered unmoved; and he added after a pause, “you knew
already that I had not come here to preserve the polite fictions, Mrs.
Manderson. The theory that no reputable person, being on oath, could
withhold a part of the truth under any circumstances is a polite
fiction.” He still stood as awaiting dismissal, but she was silent. She
walked to the window, and he stood miserably watching the slight
movement of her shoulders until it subsided. Then with face averted,
looking out on the dismal weather, she spoke at last clearly.
“Mr. Trent,” she said, “you inspire confidence in people, and I feel
that things which I don’t want known or talked about are safe with you.
And I know you must have a very serious reason for doing what you are
doing, though I don’t know what it is. I suppose it would be assisting
justice in some way if I told you the truth about what you asked just
now. To understand that truth you ought to know about what went
before—I mean about my marriage. After all, a good many people could
tell you as well as I can that it was not... a very successful union. I
was only twenty. I admired his force and courage and certainty; he was
the only strong man I had ever known. But it did not take me long to
find out that he cared for his business more than for me, and I think I
found out even sooner that I had been deceiving myself and blinding
myself, promising myself impossible things and wilfully
misunderstanding my own feelings, because I was dazzled by the idea of
having more money to spend than an English girl ever dreams of. I have
been despising myself for that for five years. My husband’s feeling for
me... well, I cannot speak of that... what I want to say is that along
with it there had always been a belief of his that I was the sort of
woman to take a great place in society, and that I should throw myself
into it with enjoyment, and become a sort of personage and do him great
credit—that was his idea; and the idea remained with him after other
delusions had gone. I was a part of his ambition. That was his really
bitter disappointment, that I failed him as a social success. I think
he was too shrewd not to have known in his heart that such a man as he
was, twenty years older than I, with great business responsibilities
that filled every hour of his life, and caring for nothing else—he must
have felt that there was a risk of great unhappiness in marrying the
sort of girl I was, brought up to music and books and unpractical
ideas, always enjoying myself in my own way. But he had really reckoned
on me as a wife who would do the honours of his position in the world;
and I found I couldn’t.”
Mrs. Manderson had talked herself into a more emotional mood than she
had yet shown to Trent. Her words flowed freely, and her voice had
begun to ring and give play to a natural expressiveness that must
hitherto have been dulled, he thought, by the shock and self-restraint
of the past few days. Now she turned swiftly from the window and faced
him as she went on, her beautiful face flushed and animated, her eyes
gleaming, her hands moving in slight emphatic gestures, as she
surrendered herself to the impulse of giving speech to things long pent
up.
“The people,” she said. “Oh, those people! Can you imagine what it must
be for any one who has lived in a world where there was always creative
work in the background, work with some dignity about it, men and women
with professions or arts to follow, with ideals and things to believe
in and quarrel about, some of them wealthy, some of them quite poor;
can you think what it means to step out of that into another world
where you _have_ to be very rich, shamefully rich, to exist at
all—where money is the only thing that counts and the first thing in
everybody’s thoughts—where the men who make the millions are so jaded
by the work, that sport is the only thing they can occupy themselves
with when they have any leisure, and the men who don’t have to work are
even duller than the men who do, and vicious as well; and the women
live for display and silly amusements and silly immoralities; do you
know how awful that life is? Of course I know there are clever people,
and people of taste in that set, but they’re swamped and spoiled, and
it’s the same thing in the end; empty, empty! Oh! I suppose I’m
exaggerating, and I did make friends and have some happy times; but
that’s how I feel after it all. The seasons in New York and London—how
I hated them! And our house-parties and cruises in the yacht and the
rest—the same people, the same emptiness.
“And you see, don’t you, that my husband couldn’t have an idea of all
this. _His_ life was never empty. He did not live it in society, and
when he was in society he had always his business plans and
difficulties to occupy his mind. He hadn’t a suspicion of what I felt,
and I never let him know; I couldn’t, it wouldn’t have been fair. I
felt I must do _something_ to justify myself as his wife, sharing his
position and fortune; and the only thing I could do was to try, and
try, to live up to his idea about my social qualities... I did try. I
acted my best. And it became harder year by year... I never was what
they call a popular hostess, how could I be? I was a failure; but I
went on trying... I used to steal holidays now and then. I used to feel
as if I was not doing my part of a bargain—it sounds horrid to put it
like that, I know, but it _was_ so—when I took one of my old
school-friends, who couldn’t afford to travel, away to Italy for a
month or two, and we went about cheaply all by ourselves, and were
quite happy; or when I went and made a long stay in London with some
quiet people who had known me all my life, and we all lived just as in
the old days, when we had to think twice about seats at the theatre,
and told each other about cheap dressmakers. Those and a few other
expeditions of the same sort were my best times after I was married,
and they helped me to go through with it the rest of the time. But I
felt my husband would have hated to know how much I enjoyed every hour
of those returns to the old life.
“And in the end, in spite of everything I could do, he came to know....
He could see through anything, I think, once his attention was turned
to it. He had always been able to see that I was not fulfilling his
idea of me as a figure in the social world, and I suppose he thought it
was my misfortune rather than my fault. But the moment he began to see,
in spite of my pretending, that I wasn’t playing my part with any
spirit, he knew the whole story; he divined how I loathed and was weary
of the luxury and the brilliancy and the masses of money just because
of the people who lived among them—who were made so by them, I
suppose.... It happened last year. I don’t know just how or when. It
may have been suggested to him by some woman—for _they_ all understood,
of course. He said nothing to me, and I think he tried not to change in
his manner to me at first; but such things hurt—and it was working in
both of us. I knew that he knew. After a time we were just being polite
and considerate to each other. Before he found me out we had been on a
footing of—how can I express it to you?—of intelligent companionship, I
might say. We talked without restraint of many things of the kind we
could agree or disagree about without its going very deep... if you
understand. And then that came to an end. I felt that the only possible
basis of our living in each other’s company was going under my feet.
And at last it was gone.
“It had been like that,” she ended simply, “for months before he died.”
She sank into the corner of a sofa by the window, as though relaxing
her body after an effort. For a few moments both were silent. Trent was
hastily sorting out a tangle of impressions. He was amazed at the
frankness of Mrs. Manderson’s story. He was amazed at the vigorous
expressiveness in her telling of it. In this vivid being, carried away
by an impulse to speak, talking with her whole personality, he had seen
the real woman in a temper of activity, as he had already seen the real
woman by chance in a temper of reverie and unguarded emotion. In both
she was very unlike the pale, self-disciplined creature of majesty that
she had been to the world. With that amazement of his went something
like terror of her dark beauty, which excitement kindled into an
appearance scarcely mortal in his eyes. Incongruously there rushed into
his mind, occupied as it was with the affair of the moment, a little
knot of ideas... she was unique not because of her beauty but because
of its being united with intensity of nature; in England all the very
beautiful women were placid, all the fiery women seemed to have burnt
up the best of their beauty; that was why no beautiful woman had ever
cast this sort of spell on him before; when it was a question of wit in
women he had preferred the brighter flame to the duller, without much
regarding the lamp. “All this is very disputable,” said his reason; and
instinct answered, “Yes, except that I am under a spell”; and a deeper
instinct cried out, “Away with it!” He forced his mind back to her
story, and found growing swiftly in him an irrepressible conviction. It
was all very fine; but it would not do.
“I feel as if I had led you into saying more than you meant to say, or
than I wanted to learn,” he said slowly. “But there is one brutal
question which is the whole point of my enquiry.” He braced his frame
like one preparing for a plunge into cold waters. “Mrs. Manderson, will
you assure me that your husband’s change toward you had nothing to do
with John Marlowe?”
And what he had dreaded came. “Oh!” she cried with a sound of anguish,
her face thrown up and open hands stretched out as if for pity; and
then the hands covered the burning face, and she flung herself aside
among the cushions at her elbow, so that he saw nothing but her heavy
crown of black hair, and her body moving with sobs that stabbed his
heart, and a foot turned inward gracelessly in an abandonment of
misery. Like a tall tower suddenly breaking apart she had fallen in
ruins, helplessly weeping.
Trent stood up, his face white and calm. With a senseless particularity
he placed his envelope exactly in the centre of the little polished
table. He walked to the door, closed it noiselessly as he went out, and
in a few minutes was tramping through the rain out of sight of White
Gables, going nowhere, seeing nothing, his soul shaken in the fierce
effort to kill and trample the raving impulse that had seized him in
the presence of her shame, that clamoured to him to drag himself before
her feet, to pray for pardon, to pour out words—he knew not what words,
but he knew that they had been straining at his lips—to wreck his
self-respect for ever, and hopelessly defeat even the crazy purpose
that had almost possessed him, by drowning her wretchedness in disgust,
by babbling with the tongue of infatuation to a woman with a husband
not yet buried, to a woman who loved another man.
Such was the magic of her tears, quickening in a moment the thing
which, as his heart had known, he must not let come to life. For Philip
Trent was a young man, younger in nature even than his years, and a way
of life that kept his edge keen and his spirit volcanic had prepared
him very ill for the meeting that comes once in the early manhood of
most of us, usually—as in his case, he told himself harshly—to no
purpose but the testing of virtue and the power of the will.
Chapter XI.
Hitherto Unpublished
My Dear Molloy:—This is in case I don’t find you at your office. I have
found out who killed Manderson, as this dispatch will show. This was my
problem; yours is to decide what use to make of it. It definitely
charges an unsuspected person with having a hand in the crime, and
practically accuses him of being the murderer, so I don’t suppose you
will publish it before his arrest, and I believe it is illegal to do so
afterwards until he has been tried and found guilty. You may decide to
publish it then; and you may find it possible to make some use or other
before then of the facts I have given. That is your affair. Meanwhile,
will you communicate with Scotland Yard, and let them see what I have
written? I have done with the Manderson mystery, and I wish to God I
had never touched it. Here follows my dispatch. P.T.
Marlstone, _June_ 16_th_.
I begin this, my third and probably my final dispatch to the _Record_
upon the Manderson murder, with conflicting feelings. I have a strong
sense of relief, because in my two previous dispatches I was obliged,
in the interests of justice, to withhold facts ascertained by me which
would, if published then, have put a certain person upon his guard and
possibly have led to his escape; for he is a man of no common boldness
and resource. These facts I shall now set forth. But I have, I confess,
no liking for the story of treachery and perverted cleverness which I
have to tell. It leaves an evil taste in the mouth, a savour of
something revolting in the deeper puzzle of motive underlying the
puzzle of the crime itself, which I believe I have solved.
It will be remembered that in my first dispatch I described the
situation as I found it on reaching this place early on Tuesday
morning. I told how the body was found, and in what state; dwelt upon
the complete mystery surrounding the crime, and mentioned one or two
local theories about it; gave some account of the dead man’s domestic
surroundings; and furnished a somewhat detailed description of his
movements on the evening before his death. I gave, too, a little fact
which may or may not have seemed irrelevant: that a quantity of whisky
much larger than Manderson habitually drank at night had disappeared
from his private decanter since the last time he was seen alive. On the
following day, the day of the inquest, I wired little more than an
abstract of the proceedings in the coroner’s court, of which a verbatim
report was made at my request by other representatives of the _Record_.
That day is not yet over as I write these lines; and I have now
completed an investigation which has led me directly to the man who
must be called upon to clear himself of the guilt of the death of
Manderson.
Apart from the central mystery of Manderson’s having arisen long before
his usual hour to go out and meet his death, there were two minor
points of oddity about this affair which, I suppose, must have occurred
to thousands of those who have read the accounts in the newspapers:
points apparent from the very beginning. The first of these was that,
whereas the body was found at a spot not thirty yards from the house,
all the people of the house declared that they had heard no cry or
other noise in the night. Manderson had not been gagged; the marks on
his wrists pointed to a struggle with his assailant; and there had been
at least one pistol-shot. (I say at least one, because it is the fact
that in murders with firearms, especially if there has been a struggle,
the criminal commonly misses his victim at least once.) This odd fact
seemed all the more odd to me when I learned that Martin the butler was
a bad sleeper, very keen of hearing, and that his bedroom, with the
window open, faced almost directly toward the shed by which the body
was found.
The second odd little fact that was apparent from the outset was
Manderson’s leaving his dental plate by the bedside. It appeared that
he had risen and dressed himself fully, down to his necktie and watch
and chain, and had gone out of doors without remembering to put in this
plate, which he had carried in his mouth every day for years, and which
contained all the visible teeth of the upper jaw. It had evidently not
been a case of frantic hurry; and even if it had been, he would have
been more likely to forget almost anything than this denture. Any one
who wears such a removable plate will agree that the putting it in on
rising is a matter of second nature. Speaking as well as eating, to say
nothing of appearances, depend upon it.
Neither of these queer details, however, seemed to lead to anything at
the moment. They only awakened in me a suspicion of something lurking
in the shadows, something that lent more mystery to the already
mysterious question how and why and through whom Manderson met his end.
With this much of preamble I come at once to the discovery which, in
the first few hours of my investigation, set me upon the path which so
much ingenuity had been directed to concealing.
I have already described Manderson’s bedroom, the rigorous simplicity
of its furnishing, contrasted so strangely with the multitude of
clothes and shoes, and the manner of its communication with Mrs.
Manderson’s room. On the upper of the two long shelves on which the
shoes were ranged I found, where I had been told I should find them,
the pair of patent leather shoes which Manderson had worn on the
evening before his death. I had glanced over the row, not with any idea
of their giving me a clue, but merely because it happens that I am a
judge of shoes, and all these shoes were of the very best workmanship.
But my attention was at once caught by a little peculiarity in this
particular pair. They were the lightest kind of lace-up dress shoes,
very thin in the sole, without toe-caps, and beautifully made, like all
the rest. These shoes were old and well worn; but being carefully
polished, and fitted, as all the shoes were, upon their trees, they
looked neat enough. What caught my eye was a slight splitting of the
leather in that part of the upper known as the vamp—a splitting at the
point where the two laced parts of the shoe rise from the upper. It is
at this point that the strain comes when a tight shoe of this sort is
forced upon the foot, and it is usually guarded with a strong stitching
across the bottom of the opening. In both the shoes I was examining
this stitching had parted, and the leather below had given way. The
splitting was a tiny affair in each case, not an eighth of an inch
long, and the torn edges having come together again on the removal of
the strain, there was nothing that a person who was not something of a
connoisseur of shoe-leather would have noticed. Even less noticeable,
and indeed not to be seen at all unless one were looking for it, was a
slight straining of the stitches uniting the upper to the sole. At the
toe and on the outer side of each shoe this stitching had been dragged
until it was visible on a close inspection of the join.
These indications, of course, could mean only one thing—the shoes had
been worn by some one for whom they were too small.
Now it was clear at a glance that Manderson was always thoroughly well
shod, and careful, perhaps a little vain, of his small and narrow feet.
Not one of the other shoes in the collection, as I soon ascertained,
bore similar marks; they had not belonged to a man who squeezed himself
into tight shoe-leather. Someone who was not Manderson had worn these
shoes, and worn them recently; the edges of the tears were quite fresh.
The possibility of some one having worn them since Manderson’s death
was not worth considering; the body had only been found about
twenty-six hours when I was examining the shoes; besides, why should
any one wear them? The possibility of some one having borrowed
Manderson’s shoes and spoiled them for him while he was alive seemed
about as negligible. With others to choose from he would not have worn
these. Besides, the only men in the place were the butler and the two
secretaries. But I do not say that I gave those possibilities even as
much consideration as they deserved, for my thoughts were running away
with me, and I have always found it good policy, in cases of this sort,
to let them have their heads. Ever since I had got out of the train at
Marlstone early that morning I had been steeped in details of the
Manderson affair; the thing had not once been out of my head. Suddenly
the moment had come when the daemon wakes and begins to range.
Let me put it less fancifully. After all, it is a detail of psychology
familiar enough to all whose business or inclination brings them in
contact with difficult affairs of any kind. Swiftly and spontaneously,
when chance or effort puts one in possession of the key-fact in any
system of baffling circumstances, one’s ideas seem to rush to group
themselves anew in relation to that fact, so that they are suddenly
rearranged almost before one has consciously grasped the significance
of the key-fact itself. In the present instance, my brain had scarcely
formulated within itself the thought, “Somebody who was not Manderson
has been wearing these shoes,” when there flew into my mind a flock of
ideas, all of the same character and all bearing upon this new notion.
It was unheard-of for Manderson to drink much whisky at night. It was
very unlike him to be untidily dressed, as the body was when found—the
cuffs dragged up inside the sleeves, the shoes unevenly laced; very
unlike him not to wash when he rose, and to put on last night’s evening
shirt and collar and underclothing; very unlike him to have his watch
in the waistcoat pocket that was not lined with leather for its
reception. (In my first dispatch I mentioned all these points, but
neither I nor any one else saw anything significant in them when
examining the body.) It was very strange, in the existing domestic
situation, that Manderson should be communicative to his wife about his
doings, especially at the time of his going to bed, when he seldom
spoke to her at all. It was extraordinary that Manderson should leave
his bedroom without his false teeth.
All these thoughts, as I say, came flocking into my mind together,
drawn from various parts of my memory of the morning’s enquiries and
observations. They had all presented themselves, in far less time than
it takes to read them as set down here, as I was turning over the
shoes, confirming my own certainty on the main point. And yet when I
confronted the definite idea that had sprung up suddenly and
unsupported before me—“_It was not Manderson who was in the house that
night_”—it seemed a stark absurdity at the first formulating. It was
certainly Manderson who had dined at the house and gone out with
Marlowe in the car. People had seen him at close quarters. But was it
he who returned at ten? That question too seemed absurd enough. But I
could not set it aside. It seemed to me as if a faint light was
beginning to creep over the whole expanse of my mind, as it does over
land at dawn, and that presently the sun would be rising. I set myself
to think over, one by one, the points that had just occurred to me, so
as to make out, if possible, why any man masquerading as Manderson
should have done these things that Manderson would not have done.
I had not to cast about very long for the motive a man might have in
forcing his feet into Manderson’s narrow shoes. The examination of
footmarks is very well understood by the police. But not only was the
man concerned to leave no footmarks of his own: he was concerned to
leave Manderson’s, if any; his whole plan, if my guess was right, must
have been directed to producing the belief that Manderson was in the
place that night. Moreover, his plan did not turn upon leaving
footmarks. He meant to leave the shoes themselves, and he did so. The
maidservant had found them outside the bedroom door, as Manderson
always left his shoes, and had polished them, replacing them on the
shoe-shelves later in the morning, after the body had been found.
When I came to consider in this new light the leaving of the false
teeth, an explanation of what had seemed the maddest part of the affair
broke upon me at once. A dental plate is not inseparable from its
owner. If my guess was right, the unknown had brought the denture to
the house with him, and left it in the bedroom, with the same object as
he had in leaving the shoes: to make it impossible that any one should
doubt that Manderson had been in the house and had gone to bed there.
This, of course, led me to the inference that _Manderson was dead
before the false Manderson came to the house_; and other things
confirmed this.
For instance, the clothing, to which I now turned in my review of the
position. If my guess was right, the unknown in Manderson’s shoes had
certainly had possession of Manderson’s trousers, waistcoat, and
shooting jacket. They were there before my eyes in the bedroom; and
Martin had seen the jacket—which nobody could have mistaken—upon the
man who sat at the telephone in the library. It was now quite plain (if
my guess was right) that this unmistakable garment was a cardinal
feature of the unknown’s plan. He knew that Martin would take him for
Manderson at the first glance.
And there my thinking was interrupted by the realization of a thing
that had escaped me before. So strong had been the influence of the
unquestioned assumption that it was Manderson who was present that
night, that neither I nor, as far as I know, any one else had noted the
point. _Martin had not seen the man’s face, nor had Mrs. Manderson._
Mrs. Manderson (judging by her evidence at the inquest, of which, as I
have said, I had a full report made by the _Record_ stenographers in
court) had not seen the man at all. She hardly could have done, as I
shall show presently. She had merely spoken with him as she lay half
asleep, resuming a conversation which she had had with her living
husband about an hour before. Martin, I perceived, could only have seen
the man’s back, as he sat crouching over the telephone; no doubt a
characteristic pose was imitated there. And the man had worn his hat,
Manderson’s broad-brimmed hat! There is too much character in the back
of a head and neck. The unknown, in fact, supposing him to have been of
about Manderson’s build, had had no need for any disguise, apart from
the jacket and the hat and his powers of mimicry.
I paused there to contemplate the coolness and ingenuity of the man.
The thing, I now began to see, was so safe and easy, provided that his
mimicry was good enough, and that his nerve held. Those two points
assured, only some wholly unlikely accident could unmask him.
To come back to my puzzling out of the matter as I sat in the dead
man’s bedroom with the tell-tale shoes before me. The reason for the
entrance by the window instead of by the front door will already have
occurred to any one reading this. Entering by the door, the man would
almost certainly have been heard by the sharp-eared Martin in his
pantry just across the hall; he might have met him face to face.
