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The House of the Whispering Pines

by Anna Katharine Green · English · Gutenberg #10083 · 629,670 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The House of the Whispering Pines

Author: Anna Katharine Green


        
Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #10083]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOUSE OF THE WHISPERING PINES ***

THE HOUSE OF THE WHISPERING PINES

By ANNA KATHARINE GREEN

1910

Author of

“The Leavenworth Case,” “That Affair Next Door,” “One of My Sons,” etc.




“Mazes intricate,
Eccentric, interwov’d, yet regular
Then most, when most irregular they seem”.

_Milton_




CONTENTS


BOOK I

SMOKE

     I.--THE HESITATING STEP

    II.--IT WAS SHE--SHE INDEED!

   III.--“OPEN!”

    IV.--THE ODD CANDLESTICK

     V.--A SCRAP OF PAPER

    VI.--COMMENTS AND REFLECTIONS

   VII.--CLIFTON ACCEPTS MY CASE

  VIII.--A CHANCE! I TAKE IT


BOOK II

SWEETWATER TO THE FRONT

    IX.--“WE KNOW OF No SUCH LETTER”

     X.--“I CAN HELP YOU”

    XI.--IN THE COACH HOUSE

   XII.--“LILA--LILA!”

  XIII.--“WHAT WE WANT IS HERE”

   XIV.--THE MOTIONLESS FIGURE

    XV.--HELEN SURPRISES SWEETWATER

   XVI.--62 CUTHBERT ROAD

  XVII.--“MUST I TELL THESE THINGS?”

 XVIII.--ON IT WAS WRITTEN--

   XIX.--“IT’S NOT WHAT YOU WILL FIND”


BOOK III

HIDDEN SURPRISES

    XX.---“HE OR YOU! THERE IS NO THIRD”

   XXI.--CARMEL AWAKES

  XXII.---“BREAK IN THE GLASS!”

 XXIII.--AT TEN INSTEAD OF TWELVE

  XXIV.--ALL THIS STOOD

   XXV.--“I AM INNOCENT”

  XXVI.--THE SYLLABLE OF DOOM

 XXVII.--EXPECTANCY

XXVIII.--“WHERE Is MY BROTHER?”


BOOK IV

WHAT THE PINES WHISPERED

  XXIX.--“I REMEMBERED THE ROOM”

   XXX.--“CHOOSE”

  XXXI.--“WERE HER HANDS CROSSED THEN?”

 XXXII.--AND I HAD SAID NOTHING!

XXXIII.--THE ARROW OF DEATH

 XXXIV.--“STEADY!”

  XXXV.--“As IF IT WERE A MECCA”

 XXXVI.--THE SURCHARGED MOMENT




BOOK ONE

SMOKE




I

THE HESITATING STEP

To have reared a towering scheme
Of happiness, and to behold it razed,
Were nothing: all men hope, and see their hopes
Frustrate, and grieve awhile, and hope anew;
But--

_A Blot in the ’Scutcheon._


The moon rode high; but ominous clouds were rushing towards it--clouds
heavy with snow. I watched these clouds as I drove recklessly,
desperately, over the winter roads. I had just missed the desire
of my life, the one precious treasure which I coveted with my
whole undisciplined heart, and not being what you call a man of
self-restraint, I was chafed by my defeat far beyond the bounds I have
usually set for myself.

The moon--with the wild skurry of clouds hastening to blot it out of
sight--seemed to mirror the chaos threatening my better impulses; and,
idly keeping it in view, I rode on, hardly conscious of my course till
the rapid recurrence of several well-known landmarks warned me that I
had taken the longest route home, and that in another moment I should
be skirting the grounds of The Whispering Pines, our country clubhouse.
_I_ had taken? Let me rather say, my horse; for he and I had traversed
this road many times together, and he had no means of knowing that the
season was over and the club-house closed. I did not think of it myself
at the moment, and was recklessly questioning whether I should not
drive in and end my disappointment in a wild carouse, when, the great
stack of chimneys coming suddenly into view against the broad disk of
the still unclouded moon, I perceived a thin trail of smoke soaring up
from their midst and realised, with a shock, that there should be no
such sign of life in a house I myself had closed, locked, and barred
that very day.

I was the president of the club and felt responsible. Pausing only long
enough to make sure that I had yielded to no delusion, and that fire of
some kind was burning on one of the club-house’s deserted hearths, I
turned in at the lower gateway. For reasons which I need not now state,
there were no bells attached to my cutter and consequently my approach
was noiseless. I was careful that it should be so, also careful to stop
short of the front door and leave my horse and sleigh in the black
depths of the pine-grove pressing up to the walls on either side. I was
sure that all was not as it should be inside these walls, but, as God
lives, I had no idea what was amiss or how deeply my own destiny was
involved in the step I was about to take.

Our club-house stands, as it may be necessary to remind you, on a
knoll thickly wooded with the ancient trees I have mentioned. These
trees--all pines and of a growth unusual and of an aspect well-nigh
hoary--extend only to the rear end of the house, where a wide stretch
of gently undulating ground opens at once upon the eye, suggesting to
all lovers of golf the admirable use to which it is put from early
spring to latest fall. Now, links, as well as parterres and driveways,
are lying under an even blanket of winter snow, and even the building,
with its picturesque gables and rows of be-diamonded windows, is
well-nigh indistinguishable in the shadows cast by the heavy pines,
which soar above it and twist their limbs over its roof and about its
forsaken corners, with a moan and a whisper always desolate to the
sensitive ear, but from this night on, simply appalling.

No other building stood within a half-mile in any direction. It was
veritably a country club, gay and full of life in the season, but
isolated and lonesome beyond description after winter had set in and
buried flower and leaf under a wide waste of untrodden snow.

I felt this isolation as I stepped from the edge of the trees and
prepared to cross the few feet of open space leading to the main door.
The sudden darkness instantly enveloping me, as the clouds, whose
advancing mass I had been watching, made their final rush upon the
moon, added its physical shock to this inner sense of desolation,
and, in some moods, I should have paused and thought twice before
attempting the door, behind which lurked the unknown with its naturally
accompanying suggestion of peril. But rage and disappointment, working
hotly within me, had left no space for fear. Rather rejoicing in the
doubtfulness of the adventure, I pushed my way over the snow until my
feet struck the steps. Here, instinct caused me to stop and glance
quickly up and down the building either way. Not a gleam of light met
my eye from the smallest scintillating pane. Was the house as soundless
as it was dark?

I listened but heard nothing. I listened again and still heard nothing.
Then I proceeded boldly up the steps and laid my hand on the door.

It was unlatched and yielded to my touch. Light or no light, sound
or no sound there was some one within. The fire which had sent its
attenuated streak of smoke up into the moonlit air, was burning yet on
one of the many hearths within, and before it I should presently see--

Whom?

What?

The question scarcely interested me.

Nevertheless I proceeded to enter and close the door carefully behind
me. As I did so, I cast an involuntary glance without. The sky was inky
and a few wandering flakes of the now rapidly advancing storm came
whirling in, biting my cheeks and stinging my forehead.

Once inside, I stopped short, possibly to listen again, possibly to
assure myself as to what I had best do next. The silence was profound.
Not a sound disturbed the great, empty building. My own footfall, as
I stirred, seemed to wake extraordinary echoes. I had moved but a few
steps, yet to my heightened senses, the noise seemed loud enough to
wake the dead. Instinctively I stopped and stood stock-still. There was
no answering cessation of movement. Darkness, silence everywhere. Yet
not quite absolute darkness. As my eyes grew accustomed to the place,
I found it possible to discern the outlines of the windows and locate
the stairs and the arches where the side halls opened. I was even able
to pick out the exact spot where the great antlers spread themselves
above the hatrack, and presently the rack itself came into view, with
its row of empty pegs, yesterday so full, to-day quite empty. That rack
interested me,--I hardly knew why,--and regardless of the noise I made,
I crossed over to it and ran my hand along the wall underneath. The
result was startling. A man’s coat and hat hung from one of the pegs.

I knew my business as president of this club. I also knew that no one
should be in the house at this time--that no one could be in it on any
honest errand. Some secret and sinister business must be at the bottom
of this mysterious intrusion immediately after the place had been
shut for the winter. Would this hat and coat identify the intruder?
I would strike a light and see. But this involved difficulties. The
gas had been turned off that very morning and I had no matches in my
pocket. But I remembered where they could be found. I had seen them
when I passed through the kitchen earlier in the day. They were very
accessible from the end of the hall where I stood. I had but to feel my
way through a passage or two and I should come to the kitchen door.

I began to move that way, and presently came creeping back, with a
match-box half full of matches in my hand. But I did not strike one
then. I had just made a move to do so, when the unmistakable sound of a
door opening somewhere in the house made me draw back into as quiet and
dark a place as I could find. This lay in the rear and at the right of
the staircase, and as the sound had appeared to come from above, it was
the most natural retreat that offered. And a good one I found it.

I had hardly taken up my stand when the darkness above gave way to a
faint glimmer, and a step became audible coming from some one of the
many small rooms in the second story, but so slowly and with such
evident hesitation that my imagination had ample time to work and fill
my mind with varying anticipations, each more disconcerting than the
last. Now I seemed to be listening to the movements of an intoxicated
man seeking an issue out of strange quarters, then to the wary approach
of one who had his own reasons for dread and was as conscious of my
presence as I was of his.

But the light, steadily increasing with each lagging but surely
advancing step, soon gave the lie to this latter supposition, since no
sane man, afraid of an ambush, would be likely to offer such odds to
the one lying in wait for him, as his own face illumined by a flaming
candle, and I was yielding to the bewilderment of the moment when the
uncertain step paused and a sob came faintly to my ears, wrung from
lips so stiff with human anguish that my fears took on new shape and
the event a significance which in my present mood of personal suffering
and preoccupation was anything but welcome. Indeed, I was coward
enough to contemplate flight and might in another moment have yielded
to the unworthy impulse if the sound of a second sigh had not struck
shudderingly on my ear, followed by the renewal of the step and the
almost immediate appearance on the stairs of a young girl holding a
candle in one hand and shielding her left cheek with the other.

Life offers few such shocks to any man, whatever his story or whatever
his temperament. I had been prepared by the sob I had heard to see
a woman, but not this woman. Nothing could have prepared me for an
encounter with this woman anywhere that night, after what had passed
between us and the wreck she had made of my life. But here! in a place
so remote and desolate I had hesitated to enter it myself! What was I
to think? How was I to reconcile so inconceivable a fact with what I
knew of her in the past, with what I hoped from her in the future.

To steady my thoughts and bring my whirling brain again under
control, I fixed my eyes on her well-known form and features as upon
a stranger’s whom I would understand and judge. I have called her a
woman and certainly I had loved her as such, but as, in this moment
of strange detachment, I watched her descend, swaying foot following
swaying foot falteringly down the stairs, I was able to see that only
the emotions which denaturalised her expression were a woman’s; that
her features, her pose, and the peculiar childlike contour of the
one cheek open to view were those of one whose yesterday was in the
playroom.

But beautiful! You do not often see such beauty. Under all the
disfigurement of an agitation so great as to daunt me and make me
question if I were its sole cause, her face shone with an individual
charm which marked her out as one of the few who are the making or
marring of men, sometimes of nations. This is the heritage she was
born to, this her lot, not to be shirked, not to be evaded even now
at her early age of seventeen. So much any one could see even in a
momentary scrutiny of her face and figure. But what was not so clear,
not even to myself with the consciousness of what had passed between
us during the last few hours, was why her heart should have so outrun
her years, and the emotion I beheld betray such shuddering depths. Some
grisly fear, some staring horror had met her in this strange retreat.
Simple grief speaks with a different language from that which I read in
her distorted features and tottering, slowly creeping form. What had
happened above? She had escaped me to run upon what? My lips refused
to ask, my limbs refused to move, and if I breathed at all, I did so
with such fierceness of restraint that her eyes never turned my way,
not even when she had reached the lowest step and paused for a moment
there, oscillating in pain or uncertainty. Her face was turned more
fully towards me now, and I had just begun to discern something in it
besides its tragic beauty, when she made a quick move and blew out
the candle she held. One moment that magical picture of superhuman
loveliness, then darkness, I might say silence, for I do not think
either of us so much as stirred for several instants. Then there came
a crash, followed by the sound of flying feet. She had flung the
candlestick out of her hand and was hurriedly crossing the hall. I
thought she was coming my way, and instinctively drew back against the
wall. But she stopped far short of me, and I heard her groping about,
then give a sudden spring towards the front door. It opened and the
wind soughed in. I felt the chill of snow upon my face, and realised
the tempest. Then all was quiet and dark again. She had slid quickly
out and the door had swung to behind her. Another instant and I heard
the click of the key as it turned in the lock, heard it and made no
outcry, such the spell, such the bewilderment of my faculties! But
once the act was accomplished and egress made difficult, nay, for the
moment, impossible, I felt all lesser emotions give way to an anxiety
which demanded immediate action, for the girl had gone out without
wraps or covering for her head, and my experience of the evening had
told me how cold it was. I must follow and find her and rescue her if
possible from the snow. The distance was long to town, the cold would
seize and perhaps prostrate her, after which, the wind and snow would
do the rest.

Throwing myself against the door, I shook it violently. It was
immovable. Then I flew to the windows. Their fastenings yielded readily
enough, but not the windows themselves; one had a broken cord, another
seemed glued to its frame, and I was still struggling with the latter
when I heard a sound which lifted the hair on my head and turned my
whole attention back to what lay behind and above me. There was still
some one in the house. I had forgotten everything in this apparition
of the woman I have described in a place so disassociated with any
conception I could possibly have of her whereabouts on this especial
evening. But this noise, short, sharp, but too distant to be altogether
recognisable, roused doubts which once awakened changed the whole tenor
of my thoughts and would not let me rest till I had probed the house
from top to bottom. To find Carmel Cumberland alone in this desolation
was a mystifying discovery to which I had found it hard enough to
reconcile myself. But Carmel here in company with another at the very
moment when I had expected the fruition of my own joy,--ah, that was to
open hell’s door in my breast; a possibility too intolerable to remain
unsettled for an instant. Though she had passed out before my eyes
in a drooping, almost agonised condition, not she, dear as she was,
and great as were my fears in her regard, was to be sought out first,
but the man! The man who was back of all this, possibly back of my
disappointment; the man whose work I may have witnessed, but at whose
identity I could not even guess.

Leaving the window, I groped my way along the wall until I reached the
rack where the man’s coat and hat hung. Whether it was my intention to
carry them away and hide them, in my anxiety to secure this intruder
and hold him to a bitter account for the misery he was causing me, or
whether I only meant to satisfy myself that they were the habiliments
of a stranger and not those of some sneaking member of the club, is of
little importance in the light of the fact which presently burst upon
me. The hat and coat were gone. Nothing hung from the rack. The wall
was free from end to end. She had taken these articles of male apparel
with her; she had not gone forth into the driving snow, unprotected,
but--

I did not know what to think. No acquaintanceship with her girlish
impulses, nothing that had occurred between us before or during this
night, had prepared me for a freak of this nature. I felt backward
along the wall; I felt forward; I even handled the pegs and counted
them as I passed to and fro, touching every one; but I could not alter
the fact. The groping she had done had been in this direction. She was
searching for this hat and coat (a man’s hat,--a derby, as I had been
careful to assure myself at the first handling) and, in them, she had
gone home as she had probably come, and there was no man in the case,
or if there were--

The doubt drove me to the staircase. Making no further effort to
unravel the puzzle which only beclouded my faculties, I began my wary
ascent. I had not the slightest fear, I was too full of cold rage for
that.

The arrangement of rooms on the second floor was well known to me. I
understood every nook and corner and could find my way about the whole
place without a light. I took but one precaution--that of slipping off
my shoes at the foot of the stairs. I wished to surprise the intruder.
I was willing to resort to any expedient to accomplish this. The
matches I carried in my pocket would make this possible if once I heard
him breathing. I held my own breath as I stole softly up, and waited
for an instant at the top of the stairs to listen. There was an awesome
silence everywhere, and I was hesitating whether to attack the front
rooms first or to follow up a certain narrow hall leading to a rear
staircase, when I remembered the thin line of smoke which, rising from
one of the chimneys, had first attracted my attention to the house. In
that was my clue. There was but one room on this floor where a fire
could be lit. It lay a few feet beyond me down the narrow hall I have
just mentioned. Why had I trusted everything to my ears when my nose
would have been a better guide? As I took the few steps necessary, a
slight smell of smoke became very perceptible, and no longer in doubt
of my course, I pushed boldly on and entering the half-open door,
struck a match and peered anxiously about.

Emptiness here just as everywhere else. A few chairs, a dresser,--it
was a ladies’ dressing-room,--some smouldering ashes on the hearth, a
lounge piled up with cushions. But no person. The sound I had heard
had not issued from this room, yet something withheld me from seeking
further. Chilled to the bone, with teeth chattering in spite of myself,
I paused just inside the door, and when the match went out in my hand
remained shivering there in the darkness, a prey to sensations more
nearly approaching those of fear than any I had ever before experienced
in my whole life.




II

IT WAS SHE--SHE INDEED!

Look on death itself!--up, up, and see
The great doom’s visage!

_Macbeth_.


Why, I did not know. There seemed to be no reason for this excess of
feeling. I had no dread of attack; my apprehension was of another sort.
Besides, any attack here must come from the rear--from the open doorway
in which I stood--and my dread lay before me, in the room itself,
which, as I have already said, appeared to be totally empty. What
could occasion my doubts, and why did I not fly the place? There were
passage-ways yet to search, why linger here like a gaby in the dark
when perhaps the man I believed to be in hiding somewhere within these
walls, was improving the opportunity to escape?

If I asked myself this question, I did not answer it, but I doubt if
I asked it then. I had forgotten the intruder; the interest which had
carried me thus far had become lost in a fresher one of which the
beginning and ending lay hidden within the four walls I now stared
upon, unseeing. Not to see and yet to feel--did that make the horror?
If so, another lighted match must help me out. I struck one while the
thought was hot within me, and again took a look at the room.

I noted but one thing new, but that made me reel back till I was half
way into the hall. Then a certain dogged persistency I possess came to
my rescue, and I re-entered the room at a leap and stood before the
lounge and its pile of cushions. They were numerous,--all that the room
contained, and more! Chairs had been stripped, window-seats denuded,
and the whole collection disposed here in a set way which struck me as
unnatural. Was this the janitor’s idea? I hardly thought so, and was
about to pluck one of these cushions off, when that most unreasonable
horror seized me again and I found myself looking back over my shoulder
at the fireplace from which rose a fading streak of smoke which some
passing gust, perhaps, had blown out into the room.

I felt sick. Was it the smell? It was not that of burning wood, hardly
of burning paper, I--but here my second match went out.

Thoroughly roused now (you will say, by what?) I felt my way out of
the room and to the head of the staircase. I remembered the candle
and candlestick I had heard thrown down on the lower floor by Carmel
Cumberland. I would secure them and come back and settle these uncanny
doubts. It might be the veriest fool business, but my mind was
disturbed and must be set at ease. Nothing else seemed so important,
yet I was not without anxiety for the lovely and delicate woman
wandering the snow-covered roads in the teeth of a furious gale, any
more than I was dead to the fact that I should never forgive myself if
I allowed the man to escape whom I believed to be hiding somewhere in
the rear of this house.

I had a hunt for the candlestick and a still longer one for the candle,
but finally I recovered both, and, lighting the latter, felt myself,
for the first time, more or less master of the situation.

Rapidly regaining the room in which my interest was now centred, I set
the candlestick down on the dresser, and approached the lounge. Hardly
knowing what I feared, or what I expected to find, I tore off one of
the cushions and flung it behind me. More cushions were revealed--but
that was not all.

Escaping from the edge of one of them I saw a shiny tress of woman’s
hair. I gave a gasp and pulled off more cushions, then I fell on my
knees, struck down by the greatest horror which a man can feel. Death
lay before me--violent, uncalled-for death--and the victim was a woman.
But it was not that. Though the head was not yet revealed, I thought I
knew the woman and that she--Did seconds pass or many minutes before
I lifted that last cushion? I shall never know. It was an eternity
to me and I am not of a sentimental cast, but I have some sort of a
conscience and during that interval it awoke. It has never quite slept
since.

