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.
“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!”
“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.
‘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 had a fair field before him now; and learning that it would be some fifteen minutes yet before he could hope to see the carriages back, he followed Hexford upstairs.
“I wish I had your advantages,” he remarked as they reached the upper floor.
“What would you do?”
“I’d wander down that hall and take a long look at things.”
“You would?”
“I’d like to see the girl and I’d like to see the brother when he thought no one was watching him.”
“Why see the girl?”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid that’s just curiosity. I’ve heard she was a wonder for beauty.”
“She was, once.”
“And not now?”
“You cannot tell; they have bound up her cheeks with cloths. She fell on the grate and got burned.”
“But I say that’s dreadful, if she was so beautiful.”
“Yes, it’s bad, but there are worse things than that. I wonder what she meant by that wild cry of ‘Tear it open! See if her heart is there?’ Tear what open? the coffin?”
“Of course. What else could she have meant?”
“Well! delirium is a queer thing; makes a fellow feel creepy all over. I don’t reckon on my nights here.”
“Hexford, help me to a peep. I’ve got a difficult job before me and I need all the aid I can get.”
“Oh, there’s no trouble about that! Walk boldly along; he won’t notice —”
“He won’t notice?”
“No, he notices nothing but what comes from the sick room.”
“I see.” Sweetwater’s jaw had fallen, but it righted itself at this last word.
“Listening, eh?”
“Yes — as a fellow never listened before.”
“Expectant like?”
“Yes, I should call it expectant.”
“Does the nurse know this?”
“The nurse is a puzzler.”
“How so?”
“Half nurse and half — but go see for yourself. Here’s a package to take in,— medicine from the drug store. Tell her there was no one else to bring it up. She’ll show no surprise.”
Muttering his thanks, Sweetwater seized the proffered package, and hastened with it down the hall. He had been as far as the turn before, but now he passed the turn to find, just as he expected, a closed door on the left and an open alcove on the right. The door led into Miss Cumberland’s room; the alcove, circular in shape and lighted by several windows, projected from the rear of the extension, and had for its outlook the stable and the huge sycamore tree growing beside it.
Sweetwater’s fingers passed thoughtfully across his chin as he remarked this and took in the expressive outline of its one occupant. He could not see his face; that was turned towards the table before which he sat. But his drooping head, rigid with desperate thinking; his relaxed hand closed around the neck of a decanter which, nevertheless, he did not lift, made upon Sweetwater an impression which nothing he saw afterwards ever quite effaced.
“When I come back, that whiskey will be half gone,” thought he, and lingered to see the tumbler filled and the first draught taken.
But no. The hand slowly unclasped and fell away from the decanter; his head sank forward until his chin rested on his breast; and a sigh, startling to Sweetwater, fell from his lips. Hexford was right; only one thing could arouse him.
Sweetwater now tried that thing. He knocked softly on the sick-room door.
This reached the ear oblivious to all else. Young Cumberland started to his feet; and for a moment Sweetwater saw again the heavy features which, an hour before, had produced such a repulsive effect upon him in the rooms below. Then the nerveless figure sank again into place, with the same constraint in its lines, and the same dejection.
Sweetwater’s hand, lifted in repetition of his knock, hung suspended. He had not expected quite such indifference as this. It upset his calculations just a trifle. As his hand fell, he reminded himself of the coroner’s advice to go easy. “Easy it is,” was his internal reply. “I’ll walk as lightly as if eggshells were under my feet.”
The door was opened to him, this time. As it swung back, he saw, first, a burst of rosy color as a room panelled in exquisite pink burst upon his sight; then the great picture of his life — the bloodless features of Carmel, calmed for the moment into sleep.
Perfect beauty is so rare, its effect so magical! Not even the bandage which swathed one cheek could hide the exquisite symmetry of the features, or take from the whole face its sweet and natural distinction. Frenzy, which had distorted the muscles and lit the eyes with a baleful glare, was lacking at this moment. Repose had quieted the soul and left the body free to express its natural harmonies.
Sweetwater gazed at the winsome, brown head over the nurse’s shoulder, and felt that for him a new and important factor had entered into this case, with his recognition of this woman’s great beauty. How deep a factor, he was far from suspecting, or he would not have met the nurse’s eye with quite so cheery and self-confident a smile.
“Excuse the intrusion,” he said. “We thought you might need these things. Hexford signed for them.”
“I’m obliged to you. Are you — one of them?” she sharply asked.
“Would it disturb you if I were? I hope not. I’ve no wish to seem intrusive.”
“What do you want? Something, I know. Give it a name before there’s a change there.”
She nodded towards the bed, and Sweetwater took advantage of the moment to scrutinise more closely the nurse herself. She was a robust, fine-looking woman, producing an impression of capability united to kindness. Strength of mind and rigid attendance to duty dominated the kindness, however. If crossed in what she considered best for her patient, possibly for herself, she could be severe, if not biting, in her speech and manner. So much Sweetwater read in the cold, clear eye and firm, self-satisfied mouth of the woman awaiting his response to the curt demand she had made.
“I want another good look at your patient, and I want your confidence since you and I may have to see much of each other before this matter is ended. You asked me to speak plainly and I have done so.”
“You are from headquarters?”
“Coroner Perry sent me.” Throwing back his coat, he showed his badge. “The coroner has returned to his office. He was quite upset by the outcry which came from this room at an unhappy moment during the funeral.”
“I know. It was my fault; I opened the door just for an instant, and in that instant my patient broke through her torpor and spoke.”
She had drawn him in, by this time, and, after another glance at her patient, softly closed the door behind him.
“I have nothing to report,” said she, “but the one sentence everybody heard.”
Sweetwater took in the little memorandum book and pencil which hung at her side, and understood her position and extraordinary amenability to his wishes. Unconsciously, a low exclamation escaped him. He was young and had not yet sunk the man entirely in the detective.
“A cruel necessity to watch so interesting a patient, for anything but her own good,” he remarked. Yet, because he was a detective as well as a man, his eye went wandering all over the room as he spoke until it fell upon a peculiar-looking cabinet or closet, let into the wall directly opposite the bed. “What’s that?” he asked.
“I don’t know; I can’t make it out, and I don’t like to ask.”
Sweetwater examined it for a moment from where he stood; then crossed over, and scrutinised it more particularly. It was a unique specimen. What it lacked in height — it could not have measured more than a foot from the bottom to the top — it made up in length, which must have exceeded five feet. The doors, of which it had two, were both tightly locked; but as they were made of transparent glass, the objects behind them were quite visible. It was the nature of these objects which made the mystery. The longer Sweetwater examined them, the less he understood the reason for their collection, much less for their preservation in a room which in all other respects, expressed the quintessence of taste.
At one end he saw a stuffed canary, not perched on a twig, but lying prone on its side. Near it was a doll, with scorched face and limbs half-consumed. Next this, the broken pieces of a china bowl and what looked like the torn remnants of some very fine lace. Further along, his eye lighted on a young girl’s bonnet, exquisite in colour and nicety of material, but crushed out of all shape and only betraying its identity by its dangling strings. The next article, in this long array of totally unhomogeneous objects, was a metronome, with its pendulum wrenched half off and one of its sides lacking. He could not determine the character of what came next, and only gave a casual examination to the rest. The whole affair was a puzzle to him, and he had no time for puzzles disconnected with the very serious affair he was engaged in investigating.
“Some childish nonsense,” he remarked, and moved towards the door. “The servants will be coming back, and I had rather not be found here. You’ll see me again — I cannot tell just when. Perhaps you may want to send for me. If so, my name is Sweetwater.”
His hand was on the knob, and he was almost out of the room when he started and looked back. A violent change in the patient had occurred. Disturbed by his voice or by some inner pulsation of the fever which devoured her, Carmel had risen from the pillow and now sat, staring straight before her with every feature working and lips opened as if to speak. Sweetwater held his breath, and the nurse leaped towards her and gently encircled her with protecting arms.
“Lie down,” she prayed; “lie down. Everything is all right: I am looking after things. Lie down, little one, and rest.”
The young girl drooped, and, yielding to the nurse’s touch, sank slowly back on the pillow; but in an instant she was up again, and flinging out her hand, she cried out loudly just as she had cried an hour before:
“Break it open! Break the glass and look in. Her heart should be there — her heart — her heart!”
“Go, or I cannot quiet her!” ordered the nurse, and Sweetwater turned to obey.
But a new obstacle offered. The brother had heard this cry, and now stood in the doorway.
“Who are you?” he impatiently demanded, surveying Sweetwater in sudden anger.
“I brought up the drugs,” was the quiet explanation of the ever-ready detective. “I didn’t mean to alarm the young lady, and I don’t think I did. It’s the fever, sir, which makes her talk so wildly.”
“We want no strangers here,” was young Cumberland’s response. “Remember, nurse, no strangers.” His tone was actually peremptory.
Sweetwater observed him in real astonishment as he slid by and made his quiet escape. He was still more astonished when, on glancing towards the alcove, he perceived that, contrary to his own prognostication, the whiskey stood as high in the decanter as before.
“I’ve got a puzzler this time,” was his comment, as he made his way downstairs. “Even Mr. Gryce would say that. I wonder how I’ll come out. Uppermost!” he finished in secret emphasis to himself. “Uppermost! It would never do for me to fail in the first big affair I’ve undertaken on my own account.”
Lurk, lurk.
King Lear.
The returning servants drove up just as Sweetwater reached the lower floor. He was at the side door when they came in, and a single glance convinced him that all had gone off decorously at the grave, and that nothing further had occurred during their absence to disturb them.
He followed them as they filed away into the kitchen, and, waiting till the men had gone about their work, turned his attention to the girls who stood about very much as if they did not know just what to do with themselves.
“Sit, ladies,” said he, drawing up chairs quite as if he were doing the honours of the house. Then with a sly, compassionate look into each woe-begone face, he artfully remarked: “You’re all upset, you are, by what Mr. Cumberland said in such an unbecoming way at the funeral. He’d like to strangle Mr. Ranelagh! Why couldn’t he wait for the sheriff. It looks as if that gentleman would have the job, all right.”
“Oh! don’t!” wailed out one of the girls, the impressionable, warm-hearted Maggie. “The horrors of this house’ll kill me. I can’t stand it a minute longer. I’ll go — I’ll go to-morrow.”
“You won’t; you’re too kind-hearted to leave Mr. Cumberland and his sister in their desperate trouble,” Sweetwater put in, with a decision as suggestive of admiration as he dared to assume.
Her eyes filled, and she said no more. Sweetwater shifted his attention to Helen. Working around by her side, he managed to drop these words into her ear:
“She talks most, but she doesn’t feel her responsibilities any more than you do. I’ve had my experience with women, and you’re of the sort that stays.”
She rolled her eyes towards him, in a slow, surprised way, that would have abashed most men.
