CHAPTER XIWHAT THE CIPHER MEANT
Tyberton Castlewas less than an hour’s drive from Hereford by motor. I had to conceal my knowledge of the neighbourhood from Tarleton, who left the arrangements in my hands, and question the man who waited on us at breakfast as if I were entirely ignorant of where the Castle lay, and how to reach it.
“No breakfast, no man,” was a favourite maxim of the physician’s, and he did full justice to the fresh trout, the kidneys and bacon, and the new-laid eggs put before us, while I had to force myself to swallow a few mouthfuls. However, the meal was over at last, and at ten o’clock we were seated in the car provided by the hotel, speeding along the road I had last trodden backward with despair in my heart.
It seemed to me that every tree was eloquent and that every cottage on the way remembered me, and wondered at my coming back. As we came near the village I was tempted to shrink back in my corner of the car and hide my face, lest the villagers should recognize it and greet me. I had to tell myself that the real test would come presently. I had never crossed the threshold of the Castle; I had never ventured into the park in the daytime; but there is no such thing as privacy on the country-side; everyhedge has eyes and ears; and it was certain that my comings and goings had been watched, and that every child on the Earl of Ledbury’s estate and every servant in his house knew more about me than his lordship did.
Tarleton was delighted with the scenery. What pleased him still more was the absence of all traffic. We did not meet one vehicle in the road, except a farmer’s cart.
“This is the least-known beauty spot in England,” he cried with enthusiasm. “Those hills yonder must be in Radnorshire, a county whose existence I have always doubted. This is the old Welsh March, where the Britons stayed the Saxon advance at last, and kept their freedom in Wild Wales. What a contrast between this and Tarifa Road, Chelsea!”
The reminder came just in time. I had been on the point of telling him that King Arthur’s tomb stood on the crest of one of the hills that overlooked the Golden Valley. I bit my lip, thankful that I hadn’t betrayed myself.
We went through the sleepy village, bringing out one or two women with babies in their arms to their garden gates. Then we turned into the park and saw the rabbits scampering to the right and left as we crossed the fern-covered slopes.
“This is a true ‘haunt of ancient peace,’” murmured the consultant wistfully. “This is the sort of place I want to end my days in. And we have come to disturb it, perhaps to bring disaster and disgrace.I should be glad if we could turn back now and go away again.”
I turned to him expectantly. His words had echoed my own thoughts so closely that I half hoped to find him ready to act upon them. But the frown on his brow and the stern set of his mouth told me that I was deluding myself.
The car drew up at the main entrance to the Castle. The ivy-clad ruins to which the building owed its name were almost screened from view by the huge red-brick front of a dull edifice dating from the reign of George the Second. The mansion had been put up out of ostentation at a cost from which the estate had never recovered, and every Earl of Ledbury since had cursed his ancestor’s extravagance. I know that the present Earl found it hard to pay the interest on his mortgages, and that he lived in one corner of the vast house, leaving long corridors and whole suites of rooms to the spiders and rats.
We got out, and Sir Frank Tarleton gave his card and mine to the man who came down the steps to receive us. His suit of black was threadbare, and his coat looked as if it had been thrust on hastily at the sound of our approach.
“Please take our cards to Lady Violet Bredwardine, and ask her ladyship if we can see her in private, on urgent business.”
The servant stared at the message. His eyes wandered from Tarleton to me, and I thought therewas a vague recognition in them when they met mine. But his manner was respectful and demure.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I believe her ladyship is out. I will inquire if you wish.”
He seemed to be hesitating whether to ask us inside. Sir Frank seized on the opening.
“I shall be glad if you will find out when she is likely to be in. Her ladyship is staying in the Castle, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes, sir.” The answer was given readily.
“We have come down from London on purpose to see her. They told us at Grosvenor Place that her ladyship had come here—I think it was on Wednesday.”
The man bowed. “That is quite right, sir. Her ladyship arrived on Wednesday evening.”
I stole an anxious glance at my chief. It was a complete confirmation of the Inspector’s report. If Lady Violet had arrived at the Castle in the evening, she could not have been back in town the same night. The alibi stood firm.
Tarleton drew out his watch as though to consult it before deciding what to do next. Suddenly he snapped out, “There is no mistake, I suppose? Her ladyship couldn’t have been in London on Wednesday night?”