Then there was the problem of the whisky. I had not attached much
importance to it; whisky will sometimes vanish in very queer ways in a
household of eight or nine persons; but it had seemed strange that it
should go in that way on that evening. Martin had been plainly quite
dumbfounded by the fact. It seemed to me now that many a man—fresh, as
this man in all likelihood was, from a bloody business, from the
unclothing of a corpse, and with a desperate part still to play—would
turn to that decanter as to a friend. No doubt he had a drink before
sending for Martin; after making that trick with ease and success, he
probably drank more.
But he had known when to stop. The worst part of the enterprise was
before him: the business—clearly of such vital importance to him, for
whatever reason—of shutting himself in Manderson’s room and preparing a
body of convincing evidence of its having been occupied by Manderson;
and this with the risk—very slight, as no doubt he understood, but how
unnerving!—of the woman on the other side of the half-open door awaking
and somehow discovering him. True, if he kept out of her limited field
of vision from the bed, she could only see him by getting up and going
to the door. I found that to a person lying in her bed, which stood
with its head to the wall a little beyond the door, nothing was visible
through the doorway but one of the cupboards by Manderson’s bed-head.
Moreover, since this man knew the ways of the household, he would think
it most likely that Mrs. Manderson was asleep. Another point with him,
I guessed, might have been the estrangement between the husband and
wife, which they had tried to cloak by keeping up, among other things,
their usual practice of sleeping in connected rooms, but which was well
known to all who had anything to do with them. He would hope from this
that if Mrs. Manderson heard him, she would take no notice of the
supposed presence of her husband.
So, pursuing my hypothesis, I followed the unknown up to the bedroom,
and saw him setting about his work. And it was with a catch in my own
breath that I thought of the hideous shock with which he must have
heard the sound of all others he was dreading most: the drowsy voice
from the adjoining room.
What Mrs. Manderson actually said, she was unable to recollect at the
inquest. She thinks she asked her supposed husband whether he had had a
good run in the car. And now what does the unknown do? Here, I think,
we come to a supremely significant point. Not only does he—standing
rigid there, as I picture him, before the dressing-table, listening to
the sound of his own leaping heart—not only does he answer the lady in
the voice of Manderson; he volunteers an explanatory statement. He
tells her that he has, on a sudden inspiration, sent Marlowe in the car
to Southampton; that he has sent him to bring back some important
information from a man leaving for Paris by the steamboat that morning.
Why these details from a man who had long been uncommunicative to his
wife, and that upon a point scarcely likely to interest her? Why these
details _about Marlowe?_
Having taken my story so far, I now put forward the following definite
propositions: that between a time somewhere about ten, when the car
started, and a time somewhere about eleven, Manderson was shot—probably
at a considerable distance from the house, as no shot was heard; that
the body was brought back, left by the shed, and stripped of its outer
clothing; that at some time round about eleven o’clock a man who was
not Manderson, wearing Manderson’s shoes, hat, and jacket, entered the
library by the garden window; that he had with him Manderson’s black
trousers, waistcoat, and motor-coat, the denture taken from Manderson’s
mouth, and the weapon with which he had been murdered; that he
concealed these, rang the bell for the butler, and sat down at the
telephone with his hat on and his back to the door; that he was
occupied with the telephone all the time Martin was in the room; that
on going up to the bedroom floor he quietly entered Marlowe’s room and
placed the revolver with which the crime had been committed—Marlowe’s
revolver—in the case on the mantelpiece from which it had been taken;
and that he then went to Manderson’s room, placed Manderson’s shoes
outside the door, threw Manderson’s garments on a chair, placed the
denture in the bowl by the bedside, and selected a suit of clothes, a
pair of shoes, and a tie from those in the bedroom.
Here I will pause in my statement of this man’s proceedings to go into
a question for which the way is now sufficiently prepared:
_Who was the false Manderson?_
Reviewing what was known to me, or might almost with certainty be
surmised, about that person, I set down the following five conclusions:
(1.) He had been in close relations with the dead man. In his acting
before Martin and his speaking to Mrs. Manderson he had made no
mistake.
(2.) He was of a build not unlike Manderson’s, especially as to height
and breadth of shoulder, which mainly determine the character of the
back of a seated figure when the head is concealed and the body loosely
clothed. But his feet were larger, though not greatly larger, than
Manderson’s.
(3.) He had considerable aptitude for mimicry and acting—probably some
experience too.
(4.) He had a minute acquaintance with the ways of the Manderson
household.
(5.) He was under a vital necessity of creating the belief that
Manderson was alive and in that house until some time after midnight on
the Sunday night.
So much I took as either certain or next door to it. It was as far as I
could see. And it was far enough.
I proceed to give, in an order corresponding with the numbered
paragraphs above, such relevant facts as I was able to obtain about Mr.
John Marlowe, from himself and other sources:
(1.) He had been Mr. Manderson’s private secretary, upon a footing of
great intimacy, for nearly four years.
(2.) The two men were nearly of the same height, about five feet eleven
inches; both were powerfully built and heavy in the shoulder. Marlowe,
who was the younger by some twenty years, was rather slighter about the
body, though Manderson was a man in good physical condition. Marlowe’s
shoes (of which I examined several pairs) were roughly about one
shoemaker’s size longer and broader than Manderson’s.
(3.) In the afternoon of the first day of my investigation, after
arriving at the results already detailed, I sent a telegram to a
personal friend, a Fellow of a college at Oxford, whom I knew to be
interested in theatrical matters, in these terms:
_Please wire John Marlowe’s record in connection with acting at Oxford
some time past decade very urgent and confidential._
My friend replied in the following telegram, which reached me next
morning (the morning of the inquest):
_Marlowe was member O.U.D.S for three years and president 19— played
Bardolph Cleon and Mercutio excelled in character acting and imitations
in great demand at smokers was hero of some historic hoaxes._
I had been led to send the telegram which brought this very helpful
answer by seeing on the mantel-shelf in Marlowe’s bedroom a photograph
of himself and two others in the costume of Falstaff’s three followers,
with an inscription from _The Merry Wives_, and by noting that it bore
the imprint of an Oxford firm of photographers.
(4.) During his connection with Manderson, Marlowe had lived as one of
the family. No other person, apart from the servants, had his
opportunities for knowing the domestic life of the Mandersons in
detail.
(5.) I ascertained beyond doubt that Marlowe arrived at a hotel in
Southampton on the Monday morning at 6.30, and there proceeded to carry
out the commission which, according to his story, and according to the
statement made to Mrs. Manderson in the bedroom by the false Manderson,
had been entrusted to him by his employer. He had then returned in the
car to Marlstone, where he had shown great amazement and horror at the
news of the murder.
These, I say, are the relevant facts about Marlowe. We must now examine
fact number 5 (as set out above) in connection with conclusion number 5
about the false Manderson.
I would first draw attention to one important fact. _The only person
who professed to have heard Manderson mention Southampton at all before
he started in the car was Marlowe_. His story—confirmed to some extent
by what the butler overheard—was that the journey was all arranged in a
private talk before they set out, and he could not say, when I put the
question to him, why Manderson should have concealed his intentions by
giving out that he was going with Marlowe for a moonlight drive. This
point, however, attracted no attention. Marlowe had an absolutely
air-tight alibi in his presence at Southampton by 6.30; nobody thought
of him in connection with a murder which must have been committed after
12.30—the hour at which Martin the butler had gone to bed. But it was
the Manderson who came back from the drive who went out of his way to
mention Southampton openly to two persons. _He even went so far as to
ring up a hotel at Southampton and ask questions which bore out
Marlowe’s story of his errand._ This was the call he was busy with when
Martin was in the library.
Now let us consider the alibi. If Manderson was in the house that
night, and if he did not leave it until some time after 12.30, Marlowe
could not by any possibility have had a direct hand in the murder. It
is a question of the distance between Marlstone and Southampton. If he
had left Marlstone in the car at the hour when he is supposed to have
done so—between 10 and 10.30—with a message from Manderson, the run
would be quite an easy one to do in the time. But it would be
physically impossible for the car—a 15 h.p. four-cylinder
Northumberland, an average medium-power car—to get to Southampton by
half-past six unless it left Marlstone by midnight at latest. Motorists
who will examine the road-map and make the calculations required, as I
did in Manderson’s library that day, will agree that on the facts as
they appeared there was absolutely no case against Marlowe.
But even if they were not as they appeared; if Manderson was dead by
eleven o’clock, and if at about that time Marlowe impersonated him at
White Gables; if Marlowe retired to Manderson’s bedroom—how can all
this be reconciled with his appearance next morning at Southampton? _He
had to get out of the house, unseen and unheard, and away in the car by
midnight._ And Martin, the sharp-eared Martin, was sitting up until
12.30 in his pantry, with the door open, listening for the telephone
bell. Practically he was standing sentry over the foot of the
staircase, the only staircase leading down from the bedroom floor.
With this difficulty we arrive at the last and crucial phase of my
investigation. Having the foregoing points clearly in mind, I spent the
rest of the day before the inquest in talking to various persons and in
going over my story, testing it link by link. I could only find the one
weakness which seemed to be involved in Martin’s sitting up until
12.30; and since his having been instructed to do so was certainly a
part of the plan, meant to clinch the alibi for Marlowe, I knew there
must be an explanation somewhere. If I could not find that explanation,
my theory was valueless. I must be able to show that at the time Martin
went up to bed the man who had shut himself in Manderson’s bedroom
might have been many miles away on the road to Southampton.
I had, however, a pretty good idea already—as perhaps the reader of
these lines has by this time, if I have made myself clear—of how the
escape of the false Manderson before midnight had been contrived. But I
did not want what I was now about to do to be known. If I had chanced
to be discovered at work, there would have been no concealing the
direction of my suspicions. I resolved not to test them on this point
until the next day, during the opening proceedings at the inquest. This
was to be held, I knew, at the hotel, and I reckoned upon having White
Gables to myself so far as the principal inmates were concerned.
So in fact it happened. By the time the proceedings at the hotel had
begun I was hard at work at White Gables. I had a camera with me. I
made search, on principles well known to and commonly practised by the
police, and often enough by myself, for certain indications. Without
describing my search, I may say at once that I found and was able to
photograph two fresh fingerprints, very large and distinct, on the
polished front of the right-hand top drawer of the chest of drawers in
Manderson’s bedroom; five more (among a number of smaller and less
recent impressions made by other hands) on the glasses of the French
window in Mrs. Manderson’s room, a window which always stood open at
night with a curtain before it; and three more upon the glass bowl in
which Manderson’s dental plate had been found lying.
I took the bowl with me from White Gables. I took also a few articles
which I selected from Marlowe’s bedroom, as bearing the most distinct
of the innumerable fingerprints which are always to be found upon
toilet articles in daily use. I already had in my possession, made upon
leaves cut from my pocket diary, some excellent fingerprints of
Marlowe’s which he had made in my presence without knowing it. I had
shown him the leaves, asking if he recognized them; and the few seconds
during which he had held them in his fingers had sufficed to leave
impressions which I was afterwards able to bring out.
By six o’clock in the evening, two hours after the jury had brought in
their verdict against a person or persons unknown, I had completed my
work, and was in a position to state that two of the five large prints
made on the window-glasses, and the three on the bowl, were made by the
left hand of Marlowe; that the remaining three on the window and the
two on the drawer were made by his right hand.
By eight o’clock I had made at the establishment of Mr. H. T. Copper,
photographer, of Bishopsbridge, and with his assistance, a dozen
enlarged prints of the finger-marks of Marlowe, clearly showing the
identity of those which he unknowingly made in my presence and those
left upon articles in his bedroom, with those found by me as I have
described, and thus establishing the facts that Marlowe was recently in
Manderson’s bedroom, where he had in the ordinary way no business, and
in Mrs Manderson’s room, where he had still less. I hope it may be
possible to reproduce these prints for publication with this dispatch.
At nine o’clock I was back in my room at the hotel and sitting down to
begin this manuscript. I had my story complete. I bring it to a close
by advancing these further propositions: that on the night of the
murder the impersonator of Manderson, being in Manderson’s bedroom,
told Mrs Manderson, as he had already told Martin, that Marlowe was at
that moment on his way to Southampton; that having made his
dispositions in the room, he switched off the light, and lay in the bed
in his clothes; that he waited until he was assured that Mrs. Manderson
was asleep; that he then arose and stealthily crossed Mrs. Manderson’s
bedroom in his stocking feet, having under his arm the bundle of
clothing and shoes for the body; that he stepped behind the curtain,
pushing the doors of the window a little further open with his hands,
strode over the iron railing of the balcony, and let himself down until
only a drop of a few feet separated him from the soft turf of the lawn.
All this might very well have been accomplished within half an hour of
his entering Manderson’s bedroom, which, according to Martin, he did at
about half-past eleven.
What followed your readers and the authorities may conjecture for
themselves. The corpse was found next morning clothed—rather untidily.
Marlowe in the car appeared at Southampton by half-past six.
I bring this manuscript to an end in my sitting-room at the hotel at
Marlstone. It is four o’clock in the morning. I leave for London by the
noon train from Bishopsbridge, and immediately after arriving I shall
place these pages in your hands. I ask you to communicate the substance
of them to the Criminal Investigation Department.
PHILIP TRENT.
Chapter XII.
Evil Days
“I am returning the cheque you sent for what I did on the Manderson
case,” Trent wrote to Sir James Molloy from Munich, whither he had gone
immediately after handing in at the _Record_ office a brief dispatch
bringing his work on the case to an unexciting close. “What I sent you
wasn’t worth one-tenth of the amount; but I should have no scruple
about pocketing it if I hadn’t taken a fancy—never mind why—not to
touch any money at all for this business. I should like you, if there
is no objection, to pay for the stuff at your ordinary space-rate, and
hand the money to some charity which does not devote itself to bullying
people, if you know of any such. I have come to this place to see some
old friends and arrange my ideas, and the idea that comes out uppermost
is that for a little while I want some employment with activity in it.
I find I can’t paint at all: I couldn’t paint a fence. Will you try me
as your Own Correspondent somewhere? If you can find me a good
adventure I will send you good accounts. After that I could settle down
and work.”
Sir James sent him instructions by telegram to proceed at once to
Kurland and Livonia, where Citizen Browning was abroad again, and town
and countryside blazed in revolt. It was a roving commission, and for
two months Trent followed his luck. It served him not less well than
usual. He was the only correspondent who saw General Dragilew killed in
the street at Volmar by a girl of eighteen. He saw burnings, lynchings,
fusillades, hangings; each day his soul sickened afresh at the
imbecilities born of misrule. Many nights he lay down in danger. Many
days he went fasting. But there was never an evening or a morning when
he did not see the face of the woman whom he hopelessly loved.
He discovered in himself an unhappy pride at the lasting force of this
infatuation. It interested him as a phenomenon; it amazed and
enlightened him. Such a thing had not visited him before. It confirmed
so much that he had found dubious in the recorded experience of men.
It was not that, at thirty-two, he could pretend to ignorance of this
world of emotion. About his knowledge let it be enough to say that what
he had learned had come unpursued and unpurchased, and was without
intolerable memories; broken to the realities of sex, he was still
troubled by its inscrutable history. He went through life full of a
strange respect for certain feminine weakness and a very simple terror
of certain feminine strength. He had held to a rather lukewarm faith
that something remained in him to be called forth, and that the voice
that should call would be heard in its own time, if ever, and not
through any seeking.
But he had not thought of the possibility that, if this proved true
some day, the truth might come in a sinister shape. The two things that
had taken him utterly by surprise in the matter of his feeling towards
Mabel Manderson were the insane suddenness of its uprising in full
strength and its extravagant hopelessness. Before it came, he had been
much disposed to laugh at the permanence of unrequited passion as a
generous boyish delusion. He knew now that he had been wrong, and he
was living bitterly in the knowledge.
Before the eye of his fancy the woman always came just as she was when
he had first had sight of her, with the gesture which he had surprised
as he walked past unseen on the edge of the cliff; that great gesture
of passionate joy in her new liberty which had told him more plainly
than speech that her widowhood was a release from torment, and had
confirmed with terrible force the suspicion, active in his mind before,
that it was her passport to happiness with a man whom she loved. He
could not with certainty name to himself the moment when he had first
suspected that it might be so. The seed of the thought must have been
sown, he believed, at his first meeting with Marlowe; his mind would
have noted automatically that such evident strength and grace, with the
sort of looks and manners that the tall young man possessed, might go
far with any woman of unfixed affections. And the connection of this
with what Mr. Cupples had told him of the Mandersons’ married life must
have formed itself in the unconscious depths of his mind. Certainly it
had presented itself as an already established thing when he began,
after satisfying himself of the identity of the murderer, to cast about
for the motive of the crime. Motive, motive! How desperately he had
sought for another, turning his back upon that grim thought, that
Marlowe—obsessed by passion like himself, and privy perhaps to
maddening truths about the wife’s unhappiness—had taken a leaf, the
guiltiest, from the book of Bothwell. But in all his investigations at
the time, in all his broodings on the matter afterwards, he had been
able to discover nothing that could prompt Marlowe to such a
deed—nothing but that temptation, the whole strength of which he could
not know, but which if it had existed must have pressed urgently upon a
bold spirit in which scruple had been somehow paralysed. If he could
trust his senses at all, the young man was neither insane nor by nature
evil. But that could not clear him. Murder for a woman’s sake, he
thought, was not a rare crime, Heaven knew! If the modern feebleness of
impulse in the comfortable classes, and their respect for the modern
apparatus of detection, had made it rare among them, it was yet far
from impossible. It only needed a man of equal daring and intelligence,
his soul drugged with the vapours of an intoxicating intrigue, to plan
and perform such a deed.
A thousand times, with a heart full of anguish, he had sought to reason
away the dread that Mabel Manderson had known too much of what had been
intended against her husband’s life. That she knew all the truth after
the thing was done he could not doubt; her unforgettable collapse in
his presence when the question about Marlowe was suddenly and bluntly
put, had swept away his last hope that there was no love between the
pair, and had seemed to him, moreover, to speak of dread of discovery.
In any case, she knew the truth after reading what he had left with
her; and it was certain that no public suspicion had been cast upon
Marlowe since. She had destroyed his manuscript, then, and taken him at
his word to keep the secret that threatened her lover’s life.
But it was the monstrous thought that she might have known murder was
brewing, and guiltily kept silence, that haunted Trent’s mind. She
might have suspected, have guessed something; was it conceivable that
she was aware of the whole plot, that she connived? He could never
forget that his first suspicion of Marlowe’s motive in the crime had
been roused by the fact that his escape was made through the lady’s
room. At that time, when he had not yet seen her, he had been ready
enough to entertain the idea of her equal guilt and her co-operation.
He had figured to himself some passionate _hystérique_, merciless as a
cat in her hate and her love, a zealous abettor, perhaps even the
ruling spirit in the crime.
Then he had seen her, had spoken with her, had helped her in her
weakness; and such suspicions, since their first meeting, had seemed
the vilest of infamy. He had seen her eyes and her mouth; he had
breathed the woman’s atmosphere. Trent was one of those who fancy they
can scent true wickedness in the air. In her presence he had felt an
inward certainty of her ultimate goodness of heart; and it was nothing
against this that she had abandoned herself a moment, that day on the
cliff, to the sentiment of relief at the ending of her bondage, of her
years of starved sympathy and unquickened motherhood. That she had
turned to Marlowe in her destitution he believed; that she had any
knowledge of his deadly purpose he did not believe.
And yet, morning and evening the sickening doubts returned, and he
recalled again that it was almost in her presence that Marlowe had made
his preparations in the bedroom of the murdered man, that it was by the
window of her own chamber that he had escaped from the house. Had he
forgotten his cunning and taken the risk of telling her then? Or had
he, as Trent thought more likely, still played his part with her then,
and stolen off while she slept? He did not think she had known of the
masquerade when she gave evidence at the inquest; it read like honest
evidence. Or—the question would never be silenced, though he scorned
it—had she lain expecting the footsteps in the room and the whisper
that should tell her that it was done? Among the foul possibilities of
human nature, was it possible that black ruthlessness and black deceit
as well were hidden behind that good and straight and gentle seeming?
These thoughts would scarcely leave him when he was alone.
Trent served Sir James, well earning his pay for six months, and then
returned to Paris where he went to work again with a better heart. His
powers had returned to him, and he began to live more happily than he
had expected among a tribe of strangely assorted friends, French,
English, and American, artists, poets, journalists, policemen,
hotel-keepers, soldiers, lawyers, business men, and others. His old
faculty of sympathetic interest in his fellows won for him, just as in
his student days, privileges seldom extended to the Briton. He enjoyed
again the rare experience of being taken into the bosom of a
Frenchman’s family. He was admitted to the momentous confidence of _les
jeunes_, and found them as sure that they had surprised the secrets of
art and life as the departed _jeunes_ of ten years before had been.