“I don’t know your name, or your business here,” said she; “but I do know that you take a good deal upon yourself when you say what I shall do or shan’t do. I don’t even know, myself.”
“That’s because your eye is not so keen to your own virtues as — well, I won’t say as mine, but as those of any appreciative stranger. I can’t help seeing what you are, you know.”
She turned her shoulder but not before he caught a slight disdainful twitch of her rosy, non-communicative mouth.
“Ah, ah, my lady, not quick enough!” thought he; and, with the most innocent air in the world, he launched forth in a tirade against the man then in custody, as though his guilt were an accepted fact and nothing but the formalities of the law stood between him and his final doom. “It must make you all feel queer,” he wound up, “to think you have waited on him and seen him tramping about these rooms for months, just as if he had no wicked feelings in his heart and meant to marry Miss Cumberland, not to kill her.”
“Oh, oh,” Maggie sobbed out. “And a perfect gentleman he was, too. I can’t believe no bad of him. He wasn’t like —” Her breath caught, and so suddenly that Sweetwater was always convinced that the more cautious Helen had twitched her by her skirt. “Like — like other gentlemen who came here. It was a kind word he had or a smile. I— I—” She made no attempt to finish but bounded to her feet, pulling up the more sedate Helen with her. “Let’s go,” she whispered, “I’m afeared of the man.”
The other yielded and began to cross the floor behind the impetuous Maggie.
Sweetwater summoned up his courage.
“One moment,” he prayed. “Will you not tell me, before you go, whether the candlestick I have noticed on the dining-room mantel is not one of a pair?”
“Yes, there were two —once,” said Helen, resisting Maggie’s effort to drag her out through the open door.
“Once,” smiled Sweetwater; “by which you mean, three days ago.”
A lowering of her head and a sudden make for the door.
Sweetwater changed his tone to one of simple inquiry.
“And was that where they always stood, the pair of them, one on each end of the dining-room mantel?”
She nodded; involuntarily, perhaps, but decisively.
Sweetwater hid his disappointment. The room mentioned was a thoroughfare for the whole family. Any member of it could have taken the candlestick.
“I’m obliged to you,” said he; and might have ventured further had she given him the opportunity. But she was too near the door to resist the temptation of flight. In another moment she was gone, and Sweetwater found himself alone with his reflections.
They were not altogether unpleasing. He was sure that he read the evidences of struggle in her slowly working lips and changing impulses.
“So, so!” thought he. “The good seed has found its little corner of soil. I’ll leave it to take root and sprout. Perhaps the coroner will profit by it. If not, I’ve a way of coaxing tender plants which should bring this one to fruit. We’ll see.”
The moon shone that night, much to Sweetwater’s discomforture. As he moved about the stable-yard, he momentarily expected to see the window of the alcove thrown up and to hear Mr. Cumberland’s voice raised in loud command for him to quit the premises. But no such interruption came. The lonely watcher, whose solitary figure he could just discern above the unshaded sill, remained immovable, with his head buried in his arms, but whether in sleep or in brooding misery, there was naught to tell.
The rest of the house presented an equally dolorous and forsaken appearance. There were lights in the kitchen and lights in the servants’ rooms at the top of the house, but no sounds either of talking or laughing. All voices had sunk to a whisper, and if by chance a figure passed one of the windows, it was in a hurried, frightened way, which Sweetwater felt very ready to appreciate.
In the stable it was no better. Zadok had bought an evening paper, and was seeking solace from its columns. Sweetwater had attempted the sociable but had been met by a decided rebuff. The coachman could not forget his attitude before the funeral and nothing, not even the pitcher of beer the detective proposed to bring in, softened the forbidding air with which this old servant met the other’s advances.
Soon Sweetwater realised that his work was over for the night and planned to leave. But there was one point to be settled first. Was there any other means of exit from these grounds save that offered by the ordinary driveway?
He had an impression that in one of his strolls about, he had detected the outlines of a door in what looked like a high brick wall in the extreme rear. If so, it were well worth his while to know where that door led. Working his way along in the shadow cast by the house and afterward by the stable itself, he came upon what was certainly a wall and a wall with a door in it. He could see the latter plainly from where he halted in the thick of the shadows. The moonlight shone broadly on it, and he could detect the very shape and size of its lock. It might be as well to try that lock, but he would have to cross a very wide strip of moonlight in order to do so, and he feared to attract attention to his extreme inquisitiveness. Yet who was there to notice him at this hour? Mr. Cumberland had not moved, the girls were upstairs, Zadok was busy with his paper, and the footman dozing over his pipe in his room over the stable. Sweetwater had just come from that room, and he knew.
A quiet stable-yard and a closed door only ten feet away! He glanced again at the latter, and made up his mind. Advancing in a quiet, sidelong way he had, he laid his hand on the small knob above the lock and quickly turned it. The door was unlocked and swung under his gentle push. An alley-way opened before him, leading to what appeared to be another residence street. He was about to test the truth of this surmise when he heard a step behind him, and turning, encountered the heavy figure of the coachman advancing towards him, with a key in his hand.
Zadok was of an easy turn, but he had been sorely tried that day, and his limit had been reached.
“You snooper!” he bawled. “What do you want here? Won’t the run of the house content ye? Come! I want to lock that door. It’s my last duty before going to bed.”
Sweetwater assumed the innocent.
“And I was just going this way. It looks like a short road into town. It is, isn’t it?”
“No! Yes,” growled the other. “Whichever it is, it isn’t your road to-night. That’s private property, sir. The alley you see, belongs to our neighbours. No one passes through there but myself and —”
He caught himself in time, with a sullen grunt which may have been the result of fatigue or of that latent instinct of loyalty which is often the most difficult obstacle a detective has to encounter.
“And Mr. Ranelagh, I suppose you would say?” was Sweetwater’s easy finish.
No answer; the coachman simply locked the door and put the key in his pocket.
Sweetwater made no effort to deter him. More than that he desisted from further questions though he was dying to ask where this key was kept at night, and whether it had been in its usual place on the evening of the murder. He had gone far enough, he thought. Another step and he might rouse this man’s suspicion, if not his enmity. But he did not leave the shadows into which he again receded until he had satisfied himself that the key went into the stable with the coachman, where it probably remained for this night, at least.
It was after ten when Sweetwater re-entered the house to say good night to Hexford. He found him on watch in the upper hall, and the man, Clarke, below. He had a word with the former:
“What is the purpose of the little door in the wall back of the stable?”
“It connects these grounds with those of the Fultons. The Fultons live on Huested Street.”
“Are the two families intimate?”
“Very. Mr. Cumberland is sweet on the young lady there. She was at the funeral to-day. She fainted when — you know when.”
“I can guess. God! What complications arise! You don’t say that any woman can care for him?”
Hexford gave a shrug. He had seen a good deal of life.
“He uses that door, then?” Sweetwater pursued, after a minute.
“Probably.”
“Did he use it that night?”
“He didn’t visit her”
“Where did he go?”
“We can’t find out. He was first seen on Garden Street, coming home after a night of debauch. He had drunk hard. Asked where he got the liquor, he maundered out something about a saloon; but none of the places which he usually frequents had seen him that night. I have tried them all and some that weren’t in his books. It was no good.”
“That door is supposed to be locked at night. Zadok says that’s his duty. Was it locked that night?”
“Can’t say. Perhaps the coroner can. You see the inquiry ran in such a different direction, at first, that a small matter like that may have been overlooked.”
Sweetwater subdued the natural retort, and, reverting to the subject of the saloons, got some specific information in regard to them. Then he passed thoughtfully down-stairs, only to come upon Helen who was just extinguishing the front-hall light.
“Good night!” he said, in passing.
“Good night, Mr. Sweetwater.”
There was something in her tone which made him stop and look back. She had stepped into the library and was blowing out the lamp there. He paused a moment and sighed softly. Then he started towards the door, only to stop again and cast another look back. She was standing in one of the doorways, anxiously watching him and twisting her fingers in and out in an irresolute way truly significant in one of her disposition.
He felt his heart leap.
Returning softly, he took up his stand before her, looking her straight in the eye.
“Good night,” he repeated, with an odd emphasis.
“Good night,” she answered, with equal force and meaning.
But the next moment she was speaking rapidly, earnestly.
“I can’t sleep,” said she. “I never can when I’m not certain of my duty. Mr. Ranelagh is an injured man. Ask what was said and done at their last dinner here. I can’t tell you. I didn’t listen and I didn’t see what happened, but it was something out of the ordinary. Three broken wineglasses lay on the tablecloth when I went in to clear away. I heard the clatter when they fell and smashed, but I said nothing. I have said nothing since; but I know there was a quarrel, and that Mr. Ranelagh was not in it, for his glass was the only one which remained unbroken. Am I wrong in telling you? I wouldn’t if — if it were not for Mr. Ranelagh. He didn’t do right by Miss Cumberland, but he don’t deserve to be in prison; and so would Miss Carmel tell you if she knew what was going on and could speak. She loved him and — I’ve said enough; I’ve said enough,” the agitated girl protested, as he leaned eagerly towards her. “I couldn’t tell the priest any more. Good night.”
And she was gone.
He hesitated a moment, then pursued his way to the side door, and so out of the house into the street. As he passed along the front of the now darkened building, he scanned it with a new interest and a new doubt. Soon he returned to his old habit of muttering to himself. “We don’t know the half of what has taken place within those walls during the last four weeks,” said he. “But one thing I will solve, and that is where this miserable fellow spent the hours between this dinner they speak of and the time of his return next day. Hexford has failed at it. Now we’ll see what a blooming stranger can do.”
Tush! I will stir about,
And all things will be well, I warrant thee.
Romeo and Juliet.
He was walking south and on the best lighted and most beautiful street in town, but his eyes were forever seeking a break in the long line of fence which marked off the grounds of a seemingly interminable stretch of neighbouring mansions, and when a corner was at last reached, he dashed around it and took a straight course for Huested Street, down which he passed with quickened steps and an air of growing assurance.
He was soon at the bottom of the hill where the street, taking a turn, plunged him at once into a thickly populated district. As this was still the residence quarter, he passed on until he gained the heart of the town and the region of the saloons. Here he slackened pace and consulted a memorandum he had made while talking to Hexford. “A big job,” was his comment, sorry to find the hour quite so late. “But I’m not bound to finish it to-night. A start is all I can hope for, so here goes.”
It was not his intention to revisit the places so thoroughly overhauled by the police. He carried another list, that of certain small groceries and quiet unobtrusive hotels where a man could find a private room in which to drink alone; it being Sweetwater’s conviction that in such a place, and in such a place only, would be found the tokens of those solitary hours spent by Arthur Cumberland between the time of his sister’s murder and his reappearance the next day. “Had they been spent in his old haunts or in any of the well-known drinking saloons of the city, some one would have peached on him before this,” he went on, in silent argument with himself. “He’s too well known, too much of a swell for all his lowering aspect and hang-dog look, to stroll along unnoticed through any of the principal streets, so soon after the news of his sister’s murder had set the whole town agog. Yet he was not seen till he struck Garden Street, a good quarter of a mile from his usual resorts.”