The cushion had not concealed the hands, but I did not look at them--I
did not dare. I must first see the face. But I did not twitch this
pillow off; I drew it aside slowly, as though held by the restraining
clutch of some one behind me. And I was so held, but not by what was
visible--rather by the terrors which gather in the soul at the summons
of some dreadful doom. I could not meet the certainty without some
preparation. I released another strand of hair; then the side of a
cheek, half buried out of sight in the loosened locks and bulging
pillows; then, with prayers to God for mercy, an icy brow; two staring
eyes--which having seen I let the cushion drop, for mercy was not to be
mine.

It was _she_, she, indeed! and judgment was glassed in the look I
met--judgment and nothing more kindly, however I might appeal to Heaven
for mercy or whatever the need of my fiercely startled and repentant
soul.

Dead! Adelaide! the woman I had planned to wrong that very night, and
who had thus wronged me! For a moment I could take in nothing but
this one astounding fact, then the how and the why woke in maddening
curiosity within me, and seizing the cushion, I dragged it aside and
stared down into the pitiful and accusing features thus revealed, as
though to tear from them the story of the crime which had released
me as I would not have been released, no, not to have had my heart’s
desire in all the fulness with which I had contemplated it a few short
hours before.

But beyond the ever accusing, protuberant stare, those features told
nothing; and steeling myself to the situation, I made what observation
I could of her condition and the surrounding circumstances. For this
was my betrothed wife. Whatever my intentions, however far my love had
strayed under the spell cast over me by her sister,--the young girl who
had just passed out,--Adelaide and I had been engaged for many months;
our wedding day was even set.

But that was all over now--ended as her life was ended: suddenly,
incomprehensibly, and by no stroke of God. Even the jewel on her finger
was gone, the token of our betrothal. This was to be expected. She
would be apt to take it off before committing herself to a fate that
proclaimed me a traitor to this symbol. I should see that ring again. I
should find it in a letter filled with bitter words. I would not think
of it or of them now. I would try to learn how she had committed this
act, whether by poison or--

It must have been by poison; no other means would suggest themselves
to one of her refined sense; but if so, why those marks on her neck,
growing darker and darker as I stared at them!

My senses reeled as I scrutinised those marks. Small, delicate but
deadly, they stared upon me from either side of her white neck till
nature could endure no more and I tottered back against the further
wall, beholding no longer room, nor lounge, nor recumbent body, but a
young girl’s exquisite face, set in lines which belied her seventeen
years, and made futile any attempt on my part at self-deception when my
reason inexorably demanded an explanation of this death. As suicide it
was comprehensible, as murder, not, unless--

And it had been murder!

I sank to the floor as I fully realised this.




III

“OPEN!”

PRINCE.--Bring forth the parties of suspicion.

FRIAR.--I am the greatest, as the time and place Doth make against me,
of this direful murder; And here I stand, both to impeach and purge.
Myself condemned and myself excused.

_Romeo and Juliet_.


I have mentioned poison as my first thought. It was a natural one, the
result undoubtedly of having noticed two small cordial glasses standing
on a little table over against the fireplace. When I was conscious
again of my own fears, I crossed to the table and peered into these
glasses. They were both empty. However, they had not been so long. In
each I found traces of anisette cordial, and though no bottle stood
near I was very confident that it could readily be found somewhere in
the room. What had preceded and followed the drinking of this cordial?

As I raised my head from bending over these glasses--not club glasses,
by the way--I caught sight of my face in the mantel mirror. It gave me
maddening thoughts. In this same mirror there had been reflected but a
little while before, two other faces, for a sight of whose expression
at that fatal moment I would gladly risk my soul.

How had _she_ looked--how that other? Would not the story of those
awful, those irrevocable moments be plain to my eye, if the quickly
responsive glass could but retain the impressions it receives and give
back at need what had once informed its surface with moving life!

I stared at the senseless glass, appealed to it with unreasoning
frenzy, as to something which could give up its secret if it
would, but only to meet my own features in every guise of fury and
despair--features I no longer knew--features which insensibly increased
my horror till I tore myself wildly from the spot, and cast about for
further clues to enlightenment, before yielding to the conviction which
was making a turmoil in mind, heart, and conscience. Alas! there was
but little more to see. A pair of curling-irons lay on the hearth,
but I had no sooner lifted them than I dropped them with a shudder of
unspeakable loathing, only to start at the noise they made in striking
the tiles. For it was the self-same noise I had heard when listening
from below. These tongs, set up against the side of the fireplace had
been jarred down by the forcible shutting of the large front door, and
no man other than myself was in the house, or had been in the house;
only the two women. But the time when this discovery would have brought
comfort was passed. Better a hundred times that a man--I had almost
said any man--should have been with them here, than that they should
be closeted together in a spot so secluded, with rancour and cause for
complaint in one heart, and a biting, deadly flame in the other, which
once reaching up must from its very nature leave behind it a corrosive
impress. I saw,-I felt,--but I did not desist from my investigations. A
stick or two still smouldered on the hearthstone. In the ashes lay some
scattered fragments of paper which crumbled at my touch. On the floor
in front I espied only a stray hair-pin; everything else was in place
throughout the room except the cushions and that horror on the lounge,
waiting the second look I had so far refrained from giving it.

That look I could no longer withhold. I must know the depth of the
gulf over which I hung. I must not wrong with a thought one who had
smiled upon me like an angel of light--a young girl, too, with the dew
of innocence on her beauty to every eye but mine and only not to mine
within--shall I say ten awful minutes? It seemed ages,--all of my life
and more. Yet that lovely breast had heaved not so many times since I
looked upon her as a deified mortal, and now two small spots on another
woman’s pulseless throat had drawn a veil of blood over that beauty,
and given to a child the attributes of a Medusa. Yet hope was not quite
stilled. I would look again and perhaps discover that my own eyes had
been at fault, that there were no marks, or if marks, not just the ones
my fancy had painted there.

Turning, I let my glance fall first on the feet. I had not noted them
before, and I was startled to see that the arctics in which they
were clad were filled all around with snow. She had walked then, as
the other was walking now; she, who detested every effort and was of
such delicate make that exertion of unusual kind could not readily be
associated with her. Had she come alone or in Carmel’s company, and if
in Carmel’s company, on what ostensible errand if not that of death?
Her dress, which was of dark wool, showed that she had changed her
garments for this trip. I had seen her at dinner, and this was not the
gown she had worn then--the gown in which she had confronted me during
those few intolerable minutes when I could not meet her eyes. Fatal
cowardice! A moment of realisation then and we might all have been
saved this horror of sin and death and shameful retribution.

And yet who knows? Not understanding what I saw, how could I measure
the might-have-beens! I would proceed with my task--note if she wore
the diamond brooch I had given her. No, she was without ornament; I had
never seen her so plainly clad. Might I draw a hope from this? Even
the pins which had fallen from her hair were such as she wore when
least adorned. Nothing spoke of the dinner party or of her having been
dragged here unaware; but all of previous intent and premeditation.
Surely hope was getting uppermost. If I had dreamed the marks--

But no! There they were, unmistakable and damning, just where the
breath struggles up. I put my own thumbs on these two dark spots to
see if--when what was it? A lightning stroke or a call of fate which
one must answer while sense remains? I felt my head pulled around by
some unseen force from behind, and met staring into mine through the
glass of the window a pair of burning eyes. Or was it fantasy? For in
another moment they were gone, nor was I in the condition just then to
dissociate the real from the unreal. But the possibility of a person
having seen me in this position before the dead was enough to startle
me to my feet, and though in another instant I became convinced that
I had been the victim of hallucination, I nevertheless made haste to
cross to the window and take a look through its dismal panes. A gale of
blinding snow was sweeping past, making all things indistinguishable,
but the absence of balcony outside was reassuring and I stepped hastily
back, asking myself for the first time what I should do and where I
should now go to ensure myself from being called as a witness to the
awful occurrence which had just taken place in this house. Should I go
home and by some sort of subterfuge now unthought of, try to deceive
my servants as to the time of my return, or attempt to create an alibi
elsewhere? Something I must do to save myself the anguish and Carmel
the danger of my testimony in this matter. She must never know, the
world must never know that I had seen her here.

I had lost at a blow everything that gives zest or meaning to life, but
I might still be spared the bottommost depth of misery--be saved the
utterance of the word which would sink that erring but delicate soul
into the hell yawning beneath her. It was my one thought now--though
I knew that the woman who had fallen victim to her childish hate had
loved me deeply and was well worth my avenging.

I could not be the death of two women; the loss of one weighed heavily
enough upon my conscience. I would fly the place--I would leave this
ghastly find to tell its own story. The night was stormy, the hour
late, the spot a remote one, and the road to it but little used. I
could easily escape and when the morrow came--but it was the present I
must think of now, this hour, this moment. How came I to stay so long!
In feverish haste, I began to throw the pillows back over the quiet
limbs, the accusing face. Shudderingly I hid those eyes (I understood
their strange protuberance now) and recklessly bent on flight, was half
way across the floor when my feet were stayed--I wonder that my reason
was not unseated--by a sudden and tremendous attack on the great door
below, mingled with loud cries to open which ran thundering through the
house, calling up innumerable echoes from its dead and hidden corners.

It was the police. The wild night, the biting storm had been of no
avail. An alarm had reached headquarters, and all hope of escape on
my part was at an end. Yet because at such crises instinct rises
superior to reason, I blew out the candle and softly made my way into
the hall. I had remembered a window opening over a shed at the head of
the kitchen staircase. I could reach it from this rear hall by just
a turn or two, and once on that shed, a short leap would land me on
the ground; after which I could easily trust to the storm to conceal
my flight across the open golf-links. It was worth trying at least;
anything was better than being found in the house with my murdered
betrothed.

I had no reason to think that I was being sought, or that my presence
in this building was even suspected. It might well be that the police
were even ignorant of the tragedy awaiting them across the threshold
of the door they seemed intent on battering down. The gleam of a
candle burning in this closed-up house, or even the tale told by the
rising smoke, may have drawn them from the road to investigate. Such
coincidences had been. Such untoward happenings had misled people into
useless self-betrayal. My case was too desperate for such weakness.
Flight at this moment might save all; I would at least attempt it. The
door was shaking on its hinges; these intruders seemed determined to
enter.

With a spring I reached the window by which I hoped to escape, and
quickly raised it. A torrent of snow swept in, covering my face and
breast in a moment. It did something more: it cleared my brain, and I
remembered my poor horse standing in this blinding gale under cover
of the snow-packed pines. Every one knew my horse. I could commit no
greater folly than to flee by the rear fields while such a witness to
my presence remained in full view in front. With the sensation of a
trapped animal, I reclosed the window and cast about for a safe corner
where I could lie concealed until I learned what had brought these men
here and how much I really had to fear from their presence.

I had but little time in which to choose. The door below had just given
way and a party of at least three men were already stamping their feet
free from snow in the hall. I did not like the tone of their voices,
it was too low and steady to suit me. I had rather have heard drunken
cries or a burst of wild hilarity than these stern and purposeful
whispers. Men of resolution could have but one errand here. My doom
was closing round me. I could only put off the fatal moment. But it
was better to do this than to plunge headlong into the unknown fate
awaiting me.

I knew of a possible place of concealment. It was in the ballroom
not far from where I stood. I remembered the spot well. It was at
the top of a little staircase leading to the musicians’ gallery. A
balustrade guarded this gallery, supported by a boarding wide enough
to hide a man lying behind it at his full length. If the search I was
endeavouring to evade was not minute enough to lead them to look behind
this boarding, it would offer me the double advantage of concealment
and an unobstructed view of what went on in the hall, through the main
doorway opening directly opposite. I could reach this ballroom and
its terminal gallery without going around to this door. A smaller one
communicated directly with the corridor in which I was then lurking,
and towards this I now made my way with all the precaution suggested by
my desperate situation. No man ever moved more lightly. The shoes which
I had taken off in the lower hall were yet in my hand. I had caught
them up after replacing the cushions on Adelaide’s body. Even to my own
straining ears I made no perceptible sound. I reached the balcony and
had stretched myself out at full length behind the boarding, before the
men below had left the lower floor.

An interval of heart-torture and wearing suspense now followed. They
were ransacking the rooms below by the aid of their own lanterns, as I
could tell from their assured manner. That they had not made at once
for the scene of crime brought me some small sense of comfort, but not
much. They were too resolute in their movements and much too thorough
and methodical in their search, for me to dream of their confining
their investigations to the first floor. Unless I very much mistook
their purpose, I should soon hear them ascending the stairs, after
which, instinct, if not the faint smell of smoke still lingering in the
air, would lead them to the room where my poor Adelaide lay.

And thus it proved. More quickly than I expected, the total darkness
in which I lay, brightened under an advancing lantern, and I heard the
steps of two men coming down the hall. It was a steady if not rapid
approach, and I was quite prepared for their presence when they finally
reached the doorway opposite and stopped to look in at what must have
appeared to them a vast and empty space. They were officials, true
enough--one hasty glance through the balustrade assured me of that. I
even knew one of them by name--he was a sergeant of police and a highly
trustworthy man. But how they had been drawn to this place at a moment
so critical, I could not surmise. Do men of this stamp scent crime
as a hound scents out prey? They had the look of hounds. Even in the
momentary glimpse I got of them, I noted the tense and expectant look
with which they endeavoured to pierce the dim spaces between us. The
chase was on. It was something more than curiosity or a chance exercise
of their duty which had brought them here. Their object was definite,
and if the sight of the low gallery in which I lay, should suggest to
them all its possibilities as a hiding-place, I should know in just one
moment more what it is for the helpless quarry to feel the clutch of
the captor.

But the moment passed without any attempt at approach on their part,
and when I lifted my head again it was to catch a glimpse of their side
faces as they turned to look elsewhere for what they were plainly in
search of. An oath, muffled but stern, which was the first word above
a whisper that I had heard issue from their lips, told me that they
had reached _the_ room and had come upon the horror which lay there.
What would they say to it! Would they know who she was--her name,
her quality, her story--and respect her dead as they certainly must
have respected her living? I listened but caught only a low murmur
as they conferred together. I imagined their movements; saw them in
my mind’s eye leaning over that death-tenanted couch, pointing with
accusing finger at those two dark marks, and consulting each other with
side-long looks, as they passed from one detail of her appearance to
another. I even imagined them crossing the floor and lifting the two
cordial glasses just as I had done, and then slowly setting them down
again, with perhaps a lift of the brows or a suggestive shake of the
head; and maddened by my own intolerable position, drawn by a power I
felt it impossible to resist, I crept to my feet and took my staggering
way down the half-dozen steps of the gallery and thence along by the
left-hand wall towards the further doorway, and through it to where
these men stood weighing the chances in which my life and honour were
involved, and those of one other of whom I dared not think and would
not have these men think for all that was left me of hope and happiness.

It was dark in the ballroom, and it was only a little less so in the
corridor. All the light was in _that_ room; but I still slid along the
wall like a thief, with eyes set and ears agape for any chance word
which might reach me. Suddenly I heard one. It was this, uttered with a
decision which had the strange effect of lifting my head and making a
man of me again:

“That settles it. He will find it hard to escape after this.”

_He!_ I had been dreading to hear a _she_. Yet why? Who on God’s earth,
save myself, could know that Carmel had been within these woeful walls
to-night. _He!_ I never stopped to question who was meant by this
definite pronoun. I was not even conscious of caring very much. I was
in a coil of threatening troubles, but I was in it alone, and, greatly
relieved by the discovery, I drew myself up and stepped quickly forward
into the room where the two officials stood.

Their faces, as they wheeled sharply about and took in my shoeless
and more or less dishevelled figure, told me with an eloquence which
made my heart sink, the unfortunate impression which my presence made
upon them. It was but a fleeting look, for these men were both by
nature and training easy masters of themselves; but its language was
unmistakable and I knew that if I were to hold my own with them, I must
get all the support I could from the truth, save where it would involve
her--from the truth and my own consciousness of innocence, if I had any
such consciousness. I was not sure that I had, for my falseness had
precipitated this tragedy,--how I might never know, but a knowledge
of the how was not necessary to my self-condemnation. Nevertheless my
hands were clean of this murder, and allowing the surety of this fact
to take a foremost place in my mind, I faced these men and with real
feeling, but as little display of it as possible, I observed:

“You have come to my aid in a critical moment. This is my betrothed
wife--the woman I was to marry--and I find her lying here dead, in this
closed and lonely house. What does it mean? I know no more than you do.”




IV

THE ODD CANDLESTICK

It is a damned and a bloody work;
The graceless action of a heavy hand,
If that it be the work of any hand.

_King John_.


The two men eyed me quietly, then Hexford pointed to my shoeless feet
and sternly retorted:

“Permit us to doubt your last assertion. You seem to be in better
position than ourselves to explain the circumstances which puzzle you.”

They were right. It was for me to talk, not for them. I conceded the
point in these words:

“Perhaps--but you cannot always trust appearances. I can explain my
own presence here and the condition in which you find me, but I cannot
explain this tragedy, near and dear as Miss Cumberland was to me. I
did not know she was in the building, alive or dead. I came upon her
here covered with the cushions just as you found her. I have felt the
shock. I do not look like myself--I do not feel like myself; it was
enough--” Here real emotion seized me and I almost broke down. I was in
a position much more dreadful than any they could imagine or should be
allowed to.

Their silence led me to examine their faces. Hexford’s mouth had
settled into a stiff, straight line and the other man’s wore a cynical
smile I did not like. At this presage of the difficulties awaiting me,
I felt one strand of the rope sustaining me above this yawning gulf
of shame and ignominy crack and give way. Oh, for a better record in
the past!--a staff on which to lean in such an hour as this! But while
nothing serious clouded my name, I had more to blush for than to pride
myself upon in my career as prince of good fellows,--and these men knew
it, both of them, and let it weigh in the scale already tipped far off
its balance by coincidences which a better man than myself would have
found it embarrassing to explain. I recognised all this, I say, in the
momentary glance I cast at their stern and unresponsive figures; but
the courage which had served me in lesser extremities did not fail me
now, and, kneeling down before my dead betrothed, I kissed her cold
white hand with sincere compunction, before attempting the garbled and
probably totally incoherent story with which I endeavoured to explain
the inexplainable situation.

They listened--I will do them that much justice; but it was with such
an air of incredulity that my words fell with less and less continuity
and finally lost themselves in a confused stammer as I reached the
point where I pulled the cushions from the couch and made my ghastly
discovery.

“You see--see for yourselves--what confronted me. My betrothed--a
dainty, delicate woman--dead--alone--in this solitary, far-away
spot--the victim of what? I asked myself then--I ask myself now. I
cannot understand it--or those glasses yonder--or _those marks!”_ They
were black by this time--unmistakable--not to be ignored by them or by
me.

“We understand those marks, and you ought to,” came from the second
man, the one I did not know.

My head fell forward; my lips refused to speak the words. I saw as in
a flash, a picture of the one woman bending over the other; terror,
reproach, anguish in the eyes whose fixed stare would never more
leave my consciousness, an access of rage or some such sadden passion
animating the other whose every curve spoke tenderness, whose every
look up to this awful day had been as an angel’s look to me. The vision
was a maddening one. I shook myself free from it by starting to my
feet. “It’s--it’s--” I gasped.

“She has been strangled,” quoth Hexford, doggedly.

“A dog’s death,” mumbled the other.

My hands came together involuntarily. At that instant, with the memory
before me of the vision I have just described, I almost wished that it
had been _my_ hate, _my_ anger which had brought those tell-tale marks
out upon that livid skin. I should have suffered less. I should only
have had to pay the penalty of my crime and not be forced to think
of Carmel with terrible revulsion, as I was now thinking, minute by
minute, fight with it as I would.

“You had better sit down,” Hexford suddenly suggested, pushing a chair
my way. “Clarke, look up the telephone and ask for three more men. I am
going into this matter thoroughly. Perhaps you will tell us where the
telephone is,” he asked, turning my way.

It was some little time before I took in these words. When I did,
I became conscious of his keen look, also of a change in my own
expression. I had forgotten the telephone. It had not yet been taken
out. If only I had remembered this before these men came--I might have
saved--No, nothing could have saved her or me, except the snow, except
the snow. That may already have saved her. All this time I was trying
to tell where the telephone was.

