CHAPTER XIXTHE MEANS TO DO ILL DEEDS
Thepale, weak woman had suddenly been transformed in Tarleton’s eyes into a heroine. He saw in her someone greater than himself. He was the official, salaried guardian of society, called upon to run no risks that a brave man ought to fear. But this forlorn woman, without a friend in whom she could confide, without support from public opinion or from the law, had taken into her trembling hands the task of delivering her sister women from a wretch whom neither opinion nor the law could reach.
Mrs. Neobard—she had surely earned her right to be called that now—thanked the doctor for his impulsive action with a look. But it was not a look of triumph. She proceeded with her story in the tone of a loser rather than a victor.
“Miss Sebright told me that she had felt a longing to become a mother, which she had no hope of satisfying because she suffered from a depravity, a club foot. She had been told as a child that no man would ever want to marry her, except for her money, and the result had been to make her distrust every man who came near her. It was a sad story and I’m afraid it is true of other women. Their self-distrust robs them of the happiness within their reach, if they only knew it.”
The speaker sighed as though contrasting their fate with her own opposite mistake.
“She told me she had come to my husband to have the longing driven out of her mind; instead of which he had persuaded her to become the mother of an illegitimate child, by a man whose name was not told her. The child was never born, happily—or unhappily; I daren’t say which. But she had written letters that disclosed what she had done, and now the doctor was holding them over her. He hadn’t gone so far as to demand money, but he was compelling her to come or write to him every week and charging her high fees. She would rather have paid a lump sum to end it. The persecution was driving her out of her mind. The poor thing actually offered me a thousand pounds.”
It was a sickening story. Hardened as he was to the ways of criminals, Tarleton listened to it with nausea.
“I promised to find the letters and return them to her if I could. I had to go to work secretly. If I had said anything to my husband it would have put him on his guard, and he would have placed the letters somewhere out of my reach. I spied on him till I saw him one day through the keyhole going to a cupboard in the wall of his dressing-room,—the one you found.”
The consultant forbore to correct her by saying that the discovery had been made by Inspector Charles.
“Of course, it was locked and I had no key that would open it. So I went to an ironmonger’s one day when the doctor was away for the week-end, and asked him to send a confidential man to open it. I pretended that my husband had lost the key while he was away on a holiday, and wanted something in the cupboard to be sent to him. I don’t know if they believed me, but they said nothing, and they made me a new key.”
In the same quiet way she went on, seeming to see nothing extraordinary in the patient contrivance by which she had outwitted the schemer who most probably looked down upon her as a simple piece of domestic furniture.
In the cupboard she had found a mass of correspondence, by no means all of it from women, but in almost every case containing painful and sometimes hideous revelations of depraved and distorted natures. The horrified woman had been obliged to leave a good deal unread. The letters from each correspondent were neatly kept on a separate file, marked with the number under which he or she wrote. These numbers puzzled her at first, as they puzzled Tarleton himself, but she had only to ask Miss Sebright for the explanation. Several numbers were missing from the series. Either the writers must have redeemed their rash confessions, or else they had gone abroad or died, and the papers had become valueless.
The real difficulty before Mrs. Neobard had beento keep her promise to Miss Sebright without the doctor’s knowing that his cupboard had been opened. Now she saw her way. If the poor victim defied him and he went to look for her file and found it gone, he would probably think he had destroyed it himself by mistake.
“He wasn’t always sober when he came in at night,” the unfortunate wife said in a tone that breathed of her past sufferings. “I felt sure he couldn’t suspect me or anyone of taking one set of letters and leaving all the rest. Anyhow, I decided to risk it. I took Miss Sebright’s letters and sent them to her by registered post. She wrote thanking me very gratefully, but telling me that she was dying and asking me to go and see her. I went more than once. It was the sight of her sinking into her grave under my husband’s cruelty that nerved me to go on.”
“I should have returned all the other letters now, without caring what happened, if I had known where to send them. But I had no key to whom the numbers stood for.”
“You would have found that if you had looked in Dr. Weathered’s appointment-book,” Sir Frank told her.
The widow opened her eyes.
“I never thought of that! I see you know how to find out everything, Sir Frank. Stop me if I am telling you anything you know already.”
The consultant waved his hand courteously forher to go on. Her story had held one surprise for him already, and he foresaw that others were to come.