The bosom of the Frenchman’s family was the same as those he had known
in the past, even to the patterns of the wallpaper and movables. But
the _jeunes_, he perceived with regret, were totally different from
their forerunners. They were much more shallow and puerile, much less
really clever. The secrets they wrested from the Universe were not such
important and interesting secrets as had been wrested by the old
_jeunes_. This he believed and deplored until one day he found himself
seated at a restaurant next to a too well-fed man whom, in spite of the
ravages of comfortable living, he recognized as one of the _jeunes_ of
his own period. This one had been wont to describe himself and three or
four others as the Hermits of the New Parnassus. He and his school had
talked outside cafes and elsewhere more than solitaries do as a rule;
but, then, rules were what they had vowed themselves to destroy. They
proclaimed that verse, in particular, was free. The Hermit of the New
Parnassus was now in the Ministry of the Interior, and already
decorated: he expressed to Trent the opinion that what France needed
most was a hand of iron. He was able to quote the exact price paid for
certain betrayals of the country, of which Trent had not previously
heard.
Thus he was brought to make the old discovery that it was he who had
changed, like his friend of the Administration, and that _les jeunes_
were still the same. Yet he found it hard to say what precisely he had
lost that so greatly mattered; unless indeed it were so simple a thing
as his high spirits.
One morning in June, as he descended the slope of the Rue des Martyrs,
he saw approaching a figure that he remembered. He glanced quickly
round, for the thought of meeting Mr. Bunner again was unacceptable.
For some time he had recognized that his wound was healing under the
spell of creative work; he thought less often of the woman he loved,
and with less pain. He would not have the memory of those three days
reopened.
But the straight and narrow thoroughfare offered no refuge, and the
American saw him almost at once.
His unforced geniality made Trent ashamed, for he had liked the man.
They sat long over a meal, and Mr. Bunner talked. Trent listened to
him, now that he was in for it, with genuine pleasure, now and then
contributing a question or remark. Besides liking his companion, he
enjoyed his conversation, with its unending verbal surprises, for its
own sake.
Bunner was, it appeared, resident in Paris as the chief Continental
agent of the Manderson firm, and fully satisfied with his position and
prospects. He discoursed on these for some twenty minutes. This subject
at length exhausted, he went on to tell Trent, who confessed that he
had been away from England for a year, that Marlowe had shortly after
the death of Manderson entered his father’s business, which was now
again in a flourishing state, and had already come to be practically in
control of it. They had kept up their intimacy, and were even now
planning a holiday for the summer. Mr. Bunner spoke with generous
admiration of his friend’s talent for affairs. “Jack Marlowe has a
natural big head,” he declared, “and if he had more experience, I
wouldn’t want to have him up against me. He would put a crimp in me
every time.”
As the American’s talk flowed on, Trent listened with a slowly growing
perplexity. It became more and more plain that something was very wrong
in his theory of the situation; there was no mention of its central
figure. Presently Mr. Bunner mentioned that Marlowe was engaged to be
married to an Irish girl, whose charms he celebrated with native
enthusiasm.
Trent clasped his hands savagely together beneath the table. What could
have happened? His ideas were sliding and shifting. At last he forced
himself to put a direct question.
Mr. Bunner was not very fully informed. He knew that Mrs. Manderson had
left England immediately after the settlement of her husband’s affairs,
and had lived for some time in Italy. She had returned not long ago to
London, where she had decided not to live in the house in Mayfair, and
had bought a smaller one in the Hampstead neighbourhood; also, he
understood, one somewhere in the country. She was said to go but little
into society. “And all the good hard dollars just waiting for some one
to spraddle them around,” said Mr. Bunner, with a note of pathos in his
voice. “Why, she has money to burn—money to feed to the birds—and
nothing doing. The old man left her more than half his wad. And think
of the figure she might make in the world. She is beautiful, and she is
the best woman I ever met, too. But she couldn’t ever seem to get the
habit of spending money the way it ought to be spent.”
His words now became a soliloquy: Trent’s thoughts were occupying all
his attention. He pleaded business soon, and the two men parted with
cordiality.
Half an hour later Trent was in his studio, swiftly and mechanically
“cleaning up”. He wanted to know what had happened; somehow he must
find out. He could never approach herself, he knew; he would never
bring back to her the shame of that last encounter with him; it was
scarcely likely that he would even set eyes on her. But he must get to
know!... Cupples was in London, Marlowe was there.... And, anyhow, he
was sick of Paris.
Such thoughts came and went; and below them all strained the fibres of
an unseen cord that dragged mercilessly at his heart, and that he
cursed bitterly in the moments when he could not deny to himself that
it was there. The folly, the useless, pitiable folly of it!
In twenty-four hours his feeble roots in Paris had been torn out. He
was looking over a leaden sea at the shining fortress-wall of the Dover
cliffs.
But though he had instinctively picked out the lines of a set purpose
from among the welter of promptings in his mind, he found it delayed at
the very outset.
He had decided that he must first see Mr. Cupples, who would be in a
position to tell him much more than the American knew. But Mr. Cupples
was away on his travels, not expected to return for a month; and Trent
had no reasonable excuse for hastening his return. Marlowe he would not
confront until he had tried at least to reconnoitre the position. He
constrained himself not to commit the crowning folly of seeking out
Mrs. Manderson’s house in Hampstead; he could not enter it, and the
thought of the possibility of being seen by her lurking in its
neighbourhood brought the blood to his face.
He stayed at an hotel, took a studio, and while he awaited Mr.
Cupples’s return attempted vainly to lose himself in work.
At the end of a week he had an idea that he acted upon with eager
precipitancy. She had let fall some word at their last meeting, of a
taste for music. Trent went that evening, and thenceforward regularly,
to the opera. He might see her; and if, in spite of his caution, she
caught sight of him, they could be blind to each other’s
presence—anybody might happen to go to the opera.
So he went alone each evening, passing as quickly as he might through
the people in the vestibule; and each evening he came away knowing that
she had not been in the house. It was a habit that yielded him a sort
of satisfaction along with the guilty excitement of his search; for he
too loved music, and nothing gave him so much peace while its magic
endured.
One night as he entered, hurrying through the brilliant crowd, he felt
a touch on his arm. Flooded with an incredible certainty at the touch,
he turned.
It was she: so much more radiant in the absence of grief and anxiety,
in the fact that she was smiling, and in the allurement of evening
dress, that he could not speak. She, too, breathed a little quickly,
and there was a light of daring in her eyes and cheeks as she greeted
him.
Her words were few. “I wouldn’t miss a note of _Tristan_,” she said,
“nor must you. Come and see me in the interval.” She gave him the
number of the box.
Chapter XIII.
Eruption
The following two months were a period in Trent’s life that he has
never since remembered without shuddering. He met Mrs. Manderson half a
dozen times, and each time her cool friendliness, a nicely calculated
mean between mere acquaintance and the first stage of intimacy, baffled
and maddened him. At the opera he had found her, to his further
amazement, with a certain Mrs. Wallace, a frisky matron whom he had
known from childhood. Mrs. Manderson, it appeared, on her return from
Italy, had somehow wandered into circles to which he belonged by
nurture and disposition. It came, she said, of her having pitched her
tent in their hunting-grounds; several of his friends were near
neighbours. He had a dim but horrid recollection of having been on that
occasion unlike himself, ill at ease, burning in the face, talking with
idiot loquacity of his adventures in the Baltic provinces, and finding
from time to time that he was addressing himself exclusively to Mrs.
Wallace. The other lady, when he joined them, had completely lost the
slight appearance of agitation with which she had stopped him in the
vestibule. She had spoken pleasantly to him of her travels, of her
settlement in London, and of people whom they both knew.
During the last half of the opera, which he had stayed in the box to
hear, he had been conscious of nothing, as he sat behind them, but the
angle of her cheek and the mass of her hair, the lines of her shoulder
and arm, her hand upon the cushion. The black hair had seemed at last a
forest, immeasurable, pathless and enchanted, luring him to a fatal
adventure.... At the end he had been pale and subdued, parting with
them rather formally.
The next time he saw her—it was at a country house where both were
guests—and the subsequent times, he had had himself in hand. He had
matched her manner and had acquitted himself, he thought, decently,
considering—
Considering that he lived in an agony of bewilderment and remorse and
longing. He could make nothing, absolutely nothing, of her attitude.
That she had read his manuscript and understood the suspicion indicated
in his last question to her at White Gables was beyond the possibility
of doubt. Then how could she treat him thus and frankly, as she treated
all the world of men who had done no injury?
For it had become clear to his intuitive sense, for all the absence of
any shade of differentiation in her outward manner, that an injury had
been done, and that she had felt it. Several times, on the rare and
brief occasions when they had talked apart, he had warning from the
same sense that she was approaching this subject; and each time he had
turned the conversation with the ingenuity born of fear. Two
resolutions he made. The first was that when he had completed a
commissioned work which tied him to London he would go away and stay
away. The strain was too great. He no longer burned to know the truth;
he wanted nothing to confirm his fixed internal conviction by faith,
that he had blundered, that he had misread the situation,
misinterpreted her tears, written himself down a slanderous fool. He
speculated no more on Marlowe’s motive in the killing of Manderson. Mr.
Cupples returned to London, and Trent asked him nothing. He knew now
that he had been right in those words—Trent remembered them for the
emphasis with which they were spoken—“So long as she considered herself
bound to him... no power on earth could have persuaded her.” He met
Mrs. Manderson at dinner at her uncle’s large and tomb-like house in
Bloomsbury, and there he conversed most of the evening with a professor
of archaeology from Berlin.
His other resolution was that he would not be with her alone.
But when, a few days after, she wrote asking him to come and see her on
the following afternoon, he made no attempt to excuse himself. This was
a formal challenge.
While she celebrated the rites of tea, and for some little time
thereafter, she joined with such natural ease in his slightly fevered
conversation on matters of the day that he began to hope she had
changed what he could not doubt had been her resolve, to corner him and
speak to him gravely. She was to all appearance careless now, smiling
so that he recalled, not for the first time since that night at the
opera, what was written long ago of a Princess of Brunswick: “Her mouth
has ten thousand charms that touch the soul.” She made a tour of the
beautiful room where she had received him, singling out this treasure
or that from the spoils of a hundred bric-à-brac shops, laughing over
her quests, discoveries, and bargainings. And when he asked if she
would delight him again with a favourite piece of his which he had
heard her play at another house, she consented at once.
She played with a perfection of execution and feeling that moved him
now as it had moved him before. “You are a musician born,” he said
quietly when she had finished, and the last tremor of the music had
passed away. “I knew that before I first heard you.”
“I have played a great deal ever since I can remember. It has been a
great comfort to me,” she said simply, and half-turned to him smiling.
“When did you first detect music in me? Oh, of course: I was at the
opera. But that wouldn’t prove much, would it?”
“No,” he said abstractedly, his sense still busy with the music that
had just ended. “I think I knew it the first time I saw you.” Then
understanding of his own words came to him, and turned him rigid. For
the first time the past had been invoked.
There was a short silence. Mrs. Manderson looked at Trent, then hastily
looked away. Colour began to rise in her cheeks, and she pursed her
lips as if for whistling. Then with a defiant gesture of the shoulders
which he remembered she rose suddenly from the piano and placed herself
in a chair opposite to him.
“That speech of yours will do as well as anything,” she began slowly,
looking at the point of her shoe, “to bring us to what I wanted to say.
I asked you here today on purpose, Mr. Trent, because I couldn’t bear
it any longer. Ever since the day you left me at White Gables I have
been saying to myself that it didn’t matter what you thought of me in
that affair; that you were certainly not the kind of man to speak to
others of what you believed about me, after what you had told me of
your reasons for suppressing your manuscript. I asked myself how it
could matter. But all the time, of course, I knew it did matter. It
mattered horribly. Because what you thought was not true.” She raised
her eyes and met his gaze calmly. Trent, with a completely
expressionless face, returned her look.
“Since I began to know you,” he said, “I have ceased to think it.”
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Manderson; and blushed suddenly and deeply.
Then, playing with a glove, she added, “But I want you to know what
_was_ true.
“I did not know if I should ever see you again,” she went on in a lower
voice, “but I felt that if I did I must speak to you about this. I
thought it would not be hard to do so, because you seemed to me an
understanding person; and besides, a woman who has been married isn’t
expected to have the same sort of difficulty as a young girl in
speaking about such things when it is necessary. And then we did meet
again, and I discovered that it was very difficult indeed. You made it
difficult.”
“How?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” said the lady. “But yes—I do know. It was just because
you treated me exactly as if you had never thought or imagined anything
of that sort about me. I had always supposed that if I saw you again
you would turn on me that hard, horrible sort of look you had when you
asked me that last question—do you remember?—at White Gables. Instead
of that you were just like any other acquaintance. You were just”—she
hesitated and spread out her hands—“nice. You know. After that first
time at the opera when I spoke to you I went home positively wondering
if you had really recognized me. I mean, I thought you might have
recognized my face without remembering who it was.”
A short laugh broke from Trent in spite of himself, but he said
nothing.
She smiled deprecatingly. “Well, I couldn’t remember if you had spoken
my name; and I thought it might be so. But the next time, at the
Iretons’, you did speak it, so I knew; and a dozen times during those
few days I almost brought myself to tell you, but never quite. I began
to feel that you wouldn’t let me, that you would slip away from the
subject if I approached it. Wasn’t I right? Tell me, please.” He
nodded. “But why?” He remained silent.
“Well,” she said, “I will finish what I had to say, and then you will
tell me, I hope, why you had to make it so hard. When I began to
understand that you wouldn’t let me talk of the matter to you, it made
me more determined than ever. I suppose you didn’t realize that I would
insist on speaking even if you were quite discouraging. I dare say I
couldn’t have done it if I had been guilty, as you thought. You walked
into my parlour today, never thinking I should dare. Well, now you
see.”
Mrs. Manderson had lost all her air of hesitancy. She had, as she was
wont to say, talked herself enthusiastic, and in the ardour of her
purpose to annihilate the misunderstanding that had troubled her so
long she felt herself mistress of the situation.
“I am going to tell you the story of the mistake you made,” she
continued, as Trent, his hands clasped between his knees, still looked
at her enigmatically. “You will have to believe it, Mr. Trent; it is
utterly true to life, with its confusions and hidden things and
cross-purposes and perfectly natural mistakes that nobody thinks twice
about taking for facts. Please understand that I don’t blame you in the
least, and never did, for jumping to the conclusion you did. You knew
that I was estranged from my husband, and you knew what that so often
means. You knew before I told you, I expect, that he had taken up an
injured attitude towards me; and I was silly enough to try and explain
it away. I gave you the explanation of it that I had given myself at
first, before I realized the wretched truth; I told you he was
disappointed in me because I couldn’t take a brilliant lead in society.
Well, that was true; he was so. But I could see you weren’t convinced.
You had guessed what it took me much longer to see, because I knew how
irrational it was. Yes; my husband was jealous of John Marlowe; you
divined that.
“Then I behaved like a fool when you let me see you had divined it; it
was such a blow, you understand, when I had supposed all the
humiliation and strain was at an end, and that his delusion had died
with him. You practically asked me if my husband’s secretary was not my
lover, Mr. Trent—I _have_ to say it, because I want you to understand
why I broke down and made a scene. You took that for a confession; you
thought I was guilty of that, and I think you even thought I might be a
party to the crime, that I had consented.... That did hurt me; but
perhaps you couldn’t have thought anything else—I don’t know.”
Trent, who had not hitherto taken his eyes from her face, hung his head
at the words. He did not raise it again as she continued. “But really
it was simple shock and distress that made me give way, and the memory
of all the misery that mad suspicion had meant to me. And when I pulled
myself together again you had gone.”
She rose and went to an escritoire beside the window, unlocked a
drawer, and drew out a long, sealed envelope.
“This is the manuscript you left with me,” she said. “I have read it
through again and again. I have always wondered, as everybody does, at
your cleverness in things of this kind.” A faintly mischievous smile
flashed upon her face, and was gone. “I thought it was splendid, Mr.
Trent—I almost forgot that the story was my own, I was so interested.
And I want to say now, while I have this in my hand, how much I thank
you for your generous, chivalrous act in sacrificing this triumph of
yours rather than put a woman’s reputation in peril. If all had been as
you supposed, the facts must have come out when the police took up the
case you put in their hands. Believe me, I understood just what you had
done, and I never ceased to be grateful even when I felt most crushed
by your suspicion.”
As she spoke her thanks her voice shook a little, and her eyes were
bright. Trent perceived nothing of this. His head was still bent. He
did not seem to hear. She put the envelope into his hand as it lay
open, palm upwards, on his knee. There was a touch of gentleness about
the act which made him look up.
“Can you—” he began slowly.
She raised her hand as she stood before him. “No, Mr. Trent; let me
finish before you say anything. It is such an unspeakable relief to me
to have broken the ice at last, and I want to end the story while I am
still feeling the triumph of beginning it.” She sank down into the sofa
from which she had first risen. “I am telling you a thing that nobody
else knows. Everybody knew, I suppose, that something had come between
us, though I did everything in my power to hide it. But I don’t think
any one in the world ever guessed what my husband’s notion was. People
who know me don’t think that sort of thing about me, I believe. And his
fancy was so ridiculously opposed to the facts. I will tell you what
the situation was. Mr. Marlowe and I had been friendly enough since he
came to us. For all his cleverness—my husband said he had a keener
brain than any man he knew—I looked upon him as practically a boy. You
know I am a little older than he is, and he had a sort of amiable lack
of ambition that made me feel it the more. One day my husband asked me
what I thought was the best thing about Marlowe, and not thinking much
about it I said, ‘His manners.’ He surprised me very much by looking
black at that, and after a silence he said, ‘Yes, Marlowe is a
gentleman; that’s so’, not looking at me.
“Nothing was ever said about that again until about a year ago, when I
found that Mr. Marlowe had done what I always expected he would
do—fallen desperately in love with an American girl. But to my disgust
he had picked out the most worthless girl, I do believe, of all those
whom we used to meet. She was the daughter of wealthy parents, and she
did as she liked with them; very beautiful, well educated, very good at
games—what they call a woman-athlete—and caring for nothing on earth
but her own amusement. She was one of the most unprincipled flirts I
ever knew, and quite the cleverest. Every one knew it, and Mr. Marlowe
must have heard it; but she made a complete fool of him, brain and all.
I don’t know how she managed it, but I can imagine. She liked him, of
course; but it was quite plain to me that she was playing with him. The
whole affair was so idiotic, I got perfectly furious. One day I asked
him to row me in a boat on the lake—all this happened at our house by
Lake George. We had never been alone together for any length of time
before. In the boat I talked to him. I was very kind about it, I think,
and he took it admirably, but he didn’t believe me a bit. He had the
impudence to tell me that I misunderstood Alice’s nature. When I hinted
at his prospects—I knew he had scarcely anything of his own—he said
that if she loved him he could make himself a position in the world. I
dare say that was true, with his abilities and his friends—he is rather
well connected, you know, as well as popular. But his enlightenment
came very soon after that.
“My husband helped me out of the boat when we got back. He joked with
Mr Marlowe about something, I remember; for through all that followed
he never once changed in his manner to him, and that was one reason why
I took so long to realize what he thought about him and myself. But to
me he was reserved and silent that evening—not angry. He was always
perfectly cold and expressionless to me after he took this idea into
his head. After dinner he only spoke to me once. Mr. Marlowe was
telling him about some horse he had bought for the farm in Kentucky,
and my husband looked at me and said, ‘Marlowe may be a gentleman, but
he seldom quits loser in a horse-trade.’ I was surprised at that, but
at that time—and even on the next occasion when he found us together—I
didn’t understand what was in his mind. That next time was the morning
when Mr Marlowe received a sweet little note from the girl asking for
his congratulations on her engagement. It was in our New York house. He
looked so wretched at breakfast that I thought he was ill, and
afterwards I went to the room where he worked, and asked what was the
matter. He didn’t say anything, but just handed me the note, and turned
away to the window. I was very glad that was all over, but terribly
sorry for him too, of course. I don’t remember what I said, but I
remember putting my hand on his arm as he stood there staring out on
the garden and just then my husband appeared at the open door with some
papers. He just glanced at us, and then turned and walked quietly back
to his study. I thought that he might have heard what I was saying to
comfort Mr. Marlowe, and that it was rather nice of him to slip away.
Mr. Marlowe neither saw nor heard him. My husband left the house that
morning for the West while I was out. Even then I did not understand.
He used often to go off suddenly like that, if some business project
called him.
“It was not until he returned a week later that I grasped the
situation. He was looking white and strange, and as soon as he saw me
he asked me where Mr. Marlowe was. Somehow the tone of his question
told me everything in a flash.