That I succeeded at last I judged from the fact that the second man
left the room. As he did so, Hexford lit the candle. Idly watching,
for nothing now could make me look at the lounge again, I noticed the
candlestick. It was of brass and rare in style and workmanship--a
candlestick to be remembered; one of a pair perhaps. I felt my hair
stir as I took in the details of its shape and ornamentation. If its
mate were in her house--No, no, no! I would not have it so. I could
not control my emotion if I let my imagination stray too far. The
candlestick must be the property of the club. I had only forgotten. It
was bought when? While thinking, planning, I was conscious of Hexford’s
eyes fixed steadily upon me.

“Did you go into the kitchen in your wanderings below?” he asked.

“No,” I began, but seeing that I had made a mistake, I bungled and
added weakly: “Yes; after matches.”

“Only matches?”

“That’s all.”

“And did you get them?”

“Yes.”

“In the dark? You must have had trouble in finding them?”

“Not at all. Only safety matches are allowed here, and they are put in
a receptacle at the side of each door. I had but to open the kitchen
door, feel along the jamb, find this receptacle, and pull the box out.
I’m well used to all parts of the house.”

“And you did this?”

“I have said so.”

“May I ask which door you allude to?”

“The one communicating with the front hall.”

“Where did you light your first match?”

“Upstairs.”

“Not in the kitchen?”

“No, sir.”

“You are sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“That’s a pity. I thought you might be able to tell me how so many wine
and whiskey bottles came to be standing on the kitchen table.”

I stared at him, dazed. Then I remembered the two small glasses on
the little table across the room, and instinctively glanced at them.
But no whiskey had been drunk out of them--the odor of anisette is
unmistakable.

“You carry the key to the wine-cellar?” he asked.

I considered a moment. I did not know what to make of bottles on the
kitchen table. These women and _bottles_! They abhorred wine; they
had reason to, God knows; T remembered the dinner and all that had
signalised it, and felt my confusion grow. But a question had been
asked, and I must answer it. It would not do for me to hesitate about a
matter of this kind. Only what was the question. Something about a key.
I had no key; the cellar had been ransacked without my help; should I
acknowledge this?

“The keys were given up by the janitor yesterday,” I managed to stammer
at last. “But I did not bring them here to-night. They are in my rooms
at home.”

I finished with a gasp. I had suddenly remembered that these keys were
not in my rooms. I had had them with me at Miss Cumberland’s and being
given to fooling with something when embarrassed, I had fooled with
them and dropped them while talking with Adelaide and watching Carmel.
I had meant to pick them up but I forgot and--

“You need say nothing more about it,” remarked Hexford. “I have no
right to question you at all.” And stepping across the room, he took
up the glasses one after the other and smelled of them. “Some sweet
stuff,” he remarked. “Cordial, I should say anisette. There wasn’t
anything like that on the kitchen table. Let us see what there is in
here,” he added, stepping into the adjoining small room into which I
had simply peered in my own investigation of the place.

As he did so, a keen blast blew in; a window in the adjoining room was
open. He cast me a hurried glance and with the door in his hand, made
the following remark:

“Your lady love--the victim here--could not have come through the snow
with no more clothing on her than we see now. She must have worn a hat
and coat or furs or something of that nature. Let us look for them.”

I rose, stumbling. I saw that he did not mean to leave me alone for a
moment. Indeed, I did not wish to be so left. Better any companionship
than that of my own thoughts and of her white upturned face. As I
followed him into this closet he pushed the door wide, pulling out an
electric torch as he did so. By its light we saw almost at first glance
the coat and hat he professed to seek, lying in a corner of the floor,
beside an overturned chair.

“Good!” left my companion’s lips. “That’s all straight. You recognise
these garments?”

I nodded, speechless. A thousand memories rushed upon me at the sight
of the long plush coat which I had so often buttoned about her, with
a troubled heart. How her eyes would seek mine as we stood thus close
together, searching, searching for the old love or the fancied love of
which the ashes only remained. Torment, all torment to remember now, as
Hexford must have seen, if the keenness of his intelligence equalled
that of his eye at this moment.

The window which stood open was a small one,-a mere slit in the wall;
but it let in a stream of zero air and I saw Hexford shiver as he
stepped towards it and looked out. But I felt hot rather than cold, and
when I instinctively put my hand to my forehead, it came away wet.




V

A SCRAP OF PAPER

Look to the lady:--
And when we have our naked frailties hid,
That suffer in exposure, let us meet,
And question this most bloody piece of work,
To know it further. Fears and scruples shake us;
In the great hand of God I stand; and, thence,
Against the undivulg’d pretence I fight
Of treasonous malice.

_Macbeth_.


Shortly after this, a fresh relay of police arrived and I could hear
the whole house being ransacked. I had found my shoes, and was sitting
in my own private room before a fire which had been lighted for me on
the hearth. I was in a state of stupor now, and if my body shook, as
it did from time to time, it was not from cold, nor do I think from
any special horror of mind or soul (I felt too dull for that), but in
response to the shuddering pines which pressed up close to the house
at this point and soughed and tapped at the walls and muttered among
themselves with an insistence which I could not ignore, notwithstanding
my many reasons for self-absorption.

The storm, which had been exceedingly fierce while it lasted, had
quieted down to a steady fall of snow. Had its mission been to serve as
a blanket to this crime by wiping out from the old snow all tell-tale
footsteps and such other records as simplify cases of this kind for the
detectives, it could not have happened more _apropos_ to the event.
From the complaints which had already reached my ears from the two
policemen, I was quite aware that even as early as their first arrival,
they had found a clean page where possibly a few minutes before the
whole secret of this tragedy may have been written in unmistakable
characters; and while this tilled me with relief in one way, it added
to my care in another, for the storm which could accomplish so much in
so short a time was a bitter one for a young girl to meet, and Carmel
must have met it at its worst, in her lonesome struggle homeward.

Where was she? Living or dead, where was she now and where was
Adelaide--the two women who for the last six weeks had filled my life
with so many unhallowed and conflicting emotions? The conjecture
passed incessantly through my brain, but it passed idly also and was
not answered even in thought. Indeed, I seemed incapable of sustaining
any line of thought for more than an instant, and when after an
indefinite length of time the door behind me opened, the look I turned
upon the gentleman who entered must have been a strange and far from
encouraging one.

He brought a lantern with him. So far the room had had no other
illumination than such as came from the fire, and when he had set this
lantern down on the mantel and turned to face me, I perceived, with
a sort of sluggish hope, that he was Dr. Perry, once a practising
physician and my father’s intimate friend, now a county official of no
ordinary intelligence and, what was better, of no ordinary feeling.

His attachment to my father had not descended to me and, for the
moment, he treated me like a stranger.

“I am the coroner of this district,” said he. “I have left my bed
to have a few words with you and learn if your detention here is
warranted. You are the president of this club, and the lady whose
violent death in this place I have been called upon to investigate, is
Miss Cumberland, your affianced wife?”

My assent, though hardly audible, was not to be misunderstood. Drawing
up a chair, he sat down and something in his manner which was not
wholly without sympathy, heartened me still more, dispelling some of
the cloudiness which had hitherto befogged my faculties.

“They have told me what you had to say in explanation of your presence
here where a crime of some nature has taken place. But I should
like to hear the story from your own lips. I feel that I owe you
this consideration. At all events, I am disposed to show it. This
is no common case of violence and the parties to it are not of the
common order. Miss Cumberland’s virtue and social standing no one
can question, while you are the son of a man who has deservedly been
regarded as an honour to the town. You have been intending to marry
Miss Cumberland?”

“Yes.” I looked the man directly in the eye. “Our wedding-day was set.”

“Did you love her? Pardon me; if I am to be of any benefit to you at
this crisis I must strike at the root of things. If you do not wish to
answer, say so, Mr. Ranelagh.”

“I do wish.” This was a lie, but what was I to do, knowing how
dangerous it would be for Carmel to have it publicly known where
my affections were really centred and what a secret tragedy of
heart-struggle and jealous passion underlay this open one of foul and
murderous death. “I am in no position to conceal anything from you. I
did love Miss Cumberland. We have been engaged for a year. She was a
woman of fortune but I am not without means of my own and could have
chosen a penniless girl and still been called prosperous.”

“I see, and she returned your love?”

“Sincerely.” Was the room light enough to reveal my guilty flush? She
had loved me only too well, too jealously, too absorbingly for her
happiness or mine.

“And the sister?”

It was gently but gravely put, and instantly I knew that our secret was
out, however safe we had considered it. This man was cognisant of it,
and if he, why not others! Why not the whole town! A danger which up to
this moment I had heard whispered only by the pines, was opening in a
gulf beneath our feet. Its imminence steadied me. I had kept my glance
on Coroner Perry, and I do not think it changed. My tone, I am quite
assured, was almost as quiet and grave as his as I made my reply in
these words:

“Her sister is her sister. I hardly think that either of us would be apt
to forget that. Have you heard otherwise, sir?”

He was prepared for equivocation, possibly for denial, but not for
attack. His manner changed and showed distrust and I saw that I had lost
rather than made by this venturous move.

“Is this your writing?” he suddenly asked, showing me a morsel of paper
which he had drawn from his vest pocket.

I looked, and felt that I now understood what the pines had been trying
to tell me for the last few hours. That compromising scrap of writing
had not been destroyed. It existed for her and my undoing! Then doubt
came. Fate could not juggle thus with human souls and purposes. I had
simply imagined myself to have recognised the words lengthening and
losing themselves in a blur before my eyes. Carmel was no fool even
if she had wild and demoniacal moments. This could not be my note to
her,--that fatal note which would make all denial of our mutual passion
unavailing.

“Is it your writing?” my watchful inquisitor repeated.

I looked again. The scrap was smaller than my note had been when it
left my hands. If it were the same, then some of the words were gone.
Were they the first ones or the last? It would make a difference in the
reading, or rather, in the conclusions to be drawn from what remained.
If only the mist would clear from before my eyes, or he would hold the
slip of paper nearer! The room was very dark. The--the--

“Is it your writing?” Coroner Perry asked for the third time.

There was no denying it. My writing was peculiar and quite
unmistakable. I should gain nothing by saying no.

“It looks like it,” I admitted reluctantly. “But I cannot be sure in
this light. May I ask what this bit of paper is and where you found it?”

“Its contents I think you know. As for the last question I think you
can answer that also if you will.”

Saying which, he quietly replaced the scrap of paper in his pocket-book.

I followed the action with my eyes. I caught a fresh glimpse of a
darkened edge, and realised the cause of the faint odour which I had
hitherto experienced without being conscious of it. The scrap had been
plucked out of the chimney. She had tried to burn it. I remembered the
fire and the smouldering bits of paper which crumbled at my touch. And
this one, this, the most important--the only important one of them all,
had flown, half-scorched, up the chimney and clung there within easy
reach.

The whole incident was plain to me, and I could even fix upon the
moment when Hexford or Clarke discovered this invaluable bit of
evidence. It was just before I burst in upon them from the ballroom,
and it was the undoubted occasion of the remark I then overheard:

“_This settles it. He cannot escape us now_.”

During the momentary silence which now ensued, I tried to remember the
exact words which had composed this note. They were few---sparks from
my very heart--I ought to be able to recollect them.

“To-night--10:30 train--we will be married at P----. Come, come, my
darling, my life. She will forgive when all is done. Hesitation will
only undo us. To-night at 10 30. Do not fail me. I shall never marry
any one but you.”

Was that all? I had an indistinct remembrance of having added some
wild and incoherent words of passionate affection affixed to her name.
_Her name_! But it may be that in the hurry and flurry of the moment,
these terms of endearment simply passed through my mind and found no
expression on paper. I could not be sure, any more than I could be
positive from the half glimpse I got of these lines, which portion had
been burned off,--the top in which the word _train_ occurred, or the
final words, emphasising a time of meeting and my determination to
marry no one but the person addressed. The first gone, the latter might
take on any sinister meaning. The latter gone, the first might prove a
safeguard, corroborating my statement that an errand had taken me into
town.

I was oppressed by the uncertainty of my position. Even if I carried
off this detail successfully, others of equal importance might be
awaiting explanation. My poor, maddened, guilt-haunted girl had made
the irreparable mistake of letting this note of mine fly unconsumed
up the chimney, and she might have made others equally incriminating.
It would be hard to find an alibi for her if suspicion once turned
her way. She had not met me at the train. The unknown but doubtless
easily-to-be-found man who had handed me her note could swear to that
fact.

Then the note itself! I had destroyed it, it is true, but its phrases
were so present to my mind--had been so branded into it by the terrors
of the tragedy which they appeared to foreshadow, that I had a dreadful
feeling that this man’s eye could read them there. I remember that
under the compelling power of this fancy, my hand rose to my brow
outspread and concealing, as if to interpose a barrier between him
and them. Is my folly past belief? Possibly. But then I have not told
you the words of this fatal communication. They were these--innocent,
if she were innocent, but how suggestive in the light of her probable
guilt:

“I cannot. Wait till to-morrow. Then you will see the depth of my love
for you--what I owe you--what I owe Adelaide.”

I should see!

I was seeing.

Suddenly I dropped my hand; a new thought had come to me. Had Carmel
been discovered on the road leading from this place?

You perceive that by this time I had become the prey of every
threatening possibility; even of that which made the present a
nightmare from which I should yet wake to old conditions and old
struggles, bad enough, God knows, but not like this--not like this.

Meantime I was conscious that not a look or movement of mine had escaped
the considerate but watchful eye of the man before me.

“You do not relish my questions,” he dryly observed. “Perhaps you would
rather tell your story without interruption. If so, I beg you to be as
explicit as possible. The circumstances are serious enough for perfect
candour on your part.”

He was wrong. They were too serious for that. Perfect candour would
involve Carmel. Seeming candour was all I could indulge in. I took a
quick resolve. I would appear to throw discretion to the winds; to
confide to him what men usually hold sacred; to risk my reputation as a
gentleman, rather than incur a suspicion which might involve others
more than it did myself. Perhaps I should yet win through and save her
from an ignominy she possibly deserved but which she must never receive
at my hands.

“I will give you an account of my evening,” said I. “It will not aid
you much, but will prove my good faith. You asked me a short time ago
if I loved the lady whom I was engaged to marry and whose dead body I
most unexpectedly came upon in this house some time before midnight. I
answered yes, and you showed that you doubted me. You were justified
in your doubts. I did love her once, or thought so, but my feelings
changed. A great temptation came into my life. Carmel returned from
school and--you know her beauty, her fascination. A week in her
presence, and marriage with Adelaide became impossible. But how evade
it? I only knew the coward’s way; to lure this inexperienced young
girl, fresh from school, into a runaway match. A change which now
became perceptible in Miss Cumberland’s manner, only egged me on. It
was not sufficiently marked in character to call for open explanation,
yet it was unmistakable to one on the watch as I was, and betokened
a day of speedy reckoning for which I was little prepared. I know
what the manly course would have been, but I preferred to skulk. I
acknowledge it now; it is the only retribution I have to offer for a
past I am ashamed of. Without losing one particle of my intention,
I governed more carefully my looks and actions, and thought I had
succeeded in blinding Adelaide to my real feelings and purpose. Whether
I did or not, I cannot say. I have no means of knowing now. She has
not been her natural self for these last few days, but she had other
causes for worry, and I have been willing enough to think that these
were the occasion of her restless ways and short, sharp speech and the
blankness with which she met all my attempts to soothe and encourage
her. This evening”--I choked at the word. The day had been one string
of extraordinary experiences, accumulating in intensity to the one
ghastly discovery which had overtopped and overwhelmed all the rest.
“This evening,” I falteringly continued, “I had set as the limit to my
endurance of the intolerable situation. During a minute of solitude
preceding the dinner at Miss Cumberland’s house on the Hill, I wrote a
few lines to her sister, urging her to trust me with her fate and meet
me at the station in time for the ten-thirty train. I meant to carry
her at once to P----, where I had a friend in the ministry who would at
once unite us in marriage. I was very peremptory, for my nerves were
giving way under the secret strain to which they had been subjected
for so long, and she herself was looking worn with her own silent and
uncommunicated conflict.

“To write this note was easy, but to deliver it involved difficulties.
Miss Cumberland’s eyes seemed to be more upon me than usual. Mine were
obliged to respond and Carmel seeing this, kept hers on her plate
or on the one other person seated at the table, her brother Arthur.
But the opportunity came as we all rose and passed together into the
drawing-room. Carmel fell into place at my side and I slipped the note
into her hand. She had not expected it and I fear that the action was
observed, for when I took my leave of Miss Cumberland shortly after,
I was struck by her expression. I had never seen such a look on her
face before, nor can I conceive of one presenting a more extraordinary
contrast to the few and commonplace words with which she bade me
good evening. I could not forget that look. I continued to see those
pinched features and burning eyes all the way home where I went to get
my grip-sack, and I saw them all the way to the station, though my
thoughts were with her sister and the joys I had planned for myself.
Man’s egotism, Dr. Perry. I neither knew Adelaide nor did I know the
girl whose love I had so over-estimated. She failed me, Dr. Perry. I
was met at the station not by herself, but by a letter--a few hurried
lines given me by an unknown man--in which she stated that I had asked
too much of her, that she could not so wrong her sister who had brought
her up and done everything for her since her mother died. I have not
that letter now, or I would show it to you. In my raging disappointment
I tore it up on the place where I received it, and threw the pieces
away. I had staked my whole future on one desperate throw and I had
lost. If I had had a pistol--” I stopped, warned by an uneasy movement
on the part of the man I addressed, that I had better not dilate too
much upon my feelings. Indeed, I had forgotten to whom I was talking. I
realised nothing, thought of nothing but the misery I was describing.
His action recalled me to the infinitely deeper misery of my present
situation, and conscious of the conclusions which might be drawn from
such impulsive utterances, I pulled myself together and proceeded to
finish my story with greater directness.

“I did not leave the station till the ten-thirty train had gone. I had
hopes, still, of seeing her, or possibly I dreaded the long ride back
to my apartments. It was from sheer preoccupation of mind that I drove
this way instead of straight out by Marshall Avenue. I had no intention
of stopping here; the club-house was formally closed yesterday, as you
may know, and I did not even have the keys with me. But, as I reached
the bend in the road where you get your first sight of the buildings, I
saw a thin streak of smoke rising from one of its chimneys, and anxious
as to its meaning, I drove in--”

“Wait, Mr. Ranelagh, I am sorry to interrupt you, but by which gate did
you enter?”

“By the lower one.”

“Was it snowing at this time?”

“Not yet. It was just before the clouds rushed upon the moon. I could
see everything quite plainly.”

My companion nodded and I went breathlessly on. Any question of his
staggered me. I was so ignorant of the facts at his command, of the facts
at any one’s command outside my own experience and observation, that the
simplest admission I made might lead directly to some clew of whose very
existence I was unaware. I was not even able to conjecture by what chance
or at whose suggestion the police had raided the place and discovered
the tragedy which had given point to that raid. No one had told me, and I
had met with no encouragement to ask. I felt myself sliding amid
pitfalls. My own act might precipitate the very doom I sought to avert.
Yet I must preserve my self-possession and answer all questions as
truthfully as possible lest I stumble into a web from which no skill of
my own or of another could extricate me.

“Fastening my horse to one of the pine trees in the thickest clump I
saw--he is there now, I suppose--I crept up to the house, and tried the
door. It was on the latch and I stole in. There was no light on the lower
floor, and after listening for any signs of life, I began to feel my way
about the house, searching for the intruder. As I did not wish to attract
attention to myself, I took off my shoes. I went through the lower rooms,
and then I came upstairs. It was some time before I reached the--the room
where a fire had been lit; but when I did I knew--not,” I hastily
corrected, as I caught his quick concentrated glance, “what had happened
or whom I should find there, but that this was the spot where the
intruder had been, possibly was now, and I determined to grapple with
him. What--what have I said?” I asked in anguish, as I caught a look on
the coroner’s face of irrepressible repulsion and disgust, slight and
soon gone but unmistakable so long as it lasted.

“Nothing,” he replied, “go on.”

But his tone, considerate as it had been from the first, did not deceive
me. I knew that I had been detected in some slip or prevarication. As I
had omitted all mention of the most serious part of my adventure--had
said nothing of my vision of Carmel or the terrible conclusions which her
presence there had awakened--my conscience was in a state of perturbation
which added greatly to my confusion. For a moment I did not know where I
stood, and I am afraid I betrayed a sense of my position. He had to
recall me to myself by an unimportant question or two before I could go
on. When I did proceed, it was with less connection of ideas and a haste
in speaking which was not due altogether to the harrowing nature of the
tale itself.