Here, Sweetwater glanced up at the corner gas-lamp beneath which he stood, and seeing that he was in Garden Street, tried to locate himself in the exact spot where this young man had first been seen on the notable morning in question. Then he looked carefully about him. Nothing in the street or its immediate neighbourhood suggested the low and secret den he was in search of.
“I shall have to make use of the list,” he decided, and asked the first passer-by the way to Hubbell’s Alley.
It was a mile off. “That settles it,” muttered Sweetwater. “Besides, I doubt if he would go into an alley. The man has sunk low, but hardly so low as that. What’s the next address I have? Cuthbert Road. Where’s that?”
Espying a policeman eyeing him with more or less curiosity from the other side of the street, he crossed over and requested to be directed to Cuthbert Road.
“Cuthbert Road! That’s where the markets are. They’re closed at this time of night,” was the somewhat suspicious reply.
Evidently the location was not a savoury one.
“Are there nothing but markets there?” inquired Sweetwater, innocently. It was his present desire not to be recognised as a detective even by the men on beat. “I’m looking up a friend. He keeps a grocery or some kind of small hotel. I have his number, but I don’t know how to get to Cuthbert Road.”
“Then turn straight about and go down the first street, and you’ll reach it before the trolley-car you see up there can strike this corner. But first, sew up your pockets. There’s a bad block between you and the markets.”
Sweetwater slapped his trousers and laughed.
“I wasn’t born yesterday,” he cried; and following the officer’s directions, made straight for the Road. “Worse than the alley,” he muttered; “but too near to be slighted. I wonder if I shouldn’t have borrowed somebody’s old coat.”
It had been wiser, certainly. In Garden Street all the houses had been closed and dark, but here they were open and often brightly lighted and noisy from cellar to roof. Men, women, and frequently children, jostled him on the pavement, and he felt his pockets touched more than once. But he wasn’t Caleb Sweetwater of the New York department of police for nothing. He laughed, bantered, fought his way through and finally reached the quieter region and, at this hour, the almost deserted one, of the markets. Sixty-two was not far off, and, pausing a moment to consider his course, he mechanically took in the surroundings. He was surprised to find himself almost in the open country. The houses extending on his left were fronted by the booths and stalls of the market but beyond these were the fields. Interested in this discovery, and anxious to locate himself exactly, he took his stand under a favouring gas-lamp, and took out his map.
What he saw, sent him forward in haste. Shops had now taken the place of tenements, and as these were mostly closed, there were very few persons on the block, and those were quiet and unobtrusive. He reached a corner before coming to 62 and was still more interested to perceive that the street which branched off thus immediately from the markets was a wide and busy one, offering both a safe and easy approach to dealer and customer. “I’m on the track,” he whispered almost aloud in his secret self-congratulation. “Sixty-two will prove a decent quiet resort which I may not be above patronising myself.”
But he hesitated when he reached it. Some houses invite and some repel. This house repelled. Yet there was nothing shabby or mysterious about it. There was the decent entrance, lighted, but not too brilliantly; a row of dark windows over it; and, above it all, a sloping roof in which another sparkle of light drew his attention to an upper row of windows, this time, of the old dormer shape. An alley ran down one side of the house to the stables, now locked but later to be thrown open for the use of the farmers who begin to gather here as early as four o’clock. Nothing wrong in its appearance, everything ship-shape and yet —“I shall find some strange characters here,” was the Sweetwater comment with which our detective opened the door and walked into the house.
It was an unusual hour for guests, and the woman whom he saw bending over a sort of desk in one corner of the room he strode into, looked up hastily, almost suspiciously.
“Well, and what is your business?” she asked, with her eye on his clothes, which while not fashionable, were evidently of the sort not often seen in that place.
“I want a room,” he tipsily confided to her, “in which I can drink and drink till I cannot see. I’m in trouble I am; but I don’t want to do any mischief; I only want to forget. I’ve money, and —” as he saw her mouth open, “and I’ve the stuff. Whiskey, just whiskey. Give me a room. I’ll be quiet.”
“I’ll give you nothing.” She was hot, angry, and full of distrust. “This house is not for such as you. It’s a farmer’s lodging; honest men, who’d stare and go mad to see a feller like you about. Go along, I tell you, or I’ll call Jim. He’ll know what to do with you.”
“Then, he’ll know mor’n I do myself,” mumbled the detective, with a crushed and discouraged air. “Money and not a place to spend it in! Why can’t I go in there?” he peevishly inquired with a tremulous gesture towards a half-open door through which a glimpse could be got of a neat little snuggery. “Nobody’ll see me. Give me a glass and leave me till I rap for you in the morning. That’s worth a fiver. Don’t you think so, missus?— And we’ll begin by passing over the fiver.”
“No.”
She was mighty peremptory and what was more, she was in a great hurry to get rid of him. This haste and the anxious ear she turned towards the hall enlightened him as to the situation. There was some one within hearing or liable to come within hearing, who possibly was not so stiff under temptation. Could it be her husband? If so, it might be worth his own while to await the good man’s coming, if only he could manage to hold his own for the next few minutes.
Changing his tactics, he turned his back on the snuggery and surveyed the offended woman, with just a touch of maudlin sentiment.
“I say,” he cried, just loud enough to attract the attention of any one within ear-shot. “You’re a mighty fine woman and the boss of this here establishment; that’s evident. I’d like to see the man who could say no to you. He’s never sat in that ’ere cashier’s seat where you be; of that I’m dead sure. He wouldn’t care for fivers if you didn’t, nor for tens either.”
She was really a fine woman for her station, and a buxom, powerful one, too. But her glance wavered under these words and she showed a desire, with difficulty suppressed, to use the strength of her white but brawny arms, in shoving him out of the house. To aid her self-control, he, on his part, began to edge towards the door, always eyeing her and always speaking loudly in admirably acted tipsy unconsciousness of the fact.
“I’m a man who likes my own way as well as anybody,” were the words with which he sought to save the situation, and further his own purposes. “But I never quarrel with a woman. Her whims are sacred to me. I may not believe in them; they may cost me money and comfort; but I yield, I do, when they are as strong in their wishes as you be. I’m going, missus — I’m going — Oh!”
The exclamation burst from him. He could not help it. The door behind him had opened, and a man stepped in, causing him so much astonishment that he forgot himself. The woman was big, bigger than most women who rule the roost and do the work in haunts where work calls for muscle and a good head behind it. She was also rosy and of a make to draw the eye, if not the heart. But the man who now entered was small almost to the point of being a manikin, and more than that, he was weazen of face and ill-balanced on his two tiny, ridiculous legs. Yet she trembled at his presence, and turned a shade paler as she uttered the feeble protest:
“Jim!”
“Is she making a fool of herself?” asked the little man in a voice as shrill as it was weak. “Do your business with me. Women are no good.” And he stalked into the room as only little men can.
Sweetwater took out his ten; pointed to the snuggery, and tapped his breast-pocket. “Whiskey here,” he confided. “Bring me a glass. I don’t mind your farmers. They won’t bother me. What I want is a locked door and a still mouth in your head.”
The last he whispered in the husband’s ear as the wife crossed reluctantly back to her books.
The man turned the bill he had received, over and over in his hand; then scrutinised Sweetwater, with his first show of hesitation.
“You don’t want to kill yourself?” he asked.
Sweetwater laughed with a show of good humour that appeared to relieve the woman, if it did not the man.
“Oh, that’s it,” he cried. “That’s what the missus was afraid of, was it? Well, I vow! And ten thousand dollars to my credit in the bank! No, I don’t want to kill myself. I just want to booze to my heart’s content, with nobody by to count the glasses. You’ve known such fellers before, and that cosey, little room over there has known them, too. Just add me to the list; it won’t harm you.”
The man’s hand closed on the bill. Sweetwater noted the action out of the corner of his eye, but his direct glance was on the woman. Her back was to him, but she had started as he mentioned the snuggery and made as if to turn; but thought better of it, and bent lower over her books.
“I’ve struck the spot,” he murmured, exultantly to himself. “This is the place I want and here I’ll spend the night; but not to booze my wits away, oh, no.”
Nevertheless it was a night virtually wasted. He learned nothing more than what was revealed by that one slight movement on the part of the woman.
Though the man came in and sat with him for an hour, and they drank together out of the flask Sweetwater had brought with him, he was as impervious to all Sweetwater’s wiles and as blind to every bait he threw out, as any man the young detective had ever had to do with. When the door closed on him, and Sweetwater was left to sit out the tedious night alone, it was with small satisfaction to himself, and some regret for his sacrificed bill. The driving in of the farmers and the awakening of life in the market, and all the stir it occasioned inside the house and out, prevented sleep even if he had been inclined that way. He had to swallow his pill, and he did it with the best grace possible. Sooner than was expected of him, sooner than was wise, perhaps, he was on his feet and peering out of the one small window this most dismal day room contained. He had not mistaken the outlook. It gave on to the alley, and all that was visible from behind the curtains where he stood, was the high brick wall of the neighbouring house. This wall had not even a window in it; which in itself was a disappointment to one of his resources. He turned back into the room, disgusted; then crept to the window again, and, softly raising the sash, cast one of his lightning glances up and down the alley. Then he softly let the sash fall again and retreated to the centre of the room, where he stood for a moment with a growing smile of intelligence and hope on his face. He had detected close against the side of the wall, a box or hand-cart full of empty bottles. It gave him an idea. With an impetuosity he would have criticised in another man, he flung himself out of the room in which he had been for so many hours confined, and coming face to face with the landlady standing in unexpected watch before the door, found it a strain on his nerves to instantly assume the sullen, vaguely abused air with which he had decided to leave the house. Nevertheless, he made the attempt, and if he did not succeed to his own satisfaction, he evidently did to hers, for she made no effort to stop him as he stumbled out, and in her final look, which he managed with some address to intercept, he perceived nothing but relief. What had been in her mind? Fear for him or fear for themselves? He could not decide until he had rummaged that cart of bottles. But how was he to do this without attracting attention to himself in a way he still felt, to be undesirable. In his indecision, he paused on the sidewalk and let his glances wander vaguely over the busy scene before him. Before be knew it, his eye had left the market and travelled across the snow-covered fields to a building standing by itself in the far distance. Its appearance was not unfamiliar. Seizing hold of the first man who passed him, he pointed it out, crying:
“What building is that?”
“That? That’s The Whispering Pines, the country club-house, where —”
He didn’t wait for the end of the sentence, but plunged into the thickest group of people he could find, with a determination greater than ever to turn those bottles over before he ate.