The man was taken off his guard, and if he had been lying he could hardly have failed to show some confusion. But the only feeling he manifested was one of resentment at the question.
“I’m positive of what I say, sir. But her ladyship hasn’t authorized me to answer questions about her movements.”
The consultant put on the air of a man who has made a slip.
“No, no; of course not. I meant to ask her ladyship herself.” He turned to me. “What do you say, Cassilis? Shall we wait inside, or shall we go for a stroll and come back again?”
I had laid my plans in the expectation that Lady Violet would be out, and I was ready with a suggestion. I made it with my heart in my mouth.
“I think one of us ought to wait here, Sir Frank. The other might walk round the park, and perhaps meet Lady Violet.”
Sir Frank seemed to find the proposal quite natural.
“Very good. I shall be glad to stretch my legs for an hour, so I’ll leave you here and come back again.”
This was an unforeseen check. I had been so sure of being the one to go out into the grounds, if I could effect the separation, that I hadn’t thought of the alternative. My only chance now was to slip out as soon as Tarleton’s back was turned. I looked at the servant, and fancied that his eye rested on me with a more friendly air than on my companion.
“Would you like to wait inside, sir?” he asked.
I hesitated. But I had to choose between trusting him and trusting the chauffeur who had drivenus out from Hereford; and he had impressed me favourably. I followed him into the Castle, while Tarleton moved off down an avenue of beeches in the park.
The servant brought me through a dreary hall full of old suits of armour and ancient high-backed chairs, but lacking in those little touches of modern comfort that are needed to make such a place home-like and attractive to the eye. He opened a door towards the inner end, and ushered me into a gloomy library, fitted up with great bookcases that looked as if they were never opened, stuffed with huge leather-bound volumes of the kind that no human being any longer wants to read. The whole room reminded me of the fairy tale of the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. It seemed to breathe of the eighteenth century, as though its life had been arrested then, and no one had trodden the faded carpet or taken down one of the dusty tomes for a hundred long years since.
The manservant had taken up a silver plate as we passed through the hall, and laid our cards on it. He now asked, “Shall I take these cards to his lordship, sir?”
He must have seen me start at the question. I put my hand into my pocket, searching his face carefully the while.
“There is no occasion for that,” I said. “Our business with her ladyship is private, and she may not wish his lordship to be troubled with it.” I tookout a note before adding, “Perhaps you remember my face?”
The man looked pleased. His chances of adding to his wages can’t have been very many in that lonely mansion. It seemed to me, moreover, that he was genuinely attached to his young mistress.
“Why, yes, sir. I did have a thought as I had seen you here before. You were staying at the Moorfield Farm, if I rec’lect rightly, sir, three years ago or might be four.”
I nodded, and the piece of paper passed silently from my hand to his.
“I’ve come to do a service to Lady Violet, if I can,” I told him. “Her ladyship knows I am coming, and she has gone out to meet me. I want you to let me out at the back of the Castle, so that I can join her; and say nothing to the friend who has come with me, or anybody else.”
He gave me a quick look of intelligence. “I understand, sir.”
He led the way out of the library again, and along a corridor still more deserted and dismal than the hall. It ended at a locked and barred door which he unfastened with some effort.
“This is the way into the ruins,” he explained. “You can pass out from them into a path that leads through the home meadows up to the Moorfield Farm. It’s a public footpath, and if anyone sees you they’ll think you’ve been exploring the ruins from outside.”
Nothing could have suited better with my plans. I knew the path, and knew that at a certain point another diverged from it and led through a well-remembered wood to the barn where I had asked Violet Bredwardine to meet me.
I passed out into the Castle grounds and clambered over the crumbling walls and fallen stones till I found myself on the path. And now every step became tragical. I was treading on the ashes of the fire in which two hearts had been scorched and branded with a mark that could never be effaced. The grass beside the narrow footway seemed to be stained with blood. I drew my breath in pain as I mounted the slope towards the lonely little farm-house in which I had passed the most glorious and the most miserable hours of my life. When I came to the gate into the wood, I stopped and leant upon it panting, and hardly able to proceed.
The wood was haunted by ghosts more dreadful to me than any spirits of the dead; the ghosts of passion and of pain, the ghosts of love and hatred, of that most terrible of all hatred which is born of love betrayed.