“I had matches in my pocket and I struck one,” I began. “Afterwards I lit
the candle. The emptiness of the room did not alarm me. I experienced the
sense of tragedy. Seeing the pillows heaped high and too regularly for
chance along a lounge ordinarily holding only two, I tore them off. I saw
a foot, a hand, a tress of bright hair. Even then I did not think of
_her_. Why should I? Not till I uncovered the face did I know the terrors
of my discovery, and then, the confusion of it all unmanned me and I fell
on my knees--”

“Go on! Go on!”

The impetuosity, the suspense in the words astounded me. I stared at the
coroner and lost the thread of my story--What had I to say more? How
account for what must be ever unaccountable to him, to the world, to my
own self, if in obedience to the demands of the situation I subdued my
own memory and blotted out all I had seen but that which it was safe to
confess to?

“There is no more to say,” I murmured. “The horror of that moment made a
chaos in my mind. I looked at the dead body of her who lay there as I
have looked at everything since; as I looked at the police when they
came--as I look at you now. But I know nothing. It is all a
phantasmagoria to me--with no more meaning than a nightmare. She is
dead--I know that--but beyond that, all is doubt--confusion--what the
world and all its passing show is to a blind man. I can neither
understand nor explain.”




VI

COMMENTS AND REFLECTIONS

There is no agony and no solace left;
Earth can console, Heaven can torment, no more

_Prometheus Unbound_


The coroner’s intent look which had more or less sustained me through
this ordeal, remained fixed upon my face as though he were still
anxious to see me exonerate myself. How much did he know? That was the
question. _How much did he know_?

Having no means of telling, I was forced to keep silent. I had revealed
all I dared to. As I came to this conclusion, his eyes fell and I knew
that the favorable minute had passed.

The question he now asked proved it.

“You say that you were not blind to surrounding objects, even if they
conveyed but little meaning to you. You must have seen, then, that the
room where Miss Cumberland lay contained two small cordial glasses,
both still moist with some liqueur.”

“I noticed that, yes.”

“Some one must have drunk with her?”

“I cannot contradict you.”

“Was Miss Cumberland fond of that sort of thing?”

“She detested liquor of all kinds. She never drank I never saw a woman
so averse to wine.” I spoke before I thought. I might better have been
less emphatic, but the mystery of those glasses had affected me from
the first. Neither she nor Carmel ever allowed themselves so much as a
social glass, yet those glasses had been drained. “Perhaps the cold--”

“There was a third glass. We found it in the adjoining closet. It had
not been used. That third glass has a meaning if only we could find it
out.”

A possibility which had risen in my mind faded at these words.

“Three glasses,” I dully repeated.

“And a small flask of cordial. The latter seems pure enough.”

“I cannot understand it.” The phrase had become stereotyped. No other
suggested itself to me.

“The problem would be simple enough if it were not for those-marks on
her neck. You saw those, too, I take it?”

“Yes. Who made them? What man--”

The lie, or rather the suggestion of a lie, flushed my face. I was
conscious of this, but it did not trouble me. I was panting for relief.
I could not rest till I knew the nature of the doubt in this man’s
mind. If these words, or any words I could use, would serve to surprise
his secret, then welcome the lie or suggestion of a lie. “It was a
brute’s act,” I went on, bungling with my sentences in anxiety to see
if my conclusions fitted in with his own. “_Who was the brute_? Do you
know, Dr. Perry?”

“There were three glasses in those rooms. Only two were drank from,”
he answered, steadily. “Tomorrow I may be in a position to answer your
question. I am not to-night.”

Why did I take heart? Not a change, not the flicker of one had passed
over his countenance at my utterance of the word _man_. Either his
official habit had stood him in wonderful stead, or the police had
failed so far to see any connection between this murder and the young
girl whose footprints, for all I knew, still lingered on the stairs.

Would the morrow arm them with completer knowledge? As I turned from
his retreating figure and flung myself down before the hearth, this was
the question I continually propounded to myself, in vain repetition.
Would the morrow reveal the fact that Adelaide’s young sister had been
with her in the hour of death, or would the fates propitiously aid her
in preserving this secret as they had already aided her in selecting
for the one man who shared it, him who of all others was bound by
honour and personal consideration for her not to divulge what he knew.

Thus the hours between two and seven passed when I fell into a fitful
sleep, from which I was rudely wakened by a loud rattle at my door,
followed by the entrance of the officer who had walked up and down the
corridor all night.

“The waggon is here,” said he. “Breakfast will be given you at the
station.”

To which Hexford, looking over his shoulder, added: “I’m sorry to say
that we have here the warrant for your arrest. Can I do anything for
you?”

“Warrant!” I burst out, “what do you want of a warrant? It is as a
witness you seek to detain me, I presume?”

“No,” was his brusque reply. “The charge upon which you are arrested is
one of murder. You will have to appear before a magistrate. I’m sorry
to be the one to tell you this, but the evidence against you is very
strong, and the police must do their duty.”

“But I am innocent, absolutely innocent,” I protested, the perspiration
starting from every pore as the full meaning of the charge burst upon
me. “What I have told you was correct. I, myself, found her dead--”

Hexford gave me a look.

“Don’t talk,” he kindly suggested. “Leave that to the lawyers.” Then,
as the other man turned aside for a moment, he whispered in my ear,
“It’s no go; one of our men saw you with your fingers on her throat. He
had clambered into a pine tree and the shade of the window was up. You
had better come quietly. Not a soul believes you innocent.”

This, then, was what had doomed me from the start; this, and that
partly burned letter. I understood now why the kind-hearted coroner,
who loved my father, had urged me to tell my tale, hoping that I would
explain this act and give him some opportunity to indulge in a doubt.
And I had failed to respond to the hint he had given me. The act
itself must appear so sinister and the impulse which drove me to it
so incomprehensible, without the heart-rending explanation I dare not
subjoin, that I never questioned the wisdom of silence in its regard.

Yet this silence had undone me. I had been seen fingering my dead
betrothed’s throat, and nothing I could now say or do would ever
convince people that she was dead before my hands touched her,
strangled by another’s clutch. One person only in the whole world would
know and feel how false this accusation was. And yesterday that one’s
trust in my guiltlessness would have thrown a ray of light upon the
deepest infamy which could befall me. But to-day there had settled over
that once innocent spirit, a cloud of too impenetrable a nature for any
light to struggle to and fro between us.

I could not contemplate that cloud. I could not dwell upon her misery,
or upon the revulsion of feeling which follows such impetuous acts. And
it had been an impetuous act--the result of one of her rages. I had
been told of these rages. I had even seen her in one. When they passed
she was her lovable self once more and very penitent and very downcast.
If all I feared were true, she was suffering acutely now. But I gave no
thought to this. I could dream of but one thing--how to save her from
the penalty of crime, a penalty I might be forced to suffer myself and
would prefer to suffer rather than see it fall upon one so young and so
angelically beautiful.

Turning to the officer next me, I put the question which had been
burning in my mind for hours:

“Tell me, how you came to know there was trouble here? What brought you
to this house? There can be nothing wrong in telling me that.”

“Well, if you don’t know--” he began.

“I do not,” I broke in.

“I guess you’d better wait till the chief has had a word with you.”

I suppressed all tokens of my disappointment, and by a not unnatural
reaction, perhaps, began to take in, and busy myself with, the very
considerations I had hitherto shunned. Where was Carmel, and how was
she enduring these awful hours? Had repentance come, and with it a
desire to own her guilt? Did she think of me and the effect this
unlooked-for death would have upon my feelings? That I should suffer
arrest for her crime could not have entered her mind. I had seen her,
but she had not seen me, in the dark hall which I must now traverse as
a prisoner and a suspect. No intimation of my dubious position or its
inevitable consequences had reached her yet. When it did, what would
she do? I did not know her well enough to tell. The attraction she
had felt for me had not been strong enough to lead her to accommodate
herself to my wishes and marry me off-hand, but it had been strong
enough to nerve her arm in whatever altercation she may have had with
her jealous-minded sister. It was the temper and not the strength
of the love which would tell in a strait like this. Would it prove
of a generous kind? Should I have to combat her desire to take upon
herself the full blame of her deed, with all its shames and penalties?
Or should I have the still deeper misery of finding her callous to
my position and welcoming any chance which diverted suspicion from
herself? Either supposition might be possible, according to my judgment
in this evil hour. All communication between us, in spite of our
ardent and ungovernable passion, had been so casual and so slight.
Looks, a whispered word or so, one furtive clasp in which our hands
seemed to grow together, were all I had to go upon as tests of her
feeling towards me. Her character I had judged from her face, which
was lovely. But faces deceive, and the loveliness of youth is not like
the loveliness of age--an absolute mirror of the soul within. Was not
Medusa captivating, for all her snaky locks? Hide those locks and one
might have thought her a Daphne.

What would relieve my doubts? As Hexford drew near me again on our way
to the head of the staircase, I summoned up courage to ask:

“Have you heard anything from the Hill? Has the news of this tragedy
been communicated to Miss Cumberland’s family, and if so, how are they
bearing this affliction?”

His lip curled, and for a minute he hesitated; then something in my
aspect or the straight-forward look I gave him, softened him and he
answered frankly, if coldly:

“Word has gone there, of course, but only the servants are affected by
it so far. Miss Cumberland, the younger, is very ill, and the boy--I
don’t know his name--has not shown up since last evening. He’s very
dissipated, they say, and may be in any one of the joints in the lower
part of the town.”

I stopped in dismay, clutching wildly at the railing of the stairs we
were descending. I had hardly heard the latter words, all my mind was
on what he had said first.

“Miss Carmel Cumberland ill?” I stammered, “too ill to be told?”

I was sufficiently master of myself to put it this way.

“Yes,” he rejoined, kindly, as he urged me down the very stairs I had
seen her descend in such a state of mind a few hours before. “A servant
who had been out late, heard the fall of some heavy body as she was
passing Miss Cumberland’s rooms, and rushing in found Miss Carmel, as
she called her, lying on the floor near the open fire. Her face had
struck the bars of the grate in falling, and she was badly burned. But
that was not all; she was delirious with fever, brought on, they think,
by anxiety about her sister, whose name she was constantly repeating.
They had a doctor for her and the whole house was up before ever the
word came of what had happened here.”

I thanked him with a look. I had no opportunity for more. Half a dozen
officers were standing about the front door, and in another moment I
was bustled into the conveyance provided and was being driven away from
the death-haunted spot.

I had heard the last whisper of those pines for many, many days. But
not in my dreams; it ever came back at night, sinister, awesome,
haunted with dead hopes and breathing of an ever doubtful future.




VII

CLIFTON ACCEPTS MY CASE

This hand of mine
Is yet a maiden and an innocent hand,
Not painted with the crimson spots of blood.
Within this bosom never enter’d yet
The dreadful motion of a murd’rous thought.

_King John_.


My first thought (when I could think at all) was this:

“She has some feeling, then! Her terror and remorse have maddened
her. I can dwell upon her image with pity.” The next, “Will they find
her wet clothes and discover that she was out last night?” The latter
possibility troubled me. My mind was the seat of strange contradictions.

As the day advanced and I began to realise that I, Elwood Ranelagh,
easy-going man of the world, but with traditions of respectable living
on both sides of my house and a list of friends of which any man might
be proud, was in a place of detention on the awful charge of murder, I
found that my keenest torment arose from the fact that I was shut off
from the instant knowledge of what was going on in the house where all
my thoughts, my fears, and shall I say it, latent hopes were centred.
To know Carmel ill and not to know how ill! To feel the threatening
arm of the law hovering constantly over her head and neither to know
the instant of its fall nor be given the least opportunity to divert
it. To realise that some small inadvertance on her part, some trivial
but incriminating object left about, some heedless murmur or burst of
unconscious frenzy might precipitate her doom, and I remain powerless,
bearing my share of suspicion and ignominy, it is true, but not the
chief share if matters befell as I have suggested, which they were
liable to do at any hour, nay, at any minute.

My examination before the magistrate held one element of comfort.
Nothing in its whole tenor went to show that, as yet, she was in the
least suspected of any participation in my so-called crime. But the
knowledge which came later, of how the police first learned of trouble
at the club-house did not add to this sense of relief, whatever
satisfaction it gave my curiosity. A cry of distress had come to them
over the telephone; a wild cry, in a woman’s choked and tremulous
voice: “Help at The Whispering Pines! Help!” That was all, or all they
revealed to me. In their endeavour to find out whether or not I was
present when this call was made, I learned the nature of their own
suspicions. They believed that Adelaide in some moment of prevision
had managed to reach the telephone and send out this message. But what
did I believe? What could I believe? All the incidents of the deadly
struggle which must have preceded the fatal culminating act, were
mysteries which my mind refused to penetrate. After hours of torturing
uncertainty, and an evening which was the miserable precursor of a
still more miserable night, I decided to drop conjecture and await the
enlightenment which must come with the morrow.

It was, therefore, in a condition of mingled dread and expectation that
I opened the paper which was brought me the next morning. Of the shock
which it gave me to see my own name blotting the page with suggestions
of hideous crime, I will not speak, but pass at once to the few gleams
of added knowledge I was able to gather from those abominable columns.
Arthur, the good-for-nothing brother, had returned from his wild
carouse and had taken affairs in charge with something like spirit
and a decent show of repentance for his own shortcomings and the mad
taste for liquor which had led him away from home that night. Carmel
was still ill, and likely to be so for many days to come. Her case was
diagnosed as one of brain fever and of a most dangerous type. Doctors
and nurses were busy at her bedside and little hope was held out of
her being able to tell soon, if ever, what she knew of her sister’s
departure from the house on that fatal evening. That her testimony
on this point would be invaluable was self-evident, for proofs were
plenty of her having haunted her sister’s rooms all the evening in a
condition of more or less delirium. She was alone in the house and this
may have added to her anxieties, all of the servants having gone to the
policemen’s ball. It was on their return in the early morning hours
that she had been discovered, lying ill and injured before her sister’s
fireplace.

One fact was mentioned which set me thinking. The keys of the
club-house had been found lying on a table in the side hall of the
Cumberland mansion--the keys which I have already mentioned as missing
from my pocket. An alarming discovery which might have acted as a
clew to the suspicious I feared, if their presence there had not been
explained by the waitress who had cleared the table after dinner.
Coming upon these keys lying on the floor beside one of the chairs,
she had carried them out into the hall and laid them where they would
be more readily seen. She had not recognised the keys, but had taken
it for granted that they belonged to Mr. Ranelagh who had dined at the
house that night.

They were my keys, and I have already related how I came to drop them
on the floor. Had they but stayed there! Adelaide, or was it Carmel,
might not have seen them and been led by some strange, if not tragic,
purpose, incomprehensible to us now and possibly never to find full
explanation, to enter the secret and forsaken spot where I later found
them, the one dead, the other fleeing in frenzy, but not in such a
thoughtless frenzy as to forget these keys or to fail to lock the
club-house door behind her. That she, on her return home, should have
had sufficient presence of mind to toss these keys down in the same
place from which she or her sister had taken them, argued well for
her clear-headedness up to that moment. The fever must have come on
later--a fever which with my knowledge of what had occurred at The
Whispering Pines, seemed the only natural outcome of the situation.

The next paragraph detailed a fact startling enough to rouse my deepest
interest. Zadok Brown, the Cumberlands’ coachman, declared that
Arthur’s cutter and what he called the grey mare had been out that
night. They were both in place when he returned to the stable towards
early morning, but the signs were unmistakable that both had been out
in the snow since he left the stable at about nine. He had locked the
stable-door at that time, but the key always hung in the kitchen where
any one could get it. This was on account of Arthur, who, if he wanted
to go out late, sometimes harnessed a horse himself. Zadok judged that
he had done so this night, though how the horse happened to be back and
in her stall and no Mr. Arthur in the house, it would take wiser heads
than his to explain. But he was sure the mare had been out.

There was some comment made on this, because Arthur had denied using
his cutter that night. He declared instead that he had gone out on foot
and designated the coachman’s tale as all bosh. “I was not the only one
who had a drop too much down-town,” was the dogged assertion with which
he met all questions on this subject. “I wouldn’t give a snap of my
finger for Zadok’s opinion on any subject, after five hours of dancing
and the necessary drinks. There were no signs of the mare having been
out when I got home.” As this was about noon the next day, his opinion
on this point could not be said to count for much.

As for myself, I felt inclined to believe that the mare had been out,
that one or both of the women had harnessed him and that it was by
these means they had reached The Whispering Pines. The night was too
cold, a storm too imminent, for them to have contemplated so long a
walk on a road so remote as that leading to the club-house. Arthur
was athletic but Adelaide was far from strong and never addicted to
walking under the most favourable conditions. Of all the mysteries
surrounding her dead presence in the club-house, the one which from
the first had struck me as the most inexplicable was the manner of her
reaching there. Now I could understand both that fact and how Carmel
had succeeded in returning in safety to her home. She had ridden both
ways--a theory which likewise explained how she came to wear a man’s
derby and possibly a man’s overcoat. With her skirts covered by a
bear-skin she would present a very fair figure of a man to any one who
chanced to pass her. This was desirable in her case. A man and woman
driving at a late hour through the city streets would attract little,
if any, attention, while two women might. Having no wish to attract
attention, they had resorted to subterfuge--or Carmel had; it was not
like Adelaide to do so. She was always perfectly open, both in manner
and speech.

These were my deductions drawn from my own knowledge. Would others who
had not my knowledge be in any wise influenced to draw the same? Would
the fact that the mare had been out during those mysterious hours when
everybody had appeared to be absent from the house, saving the one
young girl whom they afterwards found stark, staring mad with delirium,
serve to awaken suspicion of her close and personal connection with
this crime? There was nothing in this reporter’s article to show that
such an idea had dawned upon his mind, but the police are not readily
hoodwinked and I dreaded the result of their inquiries, if they chose
to follow this undoubted clew.

Yet, if they let this point slip, where should I be? Human nature is
human all the way through, and I could not help having moments when I
asked myself if this young girl were worth the sacrifice I contemplated
making for her? She was lovely to look at, amiable and of womanly
promise save at those rare and poignant moments when passion would
seize her in a gust which drove everything before it. But were any
of these considerations sufficient to justify me in letting my whole
manhood slip for the sake of one who, whatever the provocation, had
used the strength of her hands against the sister who had been as a
mother to her for so many years. That she had had provocation I did
not doubt. Adelaide, for all her virtues, was not an easy person to
deal with. Upright and perfectly sincere herself, she had no sympathy
with or commiseration for any lack of principle or any display of
selfishness in others. A little cold, a little reserved, a little
lacking in spontaneity, though always correct and always generous
in her gifts and often in her acts, her whole nature would rise at
any evidence of meanness or ingratitude, and though she said little,
you would feel her disapprobation through and through. She would
even change physically. Naturally pallid and of small inconspicuous
features, her eyes on these occasions would so flame and her whole
figure so dilate that she looked like another woman. I have seen her
brother, six feet in height and weighty for his years, cringe under her
few quiet words at these times till she absolutely seemed the taller
of the two. It was only in these moments she was handsome, and had I
loved her, I should probably have admired this passionate purity, this
intolerance of all that was small or selfish or unworthy a good woman’s
esteem. But not loving her, I had merely cherished a wholesome fear
of her displeasure, and could quite comprehend what a full display
of anger on her part might call up in her sensitive, already deeply
suffering sister. The scathing arraignment, the unbearable taunt--Well,
well, it was all dream-work, but I had time to dream and opportunity
for little else, and pictures, which till now I had sedulously kept in
the background of my imagination, would come to the front as I harped
on this topic and weighed in my disturbed mind the following question:
Should I continue the course which I had instinctively taken out of a
natural sense of chivalry, or face my calumniators with the truth and
leave my cause and hers to the justice of men, rather than to the slow
but righteous workings of Providence?

I struggled with the dilemma for hours, the more so, that I did not
stand alone in the world. I had relatives and I had friends, some of
whom had come to see me and gone away deeply grieved at my reticence.
I was swayed, too, by another consideration. I had deeply loved my
mother. She was dead, but I had her honour to think of. Should it
be said she had a murderer for her son? In the height of my inner
conflict, I had almost cried aloud the fierce denial which would arise
at this thought. But ere the word could leave my lips, such a vision
rose before me of a bewildering young face with wonderful eyes and
a smile too innocent for guile and too loving for hypocrisy, that I
forgot my late antagonistic feelings, forgot the claims of my dear,
dead mother, and even those of my own future. Such passion and such
devotion merited consideration from the man who had called them forth.
I would not slight the claims of my dead mother but I would give this
young girl a chance for her life. Let others ferret out the fact that
she had visited the club-house with her sister; I would not proclaim
it. It was enough for me to proclaim my innocence, and that I would do
to the last.