His manner of going about this was characteristic. Lounging about the stalls until he found just the sort of old codger he wanted, he scraped up an acquaintance with him on the spot, and succeeded in making himself so agreeable that when the old fellow sauntered back to the stables to take a look at his horse, Sweetwater accompanied him. Hanging round the stable-door, he kept up his chatter, while sizing up the bottles heaped in the cart at his side. He even allowed himself to touch one or two in an absent way, and was meditating an accidental upset of the whole collection when a woman he had not seen before, thrust her head out of a rear window, shouting sharply:
“Leave those bottles alone. They’re waiting for the old clothes man. He pays us money for them.”
Sweetwater gaped and strolled away. He had used his eyes to purpose, and was quite assured that the bottle he wanted was not there. But the woman’s words had given him his cue, and when later in the day a certain old Jew peddler went his rounds through this portion of the city, a disreputable-looking fellow accompanied him, whom even the sharp landlady in Cuthbert Road would have failed to recognise as the same man who had occupied the snuggery the night before. He was many hours on the route and had many new experiences with human nature. But he gained little else, and was considering with what words he should acknowledge his defeat at police headquarters, when he found himself again at the markets and a minute later in the alley where the cart stood, with the contents of which he had busied himself earlier in the day.
He had followed the peddler here because he had followed him to every other back door and alley. But he was tired and had small interest in the cart which looked quite undisturbed and in exactly the same condition as when he turned his back upon it in the morning. But when he drew nearer and began to lend a hand in removing the bottles to the waggon, he discovered that a bottle had been added to the pile, and that this bottle bore the label which marked it as being one of the two which had been taken from the club-house on the night of the murder.
“Must I Tell These Things?”
Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had liv’d a blessed time; for from this instant,
There’s nothing serious in mortality:
All is but toys; renown, and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the lees
Is left this vault to brag of.
Macbeth.
The lamp in the coroner’s room shone dully on the perturbed faces of three anxious men. They had been talking earnestly and long, but were now impatiently awaiting the appearance of a fourth party, as was shown by the glances which each threw from time to time towards the door leading into the main corridor.
The district attorney courted the light, and sat where he would be the first seen by any one entering. He had nothing to hide, being entirely engrossed in his duty.
Further back and rather behind the lamp than in front of it stood or sat, as his restlessness prompted, Coroner Perry, the old friend of Amasa Cumberland, with whose son he had now to do. Behind him, and still further in the shadow, could be seen the quiet figure of Sweetwater. All counted the minutes and all showed relief — the coroner by a loud sigh — when the door finally opened and an officer appeared, followed by the lounging form of Adelaide’s brother.
Arthur Cumberland had come unwillingly, and his dissatisfaction did not improve his naturally heavy countenance. However, he brightened a little at sight of the two men sitting at the table, and, advancing, broke into speech before either of the two officials had planned their questions.
“I call this hard,” he burst forth. “My place is at home and at the bedside of my suffering sister, and you drag me down here at nine o’clock at night to answer questions about things of which I am completely ignorant. I’ve said all I have to say about the trouble which has come into my family; but if another repetition of the same things will help to convict that scoundrel who has broken up my home and made me the wretchedest dog alive, then I’m ready to talk. So, fire ahead, Dr. Perry, and let’s be done with it.”
“Sit down,” replied the district attorney, gravely, with a gesture of dismissal to the officer. “Mr. Cumberland, we have spared you up to this time, for two very good reasons. You were in great trouble, and you appeared to be in the possession of no testimony which would materially help us. But matters have changed since you held conversation with Dr. Perry on the day following your sister’s decease. You have laid that sister away; the will which makes you an independent man for life has been read in your hearing; you are in as much ease of mind as you can be while your remaining sister’s life hangs trembling in the balance; and, more important still, discoveries not made before the funeral, have been made since, rendering it very desirable for you to enter into particulars at this present moment, which were not thought necessary then.”
“Particulars? What particulars? Don’t you know enough, as it is, to hang the fellow? Wasn’t he seen with his fingers on Adelaide’s throat? What can I tell you that is any more damaging than that? Particulars!” The word seemed to irritate him beyond endurance. Never had he looked more unprepossessing or a less likely subject for sympathy, than when he stumbled into the chair set for him by the district attorney.
“Arthur!”
The word had a subtle ring. The coroner, who uttered it, waited to watch its effect. Seemingly it had none, after the first sullen glance thrown him by the young man; and the coroner sighed again, but this time softly, and as a prelude to the following speech:
“We can understand,” said he, “why you should feel so strongly against one who has divided the hearts of your sisters, and played with one, if not with both. Few men could feel differently. You have reason for your enmity and we excuse it; but you must not carry it to the point of open denunciation before the full evidence is in and the fact of murder settled beyond all dispute. Whatever you may think, whatever we may think, it has not been so settled. There are missing links still to be supplied, and this is why we have summoned you here and ask you to be patient and give the district attorney a little clearer account of what went on in your own house, before you broke up that evening and you went to your debauch, and your sister Adelaide to her death at The Whispering Pines.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” He brought his fist down on the table with each word. “Nothing went on. That is,—”
“Something went on at dinner-time. It was not a usual meal,” put in the district attorney. “You and your sisters —”
“Stop!” He was at that point of passion which dulls the most self-controlled to all sense of propriety.
“Don’t talk to me about that dinner. I want to forget that dinner. I want to forget everything but the two things I live for — to see that fellow hanged, and to —” The words choked him, and he let his head fall, but presently threw it up again. “That dastard, whom may God confound, passed a letter across Adelaide into Carmel’s hand,” he panted out. “I saw him, but I didn’t take it in; I wasn’t thinking. I was —”
“Who broke the glasses?” urged his relentless inquisitor. “One at your plate, one at Carmel’s, and one at the head of the board where sat your sister Adelaide?”
“God! Must I tell these things?” He had started to his feet and his hand, violent in all it did, struck his forehead impulsively, as he uttered this exclamation. “Have it, then! Heaven knows I think of it enough not to be afraid to speak it out in words. Adelaide”— the name came with passion, but once uttered, produced its own calming effect, so that he went on with more restraint —“Adelaide never had much patience with me. She was a girl who only saw one way. ‘The right! the right!’ was what she dinned into my ears from the time I was a small boy and didn’t know but that all youngsters were brought up by sisters. I grew to hate what she called ‘the right,’ I wanted pleasure, a free time, and a good drink whenever the fancy took me. You know what I am, Dr. Perry, and everybody in town knows; but the impulse which has always ruled me was not a downright evil one; or if it was, I called it natural independence, and let it go at that. But Adelaide suffered. I didn’t understand it and I didn’t care a fig for it, but she did suffer. God forgive me!”
He stopped and mopped his forehead. Sweetwater moved a trifle on his seat, but the others — men who had passed the meridian of life, who had known temptations, possibly had succumbed to them, from time to time — sat like two statues, one in full light and the other in as dark a shadow as he could find.
“That afternoon,” young Cumberland presently resumed, “she was keyed up more than usual. She loved Ranelagh,— damn him!— and he had played or was playing her false. She watched him with eyes that madden me, now, when I think of them. She saw him look at Carmel, and she saw Carmel look at him. Then her eyes fell on me. I was angry; angry at them all, and I wanted a drink. It was not her habit to have wine on the table; but sometimes, when Ranelagh was there, she did. She was a slave to Ranelagh, and he could make her do whatever he wished, just as he can make you and everybody else.”
Here he shot insolent glances at his two interlocutors, one of whom changed colour — which, happily, he did not see. “‘Ring the bell,’ I ordered, ‘and have in the champagne. I want to drink to your marriage and the happy days in prospect for us all,’ It was brutal and I knew it; but I was reckless and wild for the wine. So, I guess, was Ranelagh, for he smiled at her, and she rang for the champagne. When the glasses had been set beside each plate, she turned towards Carmel. ‘We will all drink,’ she said, ‘to my coming marriage,’ This made Carmel turn pale; for Adelaide had never been known to drink a drop of liquor in her life. I felt a little queer, myself; and not one of us spoke till the glasses were filled and the maid had left the dining-room and shut the door.
“Then Adelaide rose. ‘We will drink standing,’ said she, and never had I seen her look as she did then. I thought of my evil life when I should have been watching Ranelagh; and when she lifted the glass to her lips and looked at me, almost as earnestly as she did at Ranelagh,— but it was a different kind of earnestness,— I felt like — like — well, like the wretch I was and always had been; possibly, always will be. She drank;— we wouldn’t call it drinking, for she just touched the wine with her lips; but to her it was debauch. Then she stood waiting, with the strangest gleam in her eyes, while Ranelagh drained his glass and I drained mine. Ranelagh thought she wanted some sentiment, and started to say something appropriate; but his eye fell on Carmel, who had tried to drink and couldn’t, and he bungled over his words and at last came to a pause under the steady stare of Adelaide’s eyes.
“‘Never mind, Elwood,’ she said; ‘I know what you would like to say. But that’s not what I am thinking of now. I am thinking of my brother, the boy who will soon be left to find his way through life without even the unwelcome restraint of my presence. I want him to remember this day. I want him to remember me as I stand here before him with this glass in my hand. You see wine in it, Arthur; but I see poison — poison — nothing else, for one like you who cannot refuse a friend, cannot refuse your own longing. Never from this day on shall another bottle be opened under my roof. Carmel, you have grieved as well as I over what has passed for pleasure in this house. Do as I do, and may Arthur see and remember.’
“Her fingers opened; the glass fell from her hand, and lay in broken fragments beside her plate. Carmel followed suit, and, before I knew it, my own fingers had opened, and my own glass lay in pieces on the table-cloth beneath me. Only Ranelagh’s hand remained steady. He did not choose to please her, or he was planning his perfidy and had not caught her words or understood her action. She held her breath, watching that hand; and I can hear the gasp yet with which she saw him set his glass down quietly on the board. That’s the story of those three broken glasses. If she had not died that night, I should be laughing at them now; but she did die and I don’t laugh! I curse — curse her recreant lover, and sometimes myself! Do you want anything more of me? I’m eager to be gone, if you don’t.”
The district attorney sought out and lifted a paper from the others lying on the desk before him. It was the first movement he had made since Cumberland began his tale.
“I’m sorry,” said he, with a rapid examination of the paper in his hand, “but I shall have to detain you a few minutes longer. What happened after the dinner? Where did you go from the table?”
“I went to my room to smoke. I was upset and thirsty as a fish.”
“Have you liquor in your room?”
“Sometimes.”
“Did you have any that night?”
“Not a drop. I didn’t dare. I wanted that champagne bottle, but Adelaide had been too quick for me. It was thrown out — wasted — I do believe, wasted.”
“So you did not drink? You only smoked in your room?”
“Smoked one cigar. That was all. Then I went down town.”
His tone had grown sulky, the emotion which had buoyed him up till now, seemed suddenly to have left him. With it went the fire from his eye, the quiver from his lip, and it is necessary to add, everything else calculated to awaken sympathy. He was simply sullen now.
