CHAPTER XIVTHE UNKNOWN POISON
I satfascinated. This was not the Violet Bredwardine I had known. The girl had sprung up into a woman, and the woman was making a brave fight for me more than herself. If my name came out she would be no worse off than she was already, as far as her connection with the death in the Domino Club was concerned. Her father would have to know that she and I had been friends in the past, but he need know nothing more. It was I who stood in danger. It would be useless for me to deny that I had drugged Weathered, and had carried off the case-book. His death would lie at my door unless it could be proved that something had been given to him that night in addition to opium. And it would take very strong evidence to convince a jury that there had been anyone else concerned in that night’s business besides me.
Whether her refusal to betray me was due only to loyalty, or to a faint survival or revival of the love I had forfeited, I could not tell. I only knew that my own heart was touched anew, and I longed more than ever to redeem myself in her eyes and wipe out the past.
The Earl of Ledbury controlled his wrath with an effort. He may have seen that it would be uselessto persist just then. He may have feared to press his daughter too far in our presence lest she should make some admission that would bring her within reach of the law.
“Very well; if that is your attitude, you have ceased to be my daughter. You will pack up your things and go to London by the afternoon train. I shall wire to Miss Pollexfen to meet you, and you can stay in my house till she has found you a home with some respectable family; and I shall pay for your board as long as you choose to remain with them. Beyond that I have done with you. Now go.”
Violet got up, shivering all over, to obey. Her misery was too acute for me to indulge in selfish thoughts of what her forced emancipation might mean for me.
The Earl turned to Sir Frank as if by an afterthought.
“Have you gentlemen anything else to ask Lady Violet before she goes?”
My chief passed on the question to me by a nod. His own expression was one of pity. I caught at the opportunity.
“Nothing for the moment, but I presume your lordship will be willing to let us have Lady Violet’s new address if we should want it later on.”
It was the first time I had spoken since Lord Ledbury came into the room, and he glared at me as though resenting my presumption.
“Lady Violet is of age,” he said shortly. “Ihave just been reminded of that. She is her own mistress; you had better ask her.”
Violet slowly turned and faced me. I threw all I dared of longing and pleading for forgiveness into the look I gave her. The despair in her eyes found a dull echo in her tone.
“I will send you my address as soon as I know it. But it will make no difference. I....”
Her voice choked. The next moment the door had closed on her.
And now Tarleton proceeded to astonish me. I think he astonished the Earl of Ledbury as well.
“My lord,” he said in a tone of deep gravity, “it is clear to me that you have no idea of the danger in which your daughter stands.”
“Danger!” The Earl fairly started.
“Danger,” the consultant repeated firmly. “The man whose death has brought us down here was an unscrupulous scoundrel. He laid traps for women. Under the pretence of soothing their nerves he induced them to tell him their secrets, and to write him letters containing their inmost thoughts. There is every likelihood that he met his death at the hands of some woman whom he had entrapped in that way, and whom he was attempting to blackmail.”
“But what has that to do with my daughter?” his lordship burst out. “You don’t suppose that she knew he was going to be murdered?”
“I haven’t suggested it. The evidence is to the contrary, I am glad to see. But your daughter hasbeen beguiled into writing to this man, and in her innocence she has very likely written a good many things that you would not care to see published. Those letters are still in existence, probably, and we don’t know in whose hands. Until they are found and destroyed Lady Violet will be at the mercy of the holder.”
“Wretched girl!” Even now the selfish father could find nothing better to do than to blame his child.
“Who made her wretched?” Tarleton’s face wore the stern look of a judge passing sentence. “Who drove her to confide in a stranger and a charlatan? Who handed her over to a hired companion whom she seems to have disliked and distrusted? Who taught her to look for sympathy anywhere except from her own parent and in her own home?”
Never have I witnessed a rebuke better administered or with better effect. Lord Ledbury was utterly subdued. If the condemnation had come from a young man like myself, or from a professed preacher, he might have tried to defend himself. But from a man of his own age, and a man in authority, the representative of law and public opinion, it was an unanswerable charge.
For the best part of a minute he sat silent. His face worked. Memories of the past must have come back to him; perhaps he asked himself what account he could give to Violet’s mother of her only child.His voice was altered and broken when he spoke again.
“You have been very plain with me, Sir Frank. I recognize that you have spoken as a friend—as my daughter’s friend at least, if not mine. It may be that my treatment of her has been mistaken, although I meant it for the best; at all events, it has turned out unfortunately. But her good name is the first consideration now. These letters—what do you advise me to do?”
The physician considered for a time before he spoke.
“I didn’t know of the existence of these letters when I came down here, and the problem is one that requires thinking out. It may be that they will give us a clue to the whole mystery. As far as I can see at present, three things may have happened to them.”
He turned from Lord Ledbury to me as he went on.
“Weathered may have kept them in the same safe with his case-book. In that case the person who opened the safe and carried off the book ought to have found the letters as well. But according to my present theory the person who took the book was the wearer of this costume—” he pointed to the dress in front of us. “In other words, he or she was Lady Violet’s friend. And if her friend had found any such documents he would have destroyed them and let her know at once. In my opinion, therefore,either he overlooked them, or they were kept in some more secret receptacle.”