I was in this frame of mind when Charles Clifton called and was allowed
to see me. I had sent for him in one of my discouraged moods. He was
my friend, but he was also my legal adviser, and it was as such I
had summoned him, and it was as such he had now come. Cordial as our
relations had been--though he was hardly one of my ilk--I noted no
instinctive outstretching of his hand, and so did not reach out mine.
Appearances had been too strong against me for any such spontaneous
outburst from even my best friends. I realised that to expect otherwise
from him or from any other man would be to play the fool; and this was
no time for folly. The day for that was passed.

I was the first to speak.

“You see me where you have never thought to see a friend of yours. But
we won’t go into that. The police have good reasons for what they have
done and I presume feel justified in my commitment. Notwithstanding, I
am an innocent man so far as the attack made upon Miss Cumberland goes.
I had no hand in her murder, if murder it is found out to be. My story
which you have read in the papers and which I felt forced to give out,
possibly to my own shame and that of another whom I would fain have
saved, is an absolutely true one. I did not arrive at The Whispering
Pines until after Miss Cumberland was dead. To this I am ready to
swear and it is upon this fact you must rely, in any defence you may
hereafter be called upon to make in my regard.”

He listened as a lawyer would be apt to listen to such statements from
the man who had summoned him to his aid. But I saw that I had made no
impression on his convictions. He regarded me as a guilty man, and what
was more to the point no doubt, as one for whom no plea could be made
or any rational defence undertaken.

“You don’t believe me,” I went on, still without any great bitterness.
“I am not surprised at it, after what the man Clarke has said of seeing
me with my hands on her throat. Any man, friend or not, would take me
for a villain after that. But, Charles, to you I will confess what
cowardice kept me from owning to Dr. Perry at the proper, possibly at
the only proper moment, that I did this out of a wild desire to see
if those marks were really the marks of strangling fingers. I could
not believe that she had been so killed and, led away by my doubts, I
leaned over her and--You shall believe me, you must,” I insisted, as
I perceived his hard gaze remain unsoftened. “I don’t ask it of the
rest of the world. I hardly expect any one to give me credit for good
impulses or even for speaking the plain truth after the discovery which
has been made of my treacherous attitude towards these two virtuous and
devoted women. But you--if you are to act as my counsel--must take this
denial from me as gospel truth. I may disappoint you in other ways.
I may try you and often make you regret that you undertook my case,
but on this fact you may safely pin your faith. She was dead before I
touched her. Had the police spy whose testimony is likely to hang me,
climbed the tree a moment sooner than he did, he would have seen that.
Are you ready to take my case?”

Clifton is a fair fellow and I knew if he once accepted the fact I thus
urged upon him, he would work for me with all the skill and ability
my desperate situation demanded. I, therefore, watched him with great
anxiety for the least change in the constrained attitude and fixed,
unpromising gaze with which he had listened to me, and was conscious of
a great leap of heart as the set expression of his features relaxed,
and he responded almost warmly:

“I will take your case, Ranelagh. God help me to make it good against
all odds.”

I was conscious of few hopes, but some of the oppression under which I
laboured lifted at those words. I had assured one man of my innocence!
It was like a great rock in the weary desert. My sigh of relief bespoke
my feelings and I longed to take his hand, but the moment had not yet
come. Something was wanting to a perfect confidence between us, and I
was in too sensitive a frame of mind to risk the slightest rebuff.

He was ready to speak before I was. “Then, you had not been long on the
scene of crime when the police arrived?”

“I had been in the room but a few minutes. I do not know how long I was
searching the house.”

“The police say that fully twenty minutes elapsed between the time they
received Miss Cumberland’s appeal for help and their arrival at the
club-house. If you were there that long--”

“I cannot say. Moments are hours at such a crisis--I--”

My emotions were too much for me, and I confusedly stopped. He was
surveying me with the old distrust. In a moment I saw why.

“You are not open with me,” he protested. “Why should moments be hours
to you previous to the instant when you stripped those pillows from the
couch? You are not a fanciful man, nor have you any cowardly instincts.
Why were you in such a turmoil going through a house where you could
have expected to find nothing worse than some miserable sneak thief?”

This was a poser. I had laid myself open to suspicion by one
thoughtless admission, and what was worse, it was but the beginning
in all probability of many other possible mistakes. I had never taken
the trouble to measure my words and the whole truth being impossible,
I necessarily must make a slip now and then. He had better be warned
of this. I did not wish him to undertake my cause blindfolded. He must
understand its difficulties while believing in my innocence. Then,
if he chose to draw back, well and good. I should have to face the
situation alone.

“Charles,” said I, as soon as I could perfectly control my speech, “you
are quite just in your remark. I am not and can not be perfectly open
with you. I shall tell you no lies, but beyond that I cannot promise. I
am caught in a net not altogether of my own weaving. So far I will be
frank with you. A common question may trip me up, others find me free
and ready with my defence. You have chanced upon one of the former. I
was in a turmoil of mind from the moment of my entrance into that fatal
house, but I can give no reason for it unless I am, as you hinted, a
coward.”

He settled that supposition with a gesture I had rather not have seen.
It would be better for him to consider me a poltroon than to suspect my
real reasons for the agitation which I had acknowledged.

“You say you cannot be open with me. That means you have certain
memories connected with that night which you cannot divulge.”

“Right, Charles; but not memories of guilt--of active guilt, I mean.
This I have previously insisted on, and this is what you must believe.
I am not even an accessory before the fact. I am perfectly innocent so
far as Adelaide’s death is concerned. You may proceed on that basis
without fear. That is, if you continue to take an interest in my case.
If not, I shall be the last to blame you. Little honour is likely to
accrue to you from defending me.”

“I have accepted the case and I shall continue to interest myself in
it,” he assured me, with a dogged rather than genial persistence. “But
I should like to know what I am to work upon, if it cannot be shown
that her call for help came before you entered the building.”

“That would be the best defence possible, of course,” I replied; “but
neither from your standpoint nor mine is it a feasible one. I have no
proof of my assertion, I never looked at my watch from the time I left
the station till I found it run down this very morning. The club-house
clock has been out of order for some time and was not running. All I
know and can swear to about the length of time I was in that building
prior to the arrival of the police, is that it could not have been very
long, since she was not only dead and buried under those accumulated
cushions, but in a room some little distance from the telephone.”

“That will do for me,” said he, “but scarcely for those who are
prejudiced against you. Everything points so indisputably to your
guilt. The note which you say you wrote to Carmel to meet you at the
station looks very much more like one to Miss Cumberland to meet you at
the club-house.”

It was thus I first learned which part of this letter had been burned
off.[1]

  [1] It was the top portion, leaving the rest to read:

  _“Come, come my darling, my life. She will forgive when all is done.
  Hesitation will only undo us. To-night at 10:30. I shall never marry
  any one but you.”_

  It was also evident that I had failed to add those expressions of
  affection linked to Carmel’s name which had been in my mind and
  awakened my keenest apprehension.

“Otherwise,” he pursued, “what could have taken her there? Everybody
who knew her will ask that. Such a night! so soon after seeing you!
It is a mystery any way, but one entirely inconceivable without some
such excuse for her. These lines said ‘Come!’ and she went, for reasons
which may be clear to you who were acquainted with her weak as well as
strong points. Went how? No one knows. By chance or by intention on
her part or yours, every servant was out of the house by nine o’clock,
and her brother, too. Only the sister remained, the sister whom you
profess to have urged to leave the town with you that very evening;
and she can tell us nothing,--may die without ever being able to do
so. Some shock to her feelings--you may know its character and you
may not--drove her from a state of apparent health into the wildest
delirium in a few hours. It was not your letter--if your story is true
about that letter--or she would have shown its effect immediately upon
receiving it; that is, in the early evening. And she did not. Helen,
one of the maids, declares that she saw her some time after you left
the house, and that she wore anything but a troubled look; that, in
fact, her countenance was beaming and so beautiful that, accustomed
as the girl was to her young mistress’s good looks, she was more than
struck by her appearance and spoke of it afterwards at the ball. A
telling circumstance against you, Ranelagh, not only contradicting your
own story but showing that her after condition sprang from some sudden
and extreme apprehension in connection with her sister. Did you speak?”

No, I had not spoken. I had nothing to say. I was too deeply shaken
by what he had just told me, to experience anything but the utmost
confusion of ideas. Carmel beaming and beautiful at an hour I had
supposed her suffering and full of struggle! I could not reconcile it
with the letter she had written me, or with that understanding with her
sister which ended so hideously in The Whispering Pines.

The lawyer, seeing my helpless state, proceeded with his presentation
of my case as it looked to unprejudiced eyes.

“Miss Cumberland comes to the club-house; so do you. You have not the
keys and so go searching about the building till you find an unlocked
window by which you both enter. There are those who say you purposely
left this window unfastened when you went about the house the day
before; that you dropped the keys in her house where they would be
sure to be found, and drove down to the station and stood about there
for a good half hour, in order to divert suspicion from yourself
afterwards and create an alibi in case it should be wanted. I do not
believe any of this myself, not since accepting your assurance of
innocence, but there are those who do believe it firmly and discern
in the whole affair a cool and premeditated murder. Your passion for
Carmel, while not generally known, has not passed unsuspected by your
or her intimates; and this in itself is enough to give colour to these
suspicions, even if you had not gone so far as to admit its power over
you and the extremes to which you were willing to go to secure the wife
you wished. So much for the situation as it appears to outsiders. Of
the circumstantial evidence which links you personally to this crime,
we have already spoken. It is very strong and apparently unassailable.
But truth is truth, and if you only felt free to bare your whole soul
to me as you now decline to do, I should not despair of finding some
weak link in the chain which seems so satisfactory to the police and, I
am forced to add, to the general public.”

“Charles--”

I was very near unbosoming myself to him at that moment. But I caught
myself back in time. While Carmel lay ill and unconscious, I would not
clear my name at her expense by so much as a suggestion.

“Charles,” I repeated, but in a different tone and with a different
purpose, “how do they account for the cordial that was drunk--the two
emptied glasses and the flask which were found in the adjacent closet?”

“It’s one of the affair’s conceded incongruities. Miss Cumberland is a
well-known temperance woman. Had the flask and glasses not come from
her house, you would get no one to believe that she had had anything to
do with them. Have you any hint to give on this point? It would be a
welcome addition to our case.”

Alas! I was as much puzzled by those emptied cordial glasses as he
was, and told him so; also by the presence of the third unused one.
As I dwelt in thought on the latter circumstance, I remembered the
observation which Coroner Perry had made concerning it.

“Coroner Perry speaks of a third and unused glass which was found
with the flask,” I ventured, tentatively. “He seemed to consider it
an important item, hiding some truth that would materially help this
case. What do you think, or rather, what is the general opinion on this
point?”

“I have not heard. I have seen the fact mentioned, but without comment.
It is a curious circumstance. I will make a note of it. You have no
suggestions to offer on the subject?”

“None.”

“The clew is a small one,” he smiled.

“So is the one offered by the array of bottles found on the kitchen
table; yet the latter may lead directly to the truth. Adelaide never
dug those out of the cellar where they were locked up, and I’m sure I
did not. Yet I suppose I’m given credit for doing so.”

“Naturally. The key to the wine-vault was the only key which was
lacking from the bunch left at Miss Cumberland’s. That it was used to
open the wine-vault door is evident from the fact that it was found in
the lock.”

This was discouraging. Everything was against me. If the whole affair
had been planned with an intent to inculpate me and me only, it
could not have been done with more attention to detail, nor could I
have found myself more completely enmeshed. Yet I knew, both from
circumstances and my own instinct that no such planning had occurred.
I was a victim, not of malice but of blind chance, or shall I say of
Providence? As to this one key having been slipped from the rest and
used to open the wine-vault for wine which nobody wanted and nobody
drank--this must be classed with the other incongruities which might
yet lead to my enlargement.

“You may add this coincidence to the other,” I conceded, after I had
gone thus far in my own mind. “I swear that I had nothing to do with
that key.”

Neither could I believe that it had been used or even carried there by
Adelaide or Carmel, though I knew that the full ring of keys had been
in their hands and that they had entered the building by means of one
of them. So assured was I of their innocence in this regard that the
idea which afterwards assumed such proportions in all our minds had, at
this moment, its first dawning in mine, as well as its first outward
expression.

“Some other man than myself was thirsty that night,” I firmly declared.
“We are getting on, Charles.”

Evidently he did not consider the pace a very fast one, but being a
cheerful fellow by nature, he simply expressed his dissatisfaction by
an imperceptible shrug.

“Do you know exactly what the club-house’s wine-vault contained?” he
asked.

“An inventory was given me by the steward the morning we closed. It
must be in my rooms.”

“Your rooms have been examined. You expected that, didn’t you? Probably
this inventory has been found. I don’t suppose it will help any.”

“How should it?”

“Very true; how should it! No thoroughfare there, of course.”

“No thoroughfare anywhere to-day,” I exclaimed. “To-morrow some
loop-hole of escape may suggest itself to me. I should like to sleep on
the matter. I--I should like to sleep on it.”

He saw that I had something in mind of which I had thus far given him
no intimation, and he waited anxiously for me to reconsider my last
words before he earnestly remarked:

“A day lost at a time like this is often a day never retrieved. Think
well before you bid me leave you, unenlightened as to the direction in
which you wish me to work.”

But I was not ready, not by any means ready, and he detected this when
I next spoke.

“I will see you to-morrow; any time to-morrow; meantime I will give you
a commission which you are at liberty to perform yourself or to entrust
to some capable detective. The letter, of which a portion remains,
_was_ written to Carmel, and she sent me a reply which was handed me
on the station platform by a man who was a perfect stranger to me. I
have hardly any memory of how the man looked, but it should be an easy
task to find him and if you cannot do that, the smallest scrap of the
note he gave me, and which unfortunately I tore up and scattered to the
winds, would prove my veracity in this one particular and so make it
easier for them to believe the rest.”

His eye lightened. I presume the prospect of making any practical
attempt in my behalf was welcome.

“One thing more,” I now added. “My ring was missing from Miss
Cumberland’s hand when I took away those pillows. I have reason to
think--or it is natural for me to think--that she planned to return
it to me by some messenger or in some letter. Do you know if such
messenger or such letter has been received at my apartments? Have you
heard anything about this ring? It was a notable one and not to be
confounded with any other. Any one who knew us or who had ever remarked
it on her hand would be able to identify it.”

“I have heard the ring mentioned,” he replied, “I have even heard that
the police are interested in finding it; but I have not heard that they
have been successful. You encourage me much by assuring me that it was
missing from her hand when you first saw her. That ring may prove our
most valuable clew.”

“Yes, but you must also remember that she may have taken it off before
she started for the club-house.”

“That is very true.”

“You do not know whether they have looked for it at her home?”

“I do not.”

“Will you find out, and will you see that I get all my letters?”

“I certainly will, but you must not expect to receive the latter
unopened.”

“I suppose not.”

I said this with more cheerfulness than he evidently expected. My heart
had been lightened of one load. The ring had not been discovered on
Carmel as I had secretly feared.

“I will take good care of your interests from now on,” he remarked, in
a tone much more natural than any he had before used. “Be hopeful and
show a brave front to the district attorney when he comes to interview
you. I hear that he is expected home to-morrow. If you are innocent,
you can face him and his whole office with calm assurance.” Which
showed how little he understood my real position.

There was comfort in this very thought, however, and I quietly remarked
that I did not despair.

“And I _will_ not,” he emphasised, rising with an assumption of ease
which left him as he remained hesitating before me.

It was my moment of advantage, and I improved it by proffering a
request which had been more or less in my mind during the whole of this
prolonged colloquy.

First thanking him for his disinterestedness, I remarked that he had
shown me so much consideration as a lawyer, that I now felt emboldened
to ask something from him as my friend.

“You are free,” said I; “I am not. Miss Cumberland will be buried
before I leave these four walls. I hate to think of her going to
her grave without one token from the man to whom she has been only
too good and who, whatever outrage he may have planned to her
feelings, is not without reverence for her character and a heartfelt
repentance for whatever he may have done to grieve her. Charles, a
few flowers,--white--no wreath, just a few which can be placed on her
breast or in her hand. You need not say whom they are from. It would
seem a mockery to any one but her. Lilies, Charles. I shall feel
happier to know that they are there. Will you do this for me?”

“I will.”

“That is all.”

Instinctively he held out his hand. I dropped mine in it; there was a
slight pressure, some few more murmured words and he was gone.

I slept that night.




VIII

A CHANCE! I TAKE IT

I entreat you then
From one that so imperfectly conjects,
You’d take no notice; nor build yourself a trouble
Out of his scattering and unsure observance:
It were not for your quiet, nor your good,
Nor for my manhood, honesty or wisdom,
To let you know my thoughts.

_Othello_


I slept, though a question of no small importance was agitating my
mind, demanding instant consideration and a definite answer before I
again saw this friend and adviser. I woke to ask if the suggestion
which had come to me in our brief conversation about the bottles taken
from the wine-vault, was the promising one it had then appeared, or
only a fool’s trick bound to end in disaster. I weighed the matter in
every conceivable way, and ended by trusting to the instinct which
impelled me to have resource to the one and only means by which the
scent might be diverted from its original course, confusion be sown in
the minds of the police, and Carmel, as well as myself, be saved from
the pit gaping to receive us.

This was my plan. I would acknowledge to having seen a horse and cutter
leave the club-house by the upper gateway, simultaneously with my
entrance through the lower one. I would even describe the appearance
of the person driving this cutter. No one by the greatest stretch of
imagination would be apt to associate this description with Carmel;
but it might set the authorities thinking, and if by any good chance
a cutter containing a person wearing a derby hat and a coat with an
extra high collar should have been seen on this portion of the road, or
if, as I earnestly hoped, the snow had left any signs of another horse
having been tethered in the clump of trees opposite the one where I
had concealed my own, enough of the truth might be furnished to divide
public opinion and start fresh inquiry.

That a woman’s form had sought concealment under these masculine
habiliments would not, could not, strike anybody’s mind. Nothing in
the crime had suggested a woman’s presence, much less a woman’s active
agency.

On the contrary, all the appearances, save such as I believed known to
myself alone, spoke so openly of a man’s strength, a man’s methods,
a man’s appetite, and a man’s brutal daring that the suspicion which
had naturally fallen on myself as the one and only person implicated,
would in shifting pass straight to another man, and, if he could not
be found, return to me, or be lost in a maze of speculation. This
seemed so evident after a long and close study of the situation that
I was ready with my confession when Mr. Clifton next came. I had even
forestalled it in a short interview forced upon me by the assistant
district attorney and Chief Hudson. That it had made an altogether
greater impression upon the latter than I had expected, gave me
additional courage when I came to discuss this new line of defence with
the young lawyer. I was even able to tell him that, to all appearance,
my long silence on a point so favourable to my own interests had not
militated against me to the extent one would expect from men so alive
to the subterfuges and plausible inventions of suspected criminals.

“Chief Hudson believes me, late as my statement is. I saw it in his
eye.” Thus I went on. “And the assistant district attorney, too. At
least, the latter is willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, which
was more than I expected. What do you suppose has happened? Some new
discovery on their part? If so, I ought to know what it is. Believe me,
Charles, I ought to know what it is.”

“I have heard of no new discovery,” he coldly replied, not quite
pleased, as I could see, either with my words or my manner. “An old one
may have served your purpose. If another cutter besides yours passed
through the club-house grounds at the time you mention, it left tracks
which all the fury of the storm would not have entirely obliterated
in the fifteen minutes elapsing between that time and the arrival of
the police. Perhaps they remember these tracks, and if you had been
entirely frank that night--”

“I know, I know,” I put in, “but I wasn’t. Lay it to my confusion
of mind--to the great shock I had received, to anything but my own
blood-guiltiness, and take up the matter as it now stands. Can’t
you follow up my suggestion? A witness can certainly be found who
encountered that cutter and its occupant somewhere on the long stretch
of open road between The Whispering Pines and the resident district.”

“Possibly. It would help. You have not asked for news from the Hill.”

The trembling which seized and shook me at these words testified to the
shock they gave me. “Carmel!” I cried. “She is worse--dead!”