“May I ask by which door you left the house?”
“The side door — the one I always take.”
“What overcoat did you wear?”
“I don’t remember. The first one I came to, I suppose.”
“But you can surely tell what hat?”
They expected a violent reply, and they got it.
“No, I can’t. What has my hat got to do with the guilt of Elwood Ranelagh?”
“Nothing, we hope,” was the imperturbable answer. “But we find it necessary to establish absolutely just what overcoat and what hat you wore down street that night.”
“I’ve told you that I don’t remember.” The young man’s colour was rising.
“Are not these the ones?” queried the district attorney, making a sign to Sweetwater, who immediately stepped forward, with a shabby old ulster over his arm, and a battered derby in his hand.
The young man started, rose, then sat again, shouting out with angry emphasis:
“No!“
“Yet you recognise these?”
“Why shouldn’t I? They’re mine. Only I don’t wear them any more. They’re done for. You must have rooted them out from some closet.”
“We did; perhaps you can tell us what closet.”
“I? No. What do I know about my old clothes? I leave that to the women.”
The slight faltering observable in the latter word conveyed nothing to these men.
“Mr. Cumberland,”— the district attorney was very serious,—“this hat and this coat, old as they are, were worn into town from your house that night. This we know, absolutely. We can even trace them to the club-house.”
Mechanically, not spontaneously this time, the young man rose to his feet, staring first at the man who had uttered these words, then at the garments which Sweetwater still held in view. No anger now; he was too deeply shaken for that, too shaken to answer at once — too shaken to be quite the master of his own faculties. But he rallied after an interval during which these three men devoured his face, each under his own special anxiety, and read there possibly what each least wanted to see.
“I don’t know anything about it,” were the words with which Arthur Cumberland sought to escape from the net which had been thus deftly cast about him. “I didn’t wear the things. Anybody can tell you what clothes I came home in. Ranelagh may have borrowed —”
“Ranelagh wore his own coat and hat. We will let the subject of apparel drop, and come to a topic on which you may be better qualified to speak. Mr. Cumberland, you have told us that you didn’t know at the time, and can’t remember now, where you spent that night and most of the next morning. All you can remember is that it was in some place where they let you drink all you wished and leave when the fancy took you, and not before. It was none of your usual haunts. This seemed strange to your friends, at the time; but it is easier for us to understand, now that you have told us what had occurred at your home-table. You dreaded to have your sister know how soon you could escape the influence of that moment. You wished to drink your fill and leave your family none the wiser. Am I not right?”
“Yes; it’s plain enough, isn’t it? Why harp on that string? Don’t you see that it maddens me? Do you want to drive me to drink again?”
The coroner interposed. He had been very willing to leave the burden of this painful inquiry to the man who had no personal feelings to contend with; but at this indignant cry he started forward, and, with an air of fatherly persuasion, remarked kindly:
“You mustn’t mind the official tone, or the official persistence. There is reason for all that Mr. Fox says. Answer him frankly, and this inquiry will terminate speedily. We have no wish to harry you — only to get at the truth.”
“The truth? I thought you had that pat enough. The truth? The truth about what? Ranelagh or me? I should think it was about me, from the kind of questions you ask.”
“It is, just now,” resumed the district attorney, as his colleague drew back out of sight once more. “You cannot remember the saloon in which you drank. That’s possible enough; but perhaps you can remember what they gave you. Was it whiskey, rum, absinthe, or what?”
The question took his irritable listener by surprise. Arthur gasped, and tried to steal some comfort from Coroner Perry’s eye. But that old friend’s face was too much in shadow, and the young man was forced to meet the district attorney’s eye, instead, and answer the district attorney’s question.
“I drank — absinthe,” he cried, at last.
“From this bottle?” queried the other, motioning again to Sweetwater, who now brought forward the bottle he had picked up in Cuthbert Road.
Arthur Cumberland glanced at the bottle the detective held up, saw the label, saw the shape, and sank limply in his chair, his eyes starting, his jaw falling.
“Where did you get that?” he asked, pulling himself together with a sudden desperate self-possession that caused Sweetwater to cast a quick significant glance at the coroner, as he withdrew to his corner, leaving the bottle on the table.
“That,” answered the district attorney, “was picked up at a small hotel on Cuthbert Road, just back of the markets.”
“I don’t know the place.”
“It’s not far from The Whispering Pines. In fact, you can see the club-house from the front door of this hotel.”
“I don’t know the place, I tell you.”
“It’s not a high-class resort; not select enough by a long shot, to have this brand of liquor in its cellar. They tell me that this is of very choice quality. That very few private families, even, indulge in it. That there were only two bottles of it left in the club-house when the inventory was last taken, that those two bottles are now gone, and that —”
“This is one of them? Is that what you want to say? Well, it may be for all I know. I didn’t carry it there. I didn’t have the drinking of it.”
“We have seen the man and woman who keep that hotel. They will talk, if they have to.”
“They will?” His dogged self-possession rather astonished them. “Well, that ought to please you. I’ve nothing to do with the matter.”
A change had taken place in him. The irritability approaching to violence, which had attended every speech and infused itself into every movement since he came into the room, had left him. He spoke quietly, and with a touch of irony in his tone. He seemed more the man, but not a whit more prepossessing, and, if anything, less calculated to inspire confidence. The district attorney showed that he was baffled, and Dr. Perry moved uneasily in his seat, until Sweetwater, coming forward, took up the cue and spoke for the first time since young Cumberland entered the room.
“Then I have no doubt but you will do us this favour,” he volunteered, in his pleasantest manner. “It’s not a long walk from here. Will you go there in my company, with your coat-collar pulled up and your hat well down over your eyes, and ask for a seat in the snuggery and show them this bottle? They won’t know that it’s empty. The man is sharp and the woman intelligent. They will see that you are a stranger, and admit you readily. They are only shy of one man — the man who drank there on the night of your sister’s murder.”
“You ‘re a —” he began, with a touch of his old violence; but realising, perhaps, that his fingers were in a trap, he modified his manner again, and continued more quietly. “This is an odd request to make. I begin to feel as if my word were doubted here; as if my failings and reckless confession of the beastly way in which I spent that night, were making you feel that I have no good in me and am at once a liar and a sneak. I’m not. I won’t go with you to that low drinking hell, unless you make me, but I’ll swear —”
“Don’t swear.” It is unnecessary to say who spoke. “We wouldn’t believe you, and it would be only adding perjury to the rest.”
“You wouldn’t believe me?”
“No; we have reasons, my boy. There were two bottles.”
“Well?”
“The other has been found nearer your home.”
“That’s a trick. You’re all up to tricks —”
“Not in this case, Arthur. Let me entreat you in memory of your father to be candid with us. We have arrested a man. He denies his guilt, but can produce no witnesses in support of his assertions. Yet such witnesses may exist. Indeed, we think that one such does exist. The man who took the bottles from the club-house’s wine-vault did so within a few minutes of the time when this crime was perpetrated on your sister. He should be able to give valuable testimony for or against Elwood Ranelagh. Now, you can see why we are in search of this witness and why we think you can serve us in this secret and extraordinary matter. If you can’t, say so; and we will desist from all further questions. But this will not help you. It will only show that, in our opinion, you have gained the rights of a man suspected of something more than shirking his duty as an unknown and hitherto unsuspected witness.”
“This is awful!” Young Cumberland had risen to his feet and was swaying to and fro before them like a man struck between the eyes by some maddening blow.
“God! if I had only died that night!” he muttered, with his eyes upon the floor and every muscle tense with the shock of this last calamity. “Dr. Perry,” he moaned suddenly, stretching out one hand in entreaty, and clutching at the table for support with the other, “let me go for to-night. Let me think. My brain is all in a whirl. I’ll try to answer to-morrow.” But even as he spoke he realised the futility of his request. His eye had fallen again on the bottle, and, in its shape and tell-tale label, he beheld a witness bound to testify against him if he kept silent himself.
“Don’t answer,” he went on, holding fast to the table, but letting his other hand fall. “I was always a fool. I’m nothing but a fool now. I may as well own the truth, and be done with it. I was in the clubhouse. I did rob the wine-vault; I did carry off the bottles to have a quiet spree, and it was to some place on Cuthbert Road I went. But, when I’ve admitted so much, I’ve admitted all. I saw nothing of my sister’s murder; saw nothing of what went on in the rooms upstairs. I crept in by the open window at the top of the kitchen stairs, and I came out by the same. I only wanted the liquor, and when I got it, I slid out as quickly as I could, and made my way over the golf-links to the Road.”
Wiping the sweat from his brow, he stood trembling. There was something in the silence surrounding him which seemed to go to his heart; for his free right hand rose unconsciously to his breast, and clung there. Sweetwater began to wish himself a million of miles away from this scene. This was not the enjoyable part of his work. This was the part from which he always shrunk with overpowering distaste.
The district attorney’s voice sounded thin, almost piercing, as he made this remark:
“You entered by an open window. Why didn’t you go in by the door?”
“I hadn’t the key. I had only abstracted the one which opens the wine-vault. The rest I left on the ring. It was the sight of this key, lying on our hall-table, which first gave me the idea. I feel like a cad when I think of it, but that’s of no account now. All I really care about is for you to believe what I tell you. I wasn’t mixed up in that matter of my sister’s death. I didn’t know about it — I wish I had. Adelaide might have been saved; we might all have been saved; but it was not to be.”
Flushed, he slowly sank back into his seat. No complaint, now, of being in a hurry, or of his anxiety to regain his sick sister’s bedside. He seemed to have forgotten those fears in the perturbations of the moment. His mind and interest were here; everything else had grown dim with distance.
“Did you try the front door?”
“What was the use? I knew it to be locked.”
“What was the use of trying the window? Wasn’t it also, presumably, locked?”
The red mounted hot and feverish to his cheek.
“You’ll think me no better than a street urchin or something worse,” he exclaimed. “I knew that window; I had been through it before. You can move that lock with your knife-blade. I had calculated on entering that way.”
“Mr. Ranelagh’s story receives confirmation,” commented the district attorney, wheeling suddenly towards the coroner. “He says that he found this window unlocked, when he approached it with the idea of escaping that way.”
Arthur Cumberland remained unmoved.
The district attorney wheeled back.
“There were a number of bottles taken from the wine-vault; some half dozen were left on the kitchen table. Why did you trouble yourself to carry up so many?”
“Because my greed outran my convenience. I thought I could lug away an armful, but there are limits to one’s ability. I realised this when I remembered how far I had to go, and so left the greater part of them behind.”
“Why, when you had a team ready to carry you?”
“A— I had no team.” But the denial cost him something. His cheek lost its ruddiness, and took on a sickly white which did not leave it again as long as the interview lasted.