I shuddered as I thrust open the gate and stepped beneath the trees. A sombre fir drooped like a weeping willow over one spot where the way was crossed by a trickling spring that plunged and disappeared down a steep gully choked with brambles and dark ferns. But there was a worse point than that to pass. A tall beech sent out its roots on to the path,and on the smooth rind of its trunk were cut two initial letters entwined—a V and B. The very knife that had scored them there lay in my pocket; I had never parted with it. What madness had tempted me to blazon our secret to the inquisitive country-side? I had used one precaution: I had cut the proclamation of our love on the side of the trunk that was hidden from the public way. Now, when I reached the tree, I forced a passage through the undergrowth to see how time and weather had dealt with that vain memorial. A bitter shock awaited me. Every vestige of the monogram had been destroyed by deep cuts and slashes in the bark. Only a confused web of scars and scratches marked the place. The tree’s wounds seemed to reproduce the wounds upon two hearts.
My head drooped as I dragged myself up the rest of the ascent, and came out of the wood on the open hillside. The view was exquisite. The hills of three fair counties stretched away to the horizon, and at their feet the silver Wye clasped the rich cornfields and pastures in its shining arms. But the whole prospect was darkened over for my eyes by an invisible cloud. I turned to the spot where, scarcely a hundred yards away, there rose out of the bracken the high gray walls of the forsaken barn.
Its desolation seemed symbolical. When it was built centuries ago the surrounding land had borne crops worth harvesting instead of the thin grass and waste of bracken that now surrounded it on allsides. Tradition spoke of a time not remote when the hill swarmed with folk engaged in tilling the hard soil. Their ruined cottages still lined the lanes that crept along the crest, and peeped out of the sheltered nooks. The virgin prairies of the New World had tempted some of them away; others had migrated to the mining valleys whose smoke could almost be seen from where I stood.
So the gray ancient barn stood empty, its wooden doors dangling helpless from their rusty staples, and the wind whistling through the narrow slits that showed like the arrow holes of a Norman keep. I made my way across the standing bracken that rose up to my shoulders, and gained the open doorway. But there was no one within. A solitary sheep started up from the litter of chaff that strewed the floor, and bounded out through an opening in the opposite wall, leaving me alone.
And now I began to repent that I had named as the meeting-place the spot where we had parted in such misery those three years ago. I turned with a pang from the scene, and advanced slowly towards the brow of the hill. Just below the crest, seated on a moss-covered stone beside a spring, I found her.
Violet Bredwardine rose and stood where she was, more like a statue than a living woman. Her light ringlets, breaking from beneath a quaint straw helmet, surrounded her face like a halo, and made it seem more than ever like the face of the child angel she had seemed to me when I saw her first. Eventhen there had been a wistful look in her innocent blue eyes, as though the child angel had lost her way in this troubled earth of ours, and was seeking pitifully for some escape. And I dreamt—in my madness I had dreamt—that I could offer her the help she needed, and change the sadness of her life into joy.
I strode towards her, all the old, passionate impulses of the past flooding my heart like wine, and cried, “Violet!”
She shrank back as if I had struck her and the soft eyes flashed with anger.
“How dare you! How dare you ask me to meet you like this?”
I stopped ashamed. In an instant my sudden emotion was chilled. I felt myself a criminal facing my judge.
“Forgive me,” I stammered. “I was obliged to speak to you before you saw Sir Frank Tarleton. I had to explain to you who he was and what he was going to ask you.”
She interrupted me with a gesture of scorn. She pointed to the roof of the barn, just visible over the crest of the slope from where we stood.
“How dared you ask me to meet youthere? Was there no other place?” Her voice shook. “How could you be so brutal? To remind me! To drag me back to the one spot on earth that I was trying to forget!”
The reproach pierced me like a knife. She wasright. What was I but a brute? What else is any man in dealing with the mystery of a woman’s heart—with those delicate fibres which our rude touch so often bruises and rends unawares?
I could have thrown myself at her feet and begged her to trample the life out of me. But there would have been no reparation in that; there was none in anything that I could think of doing. It was a case of least said soonest mended. I had to leave the wound I had given her to heal itself, and meanwhile try to render her the only service that was in my power.
“You can say nothing to me that I don’t deserve, nothing that is severe enough,” I answered. “I can only plead that I was distracted by anxiety, on your account.”
The indignation in her face turned to terror.
“What do you mean? You wrote to me that I had nothing more to fear.”