“I waited. I now went to the cupboard every day when I knew I was safe from interruption, to read any fresh letters that had arrived, in the hope of finding something in them that would give me a clue to the writer’s identity. At last I found one in which the writer had put her address at the head in the usual way. I suppose she did it in forgetfulness.”
Tarleton breathed softly while he waited for the name he was pretty certain of hearing.
“The address was Carlyle Square, Chelsea. I looked it up in the Directory and found she was a Mrs. Baker. Have you heard of her before?” Mrs. Neobard gave him an imploring look.
“I knew her brother, the late Captain Armstrong,” the specialist said, without answering the question directly. “Please tell me everything.”
Mrs. Neobard made an effort and went on.
“I was disappointed, in a sense, to find that her letters weren’t worth returning to her. There was nothing in them that anyone could make use of to harm her, as far as I could see. She was simply a very foolish woman with fads. She had come to my husband out of mere curiosity, I should think, and he had played on her weakness. He had pretended that she was secretly longing to commit a murder; and the silly woman believed him. She seemed rather proud of it than otherwise. I supposeit gave her a feeling of self-importance to think of herself as a possible Mrs. Maybrick. In one of her letters she compared herself with Miladi in the ‘Three Musketeers.’”
It was so exactly in keeping with his own impression of the queer little woman in Carlyle Square that Tarleton gave a nod of satisfaction.
“Ah! I see you do know her. But I suppose you won’t tell me how much you know?”
The physician was obliged to shake his head. “You could not trust me yourself, ma’am, if I did.”
“I suppose you are right,” she admitted regretfully. “Well, I went on reading this Mrs. Baker’s letters on the chance of finding something serious in them; and at last there was. He had prompted her to think out plans for committing a murder, and she was actually sending them to him.”
A gasp drew Tarleton’s attention to Sarah Neobard, who had sat hitherto listening in silence. Now she seemed roused to a sense of impending tragedy, and gazed at her mother with dilated eyes.
The widow directed a swift glance at her, and withdrew it instantly.
“You can understand my terrible position, Sir Frank. My eyes had been opened to my husband’s character. I don’t say that he had always been a bad man, but he had become one by now. I had the proof under my eyes that he was a criminal, and a danger to society. And here he was discussing plots of murder with a weak, silly woman who seemed to beunder his thumb. Judging from her letters she was quite capable of committing a murder out of vanity, just to give herself the feeling that she was an extraordinary person.”
The consultant did not credit this. But he was not there to defend Mrs. Baker, and he did not want to interrupt.
“I felt that if she did commit a crime she would be doing it as my husband’s instrument, as much as if he had hypnotized her, and that I must find some way to prevent it. Then, while I was wondering how to interfere, a letter came in which she said she had a bottle of poison in her possession, a poison unknown to the medical profession, that her brother had brought with him from Sumatra. But I expect you know about that?”
“I know the poison you speak of, certainly. The brother sold me a quantity of it. He professed it was all he had brought to England.”
“He deceived you, then. In the next letter she described exactly where she kept the poison, in a chiffonier in her drawing-room within reach of the first caller. She boasted that she kept it under lock and key, but almost anyone could pick a lock like that, as even I could see. Of course, I knew from that moment that the poison was within my husband’s reach, and I felt sure he meant to take it. Why else should he have asked about it so particularly? What did it matter to him where it was kept, unless he wanted it himself?”
“I quite agree with you,” said the specialist, seeing that he was expected to reply.
“Now you see where I stood. I knew that my husband was capable of committing a murder, if he had anything to gain by it, and now I knew that he was actually scheming to obtain a poison that couldn’t be detected. I don’t think Mrs. Baker had an idea that her brother had parted with some to you. She wrote as though her bottle held all there was. And who was it that he was thinking of murdering? I couldn’t see anyone but myself.”
“Mother!” The word burst from Sarah’s agonized lips. If she had retained any lingering softness for the dead man it must have expired in that cry. Her mother did not turn her head.
“I had to defend myself. I couldn’t prevent him from taking the poison in any other way that I could think of. I went to Mrs. Baker’s house and stole the bottle.”
“You were quite right,” the physician agreed again.