“You had no team? How then did you manage to reach home in time to make your way back to Cuthbert Road by half-past eleven?”
“I didn’t go home. I went straight across the golf-links. If fresh snow hadn’t fallen, you would have seen my tracks all the way to Cuthbert Road.”
“If fresh snow had not fallen, we should have known the whole story of that night before an hour had passed. How did you carry those bottles?”
“In my overcoat pockets. These pockets,” he blurted out, clapping his hands on either side of him.
“Had it begun to snow when you left the clubhouse?”
“No.”
“Was it dark?”
“I guess not; the links were bright as day, or I shouldn’t have got over them as quickly as I did.”
“Quickly? How quickly?” The district attorney stole a glance at the coroner, which made Sweetwater advance a step from his corner.
“I don’t know. I don’t understand these questions,” was the sullen reply.
“You walked quickly. Does that mean you didn’t look back?”
“How, look back?”
“Your sister lit a candle in the small room where her coat was found. This light should have been visible from the golf-links.”
“I didn’t see any light.”
He was almost rough in these answers. He was showing himself now at his very worst.
A few more questions followed, but they were of minor import, and aroused less violent feeling. The serious portion of the examination, if thus it might be called, was over, and all parties showed the reaction which follows all unnatural restraint or subdued excitement.
The coroner glanced meaningly at the district attorney, who, tapping with his fingers on the table, hesitated for a moment before he finally turned again upon Arthur Cumberland.
“You wish to return to your sister? You are at liberty to do so; I will trouble you no more to-night. Your sleigh is at the door, I presume.”
The young man nodded, then rising slowly, looked first at the district attorney, then at the coroner, with a glance of searching inquiry which did not escape the watchful eye of Sweetwater, lurking in the rear. There was no display of anger, scarcely of impatience, in him now. If he spoke, they did not hear him; and when he moved, it was heavily and with a drooping head. They watched him go, each as silent as he. The coroner tried to speak, but succeeded no better than the boy himself. When the door opened under his hand, they all showed relief, but were startled back into their former attention by his turning suddenly in the doorway with this final remark:
“What did you say about a bottle with a special label on it being found at our house? It never was, or, if it was, some fellow has been playing you a trick. I carried off those two bottles myself. One you see there; the other is — I can’t tell where; but I didn’t take it home. That you can bet on.”
One more look, followed by a heavy frown and a low growling sound in his throat — which may have been his way of saying good-bye — and he was gone.
Sweetwater came forward and shut the door; then the three men drew more closely together, and the district attorney remarked:
“He is better at the house. I hadn’t the heart on your account, Dr. Perry, to hurry matters faster than necessity compels. What a lout he is! Pardon me, but what a lout he is to have had two such uncommon and attractive sisters.”
“And such a father,” interposed the coroner.
“Just so — and such a father. Sweetwater? Hey! what’s the matter? You don’t look satisfied. Didn’t I cover the ground?”
“Fully, sir, so far as I see now, but —”
“Well, well — out with it.”
“I don’t know what to out with. It’s all right but — I guess I’m a fool, or tired, or something. Can I do anything more for you? If not, I should like to hunt up a bunk. A night’s sleep will make a man of me again.”
“Go then; that is, if Dr. Perry has no orders for you.”
“None. I want my sleep, too.” But Dr. Perry had not the aspect of one who expects to get it.
Sweetwater brightened. A few more words, some understanding as to the morrow, and he was gone. The district attorney and the coroner still sat, but very little passed between them. The clock overhead struck the hour; both looked up but neither moved. Another fifteen minutes, then the telephone rang. The coroner rose and lifted the receiver. The message could be heard by both gentlemen, in the extreme quiet of this midnight hour.
“Dr. Perry?”
“Yes, I’m listening.”
“He came in at a quarter to twelve, greatly agitated and very white. I ran upon him in the lower hall, and he looked angry enough to knock me down; but he simply let out a curse and passed straight up to his sister’s room. I waited till he came out; then I managed to get hold of the nurse and she told me this queer tale:
“He was all in a tremble when he came in, but she declares he had not been drinking. He went immediately to the bedside; but his sister was asleep, and he didn’t stay there, but went over where the nurse was, and began to hang about her till suddenly she felt a twitch at her side and, looking quickly, saw the little book she carries there, falling back into place. He had lifted it, and probably read what she had written in it during his absence.
“She was displeased, but he laughed when he saw that he had been caught and said boldly: ‘You are keeping a record of my sister’s ravings. Well, I think I’m as interested in them as you are, and have as much right to read as you to write. Thank God! they are innocent enough. Even you must acknowledge that,’ She made no answer, for they were innocent enough; but she’ll keep the book away from him after this — of that you may be sure.”
“And what is he doing now? Is he going into his own room to-night?”
“No. He went there but only to bring out his pillows. He will sleep in the alcove.”
“Drink?”
“No, not a drop. He has ordered the whiskey locked up. I hear him moaning sometimes to himself as if he missed it awfully, but not a thimbleful has left the decanter.”
“Goodnight, Hexford.”
“Good night.”
“You heard?” This to the district attorney.
“Every word.”
Both went for their overcoats. Only on leaving did they speak again, and then it was to say:
“At ten o’clock to-morrow morning.”
“At ten o’clock.”
On it was Written —
Can this avail thee? Look to it!
Prometheus Bound.
The district attorney was right; Sweetwater was not happy. His night’s rest had not benefited him. He had seemed natural enough when he first appeared at the coroner’s office in the early morning, and equally natural all through the lengthy conference which followed; but a half hour later, any one who knew him well,— any of his fellow detectives in New York; especially Mr. Gryce, who had almost fathered him since he came among them, a raw and inexperienced recruit — would have seen at first glance that his spirits were no longer at par, and that the cheer he displayed in manner and look was entirely assumed, and likely to disappear as soon as he found himself alone.
And it did so disappear. When, at two o’clock, he entered the club-house grounds, it was without buoyancy or any of the natural animation with which he usually went about his work. Each step seemed weighted with thought, or, at least, heavy with inner dissatisfaction. But his eye was as keen as ever, and he began to use that eye from the moment he passed the gates. What was in his mind? Was he hunting for new clews, or was he merely seeking to establish the old?
The officers on guard knew him, by this time, and let him pass hither, thither, and where he would, unmolested. He walked up and down the driveways, peering continuously at the well-trodden snow. He studied the spaces between. He sauntered to the rear, and looked out over the golf-links. Then he began to study the ground in this direction, as he had already studied it in front. The few mutterings which left his lips continued to speak of discontent. “If I had only had Clarke’s chance, or even Hexford’s,” was among his complaints. “But what can I hope now? The snow has been trampled till it is one solid cake of ice, to the very edge of the golf-links. Beyond that, the distance is too great for minute inspection. Yet it will have to be gone over, inch by inch, before I shall feel satisfied. I must know how much of his story is to be believed, and how much of it we can safely set aside.”
He ended by wandering down on the golf-links. Taking out his watch, he satisfied himself that he had time for an experiment, and immediately started for Cuthbert Road. An hour later, he came wandering back, on a different line. He looked soured, disappointed. When near the building again, he cast his eye over its rear, and gazed long and earnestly at the window which had been pointed out to him as the one from which a possible light had shone forth that night. There were no trees on this side of the house — only vines. But the vines were bare of leaves and offered no obstruction to his view. “If there had been a light in that window, any one leaving this house by the rear would have seen it, unless he had been drunk or a fool,” muttered Sweetwater, in contemptuous comment to himself. “Arthur Cumberland’s story is one lie. I’ll take the district attorney’s suggestion and return to New York to-night. My work’s done here.”
Yet he hung about the links for a long time, and finally ended by entering the house, and taking up his stand beneath the long, narrow window of the closet overlooking the golf-links. With chin resting on his arms, he stared out over the sill and sought from the space before him, and from the intricacies of his own mind, the hint he lacked to make this present solution of the case satisfactory to all his instincts.
“Something is lacking.” Thus he blurted out after a look behind him into the adjoining room of death. “I can’t say what; nor can I explain my own unrest, or my disinclination to leave this spot. The district attorney is satisfied, and so, I’m afraid is the coroner; but I’m not, and I feel as guilty —”
Here he threw open the window for air, and, thrusting his head out, glanced over the links, then aside at the pines, showing beyond the line of the house on the southern end, and then out of mere idleness, down at the ground beneath him. “As guilty,” he went on, “as Ranelagh appears to be, and some one really is. I—”
Starting, he leaned farther out. What was that he saw in the vines — not on the snow of the ground, but half way up in the tangle of small branches clinging close to the stone of the lower story, just beneath this window? He would see. Something that glistened, something that could only have got there by falling from this window. Could he reach it? No; he would have to climb up from below to do that. Well, that was easy enough. With the thought, he rushed from the room. In another minute he was beneath that window; had climbed, pulled, pushed his way up; had found the little pocket of netted vines observable from above; had thrust in his fingers and worked a small object out; had looked at it, uttered an exclamation curious in its mixture of suppressed emotions, and let himself down again into the midst of the two or three men who had scented the adventure and hastened to be witnesses of its outcome.
“A phial!” he exclaimed, “An empty phial, but —” Holding the little bottle up between his thumb and forefinger, he turned it slowly about until the label faced them.
On it was written one word, but it was a word which invariably carries alarm with it.
That word was: Poison.
Sweetwater did not return to New York that night.
“It ‘s Not what You Will Find”
I am not mad;— I would to heaven I were!
For then, ‘t is like I should forget myself:
O, if I could, what grief should I forget!—
Preach some philosophy to make me mad,
For being not mad, but sensible of grief,
My reasonable part produces reason
How I may be delivered of these woes.
King John.
“I regret to disturb you, Arthur; but my business is of great importance, and should be made known to you at once. This I say as a friend. I might have waited for the report to have reached you from hearsay, or through the evening papers; but I preferred to be the one to tell you. You can understand why.”
Sullen and unmollified, the young man thus addressed eyed, apprehensively, his father’s old friend, placed so unfortunately in his regard, and morosely exclaimed:
“Out with it! I’m a poor hand at guessing. What has happened now?”
“A discovery. A somewhat serious one I fear; at least, it will force the police to new action. Your sister may not have died entirely from strangulation; other causes may have been at work!”
“Now, what do you mean by that?” Arthur Cumberland was under his own roof and in presence of one who should have inspired his respect; but he made no effort to hide the fury which these words called up. “I should like to know what deviltry is in your minds now. Am I never to have peace?”
“Peace and tragedy do not often run together,” came in the mild tones of his would-be friend. “A great crime has taken place. All the members of this family are involved — to say nothing of the man who lies, now, under the odium of suspicion, in our common county jail. Peace can only come with the complete clearing up of this crime, and the punishment of the guilty. But the clearing up must antedate the punishment. Mr. Ranelagh’s assertion that he found Miss Cumberland dead when he approached her, may not be, as so many now believe, the reckless denial of a criminal, disturbed in his act. It may have had a basis in fact.”