“No. She’s not worse and she’s not dead. But the doctors say it will
be weeks before they can allow a question of any importance to be put
to her. You can see what that will do for us. Her testimony is too
important to the case to be ignored. A delay will follow which may or
may not be favourable to you. I am inclined to think now that it will
redound to your interests. You are ready to swear to the sleigh you
speak of; that you saw it leave the club-house grounds and turn north?”

“Quite ready; but you must not ask me to describe or in any way to
identify its occupant. I saw nothing but the hat and coat I have told
you about. It was just before the moon went under a cloud, or I could
not have seen that much.”

Is it so hard to preserve a natural aspect in telling or suggesting a
lie that Charles’s look should change as I uttered the last sentence? I
do not easily flush, and since my self-control had been called upon by
the dreadful experiences of the last few days, I had learned to conceal
all other manifestations of feeling except under some exceptional
shock. But a lie embodied in so many words, never came easy to my
lips, and I suppose my voice fell, for his glance became suddenly
penetrating, and his voice slightly sarcastic as he remarked:

“Those clouds obscured more than the moon, I fancy. I only wish that
they had not risen between you and me. This is the blindest case that
has ever been put in my hands. All the more credit to me if I see you
through it, I suppose; but--”

“Tell me,” I broke in, with equal desire to cut these recriminations
short and to learn what was going on at the Cumberland house, “have
you been to the Hill or seen anybody who has? Can’t you give me some
details of--of Carmel’s condition; of the sort of nurse who cares for
her, and how Arthur conducts himself under this double affliction?”

“I was there last night. Miss Clifford was in the house and received
me. She told me that Arthur’s state of mind was pitiful. He was never
a very affectionate brother, you know, but now they cannot get him
away from Carmel’s door. He sits or stands all day just outside the
threshold and casts jealous and beseeching looks at those who are
allowed to enter. They say you wouldn’t know him. I tried to get him to
come down and see me, but he wouldn’t leave his post.”

“Doesn’t he grieve for Adelaide? I always thought that of the two she
had the greater influence over him.”

“Yes, but they cannot get him to enter the place where she lies. His
duty is to the living, he says; at least, his anxiety is there. He
starts at every cry Carmel utters.”

“She--cries out--then?”

“Very often. I could hear her from where I sat downstairs.”

“And what does she say?”

“The one thing constantly. ‘Lila! Lila!’ Nothing more.”

I kept my face in shadow. If he saw it at all, it must have looked as
cold and hard as stone. After a moment, I went on with my queries:

“Does he--Arthur--mention me at all?”

“I did not discuss you greatly with Miss Clifford. I saw that she was
prejudiced, and I preferred not to risk an argument; but she let fall
this much: that Arthur felt very hard towards you and loudly insisted
upon your guilt. She seemed to think him justified in this. You don’t
mind my telling you? It is better for you to know what is being said
about you in town.”

I understood his motive. He was trying to drive me into giving him my
full confidence. But I would not be driven. I simply retorted quietly
but in a way to stop all such future attempts:

“Miss Clifford is a very good girl and a true friend of the whole
Cumberland family; but she is not the most discriminating person in the
world, and even if she were, her opinion would not turn me from the
course I have laid out for myself. Does the doctor--Dr. Carpenter, I
presume,--venture to say how long Carmel’s present delirium will hold?”

“He cannot, not knowing its real cause. Carmel fell ill before the
news of her sister’s death arrived at the house, you remember. Some
frightful scene must have occurred between the two, previous to
Adelaide’s departure for The Whispering Pines. What that scene was can
only be told by Carmel and for her account we must wait. Happily you
have an alibi which will serve you in this instance. You were at the
station during the time we are speaking of.”

“Has that been proved?”

“Yes; several men saw you there.”

“And the gentleman who brought me the--her letter?” It was more than
difficult for me to speak Carmel’s name. “He has not come forward?”

“Not yet; not to my knowledge, at least.”

“And the ring?”

“No news.”

“The nurse--you have told me nothing about her,” I now urged, reverting
to the topic of gravest interest to me. “Is she any one we know or an
importation of the doctor’s?”

“I did not busy myself with that. She’s a competent woman, of course. I
suppose that is what you mean?”

Could I tell him that this was not what I meant at all--that it was
her qualities as woman rather than her qualifications as nurse which
were important in this case? If she were of a suspicious, prying
disposition, given to weighing every word and marking every gesture of
a delirious patient, what might we not fear from her circumspection
when Carmel’s memory asserted itself and she grew more precise in the
frenzy which now exhausted itself in unintelligible cries, or the
ceaseless repetition of her sister’s name. The question seemed of such
importance to me that I was tempted to give expression to my secret
apprehension on this score, but I bethought myself in time and passed
the matter over with the final remark:

“Watch her, watch them all, and bring me each and every detail of the
poor girl’s sickness. You will never regret humouring me in this. You
ordered the flowers for--Adelaide?”

“Yes; lilies, as you requested.”

A short silence, then I observed:

“There will be no autopsy the papers say. The evidences of death by
strangulation are too well defined.”

“Very true. Yet I wonder at their laxity in this. There were signs of
some other agency having been at work also. Those two empty glasses
smelling of cordial--innocent perhaps--yet--”

“Don’t! I can bear no more to-day. I shall be stronger to-morrow.”

Another feeler turned aside. His cheek showed his displeasure, but the
words were kind enough with which he speedily took his leave and left
me to solitude and a long night of maddening thought.




BOOK TWO

SWEETWATER TO THE FRONT




IX

“WE KNOW OF NO SUCH LETTER”

O, he sits high in all the people’s hearts;
And that, which would appear offence in us,
His countenance like richest alchemy
Will change to virtue, and to worthiness.

_Julius Caesar_.


“And you still hold him?”

“Yes, but with growing uncertainty. He’s one of those fellows who
affect your judgment in spite of yourself. Handsome beyond the
ordinary, a finished gentleman and all that, he has, in addition to
these advantages, a way with him that goes straight to the heart in
spite of prejudice and the claims of conscience. That’s a dangerous
factor in a case like this. It hampers a man in the exercise of his
duties. You may escape the fascination, probably will; but at least you
will understand my present position and why I telephoned to New York
for an expert detective to help us on this job. I wish to give the son
of my old friend a chance.”

The man whom Coroner Perry thus addressed, leaned back in his chair and
quietly replied:

“You’re right; not because he’s the son of your old friend, a handsome
fellow and all that, but for the reason that every man should have his
full chance, whatever the appearances against him. Personally, I have
no fear of my judgment being affected by his attractions. I’ve had to
do with too many handsome scamps for that. But I shall be as just to
him as you will, simply because it seems an incredibly brutal crime for
a gentleman to commit, and also because I lay greater stress than you
do on the two or three minor points which seem to favour his latest
declaration, that a man had preceded him in his visit to this lonely
club-house,--a man whom he had himself seen leaving the grounds in a
cutter just as he entered by the opposite driveway.”

“Ah!” came in quick ejaculation from the coroner’s lips, “I like to
hear you say that. I was purposely careful not to lay emphasis on the
facts you allude to. I wished you to draw your own inferences, without
any aid from me. The police did find traces of a second horse and
cutter having passed through the club-house grounds. It was snowing
hard, and these traces were speedily obliterated, but Hexford and
Clarke saw them in time to satisfy themselves that they extended from
the northern clump of trees to the upper gateway where they took the
direction of the Hill.”

“That is not all. A grip-sack, packed for travelling, was in Mr.
Ranelagh’s cutter, showing that his story of an intended journey was
not without some foundation.”

“Yes. We have retained that grip-sack. It is not the only proof we
have of his intention to leave the city for a while. He had made other
arrangements, business arrangements--But that’s neither here nor there.
No one doubts that he planned an elopement with the beautiful Carmel;
the question is, was his disappointment followed by the murder of the
woman who stood in his way?”

District Attorney Fox (you will have guessed his identity before now)
took his time, deliberating carefully with himself before venturing
to reply. Then when the coroner’s concealed impatience was about to
disclose itself, he quietly remarked:

“I suppose that no conclusion can be drawn from the condition of the
body when our men reached it. I judge that it was still warm.”

“Yes, but so it would have been if she had met her fate several minutes
earlier than was supposed. Clarke and Hexford differ about the length
of time which intervened between the moment when the former looked into
the room from the outside and that of their final entrance. But whether
it was five minutes or ten, the period was long enough to render their
testimony uncertain as to the exact length of time she had lain there
dead. Had I been there--But it’s useless to go into that. Let us take
up something more tangible.”

“Very good. Here it is. Of the six bottles of spirits which were
surreptitiously taken from the club-house’s wine-vault, four were found
standing unopened on the kitchen table. Where are the other two?”

“That’s it! That’s the question I have put myself ever since I
interrogated the steward and found him ready to swear to the
correctness of his report and the disappearance of these two bottles.
Ranelagh did not empty them, or the bottles themselves would have been
found somewhere about the place. Now, who did?”

“No one within the club-house precincts. They were opened and emptied
elsewhere. There’s our clew and if the man you’ve got up from New York
is worth his salt, he has his task ready to hand.”

“A hard task for a stranger--and such a stranger! Not very
prepossessing, to say the least. But he has a good eye, and will get
along with the boys all right. Nothing assertive about him; not enough
go, perhaps. Would you like to see him?”

“In a moment. I want to clear my mind in reference to these bottles.
Only some one addicted to drink would drag those six bottles out of
that cold, unlighted cellar.”

“Yes, and a connoisseur at that. The two missing bottles held the
choicest brand in the whole stock. They were kept far back too--hidden,
as it were, behind the other bottles. Yet they were hauled to the front
and carried off, as you say, and by some one who knows a good thing in
spirits.”

“What was in the four bottles found on the kitchen table?”

“Sherry, whiskey, and rum. Two bottles of rum and one each of sherry
and whiskey.”

“The thief meant to carry them all off, but had not time.”

“The _gentleman_ thief! No common man such as we are looking for,
would make choice of just those bottles. So there we are again!
Contradictions in every direction.”

“Don’t let us bother with the contradictions, but just follow the clew.
Those bottles, full or empty, must be found. You know the labels?”

“Yes, and the shape and colour of the bottles, both of which are
peculiar.”

“Good! Now let us see your detective.”

But Sweetwater was not called in yet. Just as Coroner Perry offered to
touch his bell, the door opened and Mr. Clifton was ushered in. Well
and favourably known to both men, he had no difficulty in stating his
business and preferring his request.

“I am here in the interests of Elwood Ranelagh,” said he. “He is
willing to concede, and so am I, that under the circumstances his
arrest was justifiable, but not his prolonged detention. He has
little excuse to offer for the mistakes he has made, or the various
offences of which he has been guilty. His best friends must condemn his
hypocrisy and fast-and-loose treatment of Miss Cumberland; but he vows
that he had no hand in her violent death, and in this regard I feel not
only bound but forced to believe him. At all events, I am going to act
on that conviction, and have come here to entreat your aid in clearing
up one or two points which may affect your own opinion of his guilt.

“As his counsel I have been able to extract from him a fact or two
which he has hitherto withheld from the police. Reticent as he has
shown himself from the start,--and considering the character of the two
women involved in this tragedy, this cannot be looked upon as entirely
to his discredit,--he has confided to me a circumstance, which in
the excitement attendant on Miss Carmel Cumberland’s sudden illness,
may have escaped the notice of the family and very naturally, of the
police. It is this:

“The ring which Miss Cumberland wore as the sign and seal of her
engagement to him was not on her hand when he came upon her, as he
declares he did, dead. It was there at dinner-time--a curious ring
which I have often noted myself and could accurately describe if
required. If she took it off before starting for The Whispering Pines,
it should be easily found. But if she did not, what a clew it offers to
her unknown assailant! Up till now, Mr. Ranelagh has been anticipating
receiving this ring back in a letter, written before she left her home.
But he has heard of no such letter, and doubts now if you have. May I
ask if he is correct in this surmise?”

“We know of no such letter. None has come to his rooms,” replied the
coroner.

“I thought not. The whereabouts of this ring, then, is still to be
determined. You will pardon my having called your attention to it.
As Mr. Ranelagh’s legal adviser, I am very anxious to have that ring
found.”

“We are glad to receive your suggestion,” replied the district
attorney. “But you must remember that some of its force is lost by its
having originated with the accused.”

“Very true; but Mr. Ranelagh was only induced to speak of this matter
after I had worked with him for an hour. There is a mystery in his
attitude which I, for one, have not yet fathomed. You must have noticed
this also, Coroner Perry? Your inquest, when you hold it, will reveal
some curious facts; but I doubt if it will reveal the secret underlying
this man’s reticence. That we shall have to discover for ourselves.”

“He has another secret, then, than the one involving his arrest as a
suspected murderer?” was the subtle conclusion of the district attorney.

“Yes, or why does he balk so at the simplest inquiries? I have my
notion as to its nature; but I’m not here to express notions unless you
call my almost unfounded belief in him a notion. What I want to present
to you is fact, and fact which can be utilised.”

“In the cause of your client!”

“Which is equally the cause of justice.”

“Possibly. We’ll search for the ring, Mr. Clifton.”

“Meanwhile, will you cast your eye over these fragments of a note which
Mr. Ranelagh says he received from Miss Carmel Cumberland while waiting
on the station platform for her coming.”

Taking an envelope from his pocket, Mr. Clifton drew forth two small
scraps of soiled and crumpled paper, one of which was the half of
another envelope presenting very nearly the following appearance:

As he pointed this out, he remarked:

“Elwood is not so common a baptismal name, that there can be any doubt
as to the person addressed.”

The other scraps, also written in pencil and by the same hand,
contained but two or three disconnected words; but one of those words
was _Adelaide_.

“I spent an hour and a half in the yards adjoining the station before
I found those two bits,” explained the young lawyer with a simple
earnestness not displeasing to the two seasoned men he addressed.
“One was in hiding under a stacked-up pile of outgoing freight, and
the other I picked out of a cart of stuff which had been swept up in
the early morning. I offer them in corroboration of Mr. Ranelagh’s
statement that the ‘_Come!_’ used in the partially consumed letter
found in the clubhouse chimney was addressed to Miss Carmel Cumberland
and not to Adelaide, and that the place of meeting suggested by this
word was the station platform, and not the spot since made terrible by
death.”

“You are acquainted with Miss Carmel Cumberland’s handwriting?”

“If I am not, the town is full of people who are. I believe these words
to have been written by Carmel Cumberland.”

Mr. Fox placed the pieces back in their envelope and laid the whole
carefully away.

“For a second time we are obliged to you,” said he.

“You can cancel the obligation,” was the quick retort, “by discovering
the identity of the man who in derby hat and a coat with a very high
collar, left the grounds of The Whispering Pines just as Mr. Ranelagh
drove into them. I have no facilities for the job, and no desire to
undertake it.”

He had endeavoured to speak naturally, if not with an off-hand air; but
he failed somehow--else why the quick glance of startled inquiry which
Dr. Perry sent him from under his rather shaggy eyebrows.

“Well, we’ll undertake that, too,” promised the district attorney.

“I can ask no more,” returned Charles Clifton, arising to depart. “The
confronting of that man with Ranelagh will cause the latter to unseal
his lips. Before you have finished with my client, you will esteem him
much more highly than you do now.”

The district attorney smiled at what seemed the callow enthusiasm of
a youthful lawyer; but the coroner who knew his district well, looked
very thoughtfully down at the table before which he sat, and failed
to raise his head until the young man had vanished from the room and
his place had been taken by another of very different appearance and
deportment. Then he roused himself and introduced the newcomer to
the prosecuting attorney as Caleb Sweetwater, of the New York police
department.

Caleb Sweetwater was no beauty. He was plain-featured to the point
of ugliness; so plain-featured that not even his quick, whimsical
smile could make his face agreeable to one who did not know his many
valuable qualities. His receding chin and far too projecting nose
were not likely to create a favourable impression on one ignorant of
his cheerful, modest, winsome disposition; and the district attorney,
after eyeing him for a moment with ill-concealed disfavour, abruptly
suggested:

“You have brought some credentials with you, I hope.”

“Here is a letter from one of the department. Mr. Gryce wrote it,” he
added, with just a touch of pride.

“The letter is all right,” hastily remarked Dr. Perry on looking it
over. “Mr. Sweetwater is commended to us as a man of sagacity and
becoming reserve.”

“Very good. To business, then. The sooner we get to work on this new
theory, the better. Mr. Sweetwater, we have some doubts if the man we
have in hand is the man we really want. But first, how much do you know
about this case?”

“All that’s in the papers.”

“Nothing more?”

“Very little. I’ve not been in town above an hour.”

“Are you known here?”

“I don’t think so; it’s my first visit this way.”

“Then you are as ignorant of the people as they are of you. Well, that
has its disadvantages.”

“And its advantages, if you will permit me to say so, sir. I have no
prejudices, no preconceived notions to struggle against. I can take
persons as I find them; and if there is any deep family secret to
unearth, it’s mighty fortunate for a man to have nothing stand in the
way of his own instincts. No likings, I mean--no leanings this way or
that, for humane or other purely unprofessional reasons.”

The eye of District Attorney Fox stole towards that of his brother
official, but did not meet it. The coroner had turned his attention
to the table again, and, while betraying no embarrassment, was not
quite his usual self. The district attorney’s hand stole to his chin,
which he softly rubbed with his lean forefinger as he again addressed
Sweetwater.

“This tragedy--the most lamentable which has ever occurred in this
town--is really, and without exaggeration, a tragedy in high life. The
lady who was strangled by a brute’s clutch, was a woman of the highest
culture and most estimable character. Her sister, who is supposed
to have been the unconscious cause of the crime, is a young girl of
blameless record. Of the man who was seen bending over the victim with
his hands on her throat, we cannot speak so well. He has the faults
and has lived the life of a social favourite. Gifted in many ways, and
popular with both men and women, he has swung on his course with an
easy disregard of the claims of others, which, while leaving its traces
no doubt in many a humble and uncomplaining heart, did not attract
notice to his inherent lack of principle, until the horrors of this
tragedy lifted him into public view stripped of all his charms. He’s
an egotist, of the first water; there is no getting over that. But did
he strangle the woman? He says not; that he was only following some
extraordinary impulse of the moment in laying his thumbs on the marks
he saw on Miss Cumberland’s neck. A fantastic story--told too late,
besides, for perfect credence, and not worthy of the least attention
if--”

The reasons which followed are too well known to us for repetition.
Sweetwater listened with snapping eyes to all that was said; and
when he had been given the various clews indicating the presence of
a third--and as yet unknown--party on the scene of crime, he rose
excitedly to his feet and, declaring that it was a most promising case,
begged permission to make his own investigations at The Whispering
Pines, after which he would be quite ready to begin his search for the
man in the derby hat and high coat-collar, whose love for wine was so
great that he chose and carried off the two choicest bottles that the
club-house contained.

“A hardy act for any man, gentleman or otherwise, who had just
strangled the life out of a fine woman like that. If he exists and the
whole story is not a pure fabrication of the entrapped Ranelagh, he
shouldn’t be hard to find. What do you say, gentlemen? He shouldn’t be
hard to find.”

“_We_ have not found him,” emphasised the district attorney, with the
shortest possible glance at the coroner’s face.

“Then the field is all before me,” smiled Sweetwater. “Wish me luck,
gentlemen. It’s a blind job, but that’s just in my line. A map of the
town, a few general instructions, and I’m off.”

Mr. Fox turned towards the coroner, and opened his lips; but closed
them again without speaking. Did Sweetwater notice this act of
self-restraint? If he did, he failed to show it.




X

“I CAN HELP YOU”

A subtle knave; a finder out of occasions;
That has an eye can stamp and counterfeit
Advantages though true advantage never presents
Itself; A devilish knave!

_Othello_.


A half hour spent with Hexford in and about the club-house, and
Sweetwater was ready for the road. As he made his way through the
northern gate, he cast a quick look back at the long, low building he
had just left, with its tall chimneys and rows of sightless windows,
half hidden, half revealed by the encroaching pines. The mystery of
the place fascinated him. To his awakened imagination, there was a
breathless suggestion in it--a suggestion which it was his foremost
wish, just now, to understand.

And those pines--gaunt, restless, communicative! ready with their
secret, if one could only interpret their language. How their heads
came together as their garrulous tongues repeated the tale, which would
never grow old to them until age nipped their hoary heads and laid them
low in the dust, with their horror half expressed, their gruesome tale
unfinished.