“I had no difficulty. I took a bunch of all the keys I could find in the house, keys of wardrobes and drawers and boxes of different sizes, and went round to the Square. I walked up and down till I had seen a woman who looked like the mistress of the house come out, and then I knocked, and asked to be allowed to wait upstairs. I gave some common name.” She put her hand to her forehead. “That’s strange! I can’t remember the name. Well, almost the firstkey I tried opened the chiffonier and there stood the bottle just as she had described it I put it into my pocket and came away.”
Whatever theory Sir Frank had formed as to the case, it had certainly not included this incident. He had thought it possible that after Weathered had carried off the bottle his wife had found it and taken it in turn from him. He had never conjectured that the feeble-looking woman had been brave and cool enough to checkmate her husband in advance like this.
“For the moment I felt safe,” Mrs. Neobard went on steadily. “But how long could I expect to be from such a husband as mine? He was a doctor, and it was easy for him to obtain other poisons. He would have had to do that in any case, I think, as it turned out. Mrs. Baker quarrelled with him soon after, because he had advised her to kill a favourite cat. She refused to have anything more to do with him, and as her letters were more damaging to him than to her he had no hold on her. I soon found that he had destroyed them.”
This was another new light for the consultant. And it prepared him for what was to come next.
“It seemed to me that my only chance of escape was to leave him. But what reason could I give to the world for doing so? I had nothing to complain of as far as his treatment of me was concerned. He was always perfectly courteous. We were on friendly terms outwardly. I couldn’t prove that he had been unfaithful to me; I wasn’t even sure in myown mind that he had been, yet, although the letters showed me that he was pursuing one of his victims. What could I say? Was I to denounce him publicly as a scoundrel, and produce the letters? I might have ruined dozens of innocent men and women. And I might fail. I might find that the world sided with him instead of me. I knew him well enough to know exactly what he would do. He would say that I had spied on his professional work, that I had pried into the secrets of his patients and that jealousy had made me insane. And he would have found plenty of people to believe him. A wife who betrays her husband is not likely to be forgiven.
“If I left him I doubted if my own daughter would have come with me.”
This was the first allusion the mother had made to her daughter’s unhappy infatuation. And it was the last one. Sarah had begun to cry quietly. Now Mrs. Neobard put out her hand again and took her child’s.
“You won’t expect me to give youallmy reasons for deciding that I must act as I did, Sir Frank. Perhaps you will think I really was insane. I don’t know—after reading some of those letters that I found I sometimes feel it difficult to say who is sane and who isn’t. I can only say I thought over everything time after time, as quietly as I could, and I always came to the same conclusion. I think what stuck in my mind most of all was the death of poor Miss Sebright. There was no doubt that he hadmurdered her, as surely as if he had given her arsenic. I thought he ought to die.”
She said it without an effort, as though it were the most natural conclusion in the world.
“It looked like a providence to me that I had the poison ready. It was his own doing, you see. He had helped me to it through wanting it himself for his own wicked ends. I had taken it in self-defence, and there it was, ready to be used.”
The listener remembered Shakespeare’s lines, though he refrained from quoting them:
“How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done.”
“How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done.”
The master of human nature had anticipated the excuse of many King Johns. And in this case the excuse seemed genuine. In fact, the widow did not speak as though she meant to excuse herself; she seemed to be simply explaining the sequence of her thoughts.
“Then I came to a new difficulty, that I had never expected. I found I couldn’t do it.”
It sounded like confession. There was far more of apology in the tone with which she said this than there had been in her whole previous statement. For the first time there was moisture in her eyes.
“I had believed in him once.... I had loved him.”
She broke down and ceased for a few moments. Tarleton watched her with real pity.
“I dare say you will find it difficult to understand me, Sir Frank, but I think most wives would. I hadn’t changed my mind. I was still quite firm in believing that it was right to put an end to my husband, but I had to find someone else to do it.”
The consultant nodded. It was all plain to him now. His theory had not been very far wrong, after all.
“I decided that I must try to discover one of his victims, one of the men who had confessed their secrets to him and were suffering in consequence, and give the poison to him. I didn’t think of the appointment-book, unfortunately. The only way that occurred to me of getting in touch with the writers of the letters was to go to the Domino Club.”
Tarleton felt astray again for the moment. There were more complications in the case than he had even yet grasped.