As Tarleton seemed to expect my opinion I nodded in confirmation. I could have sworn that the safe contained no such correspondence, but that, of course, I dared not tell him.
“The next person who seems to have had access to the safe,” said the consultant, “was Weathered’s step-daughter. And if he had some other hiding-place in the house she is the most likely person to have known of it, and to have opened it since his death. Her mother, no doubt, would have a better right to examine her husband’s papers, but she impressed me as a weak woman, very much in her daughter’s hands. We have to face the possibility that Lady Violet’s letters have been found by a young woman of very determined character who has actually denounced her ladyship to Dr. Cassilis and myself as guilty of this man’s death.”
The Earl showed himself greatly shaken.
“But this is terrible. You, sir, and you”—he appealed to each of us in turn—“don’t believe anything so hideous.”
“Not for one moment.” It was my chief who answered. “Our presence here is the best proof of that. We found ourselves accused by this young woman of hushing up the case and screening the criminal, and we came down to obtain proof of Lady Violet’s absence from the scene of the crime. You have nothing to fear on that score, I hope and believe.You can trust us both not to let anyone know of the admission Lady Violet has just made to you that she lent her costume to someone else.”
“To the actual murderer, do you mean?” the father gasped.
“Not necessarily. That point is still in doubt. As I have said, the crime may have been committed by a woman—or a man—who had been driven to desperation. I should be glad to think so, and to think that he or she had seized the secret correspondence.”
“Why?” It was Lord Ledbury who put the question, but I waited for the answer with equal curiosity.
“Because in that case we might have every hope that it would be promptly destroyed. Such a victim would have no motive to injure her fellow victims, and we might credit her with a sense of honour. Whereas the step-daughter has shown a strong animus against Lady Violet, and we know that she is not too scrupulous when her feelings are aroused. If Miss Neobard has found these letters it may take some pressure to make her give them up.”
The Earl wrung his hands. “My means are not large, but if any sum within my power—” he began.
Tarleton cut him short with decision.
“That is one means which must not be resorted to, my lord. I must make that an absolute condition. The one thing I have to ask of you is that youwill protect your daughter from any attempt that may be made to blackmail her. Try, if you can, to win her confidence. I strongly advise you to come up to town with her yourself. Her chaperon has shown herself to be incompetent, and I shouldn’t let her into your house again. Look out for some bright, sympathetic woman of the world, and don’t engage her unless Lady Violet takes to her as a friend. And let it be seen that your daughter is under your personal protection. A blackmailer who would find a solitary girl an easy prey will think twice before he threatens one who is guarded by a father in your position. Take her with you to the theatres and picture galleries. Believe me, as a doctor, she is in need of distraction just now. I won’t answer for her sanity unless she can be cheered up and taken out of herself. I will call on her, with your permission, and keep an eye on her for a time.”
The change in the Earl of Ledbury was great indeed by now. He thanked the consultant with emotion, and undertook to carry out all his recommendations. He pressed us both to stay and lunch with him, but my chief decided that we could not spare the time.
“We must get back to town as soon as possible,” he declared. “The sooner we get on the track of the missing letters the better chance there will be of our recovering them.”
He shook hands with the Earl very cordially atparting and his lordship seemed to include me in his expressions of gratitude and good-will.
When we were seated in the car going back to Hereford my chief summed up the situation for my benefit.
“There was a possibility that Lady Violet had lent her old disguise to a friend as a blind and come to the dance in a new one. I thought it was on the cards that she might prove to be the Leopardess. Now I think we may rule that out, and I am very glad of it. She is a dear girl, and I confess she has won my heart.”
I glanced at him a little uneasily. In spite of his age, Tarleton was a fascinating man. I had seen enough of him to know that he was popular with women of all ages. Young women seemed to regard him as an uncle, and became familiar with him at very short notice; and I could not be sure that he always regarded them strictly as nieces. Glad as I was that my chief had acquitted Violet in his mind, I was not altogether pleased by the warmth with which he spoke.
“We may take it that she lent her dress to a friend who meant to impersonate her. We don’t know whether the friend had a grievance of her own against Weathered, or whether she was acting as Lady Violet’s champion. And in the second case we can’t say whether Lady Violet knew or guessed what her champion intended to do. You see, there is still a serious case against the poor girl. If thepolice knew that she was in Weathered’s power, and that she had lent her costume to his murderer, they might come to a very ugly conclusion.”
“I am certain she had no idea that any crime was going to be committed,” I spoke earnestly.
“Quite so; you feel certain of that, but Captain Charles might feel certain of the opposite. You see now why I thought it better for us to come down here instead of one of his men.”
I did indeed see it, and inwardly I thanked Sir Frank with all my heart.
“I think we will tell Charles that we obtained satisfactory proof that Lady Violet was at Tyberton Castle on Wednesday night, and that her maid found the Zenobia costume for us in her wardrobe. That ought to make him dismiss her from the case.”
I could have asked for nothing better, so far. “And the letters?” I put in anxiously.