“I almost gasped; I was wild with indignation. You know, Mr. Trent, I
don’t think I should have minded at all if any one had thought me
capable of openly breaking with my husband and leaving him for somebody
else. I dare say I might have done that. But that coarse suspicion... a
man whom he trusted... and the notion of concealment. It made me see
scarlet. Every shred of pride in me was strung up till I quivered, and
I swore to myself on the spot that I would never show by any word or
sign that I was conscious of his having such a thought about me. I
would behave exactly as I always had behaved, I determined—and that I
did, up to the very last. Though I knew that a wall had been made
between us now that could never be broken down—even if he asked my
pardon and obtained it—I never once showed that I noticed any change.
“And so it went on. I never could go through such a time again. My
husband showed silent and cold politeness to me always when we were
alone—and that was only when it was unavoidable. He never once alluded
to what was in his mind; but I felt it, and he knew that I felt it.
Both of us were stubborn in our different attitudes. To Mr. Marlowe he
was more friendly, if anything, than before—Heaven only knows why. I
fancied he was planning some sort of revenge; but that was only a
fancy. Certainly Mr. Marlowe never knew what was suspected of him. He
and I remained good friends, though we never spoke of anything intimate
after that disappointment of his; but I made a point of seeing no less
of him than I had always done. Then we came to England and to White
Gables, and after that followed—my husband’s dreadful end.”
She threw out her right hand in a gesture of finality. “You know about
the rest—so much more than any other man,” she added, and glanced up at
him with a quaint expression.
Trent wondered at that look, but the wonder was only a passing shadow
on his thought. Inwardly his whole being was possessed by thankfulness.
All the vivacity had returned to his face. Long before the lady had
ended her story he had recognized the certainty of its truth, as from
the first days of their renewed acquaintance he had doubted the story
that his imagination had built up at White Gables, upon foundations
that seemed so good to him.
He said, “I don’t know how to begin the apologies I have to make. There
are no words to tell you how ashamed and disgraced I feel when I
realize what a crude, cock-sure blundering at a conclusion my suspicion
was. Yes, I suspected—you! I had almost forgotten that I was ever such
a fool. Almost—not quite. Sometimes when I have been alone I have
remembered that folly, and poured contempt on it. I have tried to
imagine what the facts were. I have tried to excuse myself.”
She interrupted him quickly. “What nonsense! Do be sensible, Mr. Trent.
You had only seen me on two occasions in your life before you came to
me with your solution of the mystery.” Again the quaint expression came
and was gone. “If you talk of folly, it really is folly for a man like
you to pretend to a woman like me that I had innocence written all over
me in large letters—so large that you couldn’t believe very strong
evidence against me after seeing me twice.”
“What do you mean by ‘a man like me’?” he demanded with a sort of
fierceness. “Do you take me for a person without any normal instincts?
I don’t say you impress people as a simple, transparent sort of
character—what Mr. Calvin Bunner calls a case of open-work; I don’t say
a stranger might not think you capable of wickedness, if there was good
evidence for it: but I say that a man who, after seeing you and being
in your atmosphere, could associate you with the particular kind of
abomination I imagined, is a fool—the kind of fool who is afraid to
trust his senses.... As for my making it hard for you to approach the
subject, as you say, it is true. It was simply moral cowardice. I
understood that you wished to clear the matter up; and I was revolted
at the notion of my injurious blunder being discussed. I tried to show
you by my actions that it was as if it had never been. I hoped you
would pardon me without any words. I can’t forgive myself, and I never
shall. And yet if you could know—” He stopped short, and then added
quietly, “Well, will you accept all that as an apology? The very
scrubbiest sackcloth made, and the grittiest ashes on the heap.... I
didn’t mean to get worked up,” he ended lamely.
Mrs. Manderson laughed, and her laugh carried him away with it. He knew
well by this time that sudden rush of cascading notes of mirth, the
perfect expression of enjoyment; he had many times tried to amuse her
merely for his delight in the sound of it.
“But I love to see you worked up,” she said. “The bump with which you
always come down as soon as you realize that you are up in the air at
all is quite delightful. Oh, we’re actually both laughing. What a
triumphant end to our explanations, after all my dread of the time when
I should have it out with you. And now it’s all over, and you know; and
we’ll never speak of it any more.”
“I hope not,” Trent said in sincere relief. “If you’re resolved to be
so kind as this about it, I am not high-principled enough to insist on
your blasting me with your lightnings. And now, Mrs. Manderson, I had
better go. Changing the subject after this would be like playing
puss-in-the-corner after an earthquake.” He rose to his feet.
“You are right,” she said. “But no! Wait. There is another thing—part
of the same subject; and we ought to pick up all the pieces now while
we are about it. Please sit down.” She took the envelope containing
Trent’s manuscript dispatch from the table where he had laid it. “I
want to speak about this.”
His brows bent, and he looked at her questioningly. “So do I, if you
do,” he said slowly. “I want very much to know one thing.”
“Tell me.”
“Since my reason for suppressing that information was all a fantasy,
why did you never make any use of it? When I began to realize that I
had been wrong about you, I explained your silence to myself by saying
that you could not bring yourself to do a thing that would put a rope
round a man’s neck, whatever he might have done. I can quite understand
that feeling. Was that what it was? Another possibility I thought of
was that you knew of something that was by way of justifying or
excusing Marlowe’s act. Or I thought you might have a simple horror,
quite apart from humanitarian scruples, of appearing publicly in
connection with a murder trial. Many important witnesses in such cases
have to be practically forced into giving their evidence. They feel
there is defilement even in the shadow of the scaffold.”
Mrs. Manderson tapped her lips with the envelope without quite
concealing a smile. “You didn’t think of another possibility, I
suppose, Mr. Trent,” she said.
“No.” He looked puzzled.
“I mean the possibility of your having been wrong about Mr. Marlowe as
well as about me. No, no; you needn’t tell me that the chain of
evidence is complete. I know it is. But evidence of what? Of Mr.
Marlowe having impersonated my husband that night, and having escaped
by way of my window, and built up an alibi. I have read your dispatch
again and again, Mr. Trent, and I don’t see that those things can be
doubted.”
Trent gazed at her with narrowed eyes. He said nothing to fill the
brief pause that followed. Mrs. Manderson smoothed her skirt with a
preoccupied air, as one collecting her ideas.
“I did not make any use of the facts found out by you,” she slowly said
at last, “because it seemed to me very likely that they would be fatal
to Mr. Marlowe.”
“I agree with you,” Trent remarked in a colourless tone.
“And,” pursued the lady, looking up at him with a mild reasonableness
in her eyes, “as I knew that he was innocent I was not going to expose
him to that risk.”
There was another little pause. Trent rubbed his chin, with an
affectation of turning over the idea. Inwardly he was telling himself,
somewhat feebly, that this was very right and proper; that it was quite
feminine, and that he liked her to be feminine. It was permitted to
her—more than permitted—to set her loyal belief in the character of a
friend above the clearest demonstrations of the intellect.
Nevertheless, it chafed him. He would have had her declaration of faith
a little less positive in form. It was too irrational to say she
“knew”. In fact (he put it to himself bluntly), it was quite unlike
her. If to be unreasonable when reason led to the unpleasant was a
specially feminine trait, and if Mrs. Manderson had it, she was
accustomed to wrap it up better than any woman he had known.
“You suggest,” he said at length, “that Marlowe constructed an alibi
for himself, by means which only a desperate man would have attempted,
to clear himself of a crime he did not commit. Did he tell you he was
innocent?”
She uttered a little laugh of impatience. “So you think he has been
talking me round. No, that is not so. I am merely sure he did not do
it. Ah! I see you think that absurd. But see how unreasonable you are,
Mr Trent! Just now you were explaining to me quite sincerely that it
was foolishness in you to have a certain suspicion of me after seeing
me and being in my atmosphere, as you said.” Trent started in his
chair. She glanced at him, and went on: “Now, I and my atmosphere are
much obliged to you, but we must stand up for the rights of other
atmospheres. I know a great deal more about Mr. Marlowe’s atmosphere
than you know about mine even now. I saw him constantly for several
years. I don’t pretend to know all about him; but I do know that he is
incapable of a crime of bloodshed. The idea of his planning a murder is
as unthinkable to me as the idea of your picking a poor woman’s pocket,
Mr. Trent. I can imagine you killing a man, you know... if the man
deserved it and had an equal chance of killing you. I could kill a
person myself in some circumstances. But Mr. Marlowe was incapable of
doing it, I don’t care what the provocation might be. He had a temper
that nothing could shake, and he looked upon human nature with a sort
of cold magnanimity that would find excuses for absolutely anything. It
wasn’t a pose; you could see it was a part of him. He never put it
forward, but it was there always. It was quite irritating at times....
Now and then in America, I remember, I have heard people talking about
lynching, for instance, when he was there. He would sit quite silent
and expressionless, appearing not to listen; but you could feel disgust
coming from him in waves. He really loathed and hated physical
violence. He was a very strange man in some ways, Mr. Trent. He gave
one a feeling that he might do unexpected things—do you know that
feeling one has about some people? What part he really played in the
events of that night I have never been able to guess. But nobody who
knew anything about him could possibly believe in his deliberately
taking a man’s life.” Again the movement of her head expressed
finality, and she leaned back in the sofa, calmly regarding him.
“Then,” said Trent, who had followed this with earnest attention, “we
are forced back on two other possibilities, which I had not thought
worth much consideration until this moment. Accepting what you say, he
might still conceivably have killed in self-defence; or he might have
done so by accident.”
The lady nodded. “Of course I thought of those two explanations when I
read your manuscript.”
“And I suppose you felt, as I did myself, that in either of those cases
the natural thing, and obviously the safest thing, for him to do was to
make a public statement of the truth, instead of setting up a series of
deceptions which would certainly stamp him as guilty in the eyes of the
law, if anything went wrong with them.”
“Yes,” she said wearily, “I thought over all that until my head ached.
And I thought somebody else might have done it, and that he was somehow
screening the guilty person. But that seemed wild. I could see no light
in the mystery, and after a while I simply let it alone. All I was
clear about was that Mr. Marlowe was not a murderer, and that if I told
what you had found out, the judge and jury would probably think he was.
I promised myself that I would speak to you about it if we should meet
again; and now I’ve kept my promise.”
Trent, his chin resting on his hand, was staring at the carpet. The
excitement of the hunt for the truth was steadily rising in him. He had
not in his own mind accepted Mrs. Manderson’s account of Marlowe’s
character as unquestionable. But she had spoken forcibly; he could by
no means set it aside, and his theory was much shaken.
“There is only one thing for it,” he said, looking up. “I must see
Marlowe. It worries me too much to have the thing left like this. I
will get at the truth. Can you tell me,” he broke off, “how he behaved
after the day I left White Gables?”
“I never saw him after that,” said Mrs. Manderson simply. “For some
days after you went away I was ill, and didn’t go out of my room. When
I got down he had left and was in London, settling things with the
lawyers. He did not come down to the funeral. Immediately after that I
went abroad. After some weeks a letter from him reached me, saying he
had concluded his business and given the solicitors all the assistance
in his power. He thanked me very nicely for what he called all my
kindness, and said goodbye. There was nothing in it about his plans for
the future, and I thought it particularly strange that he said not a
word about my husband’s death. I didn’t answer. Knowing what I knew, I
couldn’t. In those days I shuddered whenever I thought of that
masquerade in the night. I never wanted to see or hear of him again.”
“Then you don’t know what has become of him?”
“No, but I dare say Uncle Burton—Mr. Cupples, you know—could tell you.
Some time ago he told me that he had met Mr. Marlowe in London, and had
some talk with him. I changed the conversation.” She paused and smiled
with a trace of mischief. “I rather wonder what you supposed had
happened to Mr. Marlowe after you withdrew from the scene of the drama
that you had put together so much to your satisfaction.”
Trent flushed. “Do you really want to know?” he said.
“I ask you,” she retorted quietly.
“You ask me to humiliate myself again, Mrs. Manderson. Very well. I
will tell you what I thought I should most likely find when I returned
to London after my travels: that you had married Marlowe to live
abroad.”
She heard him with unmoved composure. “We certainly couldn’t have lived
very comfortably in England on his money and mine,” she observed
thoughtfully. “He had practically nothing then.”
He stared at her—“gaped”, she told him some time afterwards. At the
moment she laughed with a little embarrassment.
“Dear me, Mr. Trent! Have I said anything dreadful? You surely must
know.... I thought everybody understood by now.... I’m sure I’ve had to
explain it often enough... if I marry again I lose everything that my
husband left me.”
The effect of this speech upon Trent was curious. For an instant his
face was flooded with the emotion of surprise. As this passed away he
gradually drew himself together, as he sat, into a tense attitude. He
looked, she thought as she saw his knuckles grow white on the arms of
the chair, like a man prepared for pain under the hand of the surgeon.
But all he said, in a voice lower than his usual tone, was, “I had no
idea of it.”
“It is so,” she said calmly, trifling with a ring on her finger.
“Really, Mr. Trent, it is not such a very unusual thing. I think I am
glad of it. For one thing, it has secured me—at least since it became
generally known—from a good many attentions of a kind that a woman in
my position has to put up with as a rule.”
“No doubt,” he said gravely. “And... the other kind?”
She looked at him questioningly. “Ah!” she laughed. “The other kind
trouble me even less. I have not yet met a man silly enough to want to
marry a widow with a selfish disposition, and luxurious habits and
tastes, and nothing but the little my father left me.”
She shook her head, and something in the gesture shattered the last
remnants of Trent’s self-possession.
“Haven’t you, by Heaven!” he exclaimed, rising with a violent movement
and advancing a step towards her. “Then I am going to show you that
human passion is not always stifled by the smell of money. I am going
to end the business—my business. I am going to tell you what I dare say
scores of better men have wanted to tell you, but couldn’t summon up
what I have summoned up—the infernal cheek to do it. They were afraid
of making fools of themselves. I am not. You have accustomed me to the
feeling this afternoon.” He laughed aloud in his rush of words, and
spread out his hands. “Look at me! It is the sight of the century! It
is one who says he loves you, and would ask you to give up very great
wealth to stand at his side.”
She was hiding her face in her hands. He heard her say brokenly,
“Please... don’t speak in that way.”
He answered: “It will make a great difference to me if you will allow
me to say all I have to say before I leave you. Perhaps it is in bad
taste, but I will risk that; I want to relieve my soul; it needs open
confession. This is the truth. You have troubled me ever since the
first time I saw you—and you did not know it—as you sat under the edge
of the cliff at Marlstone, and held out your arms to the sea. It was
only your beauty that filled my mind then. As I passed by you it seemed
as if all the life in the place were crying out a song about you in the
wind and the sunshine. And the song stayed in my ears; but even your
beauty would be no more than an empty memory to me by now if that had
been all. It was when I led you from the hotel there to your house,
with your hand on my arm, that—what was it that happened? I only knew
that your stronger magic had struck home, and that I never should
forget that day, whatever the love of my life should be. Till that day
I had admired as I should admire the loveliness of a still lake; but
that day I felt the spell of the divinity of the lake. And next morning
the waters were troubled, and she rose—the morning when I came to you
with my questions, tired out with doubts that were as bitter as pain,
and when I saw you without your pale, sweet mask of composure—when I
saw you moved and glowing, with your eyes and your hands alive, and
when you made me understand that for such a creature as you there had
been emptiness and the mere waste of yourself for so long. Madness rose
in me then, and my spirit was clamouring to say what I say at last now:
that life would never seem a full thing again because you could not
love me, that I was taken for ever in the nets of your black hair and
by the incantation of your voice—”
“Oh, stop!” she cried, suddenly throwing back her head, her face
flaming and her hands clutching the cushions beside her. She spoke fast
and disjointedly, her breath coming quick. “You shall not talk me into
forgetting common sense. What does all this mean? Oh, I do not
recognize you at all—you seem another man. We are not children; have
you forgotten that? You speak like a boy in love for the first time. It
is foolish, unreal—I know that if you do not. I will not hear it. What
has happened to you?” She was half sobbing. “How can these
sentimentalities come from a man like you? Where is your
self-restraint?”
“Gone!” exclaimed Trent, with an abrupt laugh. “It has got right away.
I am going after it in a minute.” He looked gravely down into her eyes.
“I don’t care so much now. I never could declare myself to you under
the cloud of your great fortune. It was too heavy. There’s nothing
creditable in that feeling, as I look at it; as a matter of simple fact
it was a form of cowardice—fear of what you would think, and very
likely say—fear of the world’s comment too, I suppose. But the cloud
being rolled away, I have spoken, and I don’t care so much. I can face
things with a quiet mind now that I have told you the truth in its own
terms. You may call it sentimentality or any other nickname you like.
It is quite true that it was not intended for a scientific statement.
Since it annoys you, let it be extinguished. But please believe that it
was serious to me if it was comedy to you. I have said that I love you,
and honour you, and would hold you dearest of all the world. Now give
me leave to go.”
But she held out her hands to him.
Chapter XIV.
Writing a Letter
“If you insist,” Trent said, “I suppose you will have your way. But I
had much rather write it when I am not with you. However, if I must,
bring me a tablet whiter than a star, or hand of hymning angel; I mean
a sheet of note-paper not stamped with your address. Don’t
underestimate the sacrifice I am making. I never felt less like
correspondence in my life.”
She rewarded him.
“What shall I say?” he enquired, his pen hovering over the paper.
“Shall I compare him to a summer’s day? What _shall_ I say?”
“Say what you want to say,” she suggested helpfully.
He shook his head. “What I want to say—what I have been wanting for the
past twenty-four hours to say to every man, woman, and child I met—is
‘Mabel and I are betrothed, and all is gas and gaiters.’ But that
wouldn’t be a very good opening for a letter of strictly formal, not to
say sinister, character. I have got as far as ‘Dear Mr. Marlowe.’ What
comes next?”
“I am sending you a manuscript,” she prompted, “which I thought you
might like to see.”
“Do you realize,” he said, “that in that sentence there are only two
words of more than one syllable? This letter is meant to impress, not
to put him at his ease. We must have long words.”
“I don’t see why,” she answered. “I know it is usual, but why is it? I
have had a great many letters from lawyers and business people, and
they always begin, ‘with reference to our communication’, or some such
mouthful, and go on like that all the way through. Yet when I see them
they don’t talk like that. It seems ridiculous to me.”
“It is not at all ridiculous to them.” Trent laid aside the pen with an
appearance of relief and rose to his feet. “Let me explain. A people
like our own, not very fond of using its mind, gets on in the ordinary
way with a very small and simple vocabulary. Long words are abnormal,
and like everything else that is abnormal, they are either very funny
or tremendously solemn. Take the phrase ‘intelligent anticipation’, for
instance. If such a phrase had been used in any other country in
Europe, it would not have attracted the slightest attention. With us it
has become a proverb; we all grin when we hear it in a speech or read
it in a leading article; it is considered to be one of the best things
ever said. Why? Just because it consists of two long words. The idea
expressed is as commonplace as cold mutton. Then there’s
‘terminological inexactitude’. How we all roared, and are still
roaring, at that! And the whole of the joke is that the words are long.
It’s just the same when we want to be very serious; we mark it by
turning to long words. When a solicitor can begin a sentence with,
‘pursuant to the instructions communicated to our representative,’ or
some such gibberish, he feels that he is earning his
six-and-eightpence. Don’t laugh! It is perfectly true. Now Continentals
haven’t got that feeling. They are always bothering about ideas, and
the result is that every shopkeeper or peasant has a vocabulary in
daily use that is simply Greek to the vast majority of Britons. I
remember some time ago I was dining with a friend of mine who is a
Paris cabman. We had dinner at a dirty little restaurant opposite the
central post office, a place where all the clients were cabmen or
porters. Conversation was general, and it struck me that a London
cabman would have felt a little out of his depth. Words like
‘functionary’ and ‘unforgettable’ and ‘exterminate’ and ‘independence’
hurtled across the table every instant. And these were just ordinary,
vulgar, jolly, red-faced cabmen. Mind you,” he went on hurriedly, as
the lady crossed the room and took up his pen, “I merely mention this
to illustrate my point. I’m not saying that cab-men ought to be
intellectuals. I don’t think so; I agree with Keats—happy is England,
sweet her artless cabmen, enough their simple loveliness for me. But
when you come to the people who make up the collective industrial
brain-power of the country.... Why, do you know—”
“Oh no, no, no!” cried Mrs. Manderson. “I don’t know anything at the
moment, except that your talking must be stopped somehow, if we are to
get any further with that letter to Mr. Marlowe. You shall not get out
of it. Come!” She put the pen into his hand.
Trent looked at it with distaste. “I warn you not to discourage my
talking,” he said dejectedly. “Believe me, men who don’t talk are even
worse to live with than men who do. O have a care of natures that are
mute. I confess I’m shirking writing this thing. It is almost an
indecency. It’s mixing two moods to write the sort of letter I mean to
write, and at the same time to be sitting in the same room with you.”