“I said, nothing more to fear from Dr. Weathered. That was all I thought it safe to put in a letter. And when I wrote it I hoped that I could protect you from any further trouble. But other things have happened since. There are complications in the case that I couldn’t explain without seeing you, and Sir Frank Tarleton has come down here to see if you can throw light on them.”
“Sir Frank Tarleton? Who is he?”
“He is the principal medical adviser to the Home Office. I am his assistant.”
“But I don’t understand!” She stared at me in natural wonder. “Why should he be mixed up in it? Have you told him anything?”
“Nothing; you may be assured of that. But I must tell you what has happened. Weathered is dead.”
“Dead.” The blue eyes expanded for a moment in a gleam of relief, almost of exultation. The instant after they froze dreadfully. “Bertrand! You killed him!” she whispered.
I shook my head earnestly.
“No. I should have killed him, if there had been no other way to save you from him. And I don’t believe any honest man or woman would have blamed me if I had. But it wasn’t necessary. My only object was to destroy the record of your confession, the statement that had placed you in his power. All I did was to drug him enough to make him insensible, and take his keys. When I left the Club at three o’clock in the morning he was still alive. He was found dead where I left him two hours afterwards.”
Violet hardly seemed to be listening. Her eyes were still fixed on me like two blue stones.
“You did it,” she repeated dully. “You killed him—for my sake!”
Even in the midst of the intense strain those last three words thrilled me with secret joy. Heaven forgive me for wishing for an instant that they were true. I could have brought myself to accept the terriblepossibility which had been haunting me ever since the voice of Inspector Charles had told me through the telephone that Weathered was a corpse, the possibility that I had administered a fatal dose. But I saw that Violet was on the verge of breaking down. For her sake, far more than for my own, I must banish that theory from the field.
“No,” I assured her again. “That is out of the question. Sir Frank Tarleton is the greatest living authority on poisons, and he has been engaged for the last three days in trying to ascertain the cause of death. I have been by his side the whole time, assisting him, and I know that his suspicions point in another direction altogether.”
I broke off to catch her in my arms as she swayed forward. I was just in time. I laid her gently on the moss and sprinkled her face with water from the spring, the sweet face that I would have given all I possessed to sprinkle with kisses instead. Luckily the collapse was only momentary. While I was still bending over her she opened her lips to say, “Go on. Tell me everything.”
I waited till she had recovered strength enough to sit up. It would have done harm to wait longer. It was necessary for her to know exactly how matters stood.
“Dr. Weathered had other victims beside you, and other enemies beside me. The police are on the trail of some of them and Sir Frank has obtained an important clue which may lead us to the true causeof death. But meanwhile notice has been attracted to the costume in which I went to the Domino Club that night.”
Violet began to look frightened.
“The one I lent you?—you ought to have destroyed it!” she said excitedly.
“It is very fortunate I didn’t,” I returned soothingly. “It has come out that it was the costume you generally wore; and you remember that was why you lent it to me, so that Weathered should think I was you. Anyhow, it has been traced to you, and if you couldn’t produce it you would be called on to account for its disappearance. Do you see that?”
“Yes, I see that. But surely if they know the costume was mine they must believe that I was there that night. My God, do they suspect me of the murder?”
I was agonized by her terror.
“They know you to be innocent. Your innocence has been proved,” I cried out fiercely. “You have what the law calls an alibi; you were more than a hundred miles away when the crime was committed—if there was a crime. Good heavens, Violet, can you believe that I shouldn’t have given myself up to justice the very moment it was necessary to clear you?”
Her expression softened more than I could have hoped.
“I know that, Bertrand,” she said in a low voice.“Only I don’t understand why you are here. What does Sir Frank Tarleton want with me?”
“He wanted two things. One was to make sure that you really were here on Wednesday night. He is now quite satisfied of that. The other is to ask you if you can explain something that has puzzled us in Weathered’s appointment-book. Whenever your name appears it is followed by a number, and we don’t know why.”
Violet lowered her eyes with a frown.
“He gave me that number to sign my letters by when I wrote to him. He told me that it would help me to write more freely if I used a number instead of a name.”
I started in alarm. “But why should you need that? What were the letters about?”
The poor girl’s eyes still refused to meet mine.
“He made me tell him the whole story in letters. He said that was the only way to get it off my mind.”
I clenched my teeth together to keep myself from uttering a word. The doctor’s safe had been opened and his case-book destroyed uselessly.