“Witnesses of it all,” commented the young detective as he watched
the swaying boughs rising and dipping before a certain window. “They
were peering into that room long before Clarke stole the glimpse which
has undone the unfortunate Ranelagh. If I had their knowledge, I’d do
something more than whisper.”

Thus musing, thus muttering, he plodded up the road, his insignificant
figure an unpromising break in the monotonous white of the wintry
landscape. But could the prisoner who had indirectly speeded this young
detective on his present course, have read his thoughts and rightly
estimated the force of his purpose, would he have viewed with so much
confidence the entrance of this unprepossessing stranger upon the
no-thoroughfare into which his own carefully studied admissions had
blindly sent him?

As has been said before, this road was an outlying one and but little
travelled save in the height of summer. Under ordinary circumstances
Sweetwater would have met not more than a half-dozen carts or sledges
between the club-house gates and the city streets. But to-day, the road
was full of teams carrying all sorts of incongruous people, eager for
a sight of the spot made forever notorious by a mysterious crime. He
noted them all; the faces of the men, the gestures of the women; but he
did not show any special interest till he came to that portion of the
road where the long line of half-buried fences began to give way to a
few scattered houses. Then his spirit woke, and he became quick, alert,
and persuasive. He entered houses; he talked with the people. Though
evidently not a dissipated man, he stopped at several saloons, taking
his time with his glass and encouraging the chatter of all who chose to
meet his advances. He was a natural talker and welcomed every topic,
but his eye only sparkled at one. This he never introduced himself;
he did not need to. Some one was always ready with the great theme;
and once it was started, he did not let the conversation languish till
every one present had given his or her quota of hearsay or opinion to
the general fund.

It seemed a great waste of time, for nobody had anything to say worth
the breath expended on it. But Sweetwater showed no impatience, and
proceeded to engage the attention of the next man, woman, or child he
encountered with undiminished zest and hopefulness.

He had left the country road behind, and had entered upon the jumble
of sheds, shops, and streets which marked the beginnings of the town
in this direction, when his quick and experienced eye fell on a woman
standing with uncovered head in an open doorway, peering up the street
in anxious expectation of some one not yet in sight. He liked the air
and well-kept appearance of the woman; he appreciated the neatness of
the house at her back and gauged at its proper value the interest she
displayed in the expected arrival of one whom he hoped would delay
that arrival long enough for him to get in the word which by this time
dropped almost unconsciously from his lips.

But a second survey of the woman’s face convinced him that his ordinary
loquaciousness would not serve him here. There was a refinement in
her aspect quite out of keeping with the locality in which she lived,
and he was hesitating how to proceed, when fortune favoured him by
driving against his knees a small lad on an ill-directed sled, bringing
him almost to the ground and upsetting the child who began to scream
vociferously.

It was the woman’s child, for she made instantly for the gate which,
for some reason, she found difficulty in opening. Sweetwater, seeing
this, blessed his lucky stars. He was at his best with children, and
catching the little fellow up, he soothed and fondled him and finally
brought him with such a merry air of triumph straight to his mother’s
arms, that confidence between them was immediately established and
conversation started.

He had in his pocket an ingenious little invention which he had
exhibited all along the road as an indispensable article in every
well-kept house. He wanted to show it to her, but it was too cold a day
for her to stop outside. Wouldn’t she allow him to step in and explain
how her work could be materially lessened and her labour turned to play
by a contrivance so simple that a child could run it?

It was all so ridiculous in face of this woman’s quiet intelligence,
that he laughed at his own words, and this laughter, echoed by the
child and in another instant by the mother, made everything so pleasant
for the moment that she insensibly drew back while he pulled open the
gate, only remarking, as she led the way in:

“I was looking for my husband. He may come any minute and I’m afraid he
won’t care much about contrivances to save me work--that is, if they
cost very much.”

Sweetwater, whose hand was in his pocket, drew it hastily out.

“You were watching for your husband? Do you often stand in the open
doorway, looking for him?”

Her surprised eyes met his with a stare that would have embarrassed the
most venturesome book agent, but this man was of another ilk.

“If you do,” he went on imperturbably, but with a good-humoured smile
which deepened her favourable impression of him, “how much I would give
if you had been standing there last Tuesday night when a certain cutter
and horse went by on its way up the hill.”

She was a self-contained woman, this wife of a master mechanic in one
of the great shops hard by; but her jaw fell at this, and she forgot to
chide or resist her child when he began to pull her towards the open
kitchen door.

Sweetwater, sensitive to the least change in the human face, prayed
that the husband might be detained, if only for five minutes longer,
while he, Sweetwater, worked this promising mine.

“You _were_ looking out,” he ventured. “And you _did_ see that horse
and cutter. What luck! It may save a man’s life.”

“Save!” she repeated, staggering back a few steps and dragging the
child with her. “Save a man’s life! What do you mean by that?”

“Not much if it was any cutter and any horse, and at any hour. But if
it was the horse and cutter which left The Whispering Pines at ten or
half past ten that night, then it may mean life and death to the man
now in jail under the dreadful charge of murder.”

Catching up her child, she slid into the kitchen and sat down with it,
in the first chair she came to. Sweetwater following her, took up his
stand in the doorway, unobtrusive, but patiently waiting for her to
speak. The steaming kettles and the table set for dinner gave warning
of the expected presence for which she had been watching, but she
seemed to have forgotten her husband; forgotten everything but her own
emotions.

“Who are you?” she asked at length. “You have not told me your real
business.”

“No, madam, and I ask your pardon. I feared that my real business, if
suddenly made known to you, might startle, perhaps frighten you. I
am a detective on the look-out for evidence in the case I have just
mentioned. I have a theory that a most important witness in the same,
drove by here at the hour and on the night I have named. I want to
substantiate that theory. Can you help me?”

A sensitiveness to, and quick appreciation of, the character of those
he addressed was one of Sweetwater’s most valuable attributes. No
glossing of the truth, however skillfully applied, would have served
him with this woman so well as this simple statement, followed by its
equally simple and direct inquiry. Scrutinising him over the child’s
head, she gave but a casual glance at the badge he took pains to show
her, then in as quiet and simple tones as he had himself used, she made
this reply:

“I can help you some. You make it my duty, and I have never shrunk
from duty. A horse and cutter did go by here on its way uphill, last
Tuesday night at about eleven o’clock. I remember the hour because I
was expecting my husband every minute, just as I am now. He had some
extra work on hand that night which he expected to detain him till
eleven or a quarter after. Supper was to be ready at a quarter after.
To surprise him I had beaten up some biscuits, and I had just put them
in the pan when I heard the clock strike the hour. Afraid that he would
come before they were baked, I thrust the pan into the oven and ran
to the front door to look out. It was snowing very hard, and the road
looked white and empty, but as I stood there a horse and cutter came in
sight, which, as it reached the gate, drew up in a great hurry, as if
something was the matter. Frightened, because I’m always thinking of
harm to my husband whose work is very dangerous, I ran out bare-headed
to the gate, when I saw why the man in the sleigh was making me such
wild gestures. His hat had blown off, and was lying close up against
the fence in front of me. Anxious always to oblige, I made haste to
snatch at it and carry it out to its owner. I received a sort of thank
you, and would never have remembered the occurrence if it had not
been for that murder and if--” She paused doubtfully, ran her fingers
nervously over her child’s head, looked again at Sweetwater waiting
expectantly for her next word, and faltered painfully--“if I had not
recognised the horse.”

Sweetwater drew a deep breath; it was such a happy climax. Then, as she
showed no signs of saying more, asked as quietly as his rapidly beating
heart permitted:

“Didn’t you recognise the man?”

Her answer was short but as candid as her expression.

“No. The snow was blinding; besides he wore a high collar, in which his
head was sunk down almost out of sight.”

“But the horse--”

“Was one which is often driven by here. I had rather not tell you whose
it is. I have not told any one, not even my husband, about seeing it on
the road that night. I couldn’t somehow. But if it will save a man’s
life and make clear who killed that good woman, ask any one on the
Hill, in what stable you can find a grey horse with a large black spot
on his left shoulder, and you will know as much about it as I do. Isn’t
that enough, sir? Now, I must dish up my dinner.”

“Yes, yes; it’s almost enough. Just one question, madam. Was the hat
what folks call a derby? Like this one, madam,” he explained, drawing
his own from behind his back.

“Yes, I think so. As well as I can remember, it was like that. I’m
afraid I didn’t do it any good by my handling. I had to clutch it
quick and I’m sure I bent the brim, to say nothing of smearing it with
flour-marks.”

“How?” Sweetwater had started for the door, but stopped, all eagerness
at this last remark.

“I had been cutting out biscuits, and my hands were white with flour,”
she explained, simply. “But that brushes off easily; I don’t suppose it
mattered.”

“No, no,” he hastily assented. Then while he smiled and waved his hand
to the little urchin who had been his means of introduction to this
possibly invaluable witness, he made one final plea and that was for
her name.

“Eliza Simmons,” was the straightforward reply; and this ended the
interview.

The husband, whose anticipated approach had occasioned all this
abruptness, was coming down the hill when Sweetwater left the gate. As
this detective of ours was as careful in his finish as in all the rest
of his work, he called out as he went by:

“I’ve just been trying to sell a wonderful contrivance of mine to the
missus. But it was no go.”

The man looked, smiled, and went in at his own gate with the air of one
happy in wife, child, and home.

Sweetwater went on up the hill. Towards the top, he came upon a
livery-stable. Stopping in his good-humoured way, he entered into talk
with a man loitering inside the great door. Before he left him, he had
asked him these questions:

“Any grey horse in town?”

“Yes, _one_.”

“I think I’ve seen it--has a patch of black on its left shoulder.”

“Yes.”

“Whose is it? I’ve a mighty curiosity about the horse. Looks like a
trick horse.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that. It belongs to a respectable
family. A family you must have heard about if you ever heard anything.
There’s a funeral there to-day--”

“Not Miss Cumberland’s?” exclaimed Sweetwater, all agog in a moment.

“Yes, Miss Cumberland’s. I thought you might have heard the name.”

“Yes, I’ve heard it.”

The tone was dry, the words abrupt, but the detective’s heart was
dancing like a feather. The next turn he took was toward the handsome
residence district crowning the hill.




XI

IN THE COACH HOUSE

All things that we ordained festival
Turn from their office to black funeral;
Our instruments to melancholy bells;
Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast;
And all things change them to the contrary.

_Romeo and Juliet_.


Fifteen minutes later, he stood in a finely wooded street before an
open gateway guarded by a policeman. Showing his badge, he passed in,
and entered a long and slightly curved driveway. As he did so, he took
a glance at the house. It was not as pretentious as he expected, but
infinitely more inviting. Low and rambling, covered with vines, and
nestling amid shrubbery which even in winter gave it a habitable air,
it looked as much the abode of comfort as of luxury, and gave--in
outward appearance at least--no hint of the dark shadow which had so
lately fallen across it.

The ceremonies had been set for three o’clock, and it was now half past
two. As Sweetwater reached the head of the driveway, he saw the first
of a long file of carriages approaching up the street.

“Lucky that my business takes me to the stable,” thought he. “What is
the coachman’s name? I ought to remember it. Ah--Zadok! Zadok Brown.
There’s a combination for you!”

He had reached this point in his soliloquy (a bad habit of his, for
it sometimes took audible expression) when he ran against another
policeman set to guard the side door. A moment’s parley, and he left
this man behind; but not before he had noted this door and the wide and
hospitable verandah which separated it from the driveway.

“I am willing to go all odds that I shall find that verandah the most
interesting part of the house,” he remarked, in quiet conviction, to
himself, as he noted its nearness to the stable and the ease with which
one could step from it into a vehicle passing down the driveway.

It had another point of interest, or, rather the wing had to which
it was attached. As his eye travelled back across this wing, in his
lively walk towards the stable, he caught a passing glimpse of a
nurse’s face and figure in one of its upper windows. This located the
sick chamber, and unconsciously he hushed his step and moved with the
greatest caution, though he knew that this sickness was not one of the
nerves, and that the loudest sound would fail to reach ears lapsed in a
blessed, if alarming, unconsciousness.

Once around the corner, he resumed a more natural pace, and perceiving
that the stable-door was closed but that a window well up the garden
side was open, he cast a look towards the kitchen windows at his back,
and, encountering no watchful eye, stepped up to the former one and
peered in.

A man sat with his back to him, polishing a bit of harness. This was
probably Zadok, the coachman. As his interest was less with him than
with the stalls beyond, he let his eye travel on in their direction,
when he suddenly experienced a momentary confusion by observing the
head and shoulders of Hexford leaning towards him from an opposite
window--in much the same fashion, and certainly with exactly the same
intent, as himself. As their glances crossed, both flushed and drew
back, only to return again, each to his several peep-hole. Neither
meant to lose the advantage of the moment. Both had heard of the grey
horse and wished to identify it; Hexford for his own satisfaction,
Sweetwater as the first link of the chain leading him into the
mysterious course mapped out for him by fate. That each was more or
less under the surveillance of the other did not trouble either.

There were three stalls, and in each stall a horse stamped and
fidgeted. Only one held their attention. This was a mare on the
extreme left, a large grey animal with a curious black patch on its
near shoulder. The faces of both men changed as they recognised this
distinguishing mark, and instinctively their eyes met across the width
of the open space separating them. Hexford’s finger rose to his mouth,
but Sweetwater needed no such hint. He stood, silent as his own shadow,
while the coachman rubbed away with less and less purpose, until his
hands stood quite still and his whole figure drooped in irresistible
despondency. As he raised his face, moved perhaps by that sense of a
watchful presence to which all of us are more or less susceptible, they
were both surprised to see tears on it. The next instant he had started
to his feet and the bit of harness had rattled from his hands to the
floor.

“Who are you?” he asked, with a touch of anger, quite natural under the
circumstances. “Can’t you come in by the door, and not creep sneaking
up to take a man at disadvantage?”

As he spoke, he dashed away the tears with which his cheeks were still
wet.

“I thought a heap of my young mistress,” he added, in evident apology
for this display of what such men call weakness. “I didn’t know that it
was in me to cry for anything, but I find that I can cry for her.”

Hexford left his window, and Sweetwater slid from his; next minute they
met at the stable door.

“Had luck?” whispered the local officer.

“Enough to bring me here,” acknowledged the other.

“Do you mean to this house or to this stable?”

“To this stable.”

“Have you heard that the horse was out that night?”

“Yes, she was out.”

“Who driving?”

“Ah, that’s the question!”

“This man can’t tell you.”

A jerk of Hexford’s thumb in Zadok’s direction emphasised this
statement.

“But I’m going to talk to him, for all that.”

“He wasn’t here that night; he was at a dance. He only knows that the
mare was out.”

“But I’m going to talk to him.”

“May I come in, too? I’ll not interrupt. I’ve just fifteen minutes to
spare.”

“You can do as you please. I’ve nothing to hide--from you, at any rate.”

Which wasn’t quite true; but Sweetwater wasn’t a stickler for truth,
except in the statements he gave his superiors.

Hexford threw open the stable-door, and they both walked in. The
coachman was not visible, but they could hear him moving about above,
grumbling to himself in none too encouraging a way.

Evidently he was in no mood for visitors.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” he called out, as their steps sounded on
the hardwood floor.

Hexford sauntered over to the stalls. Sweetwater stopped near the
doorway and glanced very carefully about him. Nothing seemed to escape
his eye. He even took the trouble to peer into a waste-bin, and was
just on the point of lifting down a bit of broken bottle from an open
cupboard when Brown appeared on the staircase, dressed in his Sunday
coat and carrying a bunch of fresh, hot-house roses.

He stopped midway as Sweetwater turned towards him from the cupboard,
but immediately resumed his descent and was ready with his reply when
Hexford accosted him from the other end of the stable:

“An odd beast, this. They don’t drive her for her beauty, that’s
evident.”

“She’s fast and she’s knowing,” grumbled the coachman. “Reason enough
for overlooking her spots. Who’s that man?” he grunted, with a drop of
his lantern jaws, and a slight gesture towards the unknown interloper.

“Another of us,” replied Hexford, with a shrug. “We’re both rather
interested in this horse.”

“Wouldn’t another time do?” pleaded the coachman, looking gravely down
at the flowers he held. “It’s most time for the funeral and I don’t
feel like talking, indeed I don’t, gentlemen.”

“We won’t keep you.” It was Sweetwater who spoke. “The mare’s company
enough for us. She knows a lot, this mare. I can see it in her eye. I
understand horses; we’ll have a little chat, she and I, when you are
gone.”

Brown cast an uneasy glance at Hexford.

“He’d better not touch her,” he cautioned. “He don’t know the beast
well enough for that.”

“He won’t touch her,” Hexford assured him. “She does look knowing,
don’t she? Would like to tell us something, perhaps. Was out _that_
night, I’ve heard you say. Curious! How did you know it?”

“I’ve said and said till I’m tired,” Brown answered, with sudden heat.
“This is pestering a man at a very unfortunate time. Look! the people
are coming. I must go. My poor mistress! and poor Miss Carmel! I liked
’em, do ye understand? Liked ’em--and I do feel the trouble at the
house, I do.”

His distress was so genuine that Hexford was inclined to let him go;
but Sweetwater with a cock of his keen eye put in his word and held the
coachman where he was.

“The old gal is telling me all about it,” muttered this sly, adaptable
fellow. He had sidled up to the mare and their heads were certainly
very close together. “Not touch her? See here!” Sweetwater had his
arm round the filly’s neck and was looking straight into her fiery
and intelligent eye. “Shall I pass her story on?” he asked, with a
magnetic smile at the astonished coachman, which not only softened him
but seemed to give the watchful Hexford quite a new idea of this gawky
interloper.

“You’ll oblige _me_ if you can put her knowledge into words,” the man
Zadok declared, with one fascinated eye on the horse and the other on
the house where he evidently felt that his presence was wanted. “She
was out that night, and I know it, as any coachman would know, who
doesn’t come home stone drunk. But where she was and who took her, get
her to tell if you can, for I don’t know no more ’n the dead.”

“The dead!” flashed out Sweetwater, wheeling suddenly about and
pointing straight through the open stable-door towards the house where
the young mistress the old servant mourned, lay in her funeral casket.
“Do you mean her--the lady who is about to be buried? Could _she_ tell
if her lips were not sealed by a murderer’s hand?”

“She!” The word came low and awesomely. Rude and uncultured as the man
was, he seemed to be strangely affected by this unexpected suggestion.
“I haven’t the wit to answer that,” said he. “How can we tell what
she knew. The man who killed her is in jail. _He_ might talk to some
purpose. Why don’t you question him?”

“For a very good reason,” replied Sweetwater, with an easy good-nature
that was very reassuring. “He was arrested on the spot; so that it
wasn’t he who drove this mare home, unharnessed her, put her back in
her stall, locked the stable-door and hung up the key in its place in
the kitchen. Somebody else did _that_.”

“That’s true enough, and what does it show? That the mare was out on
some other errand than the one which ended in blood and murder,” was
the coachman’s unexpected retort.

“Is that so?” whispered Sweetwater into the mare’s cocked ear.
“She’s not quite ready to commit herself,” he drawled, with another
enigmatical smile at the lingering Zadok. “She’s keeping something
back. Are you?” he pointedly inquired, leaving the stalls and walking
briskly up to Zadok.

The coachman frowned and hastily retreated a step; but in another
moment he leaped in a rage upon Sweetwater, when the sight of the
flowers he held recalled him to himself and he let his hand fall again
with the quiet remark:

“You’re overstepping your dooty. I don’t know who you are or what you
want with me, but you’re overstepping your dooty.”

“He’s right,” muttered Hexford. “Better let the fellow go. See! one of
the maids is beckoning to him.”

“He shall go, and welcome, if he will tell me where he gets his taste
for this especial brand of whiskey.” Sweetwater had crossed to the
cupboard and taken down the lower half of the broken bottle which had
attracted his notice on his first entrance, and was now holding it out,
with a quizzical look at the departing coachman.

Hexford was at his shoulder with a spring, and together they inspected
the label still sticking to it--which was that of the very rare and
expensive spirit found missing from the club-house vault.

“This is a find,” muttered Hexford into his fellow detective’s ear.
Then, with a quick move towards Zadok, he shouted out:

“You’d better answer that question. Where did this bit of broken bottle
come from? They don’t give you whiskey like this to drink.”