She led him to his abandoned chair before the escritoire and pushed him
gently into it. “Well, but please try. I want to see what you write,
and I want it to go to him at once. You see, I would be contented
enough to leave things as they are; but you say you must get at the
truth, and if you must, I want it to be as soon as possible. Do it
now—you know you can if you will—and I’ll send it off the moment it’s
ready. Don’t you ever feel that—the longing to get the worrying letter
into the post and off your hands, so that you can’t recall it if you
would, and it’s no use fussing any more about it?”
“I will do as you wish,” he said, and turned to the paper, which he
dated as from his hotel. Mrs. Manderson looked down at his bent head
with a gentle light in her eyes, and made as if to place a smoothing
hand upon his rather untidy crop of hair. But she did not touch it.
Going in silence to the piano, she began to play very softly. It was
ten minutes before Trent spoke.
“If he chooses to reply that he will say nothing?”
Mrs. Manderson looked over her shoulder. “Of course he dare not take
that line. He will speak to prevent you from denouncing him.”
“But I’m not going to do that anyhow. You wouldn’t allow it—you said
so; besides, I won’t if you would. The thing’s too doubtful now.”
“But,” she laughed, “poor Mr. Marlowe doesn’t know you won’t, does he?”
Trent sighed. “What extraordinary things codes of honour are!” he
remarked abstractedly. “I know that there are things I should do, and
never think twice about, which would make you feel disgraced if you did
them—such as giving any one who grossly insulted me a black eye, or
swearing violently when I barked my shin in a dark room. And now you
are calmly recommending me to bluff Marlowe by means of a tacit threat
which I don’t mean; a thing which hell’s most abandoned fiend did
never, in the drunkenness of guilt—well, anyhow, I won’t do it.” He
resumed his writing, and the lady, with an indulgent smile, returned to
playing very softly.
In a few minutes more, Trent said: “At last I am his faithfully. Do you
want to see it?” She ran across the twilight room, and turned on a
reading lamp beside the escritoire. Then, leaning on his shoulder, she
read what follows:
DEAR MR. MARLOWE,—_You will perhaps remember that we met, under unhappy
circumstances, in June of last year at Marlstone._
_On that occasion it was my duty, as representing a newspaper, to
make an independent investigation of the circumstances of the death
of the late Sigsbee Manderson. I did so, and I arrived at certain
conclusions. You may learn from the enclosed manuscript, which was
originally written as a dispatch for my newspaper, what those
conclusions were. For reasons which it is not necessary to state I
decided at the last moment not to make them public, or to
communicate them to you, and they are known to only two persons
beside myself._
At this point Mrs. Manderson raised her eyes quickly from the letter.
Her dark brows were drawn together. “Two persons?” she said with a note
of enquiry.
“Your uncle is the other. I sought him out last night and told him the
whole story. Have you anything against it? I always felt uneasy at
keeping it from him as I did, because I had led him to expect I should
tell him all I discovered, and my silence looked like mystery-making.
Now it is to be cleared up finally, and there is no question of
shielding you, I wanted him to know everything. He is a very shrewd
adviser, too, in a way of his own; and I should like to have him with
me when I see Marlowe. I have a feeling that two heads will be better
than one on my side of the interview.”
She sighed. “Yes, of course, uncle ought to know the truth. I hope
there is nobody else at all.” She pressed his hand. “I so much want all
that horror buried—buried deep. I am very happy now, dear, but I shall
be happier still when you have satisfied that curious mind of yours and
found out everything, and stamped down the earth upon it all.” She
continued her reading.
_Quite recently, however [the letter went on], facts have come to my
knowledge which have led me to change my decision. I do not mean that I
shall publish what I discovered, but that I have determined to approach
you and ask you for a private statement. If you have anything to say
which would place the matter in another light, I can imagine no reason
why you should withhold it._
_I expect, then, to hear from you when and where I may call upon
you; unless you prefer the interview to take place at my hotel. In
either case I desire that Mr. Cupples whom you will remember, and
who has read the enclosed document, should be present
also.—Faithfully yours,_
_Philip Trent._
“What a very stiff letter!” she said. “Now I am sure you couldn’t have
made it any stiffer in your own rooms.”
Trent slipped the letter and enclosure into a long envelope. “Yes,” he
said, “I think it will make him sit up suddenly. Now this thing mustn’t
run any risk of going wrong. It would be best to send a special
messenger with orders to deliver it into his own hands. If he’s away it
oughtn’t to be left.”
She nodded. “I can arrange that. Wait here for a little.”
When Mrs. Manderson returned, he was hunting through the music cabinet.
She sank on the carpet beside him in a wave of dark brown skirts. “Tell
me something, Philip,” she said.
“If it is among the few things that I know.”
“When you saw uncle last night, did you tell him about—about us?”
“I did not,” he answered. “I remembered you had said nothing about
telling any one. It is for you—isn’t it?—to decide whether we take the
world into our confidence at once or later on.”
“Then will you tell him?” She looked down at her clasped hands. “I wish
you to tell him. Perhaps if you think you will guess why.... There!
that is settled.” She lifted her eyes again to his, and for a time
there was silence between them.
He leaned back at length in the deep chair. “What a world!” he said.
“Mabel, will you play something on the piano that expresses mere joy,
the genuine article, nothing feverish or like thorns under a pot, but
joy that has decided in favour of the universe? It’s a mood that can’t
last altogether, so we had better get all we can out of it.”
She went to the instrument and struck a few chords while she thought.
Then she began to work with all her soul at the theme in the last
movement of the Ninth Symphony which is like the sound of the opening
of the gates of Paradise.
Chapter XV.
Double Cunning
An old oaken desk with a deep body stood by the window in a room that
overlooked St. James’s Park from a height. The room was large,
furnished and decorated by some one who had brought taste to the work;
but the hand of the bachelor lay heavy upon it. John Marlowe unlocked
the desk and drew a long, stout envelope from the back of the well.
“I understand,” he said to Mr. Cupples, “that you have read this.”
“I read it for the first time two days ago,” replied Mr. Cupples, who,
seated on a sofa, was peering about the room with a benignant face. “We
have discussed it fully.”
Marlowe turned to Trent. “There is your manuscript,” he said, laying
the envelope on the table. “I have gone over it three times. I do not
believe there is another man who could have got at as much of the truth
as you have set down there.”
Trent ignored the compliment. He sat by the table gazing stonily at the
fire, his long legs twisted beneath his chair. “You mean, of course, he
said, drawing the envelope towards him, “that there is more of the
truth to be disclosed now. We are ready to hear you as soon as you
like. I expect it will be a long story, and the longer the better, so
far as I am concerned; I want to understand thoroughly. What we should
both like, I think, is some preliminary account of Manderson and your
relations with him. It seemed to me from the first that the character
of the dead man must be somehow an element in the business.”
“You were right, Marlowe answered grimly. He crossed the room and
seated himself on a corner of the tall cushion-topped fender. “I will
begin as you suggest.”
“I ought to tell you beforehand,” said Trent, looking him in the eyes,
“that although I am here to listen to you, I have not as yet any reason
to doubt the conclusions I have stated here.” He tapped the envelope.
“It is a defence that you will be putting forward—you understand that?”
“Perfectly.” Marlowe was cool and in complete possession of himself, a
man different indeed from the worn-out, nervous being Trent remembered
at Marlstone a year and a half ago. His tall, lithe figure was held
with the perfection of muscular tone. His brow was candid, his blue
eyes were clear, though they still had, as he paused collecting his
ideas, the look that had troubled Trent at their first meeting. Only
the lines of his mouth showed that he knew himself in a position of
difficulty, and meant to face it.
“Sigsbee Manderson was not a man of normal mind,” Marlowe began in his
quiet voice. “Most of the very rich men I met with in America had
become so by virtue of abnormal greed, or abnormal industry, or
abnormal personal force, or abnormal luck. None of them had remarkable
intellects. Manderson delighted too in heaping up wealth; he worked
incessantly at it; he was a man of dominant will; he had quite his
share of luck; but what made him singular was his brainpower. In his
own country they would perhaps tell you that it was his ruthlessness in
pursuit of his aims that was his most striking characteristic; but
there are hundreds of them who would have carried out his plans with
just as little consideration for others if they could have formed the
plans.
“I’m not saying Americans aren’t clever; they are ten times cleverer
than we are, as a nation; but I never met another who showed such a
degree of sagacity and foresight, such gifts of memory and mental
tenacity, such sheer force of intelligence, as there was behind
everything Manderson did in his money-making career. They called him
the ‘Napoleon of Wall Street’ often enough in the papers; but few
people knew so well as I did how much truth there was in the phrase. He
seemed never to forget a fact that might be of use to him, in the first
place; and he did systematically with the business facts that concerned
him what Napoleon did, as I have read, with military facts. He studied
them in special digests which were prepared for him at short intervals,
and which he always had at hand, so that he could take up his report on
coal or wheat or railways, or whatever it might be, in any unoccupied
moment. Then he could make a bolder and cleverer plan than any man of
them all. People got to know that Manderson would never do the obvious
thing, but they got no further; the thing he did do was almost always a
surprise, and much of his success flowed from that. The Street got
rattled, as they used to put it, when it was known that the old man was
out with his gun, and often his opponents seemed to surrender as easily
as Colonel Crockett’s coon in the story. The scheme I am going to
describe to you would have occupied most men long enough. Manderson
could have plotted the thing, down to the last detail, while he shaved
himself.
“I used to think that his strain of Indian blood, remote as it was,
might have something to do with the cunning and ruthlessness of the
man. Strangely enough, its existence was unknown to any one but himself
and me. It was when he asked me to apply my taste for genealogical work
to his own obscure family history that I made the discovery that he had
in him a share of the blood of the Iroquois chief Montour and his
French wife, a terrible woman who ruled the savage politics of the
tribes of the Wilderness two hundred years ago. The Mandersons were
active in the fur trade on the Pennsylvanian border in those days, and
more than one of them married Indian women. Other Indian blood than
Montour’s may have descended to Manderson, for all I can say, through
previous and subsequent unions; some of the wives’ antecedents were
quite untraceable, and there were so many generations of pioneering
before the whole country was brought under civilization. My researches
left me with the idea that there is a very great deal of the aboriginal
blood present in the genealogical make-up of the people of America, and
that it is very widely spread. The newer families have constantly
intermarried with the older, and so many of them had a strain of the
native in them—and were often rather proud of it, too, in those days.
But Manderson had the idea about the disgracefulness of mixed blood,
which grew much stronger, I fancy, with the rise of the negro question
after the war. He was thunderstruck at what I told him, and was anxious
to conceal it from every soul. Of course I never gave it away while he
lived, and I don’t think he supposed I would; but I have thought since
that his mind took a turn against me from that time onward. It happened
about a year before his death.”
“Had Manderson,” asked Mr. Cupples, so unexpectedly that the others
started, “any definable religious attitude?”
Marlowe considered a moment. “None that ever I heard of,” he said.
“Worship and prayer were quite unknown to him, so far as I could see,
and I never heard him mention religion. I should doubt if he had any
real sense of God at all, or if he was capable of knowing God through
the emotions. But I understood that as a child he had had a religious
upbringing with a strong moral side to it. His private life was, in the
usual limited sense, blameless. He was almost ascetic in his habits,
except as to smoking. I lived with him four years without ever knowing
him to tell a direct verbal falsehood, constantly as he used to
practise deceit in other forms. Can you understand the soul of a man
who never hesitated to take steps that would have the effect of
hoodwinking people, who would use every trick of the markets to
mislead, and who was at the same time scrupulous never to utter a
direct lie on the most insignificant matter? Manderson was like that,
and he was not the only one. I suppose you might compare the state of
mind to that of a soldier who is personally a truthful man, but who
will stick at nothing to deceive the enemy. The rules of the game allow
it; and the same may be said of business as many business men regard
it. Only with them it is always wartime.”
“It is a sad world,” observed Mr. Cupples.
“As you say,” Marlowe agreed. “Now I was saying that one could always
take Manderson’s word if he gave it in a definite form. The first time
I ever heard him utter a downright lie was on the night he died; and
hearing it, I believe, saved me from being hanged as his murderer.”
Marlowe stared at the light above his head and Trent moved impatiently
in his chair. “Before we come to that,” he said, “will you tell us
exactly on what footing you were with Manderson during the years you
were with him?”
“We were on very good terms from beginning to end,” answered Marlowe.
“Nothing like friendship—he was not a man for making friends—but the
best of terms as between a trusted employee and his chief. I went to
him as private secretary just after getting my degree at Oxford. I was
to have gone into my father’s business, where I am now, but my father
suggested that I should see the world for a year or two. So I took this
secretaryship, which seemed to promise a good deal of varied
experience, and I had let the year or two run on to four years before
the end came. The offer came to me through the last thing in the world
I should have put forward as a qualification for a salaried post, and
that was chess.”
At the word Trent struck his hands together with a muttered
exclamation. The others looked at him in surprise.
“Chess!” repeated Trent. “Do you know,” he said, rising and approaching
Marlowe, “what was the first thing I noted about you at our first
meeting? It was your eye, Mr. Marlowe. I couldn’t place it then, but I
know now where I had seen your eyes before. They were in the head of no
less a man than the great Nikolay Korchagin, with whom I once sat in
the same railway carriage for two days. I thought I should never forget
the chess eye after that, but I could not put a name to it when I saw
it in you. I beg your pardon,” he ended suddenly, resuming his
marmoreal attitude in his chair.
“I have played the game from my childhood, and with good players,” said
Marlowe simply. “It is an hereditary gift, if you can call it a gift.
At the University I was nearly as good as anybody there, and I gave
most of my brains to that and the O.U.D.S. and playing about generally.
At Oxford, as I dare say you know, inducements to amuse oneself at the
expense of one’s education are endless, and encouraged by the
authorities. Well, one day toward the end of my last term, Dr. Munro of
Queen’s, whom I had never defeated, sent for me. He told me that I
played a fairish game of chess. I said it was very good of him to say
so. Then he said, ‘They tell me you hunt, too.’ I said, ‘Now and then.’
He asked, ‘Is there anything else you can do?’ ‘No,’ I said, not much
liking the tone of the conversation—the old man generally succeeded in
putting people’s backs up. He grunted fiercely, and then told me that
enquiries were being made on behalf of a wealthy American man of
business who wanted an English secretary. Manderson was the name, he
said. He seemed never to have heard it before, which was quite
possible, as he never opened a newspaper and had not slept a night
outside the college for thirty years. If I could rub up my spelling—as
the old gentleman put it—I might have a good chance for the post, as
chess and riding and an Oxford education were the only indispensable
points.
“Well, I became Manderson’s secretary. For a long time I liked the
position greatly. When one is attached to an active American plutocrat
in the prime of life one need not have many dull moments. Besides, it
made me independent. My father had some serious business reverses about
that time, and I was glad to be able to do without an allowance from
him. At the end of the first year Manderson doubled my salary. ‘It’s
big money,’ he said, ‘but I guess I don’t lose.’ You see, by that time
I was doing a great deal more than accompany him on horseback in the
morning and play chess in the evening, which was mainly what he had
required. I was attending to his houses, his farm in Ohio, his shooting
in Maine, his horses, his cars, and his yacht. I had become a walking
railway-guide and an expert cigar-buyer. I was always learning
something.
“Well, now you understand what my position was in regard to Manderson
during the last two or three years of my connection with him. It was a
happy life for me on the whole. I was busy, my work was varied and
interesting; I had time to amuse myself too, and money to spend. At one
time I made a fool of myself about a girl, and that was not a happy
time; but it taught me to understand the great goodness of Mrs.
Manderson.” Marlowe inclined his head to Mr. Cupples as he said this.
“She may choose to tell you about it. As for her husband, he had never
varied in his attitude towards me, in spite of the change that came
over him in the last months of his life, as you know. He treated me
well and generously in his unsympathetic way, and I never had a feeling
that he was less than satisfied with his bargain—that was the sort of
footing we lived upon. And it was that continuance of his attitude
right up to the end that made the revelation so shocking when I was
suddenly shown, on the night on which he met his end, the depth of
crazy hatred of myself that was in Manderson’s soul.”
The eyes of Trent and Mr. Cupples met for an instant.
“You never suspected that he hated you before that time?” asked Trent;
and Mr. Cupples asked at the same moment, “To what did you attribute
it?”
“I never guessed until that night,” answered Marlowe, “that he had the
smallest ill-feeling toward me. How long it had existed I do not know.
I cannot imagine why it was there. I was forced to think, when I
considered the thing in those awful days after his death, that it was a
case of a madman’s delusion, that he believed me to be plotting against
him, as they so often do. Some such insane conviction must have been at
the root of it. But who can sound the abysses of a lunatic’s fancy? Can
you imagine the state of mind in which a man dooms himself to death
with the object of delivering some one he hates to the hangman?”
Mr. Cupples moved sharply in his chair. “You say Manderson was
responsible for his own death?” he asked.
Trent glanced at him with an eye of impatience, and resumed his intent
watch upon the face of Marlowe. In the relief of speech it was now less
pale and drawn.
“I do say so,” Marlowe answered concisely, and looked his questioner in
the face. Mr. Cupples nodded.
“Before we proceed to the elucidation of your statement,” observed the
old gentleman, in a tone of one discussing a point of abstract science,
“it may be remarked that the state of mind which you attribute to
Manderson—”
“Suppose we have the story first,” Trent interrupted, gently laying a
hand on Mr. Cupples’s arm. “You were telling us,” he went on, turning
to Marlowe, “how things stood between you and Manderson. Now will you
tell us the facts of what happened that night?”
Marlowe flushed at the barely perceptible emphasis which Trent laid
upon the word “facts”. He drew himself up.
“Bunner and myself dined with Mr. and Mrs. Manderson that Sunday
evening,” he began, speaking carefully. “It was just like other dinners
at which the four of us had been together. Manderson was taciturn and
gloomy, as we had latterly been accustomed to see him. We others kept a
conversation going. We rose from the table, I suppose, about nine. Mrs.
Manderson went to the drawing-room, and Bunner went up to the hotel to
see an acquaintance. Manderson asked me to come into the orchard behind
the house, saying he wished to have a talk. We paced up and down the
pathway there, out of earshot from the house, and Manderson, as he
smoked his cigar, spoke to me in his cool, deliberate way. He had never
seemed more sane, or more well-disposed to me. He said he wanted me to
do him an important service. There was a big thing on. It was a secret
affair. Bunner knew nothing of it, and the less I knew the better. He
wanted me to do exactly as he directed, and not bother my head about
reasons.
“This, I may say, was quite characteristic of Manderson’s method of
going to work. If at times he required a man to be a mere tool in his
hand, he would tell him so. He had used me in the same kind of way a
dozen times. I assured him he could rely on me, and said I was ready.
‘Right now?’ he asked. I said of course I was.
“He nodded, and said—I tell you his words as well as I can recollect
them—attend to this. ‘There is a man in England now who is in this
thing with me. He was to have left tomorrow for Paris by the noon boat
from Southampton to Havre. His name is George Harris—at least that’s
the name he is going by. Do you remember that name?’ ‘Yes,’ I said,
‘when I went up to London a week ago you asked me to book a cabin in
that name on the boat that goes tomorrow. I gave you the ticket.’ ‘Here
it is,’ he said, producing it from his pocket.
“‘Now,’ Manderson said to me, poking his cigar-butt at me with each
sentence in a way he used to have, ‘George Harris cannot leave England
tomorrow. I find I shall want him where he is. And I want Bunner where
he is. But somebody has got to go by that boat and take certain papers
to Paris. Or else my plan is going to fall to pieces. Will you go?’ I
said, ‘Certainly. I am here to obey orders.’
“He bit his cigar, and said, ‘That’s all right; but these are not just
ordinary orders. Not the kind of thing one can ask of a man in the
ordinary way of his duty to an employer. The point is this. The deal I
am busy with is one in which neither myself nor any one known to be
connected with me must appear as yet. That is vital. But these people I
am up against know your face as well as they know mine. If my secretary
is known in certain quarters to have crossed to Paris at this time and
to have interviewed certain people—and that would be known as soon as
it happened—then the game is up.’ He threw away his cigar-end and
looked at me questioningly.
“I didn’t like it much, but I liked failing Manderson at a pinch still
less. I spoke lightly. I said I supposed I should have to conceal my
identity, and I would do my best. I told him I used to be pretty good
at make-up.
“He nodded in approval. He said, ‘That’s good. I judged you would not
let me down.’ Then he gave me my instructions. ‘You take the car right
now,’ he said, ‘and start for Southampton—there’s no train that will
fit in. You’ll be driving all night. Barring accidents, you ought to
get there by six in the morning. But whenever you arrive, drive
straight to the Bedford Hotel and ask for George Harris. If he’s there,
tell him you are to go over instead of him, and ask him to telephone me
here. It is very important he should know that at the earliest moment
possible. But if he isn’t there, that means he has got the instructions
I wired today, and hasn’t gone to Southampton. In that case you don’t
want to trouble about him any more, but just wait for the boat. You can
leave the car at a garage under a fancy name—mine must not be given.