“I don’t believe it. Nothing will make me believe it,” stormed the other, jumping up, and wildly pacing the drawing-room floor. “It is all a scheme for saving the most popular man in society. Society! That for society!” he shouted out, snapping his fingers. “He is president of the club; the pet of women; the admired of all the dolts and gawks who are taken with his style, his easy laughter, and his knack at getting at men’s hearts. He won’t laugh so easily when he’s up before a jury for murder; and he’ll never again fool women or bulldoze men, even if they are weak enough to acquit him of this crime. Enough of the smirch will stick to prevent that. If it doesn’t, I’ll —”
Again his hands went out in the horribly suggestive way they had done at his sister’s funeral. The coroner sat appalled,— confused, almost distracted between his doubts, his convictions, his sympathy for the man and his recoil from the passions he would be only too ready to pardon if he could feel quite sure of their real root and motive. Cumberland may have felt the other’s silence, or he may have realised the imprudence of his own fury; for he dropped his hands with an impatient sigh, and blurted out:
“But you haven’t told me your discovery. It seems to me it is a little late to make discoveries now.”
“This was brought about by the persistence of Sweetwater. He seems to have an instinct for things. He was leaning out of the window at the rear of the clubhouse — the window of that small room where your sister’s coat was found — and he saw, caught in the vines beneath, a —”
“Why don’t you speak out? I cannot tell what he found unless you name it.”
“A little bottle — an apothecary’s phial. It was labelled ‘Poison,’ and it came from this house.”
Arthur Cumberland reeled; then he caught himself up and stood, staring, with a very obvious intent of getting a grip on himself before he spoke.
The coroner waited, a slight flush deepening on his cheek.
“How do you know that phial came from this house?”
Dr. Perry looked up, astonished. He was prepared for the most frantic ebullitions of wrath, for violence even; or for dull, stupid, blank silence. But this calm, quiet questioning of fact took him by surprise. He dropped his anxious look, and replied:
“It has been seen on the shelves by more than one of your servants. Your sister kept it with her medicines, and the druggist with whom you deal remembers selling it some time ago to a member of your family.”
“Which member? I don’t believe this story; I don’t believe any of your —” He was fast verging on violence now.
“You will have to, Arthur. Facts are facts, and we cannot go against them. The person who bought it was yourself. Perhaps you can recall the circumstance now.”
“I cannot.” He did not seem to be quite master of himself. “I don’t know half the things I do; at least, I didn’t use to. But what are you coming to? What’s in your mind, and what are your intentions? Something to shame us further, I’ve no doubt. You’re soft on Ranelagh and don’t care how I feel, or how Carmel will feel when she comes to herself — poor girl. Are you going to call it suicide? You can’t, with those marks on her throat.”
“We’re going to carry out our investigations to the full. We’re going to hold the autopsy, which we didn’t think necessary before. That’s why I am here, Arthur. I thought it your due to know our intentions in regard to this matter. If you wish to be present, you have only to say so; if you do not, you may trust me to remember that she was your father’s daughter, as well as my own highly esteemed friend.”
Shaken to the core, the young man sat down amid innumerable tokens of the two near, if not dear, ones just mentioned; and for a moment had nothing to say. Gone was his violence, gone his self-assertion, and his insolent, captious attitude towards his visitor. The net had been drawn too tightly, or the blow fallen too heavily. He was no longer a man struggling with his misery, but a boy on whom had fallen a man’s responsibilities, sufferings, and cares.
“My duty is here,” he said at last. “I cannot leave Carmel.”
“The autopsy will take place to-morrow. How is Carmel to-day?”
“No better.” The words came with a shudder. “Doctor, I’ve been a brute to you. I am a brute! I have misused my life and have no strength with which to meet trouble. What you propose to do with — with Adelaide is horrible to me. I didn’t love her much while she was living; I broke her heart and shamed her, from morning till night, every day of her life; but good-for-nothing as I am and good-for-nothing as I’ve always been, if I could save her body this last humiliation, I would willingly die right here and now, and be done with it. Must this autopsy take place?”
“It must.”
“Then —” He raised his arm; the blood swept up, dyeing his cheeks, his brow, his very neck a vivid scarlet. “Tell them to lock up every bottle the house holds, or I cannot answer for myself. I should like to drink and drink till I knew nothing, cared for nothing, was a madman or a beast.”
“You will not drink.” The coroner’s voice rang deep; he was greatly moved. “You will not drink, and you will come to the office at five o’clock to-morrow. We may have only good news to impart. We may find nothing to complicate the situation.”
Arthur Cumberland shook his head. “It’s not what you will find —” said he, and stopped, biting his lips and looking down.
The coroner uttered a few words of consolation forced from him by the painfulness of the situation. The young man did not seem to hear them. The only sign of life he gave was to rush away the moment the coroner had taken his leave, and regain his seat within sight and hearing of his still unconscious sister. As he did so, these words came to his ears through the door which separated them:
“Flowers — I smell flowers! Lila, you always loved flowers; but I never saw your hands so full of them.”
Arthur uttered a sharp cry; then, bowing his face upon his aims, he broke into sobs which shook the table where he sat.
Twenty-four hours later, in the coroner’s office, sat an anxious group discussing the great case and the possible revelations awaiting them. The district attorney, Mr. Clifton, the chief of police, and one or two others — among them Sweetwater — made up the group, and carried on the conversation. Dr. Perry only was absent. He had undertaken to make the autopsy and had been absent, for this purpose, several hours.
Five o’clock had struck, and they were momentarily looking for his reappearance; but, when the door opened, as it did at this time, it was to admit young Cumberland, whose white face and shaking limbs betrayed his suspense and nervous anxiety.
He was welcomed coldly, but not impolitely, and sat down in very much the same place he had occupied during his last visit, but in a very different, and much more quiet state of mind. To Sweetwater, his aspect was one of despair, but be made no remark upon it; only kept all his senses alert for the coming moment, of so much importance to them all. But even he failed to guess how important, until the door opened again, and the coroner appeared, looking not so much depressed as stunned. Picking out Arthur from the group, he advanced towards him with some commonplace remark; but desisted suddenly and turned upon the others instead.
“I have finished the autopsy,” said he. “I knew just what poison the phial had held, and lost no time in my tests. A minute portion of this drug, which is dangerous only in large quantities, was found in the stomach of the deceased; but not enough to cause serious trouble, and she died, as we had already decided, from the effect of the murderous clutch upon her throat. But,” he went on sternly, as young Cumberland moved, and showed signs of breaking in with one of his violent invectives against the supposed assassin, “I made another discovery of still greater purport. When we lifted the body out of its resting-place, something beside withered flowers slid from her breast and fell at our feet. The ring, gentlemen — the ring which Ranelagh says was missing from her hand when he came upon her, and which certainly was not on her finger when she was laid in the casket,— rolled to the floor when we moved her. Here it is; there is one person here, at least, who can identify it. But I do not ask that person to speak. That we may well spare him.”
He laid the ring on the table, not too near Arthur, not within reach of his hand, but close enough for him to see it. Then he sat down, and hid his face in his hands. The last few days had told on him. He looked older, by ten years, than he had at the beginning of the month.
The silence which followed these words and this action, was memorable to everybody there concerned. Some had seen, and all had heard of young Cumberland’s desperate interruption of the funeral, and the way his hand had invaded the flowers which the children had cast in upon her breast. As the picture, real or fancied, rose before their eyes, one man rose and left his place at the table; then another, and presently another. Even Charles Clifton drew back. The district attorney remained where he was, and so did young Cumberland. The latter had reached out his hand, but he had not touched the ring, and he sat thus, frozen. What went on in his heart, no man there could guess, and he did not enlighten them. When at last he looked up, it was with a dazed air and an almost humble mien:
“Providence has me this time,” he muttered. “I don’t understand these mysteries. You will have to deal with them as you think best.” His eyes, still glued to the jewel, dilated and filled with fierce light as he said this. “Damn the ring, and damn the man who gave it to her! However it came into her casket, he’s at the bottom of the business, just as he was at the bottom of her death. If you think anything else, you will think a lie.”
Turning away, he made for the door. There was in his manner, desperation approaching to bravado, but no man made the least effort to detain him. Not till he was well out of the room did any one move, then the district attorney raised his finger, and Arthur Cumberland did not ride back to his home alone.
“He or You! There is No Third”
A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
And yet I would not sleep Merciful powers!
Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose.
Macbeth.
For several days I had been ill. They were merciful days to me since I was far too weak for thought. Then there came a period of conscious rest, then renewed interest in life and my own fate and reputation. What had happened during this interval?
I had a confused memory of having seen Clifton’s face at my bedside, but I was sure that no words had passed between us. When would he come again? When should I hear about Carmel, and whether she were yet alive, or mercifully dead, like her sister? I might read the papers, but they had been carefully kept from me. Not one was in sight. The nurse would undoubtedly give me the information I desired, but, kind as she had been, I dreaded to consult a stranger about matters which involved my very existence and every remaining hope. Yet I must know; for I could not help thinking, now, and I dreaded to think amiss and pile up misery for myself when I needed support and consolation.
I would risk one question, but no more. I would ask about the inquest. Had it been held? If she said yes — ah, if she said yes!— I should know that Carmel was dead; and the news, coming thus, would kill me. So I asked nothing, and was lying in a sufficiently feverish condition when the doctor came in, saw my state, and thinking to cheer me up, remarked blandly:
“You are well enough this morning to hear good news. Do you recognise the room you are in?”
“I’m in the hospital, am I not?”
“Hardly. You are in one of Mr. O’Hagen’s own rooms.” (Mr. O’Hagen was the head keeper.) “You are detained, now, simply as a witness.”
I was struck to the heart; terrified in an instant.
“What? Why? What has happened?” I questioned, rapidly, half starting up, then falling back on my pillow under his astonished eye.
“Nothing,” he parried, seeing his mistake, and resorting to the soothing process. “They simply have had time to think. You’re not the sort of man from which criminals are made.”
“That’s nonsense,” I retorted, reckless of his opinion, and mad to know the truth, yet shrinking horribly from it. “Criminals are made from all kinds of men; neither are the police so philosophical. Something has occurred. But don’t tell me —” I protested inconsistently, as he opened his lips. “Send for Mr. Clifton. He’s my friend; I can better bear —”
“Here he is,” said the doctor, as the door softly opened under the nurse’s careful hand.
I looked up, saw Charles’s faithful face, and stretched out my hand without speaking. Never had I needed a friend more, and never had I been more constrained in my greeting. I feared to show my real heart, my real fears, my real reason for not hailing my release, as every one evidently expected me to!
With a gesture to the nurse, the doctor tiptoed out, muttering to Clifton, as he passed, some word of warning or casual instruction. The nurse followed, and Clifton, coming forward, took a seat at my side. He was cheerful but not too cheerful; and the air of slight constraint which tinged his manner, as much as it did mine, did not escape me.