“I expect you know all about the Club. My husband had started it as a means of getting money out of his patients, but it caught on, and became quite a fashionable resort. It brought him something like £1,000 a year. Of course, his name didn’t appear, but everyone knew he was to be met there regularly. He never missed a dance. The nominal proprietor of the Club was the woman who managed it for him, Madame Bonnell.”
“Yes. I knew all that. And I know Madame Bonnell.”
Mrs. Neobard’s face betrayed some apprehension.
“Know her as a friend, do you mean?” she ventured.
“I know her well enough to think she could be a very dangerous one.”
“Ah, then youdoknow her. I wish I had!... I went to her to buy a ticket of admission to the Club, as I wasn’t a member. I didn’t mean to tell her who I was, but she knew somehow.”
“Madame Bonnell knew a good deal.”
“Yes, I found that out, too, before I had done with her. She was all politeness; she pretended to think I was coming out of curiosity and treated it as a sort of joke. She promised of her own accord not to let Dr. Weathered know. Promised it playfully, you understand, as if it were of no consequence whether he did or not. What she really thought I can’t tell, but she must have suspected something and meant to get me in her power.
“She deceived me completely. I asked her some questions about the people who came, especially the patients. I wanted to find out which of them came against their will, but I hoped she wouldn’t see what I was driving at.”
A sheep might as well have tried to hoodwink a wolf, was Tarleton’s inward comment, but he thought he had interrupted enough.
“She answered all my questions so glibly and seemed so anxious to oblige that I was led on further and further. At last she said, ‘You can see I am a friend, madam; why not trust me? I see you wantto know your husband’s enemies and I am willing to help you. This Club is full of them. Every time the doctor comes here I consider he takes his life in his hands.’
“I tried to draw back, but it was too late. She refused to let me go. She said, ‘I must choose between you and your husband, madam. He is my employer, he pays me well, and if anything happens to him you may engage another manageress, and I shall lose my daily bread. If it is your object to preserve him from danger we can work together.’
“She must have guessed pretty well by this time that I had a different object, because she hardly waited for me to answer. Before I could make up my mind what to say, she went on: ‘On the other hand, I have no friendship for Dr. Weathered. Of late I have sometimes wished that he were out of the way. The Club would do better without him in my opinion. He is unpopular. And always I am afraid of some terribleesclandre—some frightful scene or some exposure that would ruin the Club and perhaps injure my character.’”
In spite of the gravity of the situation Sir Frank Tarleton relished Madame’s regard for her character, though he kept his enjoyment to himself.
“She meant me to feel that she was on my side, I could see. It seemed to be a pure matter of business with her. She was ready to help me to save my husband or to kill him—it didn’t matter which, provided it was made worth her while. At the sametime she let me see that I was in her power. ‘It comes to this,’ she said at last, ‘that if you are not going to trust me I can’t afford to trust you. You may have come here to pump me, to find out if I deserve your husband’s confidence. In that case I must report this conversation to him for my own protection; I expect you to see that, madam.’”
It was all so clever, as clever as the advertisement about the letters, Tarleton reflected. He did not wonder that Mrs. Neobard had been overmatched.
“In the end I had to give in to her. I saw no way out, and it looked as if she would be perfectly willing to help me on her own terms. I undertook to transfer the whole property in the Domino Club to her on my husband’s death, and she undertook to find one of his victims who hated him enough to kill him, if he could do it safely, and give him the secret poison. No one was to know where she had obtained it.
“I took the bottle to her the next day. The moment it was in her hands she said to me, ‘I must have more than this, madam. I must have the letters you have found. They are your justification for planning your husband’s death, and I must have them to show in my defence if I get into trouble for assisting you.’
“I had been weak enough to tell her nearly everything I have told you, because I couldn’t bear to let her think that I was a bad woman acting from evil motives. Now I repented too late. As usual, shehad a perfect answer to everything I could say. ‘It comes to this, madam, that you have given me the means to commit a murder, and you have made these letters your excuse. If you decline to produce them I must doubt if they exist, and as an honest woman I shall hand this bottle over to the police.’”
Tarleton got out of his chair. If he did not yet know all he wanted to know, he knew all that this poor woman could tell him.
“Thank you. If I have your permission to use this information in my own way neither you nor your daughter need fear anything more.”
The astonished woman stopped him on the way to the door.
“But after Madame Bonnell had got the letters she turned round and refused to go on with the plot. How did my husband die?”
“I am going to ask her that.”