See about changing your appearance—I don’t care how, so you do it well.
Travel by the boat as George Harris. Let on to be anything you like,
but be careful, and don’t talk much to anybody. When you arrive, take a
room at the Hotel St Petersbourg. You will receive a note or message
there, addressed to George Harris, telling you where to take the wallet
I shall give you. The wallet is locked, and you want to take good care
of it. Have you got that all clear?’
“I repeated the instructions. I asked if I should return from Paris
after handing over the wallet. ‘As soon as you like,’ he said. ‘And
mind this—whatever happens, don’t communicate with me at any stage of
the journey. If you don’t get the message in Paris at once, just wait
until you do—days, if necessary. But not a line of any sort to me.
Understand? Now get ready as quick as you can. I’ll go with you in the
car a little way. Hurry.’
“That is, as far as I can remember, the exact substance of what
Manderson said to me that night. I went to my room, changed into day
clothes, and hastily threw a few necessaries into a kit-bag. My mind
was in a whirl, not so much at the nature of the business as at the
suddenness of it. I think I remember telling you the last time we
met”—he turned to Trent—“that Manderson shared the national fondness
for doings things in a story-book style. Other things being equal, he
delighted in a bit of mystification and melodrama, and I told myself
that this was Manderson all over. I hurried downstairs with my bag and
rejoined him in the library. He handed me a stout leather letter-case,
about eight inches by six, fastened with a strap with a lock on it. I
could just squeeze it into my side-pocket. Then I went to get the car
from the garage behind the house.
“As I was bringing it round to the front a disconcerting thought struck
me. I remembered that I had only a few shillings in my pocket.
“For some time past I had been keeping myself very short of cash, and
for this reason—which I tell you because it is a vital point, as you
shall see in a minute. I was living temporarily on borrowed money. I
had always been careless about money while I was with Manderson, and
being a gregarious animal I had made many friends, some of them
belonging to a New York set that had little to do but get rid of the
large incomes given them by their parents. Still, I was very well paid,
and I was too busy even to attempt to go very far with them in that
amusing occupation. I was still well on the right side of the ledger
until I began, merely out of curiosity, to play at speculation. It’s a
very old story—particularly in Wall Street. I thought it was easy; I
was lucky at first; I would always be prudent—and so on. Then came the
day when I went out of my depth. In one week I was separated from my
toll, as Bunner expressed it when I told him; and I owed money too. I
had had my lesson. Now in this pass I went to Manderson and told him
what I had done and how I stood. He heard me with a very grim smile,
and then, with the nearest approach to sympathy I had ever found in
him, he advanced me a sum on account of my salary that would clear me.
‘Don’t play the markets any more,’ was all he said.
“Now on that Sunday night Manderson knew that I was practically without
any money in the world. He knew that Bunner knew it too. He may have
known that I had even borrowed a little more from Bunner for
pocket-money until my next cheque was due, which, owing to my
anticipation of my salary, would not have been a large one. Bear this
knowledge of Manderson’s in mind.
“As soon as I had brought the car round I went into the library and
stated the difficulty to Manderson.
“What followed gave me, slight as it was, my first impression of
something odd being afoot. As soon as I mentioned the word ‘expenses’
his hand went mechanically to his left hip-pocket, where he always kept
a little case containing notes to the value of about a hundred pounds
in our money. This was such a rooted habit in him that I was astonished
to see him check the movement suddenly. Then, to my greater amazement,
he swore under his breath. I had never heard him do this before; but
Bunner had told me that of late he had often shown irritation in this
way when they were alone. ‘Has he mislaid his note-case?’ was the
question that flashed through my mind. But it seemed to me that it
could not affect his plan at all, and I will tell you why. The week
before, when I had gone up to London to carry out various commissions,
including the booking of a berth for Mr. George Harris, I had drawn a
thousand pounds for Manderson from his bankers, and all, at his
request, in notes of small amounts. I did not know what this unusually
large sum in cash was for, but I did know that the packets of notes
were in his locked desk in the library, or had been earlier in the day,
when I had seen him fingering them as he sat at the desk.
“But instead of turning to the desk, Manderson stood looking at me.
There was fury in his face, and it was a strange sight to see him
gradually master it until his eyes grew cold again. ‘Wait in the car,’
he said slowly. ‘I will get some money.’ We both went out, and as I was
getting into my overcoat in the hall I saw him enter the drawing-room,
which, you remember, was on the other side of the entrance hall.
“I stepped out on to the lawn before the house and smoked a cigarette,
pacing up and down. I was asking myself again and again where that
thousand pounds was; whether it was in the drawing-room, and if so,
why. Presently, as I passed one of the drawing-room windows, I noticed
Mrs Manderson’s shadow on the thin silk curtain. She was standing at
her escritoire. The window was open, and as I passed I heard her say,
‘I have not quite thirty pounds here. Will that be enough?’ I did not
hear the answer, but next moment Manderson’s shadow was mingled with
hers, and I heard the chink of money. Then, as he stood by the window,
and as I was moving away, these words of his came to my ears—and these
at least I can repeat exactly, for astonishment stamped them on my
memory—‘I’m going out now. Marlowe has persuaded me to go for a
moonlight run in the car. He is very urgent about it. He says it will
help me to sleep, and I guess he is right.’
I have told you that in the course of four years I had never once heard
Manderson utter a direct lie about anything, great or small. I believed
that I understood the man’s queer, skin-deep morality, and I could have
sworn that if he was firmly pressed with a question that could not be
evaded he would either refuse to answer or tell the truth. But what had
I just heard? No answer to any question. A voluntary statement, precise
in terms, that was utterly false. The unimaginable had happened. It was
almost as if some one I knew well, in a moment of closest sympathy, had
suddenly struck me in the face. The blood rushed to my head, and I
stood still on the grass. I stood there until I heard his step at the
front door, and then I pulled myself together and stepped quickly to
the car. He handed me a banker’s paper bag with gold and notes in it.
‘There’s more than you’ll want there,’ he said, and I pocketed it
mechanically.
“For a minute or so I stood discussing with Manderson—it was by one of
those _tours de force_ of which one’s mind is capable under great
excitement—points about the route of the long drive before me. I had
made the run several times by day, and I believe I spoke quite calmly
and naturally about it. But while I spoke my mind was seething in a
flood of suddenly born suspicion and fear. I did not know what I
feared. I simply felt fear, somehow—I did not know how—connected with
Manderson. My soul once opened to it, fear rushed in like an assaulting
army. I felt—I knew—that something was altogether wrong and sinister,
and I felt myself to be the object of it. Yet Manderson was surely no
enemy of mine. Then my thoughts reached out wildly for an answer to the
question why he had told that lie. And all the time the blood hammered
in my ears, ‘Where is that money?’ Reason struggled hard to set up the
suggestion that the two things were not necessarily connected. The
instinct of a man in danger would not listen to it. As we started, and
the car took the curve into the road, it was merely the unconscious
part of me that steered and controlled it, and that made occasional
empty remarks as we slid along in the moonlight. Within me was a
confusion and vague alarm that was far worse than any definite terror I
ever felt.
“About a mile from the house, you remember, one passed on one’s left a
gate, on the other side of which was the golf-course. There Manderson
said he would get down, and I stopped the car. ‘You’ve got it all
clear?’ he asked. With a sort of wrench I forced myself to remember and
repeat the directions given me. ‘That’s OK,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, then.
Stay with that wallet.’ Those were the last words I heard him speak, as
the car moved gently away from him.”
Marlowe rose from his chair and pressed his hands to his eyes. He was
flushed with the excitement of his own narrative, and there was in his
look a horror of recollection that held both the listeners silent. He
shook himself with a movement like a dog’s, and then, his hands behind
him, stood erect before the fire as he continued his tale.
“I expect you both know what the back-reflector of a motor car is.”
Trent nodded quickly, his face alive with anticipation; but Mr.
Cupples, who cherished a mild but obstinate prejudice against motor
cars, readily confessed to ignorance.
“It is a small round or more often rectangular mirror,” Marlowe
explained, “rigged out from the right side of the screen in front of
the driver, and adjusted in such a way that he can see, without turning
round, if anything is coming up behind to pass him. It is quite an
ordinary appliance, and there was one on this car. As the car moved on,
and Manderson ceased speaking behind me, I saw in that mirror a thing
that I wish I could forget.”
Marlowe was silent for a moment, staring at the wall before him.
“Manderson’s face,” he said in a low tone. “He was standing in the
road, looking after me, only a few yards behind, and the moonlight was
full on his face. The mirror happened to catch it for an instant.
“Physical habit is a wonderful thing. I did not shift hand or foot on
the controlling mechanism of the car. Indeed, I dare say it steadied me
against the shock to have myself braced to the business of driving. You
have read in books, no doubt, of hell looking out of a man’s eyes, but
perhaps you don’t know what a good metaphor that is. If I had not known
Manderson was there, I should not have recognized the face. It was that
of a madman, distorted, hideous in the imbecility of hate, the teeth
bared in a simian grin of ferocity and triumph; the eyes.... In the
little mirror I had this glimpse of the face alone. I saw nothing of
whatever gesture there may have been as that writhing white mask glared
after me. And I saw it only for a flash. The car went on, gathering
speed, and as it went, my brain, suddenly purged of the vapours of
doubt and perplexity, was as busy as the throbbing engine before my
feet. I knew.
“You say something in that manuscript of yours, Mr. Trent, about the
swift automatic way in which one’s ideas arrange themselves about some
new illuminating thought. It is quite true. The awful intensity of
ill-will that had flamed after me from those straining eyeballs poured
over my mind like a searchlight. I was thinking quite clearly now, and
almost coldly, for I knew what—at least I knew whom—I had to fear, and
instinct warned me that it was not a time to give room to the emotions
that were fighting to possess me. The man hated me insanely. That
incredible fact I suddenly knew. But the face had told me, it would
have told anybody, more than that. It was a face of hatred gratified,
it proclaimed some damnable triumph. It had gloated over me driving
away to my fate. This too was plain to me. And to what fate?
“I stopped the car. It had gone about two hundred and fifty yards, and
a sharp bend of the road hid the spot where I had set Manderson down. I
lay back in the seat and thought it out. Something was to happen to me.
In Paris? Probably—why else should I be sent there, with money and a
ticket? But why Paris? That puzzled me, for I had no melodramatic ideas
about Paris. I put the point aside for a moment. I turned to the other
things that had roused my attention that evening. The lie about my
‘persuading him to go for a moonlight run’. What was the intention of
that? Manderson, I said to myself, will be returning without me while I
am on my way to Southampton. What will he tell them about me? How
account for his returning alone, and without the car? As I asked myself
that sinister question there rushed into my mind the last of my
difficulties: ‘Where are the thousand pounds?’ And in the same instant
came the answer: ‘The thousand pounds are in my pocket.’
“I got up and stepped from the car. My knees trembled and I felt very
sick. I saw the plot now, as I thought. The whole of the story about
the papers and the necessity of their being taken to Paris was a blind.
With Manderson’s money about me, of which he would declare I had robbed
him, I was, to all appearance, attempting to escape from England, with
every precaution that guilt could suggest. He would communicate with
the police at once, and would know how to put them on my track. I
should be arrested in Paris, if I got so far, living under a false
name, after having left the car under a false name, disguised myself,
and travelled in a cabin which I had booked in advance, also under a
false name. It would be plainly the crime of a man without money, and
for some reason desperately in want of it. As for my account of the
affair, it would be too preposterous.
“As this ghastly array of incriminating circumstances rose up before
me, I dragged the stout letter-case from my pocket. In the intensity of
the moment, I never entertained the faintest doubt that I was right,
and that the money was there. It would easily hold the packets of
notes. But as I felt it and weighed it in my hands it seemed to me
there must be more than this. It was too bulky. What more was to be
laid to my charge? After all, a thousand pounds was not much to tempt a
man like myself to run the risk of penal servitude. In this new
agitation, scarcely knowing what I did, I caught the surrounding strap
in my fingers just above the fastening and tore the staple out of the
lock. Those locks, you know, are pretty flimsy as a rule.”
Here Marlowe paused and walked to the oaken desk before the window.
Opening a drawer full of miscellaneous objects, he took out a box of
odd keys, and selected a small one distinguished by a piece of pink
tape.
He handed it to Trent. “I keep that by me as a sort of morbid memento.
It is the key to the lock I smashed. I might have saved myself the
trouble, if I had known that this key was at that moment in the
left-hand side-pocket of my overcoat. Manderson must have slipped it
in, either while the coat was hanging in the hall or while he sat at my
side in the car. I might not have found the tiny thing there for weeks:
as a matter of fact I did find it two days after Manderson was dead,
but a police search would have found it in five minutes. And then I—I
with the case and its contents in my pocket, my false name and my sham
spectacles and the rest of it—I should have had no explanation to offer
but the highly convincing one that I didn’t know the key was there.”
Trent dangled the key by its tape idly. Then: “How do you know this is
the key of that case?” he asked quickly.
“I tried it. As soon as I found it I went up and fitted it to the lock.
I knew where I had left the thing. So do you, I think, Mr. Trent. Don’t
you?” There was a faint shade of mockery in Marlowe’s voice.
“_Touché_,” Trent said, with a dry smile. “I found a large empty
letter-case with a burst lock lying with other odds and ends on the
dressing-table in Manderson’s room. Your statement is that you put it
there. I could make nothing of it.” He closed his lips.
“There was no reason for hiding it,” said Marlowe. “But to get back to
my story. I burst the lock of the strap. I opened the case before one
of the lamps of the car. The first thing I found in it I ought to have
expected, of course, but I hadn’t.” He paused and glanced at Trent.
“It was—” began Trent mechanically, and then stopped himself. “Try not
to bring me in any more, if you don’t mind,” he said, meeting the
other’s eye. “I have complimented you already in that document on your
cleverness. You need not prove it by making the judge help you out with
your evidence.”
“All right,” agreed Marlowe. “I couldn’t resist just that much. If
_you_ had been in my place you would have known before I did that
Manderson’s little pocket-case was there. As soon as I saw it, of
course, I remembered his not having had it about him when I asked for
money, and his surprising anger. He had made a false step. He had
already fastened his note-case up with the rest of what was to figure
as my plunder, and placed it in my hands. I opened it. It contained a
few notes as usual, I didn’t count them.
“Tucked into the flaps of the big case in packets were the other notes,
just as I had brought them from London. And with them were two small
wash-leather bags, the look of which I knew well. My heart jumped
sickeningly again, for this, too, was utterly unexpected. In those bags
Manderson kept the diamonds in which he had been investing for some
time past. I didn’t open them; I could feel the tiny stones shifting
under the pressure of my fingers. How many thousands of pounds’ worth
there were there I have no idea. We had regarded Manderson’s
diamond-buying as merely a speculative fad. I believe now that it was
the earliest movement in the scheme for my ruin. For any one like
myself to be represented as having robbed him, there ought to be a
strong inducement shown. That had been provided with a vengeance.
“Now, I thought, I have the whole thing plain, and I must act. I saw
instantly what I must do. I had left Manderson about a mile from the
house. It would take him twenty minutes, fifteen if he walked fast, to
get back to the house, where he would, of course, immediately tell his
story of robbery, and probably telephone at once to the police in
Bishopsbridge. I had left him only five or six minutes ago; for all
that I have just told you was as quick thinking as I ever did. It would
be easy to overtake him in the car before he neared the house. There
would be an awkward interview. I set my teeth as I thought of it, and
all my fears vanished as I began to savour the gratification of telling
him my opinion of him. There are probably few people who ever
positively looked forward to an awkward interview with Manderson; but I
was mad with rage. My honour and my liberty had been plotted against
with detestable treachery. I did not consider what would follow the
interview. That would arrange itself.
“I had started and turned the car, I was already going fast toward
White Gables, when I heard the sound of a shot in front of me, to the
right.
“Instantly I stopped the car. My first wild thought was that Manderson
was shooting at me. Then I realized that the noise had not been close
at hand. I could see nobody on the road, though the moonlight flooded
it. I had left Manderson at a spot just round the corner that was now
about a hundred yards ahead of me. After half a minute or so, I started
again, and turned the corner at a slow pace. Then I stopped again with
a jar, and for a moment I sat perfectly still.
“Manderson lay dead a few steps from me on the turf within the gate,
clearly visible to me in the moonlight.”
Marlowe made another pause, and Trent, with a puckered brow, enquired,
“On the golf-course?”
“Obviously,” remarked Mr. Cupples. “The eighth green is just there.” He
had grown more and more interested as Marlowe went on, and was now
playing feverishly with his thin beard.
“On the green, quite close to the flag,” said Marlowe. “He lay on his
back, his arms were stretched abroad, his jacket and heavy overcoat
were open; the light shone hideously on his white face and his
shirt-front; it glistened on his bared teeth and one of the eyes. The
other... you saw it. The man was certainly dead. As I sat there
stunned, unable for the moment to think at all, I could even see a thin
dark line of blood running down from the shattered socket to the ear.
Close by lay his soft black hat, and at his feet a pistol.
“I suppose it was only a few seconds that I sat helplessly staring at
the body. Then I rose and moved to it with dragging feet; for now the
truth had come to me at last, and I realized the fullness of my
appalling danger. It was not only my liberty or my honour that the
maniac had undermined. It was death that he had planned for me; death
with the degradation of the scaffold. To strike me down with certainty,
he had not hesitated to end his life; a life which was, no doubt,
already threatened by a melancholic impulse to self-destruction; and
the last agony of the suicide had been turned, perhaps, to a devilish
joy by the thought that he dragged down my life with his. For as far as
I could see at the moment my situation was utterly hopeless. If it had
been desperate on the assumption that Manderson meant to denounce me as
a thief, what was it now that his corpse denounced me as a murderer?
“I picked up the revolver and saw, almost without emotion, that it was
my own. Manderson had taken it from my room, I suppose, while I was
getting out the car. At the same moment I remembered that it was by
Manderson’s suggestion that I had had it engraved with my initials, to
distinguish it from a precisely similar weapon which he had of his own.
“I bent over the body and satisfied myself that there was no life left
in it. I must tell you here that I did not notice, then or afterwards,
the scratches and marks on the wrists, which were taken as evidence of
a struggle with an assailant. But I have no doubt that Manderson
deliberately injured himself in this way before firing the shot; it was
a part of his plan.
“Though I never perceived that detail, however, it was evident enough
as I looked at the body that Manderson had not forgotten, in his last
act on earth, to tie me tighter by putting out of court the question of
suicide. He had clearly been at pains to hold the pistol at arm’s
length, and there was not a trace of smoke or of burning on the face.
The wound was absolutely clean, and was already ceasing to bleed
outwardly. I rose and paced the green, reckoning up the points in the
crushing case against me.
“I was the last to be seen with Manderson. I had persuaded him—so he
had lied to his wife and, as I afterwards knew, to the butler—to go
with me for the drive from which he never returned. My pistol had
killed him. It was true that by discovering his plot I had saved myself
from heaping up further incriminating facts—flight, concealment, the
possession of the treasure. But what need of them, after all? As I
stood, what hope was there? What could I do?”
Marlowe came to the table and leaned forward with his hands upon it. “I
want,” he said very earnestly, “to try to make you understand what was
in my mind when I decided to do what I did. I hope you won’t be bored,
because I must do it. You may both have thought I acted like a fool.
But after all the police never suspected me. I walked that green for a
quarter of an hour, I suppose, thinking the thing out like a game of
chess. I had to think ahead and think coolly; for my safety depended on
upsetting the plans of one of the longest-headed men who ever lived.
And remember that, for all I knew, there were details of the scheme
still hidden from me, waiting to crush me.
“Two plain courses presented themselves at once. Either of them, I
thought, would certainly prove fatal. I could, in the first place, do
the completely straightforward thing: take back the dead man, tell my
story, hand over the notes and diamonds, and trust to the saving power
of truth and innocence. I could have laughed as I thought of it. I saw
myself bringing home the corpse and giving an account of myself,
boggling with sheer shame over the absurdity of my wholly unsupported
tale, as I brought a charge of mad hatred and fiendish treachery
against a man who had never, as far as I knew, had a word to say
against me. At every turn the cunning of Manderson had forestalled me.
His careful concealment of such a hatred was a characteristic feature
of the stratagem; only a man of his iron self-restraint could have done
it. You can see for yourselves how every fact in my statement would
appear, in the shadow of Manderson’s death, a clumsy lie. I tried to
imagine myself telling such a story to the counsel for my defence. I
could see the face with which he would listen to it; I could read in
the lines of it his thought, that to put forward such an impudent
farrago would mean merely the disappearance of any chance there might
be of a commutation of the capital sentence.
“True, I had not fled. I had brought back the body; I had handed over
the property. But how did that help me? It would only suggest that I
had yielded to a sudden funk after killing my man, and had no nerve
left to clutch at the fruits of the crime; it would suggest, perhaps,
that I had not set out to kill but only to threaten, and that when I
found that I had done murder the heart went out of me. Turn it which
way I would, I could see no hope of escape by this plan of action.