“Well, old fellow,” he began —
My hand went up in entreaty.
“Tell me why they have withdrawn their suspicions. I’ve heard nothing — read nothing — for days. I don’t understand this move.”
For reply, he laid his hand on mine.
“You’re stanch,” he began. “You have my regard, Elwood. Not many men would have stood the racket and sacrificed themselves as you have done. The fact is recognised, now, and your motive —”
I must have turned very white; for he stopped and sprang to his feet, searching for some restorative.
I felt the need of blinding him to my condition. With an effort, which shook me from head to foot, I lifted myself from the depths into which his words had plunged me, and fighting for self-control, faltered forth, feebly enough:
“Don’t be frightened. I’m all right again; I guess I’m not very strong yet. Sit down; I don’t need anything.”
He turned and surveyed me carefully, and finding my colour restored, reseated himself, and proceeded, more circumspectly:
“Perhaps I had better wait till to-morrow before I satisfy your curiosity,” said he.
“And leave me to imagine all sorts of horrors? No! Tell me at once. Is — is — has anything happened at the Cumberlands’?”
“Yes. What you feared has happened — No, no; Carmel is not dead. Did you think I meant that? Forgive me. I should have remembered that you had other causes for anxiety than the one weighing on our minds. She is holding her own — just holding it — but that is something, in one so young and naturally healthy.”
I could see that I baffled him. It could not be helped. I did not dare to utter the question with which my whole soul was full. I could only look my entreaty. He misunderstood it, as was natural enough.
“She does not know yet what is in store for her,” were his words; and I could only lie still, and look at him helplessly, and try not to show the despair that was sinking me deeper and deeper into semi-unconsciousness. “When she comes to herself, she will have to be told; but you will be on your feet, then, and will be allowed, no doubt, to soften the blow for her by your comfort and counsel. The fact that it must have been you, if not he —”
“He!“ Did I shout it, or was the shout simply in my own mind? I trembled as I rose on my elbow. I searched his face in terror of my self-betrayal; but his showed only compassion and an eager desire to clear the air between us by telling me the exact facts.
“Yes — Arthur. His guilt has not been proven; he has not even been remanded; the sister’s case is too pitiful and Coroner Perry too soft-hearted, where any of that family is involved. But no one doubts his guilt, and he does not deny it himself. You know — probably no one better — that he cannot very consistently do this, in face of the evidence accumulated against him, evidence stronger in many regards, than that accumulated against yourself. The ungrateful boy! The — the — Pardon me, I don’t often indulge in invectives against unhappy men who have their punishment before them, but I was thinking of you and what you have suffered in this jail, where you have not belonged — no, not for a day.”
“Don’t think of me.” The words came with a gasp. I was never so hard put to it — not when I first realised that I had been seen with my fingers on Adelaide’s throat. Arthur! A booby and a boor, but certainly not the slayer of his sister, unless I had been woefully mistaken in all that had taken place in that club-house previous to my entrance into it on that fatal night. As I caught Clifton’s eye fixed upon me, I repeated — though with more self-control, I hope: “Don’t think of me. I’m not thinking of myself. You speak of evidence. What evidence? Give me details. Don’t you see that I am burning with curiosity? I shan’t be myself till I hear.”
This alarmed him.
“It’s a risk,” said he. “The doctor told me to be careful not to excite you too much. But suspense is always more intolerable than certainty, and you have heard too much to be left in ignorance of the rest.”
“Yes, yes,” I agreed feverishly, pressing his hand.
“It all came about through you,” he blundered on. “You told me of the fellow you saw riding away from The Whispering Pines at the time you entered the grounds. I passed the story on to the coroner, and he to a New York detective they have put on this case. He and Arthur’s own surly nature did the rest.”
I cringed where I lay. This was my work. The person who drove out of the club-house grounds while I stood in the club-house hall was Carmel — and the clew I had given, instead of baffling and confusing them, had led directly to Arthur!
Seeing nothing peculiar — or at all events, giving no evidence of having noted anything peculiar in my movement — Clifton went evenly on, pouring into my astonished ears the whole long story of this detective’s investigations.
I heard of his visit at the mechanic’s cottage and of the identification of the hat marked by Eliza Simmons’s floury thumb, with an old one of Arthur’s, fished out from one of the Cumberland closets; then, as I lay dumb, in my secret dismay and perturbation, of Arthur’s acknowledged visit to the club-house, and his abstraction of the bottles, which to all minds save my own, perhaps, connected him directly and well-nigh unmistakably, with the crime.
“The finger of God! Nothing else. Such coincidences cannot be natural,” was my thought. And I braced myself to meet the further disclosures I saw awaiting me.
But when these disclosures were made, and Arthur’s conduct at the funeral was given its natural explanation by the finding of the tell-tale ring in Adelaide’s casket, I was so affected, both by the extraordinary nature of the facts and the doubtful position in which they seemed to place one whom, even now, I found it difficult to believe guilty of Adelaide’s death, that Clifton, aroused, in spite of his own excitement, to a sudden realisation of my condition, bounded to his feet and impetuously cried out:
“I had to tell you. It was your due and you would not have been satisfied if I had not. But I fear that I rushed my narrative too suddenly upon you; that you needed more preparation, and that the greatest kindness I can show you now, is to leave before I do further mischief.”
I believe I answered. I know that his idea of leaving was insupportable to me. That I wanted him to stay until I had had time to think and adjust myself to these new conditions. Instinctively, I did not feel as certain of Arthur’s guilt as he did. My own case had taught me the insufficiency of circumstantial evidence to settle a mooted fact. Besides, I knew Arthur even better than I did his sisters. He was as full of faults, and as lacking in amiable and reliable traits as any fellow of my acquaintance. But he had not the inherent snap which makes for crime. He lacked the vigour which,— God forgive me the thought!— lay back of Carmers softer characteristics. I could not imagine him guilty; I could, for all my love, imagine his sister so, and did. The conviction would not leave my mind.
“Charles,” said I, at last, struggling for calmness, and succeeding better in my task than either he or I expected; “what motive do they assign for this deed? Why should Arthur follow Adelaide to the club-house and kill her? Now, if he had followed me —”
“You were at dinner with them that night, and know what she did and what she vowed about the wine. He was very angry. Though he dropped his glass, and let it shiver on the board, he himself says that he was desperately put out with her, and could only drown his mad emotions in drink. He knew that she would hear of it if he went to any saloon in town; so he stole the key from your bunch, and went to help himself out of the club-house wine-vault. That’s how he came to be there. What followed, who knows? He won’t tell, and we can only conjecture. The ring, which she certainly wore that night, might give the secret away; but it is not gifted with speech, though as a silent witness it is exceedingly eloquent.”
The episode of the ring confused me. I could make nothing out of it, could not connect it with what I myself knew of the confused experiences of that night. But I could recall the dinner and the sullen aspect, not unmixed with awe, with which this boy contemplated his sister when his own glass fell from his nerveless fingers. My own heart was not in the business; it was on the elopement I had planned; but I could not help seeing what I have just mentioned, and it recurred to me now with fatal distinctness. The awe was as great as the sullenness. Did that offer a good foundation for crime? I disliked Arthur. I had no use for the boy, and I wished with all my heart to detect guilt in his actions, rather than in those of the woman I loved; but I could not forget that tinge of awe on features too heavy to mirror very readily the nicer feelings of the human soul. It would come up, and, under the influence of this impression I said:
“Are you sure that he made no denial of this crime? That does not seem like Arthur, guilty or innocent.”
“He made none in my presence and I was in the coroner’s office when the ring was produced from its secret hiding-place and set down before him. There was no open accusation made, but he must have understood the silence of all present. He acknowledged some days ago, when confronted with the bottle found in Cuthbert Road, that he had taken both it and another from the club-house just before the storm began to rage that night.”
“The hour, the very hour!” I muttered.
“He entered and left by that upper hall window, or so he says; but he is not to be believed in all his statements. Some of his declarations we know to be false.”
“Which ones? Give me a specimen, Charlie. Mention something he has said that you know to be false.”
“Well, it is hard to accuse a man of a direct lie. But he cannot be telling the truth when he says that he crossed the links immediately to Cuthbert Road, thus cutting out the ride home, of which we have such extraordinary proof.”
Under the fear of betraying my thoughts, I hurriedly closed my eyes. I was in an extraordinary position, myself. What seemed falsehood to them, struck me as the absolute truth. Carmel had been the one to go home; he, without doubt, had crossed the links, as he said. As this conviction penetrated deeply and yet more deeply into my mind, I shrank inexpressibly from the renewed mental struggle into which it plunged me. To have suffered, myself,— to have fallen under the ban of suspicion and the disgrace of arrest — had certainly been hard; but it was nothing to beholding another in the same plight through my own rash and ill-advised attempt to better my position and Carmel’s by what I had considered a totally harmless subterfuge.
I shuddered as I anticipated the sleepless hours of silent debate which lay before me. The voice which whispered that Arthur Cumberland was not over-gifted with sensitiveness and would not feel the shame of his position like another, did not carry with it an indisputable message, and could not impose on my conscience for more than a passing moment. The lout was human; and I could not stifle my convictions in his favour.
But Carmel!
I clenched my hands under the clothes. I wished it were not high noon, but dark night; that Clifton would only arise or turn his eyes away; that something or anything might happen to give me an instant of solitary contemplation, without the threatening possibility of beholding my thoughts and feelings reflected in another’s mind.
Was this review instantaneous, or the work of many minutes? Forced by the doubt to open my eyes, I met Clifton’s full look turned watchfully on me. The result was calming; even to my apprehensive gaze it betrayed no new enlightenment. My struggle had been all within; no token of it had reached him.
This he showed still more plainly when he spoke.
“There will be a close sifting of evidence at the inquest. You will not enjoy this; but the situation, hard as it may prove, has certainly improved so far as you are concerned. That should hasten your convalescence.”
“Poor Arthur!” burst from my lips, and the cry was echoed in my heart. Then, because I could no longer endure the pusillanimity which kept me silent, I rose impulsively into a sitting posture, and, summoning all my faculties into full play, endeavoured to put my finger on the one weak point in the evidence thus raised against Carmel’s brother.
“What sort of a man would you make Arthur out to be, when you accuse him of robbing the wine-vault on top of a murderous assault on his sister?”
“I know. It argues a brute, but he —”
“Arthur Cumberland is selfish, unresponsive, and hard, but he is not a brute. I’m disposed to give him the benefit of my good opinion to this extent, Charlie; I cannot believe he first poisoned and then choked that noble woman.”
Clifton drew himself up in his turn, astonishment battling with renewed distrust.
“Either he or you, Ranelagh!” he exclaimed, firmly. “There is no third person. This you must realise.”