“That they don’t,” muttered the coachman, not so much abashed as they
had expected. “And I wouldn’t care for it if they did. I found that bit
of bottle in the ash-barrel outside, and fished it out to put varnish
in. I liked the shape.”

“Broken this way?”

“Yes; it’s just as good.”

“Is it? Well, never mind, run along. We’ll close the stable-door for
you.”

“I’d rather do it myself and carry in the key.”

“Here then; we’re going to the funeral, too. You’d like to?” This
latter in a whisper to Sweetwater.

The answer was a fervent one. Nothing in all the world would please
this protean-natured man quite so well.




XII

“LILA--LILA!”

O, treble woe Fall ten times treble on that cursed head, Whose wicked
deed thy most ingenious sense Depriv’d thee of!--Hold off the earth
awhile, Till I have caught her once more in my arms.

_Hamlet_.


“Let us enter by the side door,” suggested Sweetwater, as the two moved
towards the house. “And be sure you place me where I can see without
being seen. I have no wish to attract attention to myself, or to be
identified with the police until the necessity is forced upon me.”

“Then we won’t go in together,” decided Hexford. “Find your own
place; you won’t have any difficulty. A crowd isn’t expected. Miss
Cumberland’s condition forbids it.”

Sweetwater nodded and slid in at the side door.

He found himself at once in a narrow hall, from the end of which opened
a large room. A few people were to be seen in this latter place, and
his first instinct was to join them; but finding that a few minutes yet
remained before the hour set for the services, he decided to improve
them by a rapid glance about this hall, which, for certain reasons
hardly as yet formulated in his own mind, had a peculiar interest for
him.

The most important object within view, according to his present
judgment, was the staircase which connected it with the floor above;
but if you had asked his reason for this conclusion, he would not have
told you, as Ranelagh might have done, that it was because it was the
most direct and convenient approach to Carmel Cumberland’s room. His
thoughts were far from this young girl, intimately connected as she
was with this crime; which shows through what a blind maze he was
insensibly working. With his finger on the thread which had been put
in his hand, he was feeling his way along inch by inch. It had brought
him to this staircase, and it led him next to a rack upon which hung
several coats and a gentleman’s hat.

He inspected the former and noted that one was finished with a high
collar; but he passed the latter by--it was not a derby. The table
stood next the rack, and on its top lay nothing more interesting than a
clothes-brush and one or two other insignificant objects; but, with his
memory for details, he had recalled the keys which one of the maids had
picked up somewhere about this house, and laid on a hall table. If this
were the hall and this the table, then was every inch of the latter’s
simple cloth-covered top of the greatest importance in his eyes.

He had no further time for even these cursory investigations; Hexford’s
step could be heard on the verandah, and Sweetwater was anxious to
locate himself before the officer came in. Entering the room before
him, he crossed to the small group clustered in its further doorway.
There were several empty chairs in sight; but he passed around them
all to a dark and inconspicuous corner, from which, without effort, he
could take in every room on that floor--from the large parlour in which
the casket stood, to the remotest region of the servants’ hall.

The clergyman had not yet descended, and Sweetwater had time to
observe the row of little girls sitting in front of the bearers, each
with a small cluster of white flowers in her hand. Miss Cumberland’s
Sunday-school class, he conjectured, and conjectured rightly. He also
perceived that some of these children loved her.

Near them sat a few relatives and friends. Among these was a very, very
old man, whom he afterwards heard was a great-uncle and a centenarian.
Between him and one of the little girls, there apparently existed a
strong sympathy; for his hand reached out and drew her to him when
the tears began to steal down her cheeks, and the looks which passed
between the two had all the appeal and all the protection of a great
love.

Sweetwater, who had many a soft spot in his breast, felt his heart
warm at this one innocent display of natural feeling in an assemblage
otherwise frozen by the horror of the occasion. His eyes dwelt
lingeringly on the child, and still more lingeringly on the old, old
man, before passing to that heaped-up mound of flowers, under which lay
a murdered body and a bruised heart. He could not see the face, but the
spectacle was sufficiently awe-compelling without that.

Would it have seemed yet more so, had he known at whose request the
huge bunch of lilies had been placed over that silent heart?

The sister sick, the brother invisible, there was little more to hold
his attention in this quarter; so he let it roam across the heads
of the people about him, to the distant hall communicating with the
kitchen.

Several persons were approaching from this direction, among them Zadok.
The servants of the house, no doubt, for they came in all together
and sat down, side by side, in the chairs Sweetwater had so carefully
passed by. There were five persons in all: two men and three women.
Only two interested him--Zadok, with whom he had already made a
superficial acquaintance and had had one bout; and a smart, bright-eyed
girl with a resolute mouth softened by an insistent dimple, who struck
him as possessing excellent sense and some natural cleverness. A girl
to know and a girl to talk to, was his instantaneous judgment. Then he
forgot everything but the solemnity of the occasion, for the clergyman
had entered and taken his place, and a great hush had fallen upon the
rooms and upon every heart there present.


“_I am the resurrection and the life_.”

Never had these consoling words sounded more solemn than when they
rang above the remains of Adelaide Cumberland, in this home where she
had reigned as mistress ever since her seventeenth year. The nature of
the tragedy which had robbed the town of one of its most useful young
women; the awful fate impending over its supposed author,--a man who
had come and gone in these rooms with a spell of fascination to which
many of those present had themselves succumbed--the brooding sense
of illness, if not of impending death, in the room above; gave to
these services a peculiar poignancy which in some breasts of greater
susceptibility than the rest, took the form of a vague expectancy
bordering on terror.

Sweetwater felt the poignancy, but did not suffer from the terror. His
attention had been attracted in a new direction, and he found himself
watching, with anxious curiosity, the attitude and absorbed expression
of a good-looking young man whom he was far from suspecting to be the
secret representative of the present suspect, whom nobody could forget,
yet whom nobody wished to remember at this hallowed hour.

Had this attitude and this absorption been directed towards the casket
over which the clergyman’s words rose and fell with ever increasing
impressiveness, he might have noted the man but would scarcely
have been held by him. But this interest, sincere and strong as it
undoubtedly was, centred not so much in the services, careful as he
was to maintain a decorous attitude towards the same, but in the faint
murmurs which now and then came down from above where unconsciousness
reigned and the stricken brother watched over the delirious sister,
with a concentration and abandonment to fear which made him oblivious
of all other duties, and almost as unconscious of the rites then being
held below over one who had been as a mother to him, as the sick girl
herself with her ceaseless and importunate “Lila! Lila!” The detective,
watching this preoccupied stranger, shared in some measure his secret
emotions, and thus was prepared for the unexpected occurrence of a few
minutes later.

No one else had the least forewarning of any break in the services.
There had been nothing in the subdued but impressive rendering of the
prayers to foreshadow a dramatic episode; yet it came, and in this
manner:

The final words had been said, and the friends present invited to look
their last on the calm face which, to many there, had never worn so
sweet a smile in life. Some had hesitated; but most had obeyed the
summons, among them Sweetwater. But he had not much time in which to
fix those features in his mind; for the little girls, who had been
waiting patiently for this moment, now came forward; and he stepped
aside to watch them as they filed by, dropping as they did so, a
tribute of fragrant flowers upon the quiet breast. They were followed
by the servants, among whom Zadok had divided his roses. As the last
cluster fell from the coachman’s trembling hand, the undertaker
advanced with the lid, and, pausing a moment to be sure that all were
satisfied, began to screw it on.

Suddenly there was a cry, and the crowd about the door leading into
the main hall started back, as wild steps were heard on the stairs and
a young man rushed into the room where the casket stood, and advanced
upon the officiating clergyman and the astonished undertaker with a
fierceness which was not without its suggestion of authority.

“Take it off!” he cried, pointing at the lid which had just been
fastened down. “I have not seen her--I must see her. Take it off!”

It was the brother, awake at last to the significance of the hour!

The clergyman, aghast at the sacrilegious look and tone of the
intruder, stepped back, raising one arm in remonstrance, and
instinctively shielding the casket with the other. But the undertaker
saw in the frenzied eye fixed upon his own, that which warned him
to comply with the request thus harshly and peremptorily uttered.
Unscrewing the lid, he made way for the intruder, who, drawing near,
pushed aside the roses which had fallen on the upturned face, and,
laying his hand on the brow, muttered a few low words to himself. Then
he withdrew his hand, and without glancing to right or left, staggered
back to the door amid a hush as unbroken as that which reigned behind
him in that open casket. Another moment and his white, haggard face and
disordered figure would be blotted from sight by the door-jamb.

The minister recovered his poise and the bearers their breath; the men
stirred in their seats and the women began to cast frightened looks
at each other, and then at the children, some of whom had begun to
whimper, when in an instant all were struck again into stone. The young
man had turned and was facing them all, with his hands held out in a
clench which in itself was horrible.

“If they let the man go,” he called out in loud and threatening tones,
“I will strangle him with these two hands.”

The word, and not the shriek which burst irrepressibly from more
than one woman before him, brought him to himself. With a ghastly
look on his bloated features, he scanned for one moment the row of
deeply shocked faces before him, then tottered back out of sight, and
fled towards the staircase. All thought that an end had come to the
harrowing scene, and minister and people faced each other once more;
when, loud and sharp from above, there rang down the shrill cry of
delirium, this time in articulate words which even the children could
understand:

“Break it open, I say! break it open, and see if her heart is there!”

It was too awful. Men and women and children leaped to their feet
and dashed away into the streets, uttering smothered cries and wild
ejaculations. In vain the clergyman raised his voice and bade them
respect the dead; the rooms were well-nigh empty before he had finished
his appeal. Only the very old uncle and the least of the children
remained of all who had come there in memory of their departed
kinswoman and friend.

The little one had fled to the old man’s arms before he could rise, and
was now held close to his aged and shaking knees, while he strove to
comfort her and explain.

Soon these, too, were gone, and the casket was refastened and carried
out by the shrinking bearers, leaving in those darkened rooms a trail
of desolation which was only broken from time to time by the now faint
and barely heard reiteration of the name of her who had just been borne
away!

“Lila! Lila!”




XIII

“WHAT WE WANT IS HERE”

I’ll tell you, by the way,
The greatest comfort in the world.
You said
There was a clew to all.
Remember, Sweet,
He said there was a clew!
I hold it.
Come!

_A Blot in the ’Scutcheon._


Sweetwater, however affected by this scene, had not lost control
of himself or forgotten the claims of duty. He noted at a glance
that, while the candid looking stranger, whose lead he had been
following, was as much surprised as the rest at the nature of the
interruption--which he had possibly anticipated and for which he was
in some measure prepared--he was, of all present, the most deeply
and peculiarly impressed by it. No element of fear had entered into
his emotion; nor had it been heightened by any superstitious sense.
Something deeper and more important by far had darkened his thoughtful
eye and caused that ebb and flow of colour in a cheek unused, if
Sweetwater read the man aright, to such quick and forcible changes.

Sweetwater took occasion, likewise, while the excitement was at its
height, to mark what effect had been made on the servants by the action
and conduct of young Cumberland. “They know him better than we do,” was
his inner comment; “what do they think of his words, and what do they
think of him?”

It was not so easy to determine as the anxious detective might wish.
Only one of them showed a simple emotion, and that one was, without
any possibility of doubt, the cook. She was a Roman Catholic, and was
simply horrified by the sacrilege of which she had been witness. There
was no mistaking her feelings. But those of the other two women were
more complex.

So were those of the men. Zadok specially watched each movement of
his young master with open mistrust; and very nearly started upright,
in his repugnance and dismay, when that intruding hand fell on the
peaceful brow of her over whose fate, to his own surprise, he had been
able to shed tears. Some personal prejudice lay back of this or some
secret knowledge of the man from whose touch even the dead appeared to
shrink.

And the women! Might not the same explanation account for that curious
droop of the eye with which the two younger clutched at each other’s
hands, to keep from screaming, and interchanged whispered words which
Sweetwater would have given considerable out of his carefully cherished
hoard to have heard.

It was impossible to tell, at present; but he was confident that it
would not be long before he understood these latter, at least. He had
great confidence in his success with women, homely as he was. He was
not so sure of himself with men; and he felt that some difficulties
and not a few pitfalls lay between him and, for instance, the
uncommunicative Zadok. “But I’ve the whole long evening before me,” he
added in quiet consolation to himself. “It will be a pity if I can’t
work some of them in that time.”

The last thing he had remarked, before Carmel’s unearthly cry had sent
the horrified guests in disorder from the house, was the presence of
Dr. Perry in a small room which Sweetwater had supposed empty, until
the astonishing events I have endeavoured to describe brought its
occupant to the door. What the detective then read in the countenance
of the family’s best friend, he kept to himself; but his own lost a
trace of its former anxiety, as the official slipped back out of sight
and remained so, even after the funeral cortege had started on its
course.

Plans had been made for carrying the servants to the cemetery, and,
despite the universal disturbance consequent upon these events, these
plans were adhered to. Sweetwater watched them all ride away in the
last two carriages.

This gave him the opportunity he wanted. Leaving his corner, he looked
up Hexford, and asked who was left in the house.

“Dr. Perry, Mr. Clifton, the lawyer, Mr. Cumberland, his sick sister,
and the nurse.”

“Mr. Cumberland! Didn’t he go to the grave?”

“Did you expect him to, after _that_?”

Sweetwater’s shoulders rose, and his voice took on a tone of
indifference.

“There’s no telling. Where is he now, do you think? Upstairs?”

“Yes. It seems he spends all his time in a little alcove opposite
his sister’s door. They won’t let him inside, for fear of disturbing
the patient; so he just sits where I’ve told you, doing nothing but
listening to every sound that comes through the door.”

“Is he there now?”

“Yes, and shaking just like a leaf. I walked by him a moment ago and
noticed particularly.”

“Where’s his room? In sight of the alcove you mention?”

“No; there’s a partition or two between. If you go up by the side
staircase, you can slip into it without any one seeing you. Coroner
Perry and Mr. Clifton are in front.”

“Is the side door locked?”

“No.”

“Lock it. The back door, of course, is.”

“Yes, the cook attended to that.”

“I want a few minutes all by myself. Help me, Hexford. If Dr. Perry has
given you no orders, take your stand upstairs where you can give me
warning if Mr. Cumberland makes a move to leave his post, or the nurse
her patient.”

“I’m ready; but I’ve been in that room and I’ve found nothing.”

“I don’t know that I shall. You say that it is near the head of the
stairs running up from the side door?”

“Just a few feet away.”

“I would have sworn to that fact, even if you hadn’t told me,” muttered
Sweetwater.

Five minutes later, he had slipped from sight; and for some time not
even Hexford knew where he was.

“Dr. Perry, may I have a few words with you?”

The coroner turned quickly. Sweetwater was before him; but not the same
Sweetwater he had interviewed some few hours before in his office. This
was quite a different looking personage. Though nothing could change
his features, the moment had come when their inharmonious lines no
longer obtruded themselves upon the eye; and the anxious, nay, deeply
troubled official whom he addressed, saw nothing but the ardour and
quiet self-confidence they expressed.

“It’ll not take long,” he added, with a short significant glance in the
direction of Mr. Clifton.

Dr. Perry nodded, excused himself to the lawyer and followed the
detective into the small writing-room which he had occupied during
the funeral. In the decision with which Sweetwater closed the door
behind them there was something which caused the blood to mount to the
coroner’s brow.

“You have made some discovery?” said he.

“A very important one,” was the quick, emphatic reply. And in a few
brief words the detective related his interview with the master
mechanic’s wife on the highroad. Then with an eager, “Now let me show
you something,” he led the coroner through the dining-room into the
side hall, where he paused before the staircase.

“Up?” queried the coroner, with an obvious shrinking from what he might
encounter above.

“No,” was the whispered reply. “What we want is _here_.” And, pushing
open a small door let into the under part of the stairway (if Ranelagh
in his prison cell could have seen and understood this movement!), he
disclosed a closet and in that closet a coat or two, and one derby hat.
He took down the latter and, holding it out to the light, pointed to a
spot on the under side of its brim.

The coroner staggered as he saw it, and glanced helplessly about him.
He had known this family all their lives and the father had been his
dearest friend. But he could say nothing in face of this evidence. The
spot was a flour-mark, in which could almost be discerned the outline
of a woman’s thumb.




XIV

THE MOTIONLESS FIGURE

’S blood, there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy
could find it out.

_Hamlet_.


“The coat is here, too,” whispered Sweetwater, after a moment of
considerate silence. “I had searched the hall-rack for them; I had
searched his closets; and was about owning myself to be on a false
trail, when I spied this little door. We had better lock it, now, had
we not, till you make up your mind what to do with this conclusive bit
of evidence.”

“Yes, lock it. I’m not quite myself, Sweetwater. I’m no stranger to
this house, or to the unfortunate young people in it. I wish I had not
been re-elected last year. I shall never survive the strain if--” He
turned away.

Sweetwater carefully returned the hat to its peg, turned the key in the
door, and softly followed his superior back into the dining-room, and
thence to their former retreat.

“I can see that it’s likely to be a dreadful business,” he ventured
to remark, as the two stood face to face again. “But we’ve no choice.
Facts are facts, and we’ve got to make the best of them. You mean me to
go on?”

“Go on?”

“Following up the clews which you have yourself given me? I’ve only
finished with one; there’s another--”

“The bottles?”

“Yes, the bottles. I believe that I shall not fail there if you’ll give
me a little time. I’m a stranger in town, you remember, and cannot be
expected to move as fast as a local detective.”

“Sweetwater, you have but one duty--to follow both clews as far as they
will take you. As for my duty, that is equally plain, to uphold you in
all reasonable efforts and to shrink at nothing which will save the
innocent and bring penalty to the guilty. Only be careful. Remember
the evidence against Ranelagh. You will have to forge an exceedingly
strong chain to hold your own against the facts which have brought this
recreant lover to book. You see--O, I wish that poor girl could get
ease!” he impetuously cried, as “Lila! Lila!” rang again through the
house.

“There can never be any ease for her,” murmured Sweetwater. “Whatever
the truth, she’s bound to suffer if ever she awakens to reality again.
Do you agree with the reporters that she knew why and for what her
unhappy sister left this house that night?”

“If not, why this fever?”

“That’s sound.”

“_She_--” the coroner was emphatic, “_she_ is the only one who is
wholly innocent in this whole business. Consider her at every point.
Her life is invaluable to every one concerned. But she must not be
roused to the fact; not yet. Nor must he be startled either; you know
whom I mean. Quiet does it, Sweetwater. Quiet and a seeming deference
to his wishes as the present head of the house.”

“Is the place his? Has Miss Cumberland made a will?”

“Her will will be read to-morrow. For to-night, Arthur Cumberland’s
position here is the position of a master.”

“I will respect it, sir, up to all reasonable bounds. I don’t think
he meditates giving any trouble. He’s not at all impressed by our
presence. All he seems to care about is what his sister may be led to
say in her delirium.”

“That’s how you look at it?” The coroner’s tone was one of gloom. Then,
after a moment of silence: “You may call my carriage, Sweetwater. I can
do nothing further here to-day. The atmosphere of this house stifles
me. Dead flowers, dead hopes, and something worse than death lowering
in the prospect. I remember my old friend--this was his desk. Let us
go, I say.”

Sweetwater threw open the door, but his wistful look did not escape the
older man’s eye.

“You’re not ready to go? Wish to search the house, perhaps.”

“Naturally.”

“It has already been done in a general way.”

“I wish to do it thoroughly.”

The coroner sighed.

“I should be wrong to stand in your way. Get your warrant and the house
is yours. But remember the sick girl.”

“That’s why I wish to do the job my self.”

“You’re a good fellow, Sweetwater.” Then as he was passing out, “I’m
going to rely on you to see this thing through, quietly if you can,
openly and in the public eye if you must. The keys tell the tale--the
keys and the hat. If the former had been left in the club-house and
the latter found without the mark set on it by the mechanic’s wife,
Ranelagh’s chances would look as slim to-day as they did immediately
after the event. But with things as they are, he may well rest easily
to-night; the clouds are lifting for him.”

Which shows how little we poor mortals realise what makes for the peace
even of those who are the nearest to us and whose lives and hearts we
think we can read like an open book.

The coroner gone, Sweetwater made his way to the room where he had last
seen Mr. Clifton. He found it empty and was soon told by Hexford that
the lawyer had left. This was welcome news to him; he felt that he h

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