“The second of the obvious things that I might do was to take the hint
offered by the situation, and to fly at once. That too must prove
fatal. There was the body. I had no time to hide it in such a way that
it would not be found at the first systematic search. But whatever I
should do with the body, Manderson’s not returning to the house would
cause uneasiness in two or three hours at most. Martin would suspect an
accident to the car, and would telephone to the police. At daybreak the
roads would be scoured and enquiries telegraphed in every direction.
The police would act on the possibility of there being foul play. They
would spread their nets with energy in such a big business as the
disappearance of Manderson. Ports and railway termini would be watched.
Within twenty-four hours the body would be found, and the whole country
would be on the alert for me—all Europe, scarcely less; I did not
believe there was a spot in Christendom where the man accused of
Manderson’s murder could pass unchallenged, with every newspaper crying
the fact of his death into the ears of all the world. Every stranger
would be suspect; every man, woman, and child would be a detective. The
car, wherever I should abandon it, would put people on my track. If I
had to choose between two utterly hopeless courses, I decided, I would
take that of telling the preposterous truth.
“But now I cast about desperately for some tale that would seem more
plausible than the truth. Could I save my neck by a lie? One after
another came into my mind; I need not trouble to remember them now.
Each had its own futilities and perils; but every one split upon the
fact—or what would be taken for fact—that I had induced Manderson to go
out with me, and the fact that he had never returned alive. Notion
after notion I swiftly rejected as I paced there by the dead man, and
doom seemed to settle down upon me more heavily as the moments passed.
Then a strange thought came to me.
“Several times I had repeated to myself half-consciously, as a sort of
refrain, the words in which I had heard Manderson tell his wife that I
had induced him to go out. ‘Marlowe has persuaded me to go for a
moonlight run in the car. He is very urgent about it.’ All at once it
struck me that, without meaning to do so, I was saying this in
Manderson’s voice.
“As you found out for yourself, Mr. Trent, I have a natural gift of
mimicry. I had imitated Manderson’s voice many times so successfully as
to deceive even Bunner, who had been much more in his company than his
own wife. It was, you remember”—Marlowe turned to Mr. Cupples—“a
strong, metallic voice, of great carrying power, so unusual as to make
it a very fascinating voice to imitate, and at the same time very easy.
I said the words carefully to myself again, like this—” he uttered
them, and Mr. Cupples opened his eyes in amazement—“and then I struck
my hand upon the low wall beside me. ‘Manderson never returned alive?’
I said aloud. ‘But Manderson _shall_ return alive!’”
“In thirty seconds the bare outline of the plan was complete in my
mind. I did not wait to think over details. Every instant was precious
now. I lifted the body and laid it on the floor of the car, covered
with a rug. I took the hat and the revolver. Not one trace remained on
the green, I believe, of that night’s work. As I drove back to White
Gables my design took shape before me with a rapidity and ease that
filled me with a wild excitement. I should escape yet! It was all so
easy if I kept my pluck. Putting aside the unusual and unlikely, I
should not fail. I wanted to shout, to scream!
“Nearing the house I slackened speed, and carefully reconnoitred the
road. Nothing was moving. I turned the car into the open field on the
other side of the road, about twenty paces short of the little door at
the extreme corner of the grounds. I brought it to rest behind a stack.
When, with Manderson’s hat on my head and the pistol in my pocket, I
had staggered with the body across the moonlit road and through that
door, I left much of my apprehension behind me. With swift action and
an unbroken nerve I thought I ought to succeed.”
With a long sigh Marlowe threw himself into one of the deep chairs at
the fireside and passed his handkerchief over his damp forehead. Each
of his hearers, too, drew a deep breath, but not audibly.
“Everything else you know,” he said. He took a cigarette from a box
beside him and lighted it. Trent watched the very slight quiver of the
hand that held the match, and privately noted that his own was at the
moment not so steady.
“The shoes that betrayed me to you,” pursued Marlowe after a short
silence, “were painful all the time I wore them, but I never dreamed
that they had given anywhere. I knew that no footstep of mine must
appear by any accident in the soft ground about the hut where I laid
the body, or between the hut and the house, so I took the shoes off and
crammed my feet into them as soon as I was inside the little door. I
left my own shoes, with my own jacket and overcoat, near the body,
ready to be resumed later. I made a clear footmark on the soft gravel
outside the French window, and several on the drugget round the carpet.
The stripping off of the outer clothing of the body, and the dressing
of it afterwards in the brown suit and shoes, and putting the things
into the pockets, was a horrible business; and getting the teeth out of
the mouth was worse. The head—but you don’t want to hear about it. I
didn’t feel it much at the time. I was wriggling my own head out of a
noose, you see. I wish I had thought of pulling down the cuffs, and had
tied the shoes more neatly. And putting the watch in the wrong pocket
was a bad mistake. It had all to be done so hurriedly.
“You were wrong, by the way, about the whisky. After one stiffish drink
I had no more; but I filled up a flask that was in the cupboard, and
pocketed it. I had a night of peculiar anxiety and effort in front of
me and I didn’t know how I should stand it. I had to take some once or
twice during the drive. Speaking of that, you give rather a generous
allowance of time in your document for doing that run by night. You say
that to get to Southampton by half-past six in that car, under the
conditions, a man must, even if he drove like a demon, have left
Marlstone by twelve at latest. I had not got the body dressed in the
other suit, with tie and watch-chain and so forth, until nearly ten
minutes past; and then I had to get to the car and start it going. But
then I don’t suppose any other man would have taken the risks I did in
that car at night, without a headlight. It turns me cold to think of it
now.
“There’s nothing much to say about what I did in the house. I spent the
time after Martin had left me in carefully thinking over the remaining
steps in my plan, while I unloaded and thoroughly cleaned the revolver
using my handkerchief and a penholder from the desk. I also placed the
packets of notes, the note-case, and the diamonds in the roll-top desk,
which I opened and relocked with Manderson’s key. When I went upstairs
it was a trying moment, for though I was safe from the eyes of Martin,
as he sat in his pantry, there was a faint possibility of somebody
being about on the bedroom floor. I had sometimes found the French maid
wandering about there when the other servants were in bed. Bunner, I
knew, was a deep sleeper. Mrs. Manderson, I had gathered from things I
had heard her say, was usually asleep by eleven; I had thought it
possible that her gift of sleep had helped her to retain all her beauty
and vitality in spite of a marriage which we all knew was an unhappy
one. Still it was uneasy work mounting the stairs, and holding myself
ready to retreat to the library again at the least sound from above.
But nothing happened.
“The first thing I did on reaching the corridor was to enter my room
and put the revolver and cartridges back in the case. Then I turned off
the light and went quietly into Manderson’s room.
“What I had to do there you know. I had to take off the shoes and put
them outside the door, leave Manderson’s jacket, waistcoat, trousers,
and black tie, after taking everything out of the pockets, select a
suit and tie and shoes for the body, and place the dental plate in the
bowl, which I moved from the washing-stand to the bedside, leaving
those ruinous finger-marks as I did so. The marks on the drawer must
have been made when I shut it after taking out the tie. Then I had to
lie down in the bed and tumble it. You know all about it—all except my
state of mind, which you couldn’t imagine and I couldn’t describe.
“The worst came when I had hardly begun my operations: the moment when
Mrs Manderson spoke from the room where I supposed her asleep. I was
prepared for it happening; it was a possibility; but I nearly lost my
nerve all the same. However....
“By the way, I may tell you this: in the extremely unlikely contingency
of Mrs. Manderson remaining awake, and so putting out of the question
my escape by way of her window, I had planned simply to remain where I
was a few hours, and then, not speaking to her, to leave the house
quickly and quietly by the ordinary way. Martin would have been in bed
by that time. I might have been heard to leave, but not seen. I should
have done just as I had planned with the body, and then made the best
time I could in the car to Southampton. The difference would have been
that I couldn’t have furnished an unquestionable alibi by turning up at
the hotel at 6.30. I should have made the best of it by driving
straight to the docks, and making my ostentatious enquiries there. I
could in any case have got there long before the boat left at noon. I
couldn’t see that anybody could suspect me of the supposed murder in
any case; but if any one had, and if I hadn’t arrived until ten
o’clock, say, I shouldn’t have been able to answer, ‘It is impossible
for me to have got to Southampton so soon after shooting him.’ I should
simply have had to say I was delayed by a breakdown after leaving
Manderson at half-past ten, and challenged any one to produce any fact
connecting me with the crime. They couldn’t have done it. The pistol,
left openly in my room, might have been used by anybody, even if it
could be proved that that particular pistol was used. Nobody could
reasonably connect me with the shooting so long as it was believed that
it was Manderson who had returned to the house. The suspicion could
not, I was confident, enter any one’s mind. All the same, I wanted to
introduce the element of absolute physical impossibility; I knew I
should feel ten times as safe with that. So when I knew from the sound
of her breathing that Mrs. Manderson was asleep again, I walked quickly
across her room in my stocking feet, and was on the grass with my
bundle in ten seconds. I don’t think I made the least noise. The
curtain before the window was of soft, thick stuff and didn’t rustle,
and when I pushed the glass doors further open there was not a sound.”
“Tell me,” said Trent, as the other stopped to light a new cigarette,
“why you took the risk of going through Mrs. Manderson’s room to escape
from the house. I could see when I looked into the thing on the spot
why it had to be on that side of the house; there was a danger of being
seen by Martin, or by some servant at a bedroom window, if you got out
by a window on one of the other sides. But there were three unoccupied
rooms on that side; two spare bedrooms and Mrs. Manderson’s
sitting-room. I should have thought it would have been safer, after you
had done what was necessary to your plan in Manderson’s room, to leave
it quietly and escape through one of those three rooms.... The fact
that you went through her window, you know,” he added coldly, “would
have suggested, if it became known, various suspicions in regard to the
lady herself. I think you understand me.”
Marlowe turned upon him with a glowing face. “And I think you will
understand me, Mr. Trent,” he said in a voice that shook a little,
“when I say that if such a possibility had occurred to me then, I would
have taken any risk rather than make my escape by that way.... Oh
well!” he went on more coolly, “I suppose that to any one who didn’t
know her, the idea of her being privy to her husband’s murder might not
seem so indescribably fatuous. Forgive the expression.” He looked
attentively at the burning end of his cigarette, studiously unconscious
of the red flag that flew in Trent’s eyes for an instant at his words
and the tone of them.
That emotion, however, was conquered at once. “Your remark is perfectly
just,” Trent said with answering coolness. “I can quite believe, too,
that at the time you didn’t think of the possibility I mentioned. But
surely, apart from that, it would have been safer to do as I said; go
by the window of an unoccupied room.”
“Do you think so?” said Marlowe. “All I can say is, I hadn’t the nerve
to do it. I tell you, when I entered Manderson’s room I shut the door
of it on more than half my terrors. I had the problem confined before
me in a closed space, with only one danger in it, and that a known
danger: the danger of Mrs. Manderson. The thing was almost done; I had
only to wait until she was certainly asleep after her few moments of
waking up, for which, as I told you, I was prepared as a possibility.
Barring accidents, the way was clear. But now suppose that I, carrying
Manderson’s clothes and shoes, had opened that door again and gone in
my shirt-sleeves and socks to enter one of the empty rooms. The
moonlight was flooding the corridor through the end window. Even if my
face was concealed, nobody could mistake my standing figure for
Manderson’s. Martin might be going about the house in his silent way.
Bunner might come out of his bedroom. One of the servants who were
supposed to be in bed might come round the corner from the other
passage—I had found Célestine prowling about quite as late as it was
then. None of these things was very likely; but they were all too
likely for me. They were uncertainties. Shut off from the household in
Manderson’s room I knew exactly what I had to face. As I lay in my
clothes in Manderson’s bed and listened for the almost inaudible
breathing through the open door, I felt far more ease of mind, terrible
as my anxiety was, than I had felt since I saw the dead body on the
turf. I even congratulated myself that I had had the chance, through
Mrs Manderson’s speaking to me, of tightening one of the screws in my
scheme by repeating the statement about my having been sent to
Southampton.”
Marlowe looked at Trent, who nodded as who should say that his point
was met.
“As for Southampton,” pursued Marlowe, “you know what I did when I got
there, I have no doubt. I had decided to take Manderson’s story about
the mysterious Harris and act it out on my own lines. It was a
carefully prepared lie, better than anything I could improvise. I even
went so far as to get through a trunk call to the hotel at Southampton
from the library before starting, and ask if Harris was there. As I
expected, he wasn’t.”
“Was that why you telephoned?” Trent enquired quickly.
“The reason for telephoning was to get myself into an attitude in which
Martin couldn’t see my face or anything but the jacket and hat, yet
which was a natural and familiar attitude. But while I was about it, it
was obviously better to make a genuine call. If I had simply pretended
to be telephoning, the people at the exchange could have told at once
that there hadn’t been a call from White Gables that night.”
“One of the first things I did was to make that enquiry,” said Trent.
“That telephone call, and the wire you sent from Southampton to the
dead man to say Harris hadn’t turned up, and you were returning—I
particularly appreciated both those.”
A constrained smile lighted Marlowe’s face for a moment. “I don’t know
that there’s anything more to tell. I returned to Marlstone, and faced
your friend the detective with such nerve as I had left. The worst was
when I heard you had been put on the case—no, that wasn’t the worst.
The worst was when I saw you walk out of the shrubbery the next day,
coming away from the shed where I had laid the body. For one ghastly
moment I thought you were going to give me in charge on the spot. Now
I’ve told you everything, you don’t look so terrible.”
He closed his eyes, and there was a short silence. Then Trent got
suddenly to his feet.
“Cross-examination?” enquired Marlowe, looking at him gravely.
“Not at all,” said Trent, stretching his long limbs. “Only stiffness of
the legs. I don’t want to ask any questions. I believe what you have
told us. I don’t believe it simply because I always liked your face, or
because it saves awkwardness, which are the most usual reasons for
believing a person, but because my vanity will have it that no man
could lie to me steadily for an hour without my perceiving it. Your
story is an extraordinary one; but Manderson was an extraordinary man,
and so are you. You acted like a lunatic in doing what you did; but I
quite agree with you that if you had acted like a sane man you wouldn’t
have had the hundredth part of a dog’s chance with a judge and jury.
One thing is beyond dispute on any reading of the affair: you are a man
of courage.”
The colour rushed into Marlowe’s face, and he hesitated for words.
Before he could speak Mr. Cupples arose with a dry cough.
“For my part,” he said, “I never supposed you guilty for a moment.”
Marlowe turned to him in grateful amazement, Trent with an incredulous
stare. “But,” pursued Mr. Cupples, holding up his hand, “there is one
question which I should like to put.”
Marlowe bowed, saying nothing.
“Suppose,” said Mr. Cupples, “that some one else had been suspected of
the crime and put upon trial. What would you have done?”
“I think my duty was clear. I should have gone with my story to the
lawyers for the defence, and put myself in their hands.”
Trent laughed aloud. Now that the thing was over, his spirits were
rapidly becoming ungovernable. “I can see their faces!” he said. “As a
matter of fact, though, nobody else was ever in danger. There wasn’t a
shred of evidence against any one. I looked up Murch at the Yard this
morning, and he told me he had come round to Bunner’s view, that it was
a case of revenge on the part of some American black-hand gang. So
there’s the end of the Manderson case. Holy, suffering Moses! _What_ an
ass a man can make of himself when he thinks he’s being preternaturally
clever!” He seized the bulky envelope from the table and stuffed it
into the heart of the fire. “There’s for you, old friend! For want of
you the world’s course will not fail. But look here! It’s getting
late—nearly seven, and Cupples and I have an appointment at half-past.
We must go. Mr. Marlowe, goodbye.” He looked into the other’s eyes. “I
am a man who has worked hard to put a rope round your neck. Considering
the circumstances, I don’t know whether you will blame me. Will you
shake hands?”
Chapter XVI.
The Last Straw
“What was that you said about our having an appointment at half-past
seven?” asked Mr. Cupples as the two came out of the great gateway of
the pile of flats. “Have we such an appointment?”
“Certainly we have,” replied Trent. “You are dining with me. Only one
thing can properly celebrate this occasion, and that is a dinner for
which I pay. No, no! I asked you first. I have got right down to the
bottom of a case that must be unique—a case that has troubled even my
mind for over a year—and if that isn’t a good reason for standing a
dinner, I don’t know what is. Cupples, we will not go to my club. This
is to be a festival, and to be seen in a London club in a state of
pleasurable emotion is more than enough to shatter any man’s career.
Besides that, the dinner there is always the same, or, at least, they
always make it taste the same, I know not how. The eternal dinner at my
club hath bored millions of members like me, and shall bore; but
tonight let the feast be spread in vain, so far as we are concerned. We
will not go where the satraps throng the hall. We will go to
Sheppard’s.”
“Who is Sheppard?” asked Mr. Cupples mildly, as they proceeded up
Victoria Street. His companion went with an unnatural lightness, and a
policeman, observing his face, smiled indulgently at a look of
happiness which he could only attribute to alcohol.
“Who is Sheppard?” echoed Trent with bitter emphasis. “That question,
if you will pardon me for saying so, Cupples, is thoroughly
characteristic of the spirit of aimless enquiry prevailing in this
restless day. I suggest our dining at Sheppard’s, and instantly you
fold your arms and demand, in a frenzy of intellectual pride, to know
who Sheppard is before you will cross the threshold of Sheppard’s. I am
not going to pander to the vices of the modern mind. Sheppard’s is a
place where one can dine. I do not know Sheppard. It never occurred to
me that Sheppard existed. Probably he is a myth of totemistic origin.
All I know is that you can get a bit of saddle of mutton at Sheppard’s
that has made many an American visitor curse the day that Christopher
Columbus was born.... Taxi!”
A cab rolled smoothly to the kerb, and the driver received his
instructions with a majestic nod.
“Another reason I have for suggesting Sheppard’s,” continued Trent,
feverishly lighting a cigarette, “is that I am going to be married to
the most wonderful woman in the world. I trust the connection of ideas
is clear.”
“You are going to marry Mabel!” cried Mr. Cupples. “My dear friend,
what good news this is! Shake hands, Trent; this is glorious! I
congratulate you both from the bottom of my heart. And may I say—I
don’t want to interrupt your flow of high spirits, which is very
natural indeed, and I remember being just the same in similar
circumstances long ago—but may I say how earnestly I have hoped for
this? Mabel has seen so much unhappiness, yet she is surely a woman
formed in the great purpose of humanity to be the best influence in the
life of a good man. But I did not know her mind as regarded yourself.
_Your_ mind I have known for some time,” Mr. Cupples went on, with a
twinkle in his eye that would have done credit to the worldliest of
creatures. “I saw it at once when you were both dining at my house, and
you sat listening to Professor Peppmuller and looking at her. Some of
us older fellows have our wits about us still, my dear boy.”
“Mabel says she knew it before that,” replied Trent, with a slightly
crestfallen air. “And I thought I was acting the part of a person who
was not mad about her to the life. Well, I never was any good at
dissembling. I shouldn’t wonder if even old Peppmuller noticed
something through his double convex lenses. But however crazy I may
have been as an undeclared suitor,” he went on with a return to
vivacity, “I am going to be much worse now. As for your
congratulations, thank you a thousand times, because I know you mean
them. You are the sort of uncomfortable brute who would pull a face
three feet long if you thought we were making a mistake. By the way, I
can’t help being an ass tonight; I’m obliged to go on blithering. You
must try to bear it. Perhaps it would be easier if I sang you a
song—one of your old favourites. What was that song you used always to
be singing? Like this, wasn’t it?” He accompanied the following stave
with a dexterous clog-step on the floor of the cab:
“There was an old nigger, and he had a wooden leg.
He had no tobacco, no tobacco could he beg.
Another old nigger was as cunning as a fox,
And he always had tobacco in his old tobacco-box.
Now for the chorus!
Yes, he always had tobacco in his old tobacco-box.
But you’re not singing. I thought you would be making the welkin ring.”
“I never sang that song in my life,” protested Mr. Cupples. “I never
heard it before.”
“Are you sure?” enquired Trent doubtfully. “Well, I suppose I must take
your word for it. It is a beautiful song, anyhow: not the whole
warbling grove in concert heard can beat it. Somehow it seems to
express my feelings at the present moment as nothing else could; it
rises unbidden to the lips. Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth
speaketh, as the Bishop of Bath and Wells said when listening to a
speech of Mr. Balfour’s.”
“When was that?” asked Mr. Cupples.
“On the occasion,” replied Trent, “of the introduction of the
Compulsory Notification of Diseases of Poultry Bill, which ill-fated
measure you of course remember. Hullo!” he broke off, as the cab rushed
down a side street and swung round a corner into a broad and populous
thoroughfare, “we’re there already”. The cab drew up.