“Ah! I didn’t care to tell Lord Ledbury all I feared about them. I shouldn’t be surprised if Weathered had stored them in the Domino Club.”
I could not restrain a cry of alarm.
“Yes,” Tarleton went on, “that would be the worst case of all. Because by this time they must be in the hands of Madame Bonnell.”
The smooth, smiling face of the Frenchwoman with its shrewd black eyes and thin lips rose before me. As my chief had said, this was the worst case of all.
“If that woman has them it may be some timebefore we hear of them,” the specialist pursued in a meditative tone. “She may wait till the inquiry into the death is over, and the case disposed of as far as the police are concerned. Then the victims will each receive a discreet letter, probably from an agent, informing them that certain letters which appear to be in their handwriting have been found, and asking if they wish to have them returned. There won’t be a word about money in the first communication, you may be sure. The victims will simply be invited to call on the agents and inspect the letters. That woman knows her business, I fancy.”
It was horrible to think of Violet being slowly drawn into the serpent’s coils. There would be less mercy to look for in such a woman than in Weathered himself.
The physician moved his shoulders as if to shake off an unpleasant burden.
“We will put that aside for the moment, and consider the question of the murder. Everything now depends on the information I expect to find waiting for me when we get back. If my diagnosis is correct, Weathered died from a poison described in the book I have told you of,Across Sumatra, by Captain Armstrong. The natives have some name for it which I forget, but I have called itUpasine.”
“Upasine!” I repeated the name in stupefaction.
“Yes. You have heard, no doubt—everybody has heard—of the famous upas tree. According tothe tales of the old explorers, it was a tree that exhaled a deadly vapour, so that the traveller who went to sleep beneath its shelter never woke again. The bones of animals were found scattered round the trunk, and they were supposed to have perished in the same way, by going to sleep within the deadly radius.”
“But surely,” I said in astonishment, “surely no one believes that any longer? I thought it had been proved to be a fable.”
The great expert shook his head.
“There are not many fables that haven’t some truth in them,” he pronounced. “The legendary glories of Timbuktu were dismissed at one time as travellers’ tales, but it turned out there was a city called Timbuktu on the southern edge of the desert of Sahara; that it was the great market to which the caravans from the Mediterranean coast made their way, and even that it once possessed something like a university, when it became a refuge for the Moors who were driven out of Spain. The accounts of the upas tree and its fatal shadow were dismissed in the same shallow way without any inquiry as to how they originated. Armstrong happened to be an intelligent man, and he told me that one of the objects of his exploration of Sumatra had been to find out the truth about the upas.”
My incredulity began to give way before my chief’s sober words.
“He started out with the conviction that bonesand corpses had been found under some trees by some explorers, who had accepted the native theory that the tree cast a deadly spell on all within its range. Other travellers had tested the theory and found that it was possible to sleep under the tree in perfect safety. And so they had treated the whole thing as a pure fancy, without inquiring further. Armstrong did inquire further, and perhaps you can guess what he found?”
For some moments I was hopelessly puzzled. “The leaves are poisonous, perhaps, and the sleepers die because they have eaten them?”
“Not a bad guess. No; Armstrong discovered a minute fungus that grows in the soil round the root of the upas tree, and apparently nowhere else. The animals that browse on this fungus are overcome by sleep, and die without waking. It contains a soporific poison which acts rather like opium at first, but has a peculiar effect on the skin, which it dries up like parchment. You were the first to draw my attention to the parchment-like appearance of Weathered’s face, you may remember.”
I did remember. A burden was lifted from my heart by the recollection. Whatever peril I might stand in from the law, I could assure myself at last that I was not a murderer. The drug I had administered to Violet’s persecutor had contained no grain of any other poison than opium. And now I need not fear that I had given him an overdose of that.He had died, he must have died, from the poison discovered by the explorer of Sumatra. And that meant that he had died by some other hand than mine.
The specialist continued his explanation.
“You see now why I asked you to make no more remarks on what you saw. Whoever used this poison probably believes that he is the only person who possesses any, or even knows of its existence. Armstrong’s book attracted very little notice. It was badly written, for one thing, and there were no illustrations, a fatal omission in a book of travels nowadays. I don’t think there was a word about this discovery in any of the reviews. Naturally the murderer thinks that he is safe from detection.”
“How did you come to hear of the poison?” I ventured to ask.
“In the simplest way. Captain Armstrong himself brought me a sample to analyse.”
Of course! I could have kicked myself. Tarleton was the one man to whom any such discoverer would be certain to come for an opinion.
“He had picked and dried a handful or two of the toadstools, as he called them, but they had crumbled on the voyage home, and what he brought me was dust. I detected the presence of an agent not yet known to science, and I gave it the name of upasine. It seemed to me so dangerous that an unknown poison should be in the hands of anyone but a man like myself, that I asked Armstrong to sellme all he had brought home, and he agreed to do it.”
“But in that case—your bottle was untouched?” I objected.
“True. It is clear that he deceived me. Either he had parted with some of the poison before coming to me, and didn’t like to admit it, or else he kept some for himself as a curiosity. If it isn’t in his possession, I expect to hear of it in the same quarter as the leopard skin and claws.”