“Here we are,” said Trent, as he paid the man, and led Mr. Cupples into
a long, panelled room set with many tables and filled with a hum of
talk. “This is the house of fulfilment of craving, this is the bower
with the roses around it. I see there are three bookmakers eating pork
at my favourite table. We will have that one in the opposite corner.”
He conferred earnestly with a waiter, while Mr. Cupples, in a pleasant
meditation, warmed himself before the great fire. “The wine here,”
Trent resumed, as they seated themselves, “is almost certainly made out
of grapes. What shall we drink?”
Mr. Cupples came out of his reverie. “I think,” he said, “I will have
milk and soda water.”
“Speak lower!” urged Trent. “The head-waiter has a weak heart, and
might hear you. Milk and soda water! Cupples, you may think you have a
strong constitution, and I don’t say you have not, but I warn you that
this habit of mixing drinks has been the death of many a robuster man
than you. Be wise in time. Fill high the bowl with Samian wine, leave
soda to the Turkish hordes. Here comes our food.” He gave another order
to the waiter, who ranged the dishes before them and darted away. Trent
was, it seemed, a respected customer. “I have sent,” he said, “for wine
that I know, and I hope you will try it. If you have taken a vow, then
in the name of all the teetotal saints drink water, which stands at
your elbow, but don’t seek a cheap notoriety by demanding milk and
soda.”
“I have never taken any pledge,” said Mr. Cupples, examining his mutton
with a favourable eye. “I simply don’t care about wine. I bought a
bottle once and drank it to see what it was like, and it made me ill.
But very likely it was bad wine. I will taste some of yours, as it is
your dinner, and I do assure you, my dear Trent, I should like to do
something unusual to show how strongly I feel on the present occasion.
I have not been so delighted for many years. To think,” he reflected
aloud as the waiter filled his glass, “of the Manderson mystery
disposed of, the innocent exculpated, and your own and Mabel’s
happiness crowned—all coming upon me together! I drink to you, my dear
friend.” And Mr. Cupples took a very small sip of the wine.
“You have a great nature,” said Trent, much moved. “Your outward
semblance doth belie your soul’s immensity. I should have expected as
soon to see an elephant conducting at the opera as you drinking my
health. Dear Cupples! May his beak retain ever that delicate
rose-stain!—No, curse it all!” he broke out, surprising a shade of
discomfort that flitted over his companion’s face as he tasted the wine
again. “I have no business to meddle with your tastes. I apologize. You
shall have what you want, even if it causes the head-waiter to perish
in his pride.”
When Mr. Cupples had been supplied with his monastic drink, and the
waiter had retired, Trent looked across the table with significance.
“In this babble of many conversations,” he said, “we can speak as
freely as if we were on a bare hillside. The waiter is whispering soft
nothings into the ear of the young woman at the pay-desk. We are alone.
What do you think of that interview of this afternoon?” He began to
dine with an appetite.
Without pausing in the task of cutting his mutton into very small
pieces Mr. Cupples replied: “The most curious feature of it, in my
judgement, was the irony of the situation. We both held the clue to
that mad hatred of Manderson’s which Marlowe found so mysterious. We
knew of his jealous obsession; which knowledge we withheld, as was very
proper, if only in consideration of Mabel’s feelings. Marlowe will
never know of what he was suspected by that person. Strange! Nearly all
of us, I venture to think, move unconsciously among a network of
opinions, often quite erroneous, which other people entertain about us.
I remember, for instance, discovering quite by accident some years ago
that a number of people of my acquaintance believed me to have been
secretly received into the Church of Rome. This absurd fiction was
based upon the fact, which in the eyes of many appeared conclusive,
that I had expressed myself in talk as favouring the plan of a weekly
abstinence from meat. Manderson’s belief in regard to his secretary
probably rested upon a much slighter ground. It was Mr Bunner, I think
you said, who told you of his rooted and apparently hereditary temper
of suspicious jealousy.... With regard to Marlowe’s story, it appeared
to me entirely straightforward, and not, in its essential features,
especially remarkable, once we have admitted, as we surely must, that
in the case of Manderson we have to deal with a more or less disordered
mind.”
Trent laughed loudly. “I confess,” he said, “that the affair struck me
as a little unusual.
“Only in the development of the details,” argued Mr. Cupples. “What is
there abnormal in the essential facts? A madman conceives a crazy
suspicion; he hatches a cunning plot against his fancied injurer; it
involves his own destruction. Put thus, what is there that any man with
the least knowledge of the ways of lunatics would call remarkable? Turn
now to Marlowe’s proceedings. He finds himself in a perilous position
from which, though he is innocent, telling the truth will not save him.
Is that an unheard-of situation? He escapes by means of a bold and
ingenious piece of deception. That seems to me a thing that might
happen every day, and probably does so.” He attacked his now
unrecognizable mutton.
“I should like to know,” said Trent, after an alimentary pause in the
conversation, “whether there is anything that ever happened on the face
of the earth that you could not represent as quite ordinary and
commonplace by such a line of argument as that.”
A gentle smile illuminated Mr. Cupples’s face. “You must not suspect me
of empty paradox,” he said. “My meaning will become clearer, perhaps,
if I mention some things which do appear to me essentially remarkable.
Let me see .... Well, I would call the life history of the liver-fluke,
which we owe to the researches of Poulton, an essentially remarkable
thing.”
“I am unable to argue the point,” replied Trent. “Fair science may have
smiled upon the liver-fluke’s humble birth, but I never even heard it
mentioned.”
“It is not, perhaps, an appetizing subject,” said Mr. Cupples
thoughtfully, “and I will not pursue it. All I mean is, my dear Trent,
that there are really remarkable things going on all round us if we
will only see them; and we do our perceptions no credit in regarding as
remarkable only those affairs which are surrounded with an accumulation
of sensational detail.”
Trent applauded heartily with his knife-handle on the table, as Mr.
Cupples ceased and refreshed himself with milk and soda water. “I have
not heard you go on like this for years,” he said. “I believe you must
be almost as much above yourself as I am. It is a bad case of the
unrest which men miscall delight. But much as I enjoy it, I am not
going to sit still and hear the Manderson affair dismissed as
commonplace. You may say what you like, but the idea of impersonating
Manderson in those circumstances was an extraordinarily ingenious
idea.”
“Ingenious—certainly!” replied Mr. Cupples. “Extraordinarily so—no! In
those circumstances (your own words) it was really not strange that it
should occur to a clever man. It lay almost on the surface of the
situation. Marlowe was famous for his imitation of Manderson’s voice;
he had a talent for acting; he had a chess-player’s mind; he knew the
ways of the establishment intimately. I grant you that the idea was
brilliantly carried out; but everything favoured it. As for the
essential idea, I do not place it, as regards ingenuity, in the same
class with, for example, the idea of utilizing the force of recoil in a
discharged firearm to actuate the mechanism of ejecting and reloading.
I do, however, admit, as I did at the outset, that in respect of
details the case had unusual features. It developed a high degree of
complexity.”
“Did it really strike you in that way?” enquired Trent with desperate
sarcasm.
“The affair became complicated,” went on Mr. Cupples unmoved, “because
after Marlowe’s suspicions were awakened, a second subtle mind came in
to interfere with the plans of the first. That sort of duel often
happens in business and politics, but less frequently, I imagine, in
the world of crime.”
“I should say never,” Trent replied; “and the reason is, that even the
cleverest criminals seldom run to strategic subtlety. When they do,
they don’t get caught, since clever policemen have if possible less
strategic subtlety than the ordinary clever criminal. But that rather
deep quality seems very rarely to go with the criminal make-up. Look at
Crippen. He was a very clever criminal as they go. He solved the
central problem of every clandestine murder, the disposal of the body,
with extreme neatness. But how far did he see through the game? The
criminal and the policeman are often swift and bold tacticians, but
neither of them is good for more than a quite simple plan. After all,
it’s a rare faculty in any walk of life.”
“One disturbing reflection was left on my mind,” said Mr. Cupples, who
seemed to have had enough of abstractions for the moment, “by what we
learned today. If Marlowe had suspected nothing and walked into the
trap, he would almost certainly have been hanged. Now how often may not
a plan to throw the guilt of murder on an innocent person have been
practised successfully? There are, I imagine, numbers of cases in which
the accused, being found guilty on circumstantial evidence, have died
protesting their innocence. I shall never approve again of a
death-sentence imposed in a case decided upon such evidence.”
“I never have done so, for my part,” said Trent. “To hang in such cases
seems to me flying in the face of the perfectly obvious and sound
principle expressed in the saying that ‘you never can tell’. I agree
with the American jurist who lays it down that we should not hang a
yellow dog for stealing jam on circumstantial evidence, not even if he
has jam all over his nose. As for attempts being made by malevolent
persons to fix crimes upon innocent men, of course it is constantly
happening. It’s a marked feature, for instance, of all systems of rule
by coercion, whether in Ireland or Russia or India or Korea; if the
police cannot get hold of a man they think dangerous by fair means,
they do it by foul. But there’s one case in the State Trials that is
peculiarly to the point, because not only was it a case of fastening a
murder on innocent people, but the plotter did in effect what Manderson
did; he gave up his own life in order to secure the death of his
victims. Probably you have heard of the Campden Case.”
Mr. Cupples confessed his ignorance and took another potato.
“John Masefield has written a very remarkable play about it,” said
Trent, “and if it ever comes on again in London, you should go and see
it, if you like having the fan-tods. I have often seen women weeping in
an undemonstrative manner at some slab of oleo-margarine sentiment in
the theatre. By George! what everlasting smelling-bottle hysterics they
ought to have if they saw that play decently acted! Well, the facts
were that John Perry accused his mother and brother of murdering a man,
and swore he had helped them to do it. He told a story full of
elaborate detail, and had an answer to everything, except the curious
fact that the body couldn’t be found; but the judge, who was probably
drunk at the time—this was in Restoration days—made nothing of that.
The mother and brother denied the accusation. All three prisoners were
found guilty and hanged, purely on John’s evidence. Two years after,
the man whom they were hanged for murdering came back to Campden. He
had been kidnapped by pirates and taken to sea. His disappearance had
given John his idea. The point about John is, that his including
himself in the accusation, which amounted to suicide, was the thing in
his evidence which convinced everybody of its truth. It was so obvious
that no man would do himself to death to get somebody else hanged. Now
that is exactly the answer which the prosecution would have made if
Marlowe had told the truth. Not one juryman in a million would have
believed in the Manderson plot.”
Mr. Cupples mused upon this a few moments. “I have not your
acquaintance with that branch of history,” he said at length; “in fact,
I have none at all. But certain recollections of my own childhood
return to me in connection with this affair. We know from the things
Mabel told you what may be termed the spiritual truth underlying this
matter; the insane depth of jealous hatred which Manderson concealed.
We can understand that he was capable of such a scheme. But as a rule
it is in the task of penetrating to the spiritual truth that the
administration of justice breaks down. Sometimes that truth is
deliberately concealed, as in Manderson’s case. Sometimes, I think, it
is concealed because simple people are actually unable to express it,
and nobody else divines it. When I was a lad in Edinburgh the whole
country went mad about the Sandyford Place murder.”
Trent nodded. “Mrs. M’Lachlan’s case. She was innocent right enough.”
“My parents thought so,” said Mr. Cupples. “I thought so myself when I
became old enough to read and understand that excessively sordid story.
But the mystery of the affair was so dark, and the task of getting at
the truth behind the lies told by everybody concerned proved so
hopeless, that others were just as fully convinced of the innocence of
old James Fleming. All Scotland took sides on the question. It was the
subject of debates in Parliament. The press divided into two camps, and
raged with a fury I have never seen equalled. Yet it is obvious, is it
not? for I see you have read of the case—that if the spiritual truth
about that old man could have been known there would have been very
little room for doubt in the matter. If what some surmised about his
disposition was true, he was quite capable of murdering Jessie
M’Pherson and then casting the blame on the poor feeble-minded creature
who came so near to suffering the last penalty of the law.”
“Even a commonplace old dotard like Fleming can be an unfathomable
mystery to all the rest of the human race,” said Trent, “and most of
all in a court of justice. The law certainly does not shine when it
comes to a case requiring much delicacy of perception. It goes wrong
easily enough over the Flemings of this world. As for the people with
temperaments who get mixed up in legal proceedings, they must feel as
if they were in a forest of apes, whether they win or lose. Well, I
dare say it’s good for their sort to have their noses rubbed in reality
now and again. But what would twelve red-faced realities in a jury-box
have done to Marlowe? His story would, as he says, have been a great
deal worse than no defence at all. It’s not as if there were a single
piece of evidence in support of his tale. Can’t you imagine how the
prosecution would tear it to rags? Can’t you see the judge simply
taking it in his stride when it came to the summing up? And the
jury—you’ve served on juries, I expect—in their room, snorting with
indignation over the feebleness of the lie, telling each other it was
the clearest case they ever heard of, and that they’d have thought
better of him if he hadn’t lost his nerve at the crisis, and had
cleared off with the swag as he intended. Imagine yourself on that
jury, not knowing Marlowe, and trembling with indignation at the record
unrolled before you—cupidity, murder, robbery, sudden cowardice,
shameless, impenitent, desperate lying! Why, you and I believed him to
be guilty until—”
“I beg your pardon! I beg your pardon!” interjected Mr. Cupples, laying
down his knife and fork. “I was most careful, when we talked it all
over the other night, to say nothing indicating such a belief. _I_ was
always certain that he was innocent.”
“You said something of the sort at Marlowe’s just now. I wondered what
on earth you could mean. Certain that he was innocent! How can you be
certain? You are generally more careful about terms than that,
Cupples.”
“I said ‘certain’,” Mr. Cupples repeated firmly.
Trent shrugged his shoulders. “If you really were, after reading my
manuscript and discussing the whole thing as we did,” he rejoined,
“then I can only say that you must have totally renounced all trust in
the operations of the human reason; an attitude which, while it is bad
Christianity and also infernal nonsense, is oddly enough bad Positivism
too, unless I misunderstand that system. Why, man—”
“Let me say a word,” Mr. Cupples interposed again, folding his hands
above his plate. “I assure you I am far from abandoning reason. I am
certain he is innocent, and I always was certain of it, because of
something that I know, and knew from the very beginning. You asked me
just now to imagine myself on the jury at Marlowe’s trial. That would
be an unprofitable exercise of the mental powers, because I know that I
should be present in another capacity. I should be in the witness-box,
giving evidence for the defence. You said just now, ‘If there were a
single piece of evidence in support of his tale.’ There is, and it is
my evidence. And,” he added quietly, “it is conclusive.” He took up his
knife and fork and went contentedly on with his dinner.
The pallor of sudden excitement had turned Trent to marble while Mr
Cupples led laboriously up to this statement. At the last word the
blood rushed to his face again, and he struck the table with an
unnatural laugh. “It can’t be!” he exploded. “It’s something you
fancied, something you dreamed after one of those debauches of soda and
milk. You can’t really mean that all the time I was working on the case
down there you knew Marlowe was innocent.”
Mr. Cupples, busy with his last mouthful, nodded brightly. He made an
end of eating, wiped his sparse moustache, and then leaned forward over
the table. “It’s very simple,” he said. “I shot Manderson myself.”
“I am afraid I startled you,” Trent heard the voice of Mr. Cupples say.
He forced himself out of his stupefaction like a diver striking upward
for the surface, and with a rigid movement raised his glass. But half
of the wine splashed upon the cloth, and he put it carefully down again
untasted. He drew a deep breath, which was exhaled in a laugh wholly
without merriment. “Go on,” he said.
“It was not murder,” began Mr. Cupples, slowly measuring off inches
with a fork on the edge of the table. “I will tell you the whole story.
On that Sunday night I was taking my before-bedtime constitutional,
having set out from the hotel about a quarter past ten. I went along
the field path that runs behind White Gables, cutting off the great
curve of the road, and came out on the road nearly opposite that gate
that is just by the eighth hole on the golf-course. Then I turned in
there, meaning to walk along the turf to the edge of the cliff, and go
back that way. I had only gone a few steps when I heard the car coming,
and then I heard it stop near the gate. I saw Manderson at once. Do you
remember my telling you I had seen him once alive after our quarrel in
front of the hotel? Well, this was the time. You asked me if I had, and
I did not care to tell a falsehood.”
A slight groan came from Trent. He drank a little wine, and said
stonily, “Go on, please.”
“It was, as you know,” pursued Mr. Cupples, “a moonlight night, but I
was in shadow under the trees by the stone wall, and anyhow they could
not suppose there was any one near them. I heard all that passed just
as Marlowe has narrated it to us, and I saw the car go off towards
Bishopsbridge. I did not see Manderson’s face as it went, because his
back was to me, but he shook the back of his left hand at the car with
extraordinary violence, greatly to my amazement. Then I waited for him
to go back to White Gables, as I did not want to meet him again. But he
did not go. He opened the gate through which I had just passed, and he
stood there on the turf of the green, quite still. His head was bent,
his arms hung at his sides, and he looked somehow—rigid. For a few
moments he remained in this tense attitude, then all of a sudden his
right arm moved swiftly, and his hand was at the pocket of his
overcoat. I saw his face raised in the moonlight, the teeth bared, and
the eyes glittering, and all at once I knew that the man was not sane.
Almost as quickly as that flashed across my mind, something else
flashed in the moonlight. He held the pistol before him, pointing at
his breast.
“Now I may say here I shall always be doubtful whether Manderson really
meant to kill himself then. Marlowe naturally thinks so, knowing
nothing of my intervention. But I think it quite likely he only meant
to wound himself, and to charge Marlowe with attempted murder and
robbery.
“At that moment, however, I assumed it was suicide. Before I knew what
I was doing I had leapt out of the shadows and seized his arm. He shook
me off with a furious snarling noise, giving me a terrific blow in the
chest, and presenting the revolver at my head. But I seized his wrists
before he could fire, and clung with all my strength—you remember how
bruised and scratched they were. I knew I was fighting for my own life
now, for murder was in his eyes. We struggled like two beasts, without
an articulate word, I holding his pistol-hand down and keeping a grip
on the other. I never dreamed that I had the strength for such an
encounter. Then, with a perfectly instinctive movement—I never knew I
meant to do it—I flung away his free hand and clutched like lightning
at the weapon, tearing it from his fingers. By a miracle it did not go
off. I darted back a few steps, he sprang at my throat like a wild cat,
and I fired blindly in his face. He would have been about a yard away,
I suppose. His knees gave way instantly, and he fell in a heap on the
turf.
“I flung the pistol down and bent over him. The heart’s action ceased
under my hand. I knelt there staring, struck motionless; and I don’t
know how long it was before I heard the noise of the car returning.
“Trent, all the time that Marlowe paced that green, with the moonlight
on his white and working face, I was within a few yards of him,
crouching in the shadow of the furze by the ninth tee. I dared not show
myself. I was thinking. My public quarrel with Manderson the same
morning was, I suspected, the talk of the hotel. I assure you that
every horrible possibility of the situation for me had rushed across my
mind the moment I saw Manderson fall. I became cunning. I knew what I
must do. I must get back to the hotel as fast as I could, get in
somehow unperceived, and play a part to save myself. I must never tell
a word to any one. Of course I was assuming that Marlowe would tell
every one how he had found the body. I knew he would suppose it was
suicide; I thought every one would suppose so.
“When Marlowe began at last to lift the body, I stole away down the
wall and got out into the road by the clubhouse, where he could not see
me. I felt perfectly cool and collected. I crossed the road, climbed
the fence, and ran across the meadow to pick up the field path I had
come by that runs to the hotel behind White Gables. I got back to the
hotel very much out of breath.”
“Out of breath,” repeated Trent mechanically, still staring at his
companion as if hypnotized.
“I had had a sharp run,” Mr. Cupples reminded him. “Well, approaching
the hotel from the back I could see into the writing-room through the
open window. There was nobody in there, so I climbed over the sill,
walked to the bell and rang it, and then sat down to write a letter I
had meant to write the next day. I saw by the clock that it was a
little past eleven. When the waiter answered the bell I asked for a
glass of milk and a postage stamp. Soon afterwards I went up to bed.
But I could not sleep.”
Mr. Cupples, having nothing more to say, ceased speaking. He looked in
mild surprise at Trent, who now sat silent, supporting his bent head in
his hands.
“He could not sleep,” murmured Trent at last in a hollow tone. “A
frequent result of over-exertion during the day. Nothing to be alarmed
about.” He was silent again, then looked up with a pale face. “Cupples,
I am cured. I will never touch a crime-mystery again. The Manderson
affair shall be Philip Trent’s last case. His high-blown pride at
length breaks under him.” Trent’s smile suddenly returned. “I could
have borne everything but that last revelation of the impotence of
human reason. Cupples, I have absolutely nothing left to say, except
this: you have beaten me. I drink your health in a spirit of
self-abasement. And _you_ shall pay for the dinner.”
THE END.