CHAPTER XXVIII.
“For life must life, and blood must blood repay.”
“For life must life, and blood must blood repay.”
“For life must life, and blood must blood repay.”
“For life must life, and blood must blood repay.”
Cuthbert Ramsay arrived at Dorchester on Saturday just in time to dress for dinner, and he contrived to make himself so agreeable to all the family in the course of that friendly meal, that Janet and Sophia forgave him for his base desertion, and Harrington forgave him for being a great deal cleverer and happier than himself. He was in very high spirits—had been working hard in London—attending lectures—witnessing operations—and looking after those gratis patients in the slums who were his chief delight.
“I love to find out what life means below the surface,” he said. “One only gets at realities when one comes face to face with the struggle for existence. The children—the poor pinched atomies whom one looks at with a shudder, remembering thattheyare the men and women of the future! That is the terrible point—to think that in those little half-starved faces one sees the men who are to meet in Trafalgar Square and unmake our smooth, easy world—to think that in those wizened morsels of humanity we have all the elements of discord and destruction in the days to come.Thatis the appalling thought.”
“It is a thought that should teach us our duty to them,” said Janet.
“What do you take that duty to be?”
“To educate them!”
“Educate—yes—educate them in the ways of health and cleanliness—after we have fed them.ThatI take to be our primary duty to the children as much as to the lower animals. You know the old adage, Miss Dalbrook,mens sana in corpore sano. Did you ever hear of a sound and healthy mind in an unsound scrofulous body? So long as we leave the little children to semi-starvation, we are sacrificing to the Demon Scrofula, which is to our enlightened age what the Demon Leprosy was to those darker ages whose ignorance we prate about.”
“I am not in favour of pauperizing the working classes,” said Harrington.
“That idea of pauperism is a bugbear and a stumbling-block in the path of benevolence. Do you pauperize an agricultural labourerwhose utmost wages are fifteen shillings a week if you provide his children with two good meals of fresh meat in the seven days, and so grow better bone and sinew than can be produced upon bread and dripping, or bread and treacle? Do you pauperize a man by giving him a free supply of pure water, and larger, airier rooms than his scanty wages will buy for him? To subsidize is not to pauperize, Mr. Dalbrook; and if England is to hold together upon the old lines during the coming centuries, the well-to-do will have to help the poor upon a stronger and wider basis than that on which they have helped them in the past, and a good deal of the spare cash that is now being spent on fine clothes and dinner-parties will have to be spent upon feeding and housing the million.”
The two young men drove over to Milbrook early on Sunday morning, in order to attend morning service at the picturesque old church. Matthew Dalbrook and his daughters were to join them at the Priory in time for luncheon, which was to be a regular family party.
Cuthbert was silent for the greater part of the drive, and Theodore was thoughtfully observant of him. Yes, there might be something in Sophy’s idea. More than once during that long drive the young man’s face brightened with a sudden smile, a smile of ineffable happiness, as of a dreaming lover who sees the gates of his earthly paradise opening, sees his mistress coming to meet him on the threshold. Theodore’s heart sank at the thought that Sophia had hit upon the truth. Anyway there was hopelessness in the idea. If it were to be Theodore’s blessed fate to see the one love of his life victorious, soon or late, after long patience and devoted sacrifice, Cuthbert must taste the bitterness of having loved in vain. But he would hardly be worthy of pity, perhaps, seeing that he had known from the first how the land lay, seeing that honour forbade his falling in love with Juanita.
But will honour make a man blind to beauty, deaf to the music of a voice, impervious to the subtle charms of all that is purest, best, and loveliest in womanhood? Theodore began to think that he had done wrong in bringing his friend within the influence of irresistible charms.
“I was a fool to think that he could help himself; I was a worse fool to suppose that she will ever care for me—the humdrum cousin whom she has known all her life—the country solicitor whose image she has always associated with leases and bills of dilapidation—a little more than a bailiff, and a little less than a gentleman.”
They consigned the dog-cart to the village ostler, who was expiating the jovial self-indulgence of Saturday night in the penitential drowsiness of Sunday morning, and they were in their places in the grey old church when Lady Carmichael came to the chancel pew. Theodore’s watchful eyes followed her from her entrance in a haloof sunshine, which was suddenly obscured as the curtain dropped behind her, to the moment when she bowed her head in prayer. He saw her face brighten as she passed the pew where he and his friend were sitting, and he told himself that it was Cuthbert’s presence which conjured up that happier light in her soft, dark eyes. On the walk from the church to the Priory it was with Cuthbert she talked—Cuthbert the irrepressible, who had so much to say that he must needs find listeners. It was Cuthbert who sat next her at luncheon, and who engrossed her attention throughout the meal. It was Cuthbert who went through the hot-houses, fern-houses, and greenhouses with her after luncheon, and gave her practical lessons in botany and entomology as they went along, and who promised her some Austrian frogs. The day was one long triumph for Cuthbert Ramsay, and he gave himself up to the intoxication of the hour as a drunkard surrenders to strong drink, unconditionally, without thought of the morrow.
“What do you think of your friend’s infatuationnow?” asked Janet, with her most biting accent, as she and Theodore followed in the horticultural procession, she carefully picking up her gown at every one of those treacherous puddles which are to be found in the best-regulated hot-houses. “Have you any doubt in your mind now?”
“No. I have no doubt.”
The carriages were at the door half an hour afterwards, and all through the homeward drive Cuthbert was silent as the grave. Only as they came into Dorchester did he find speech to say,—
“I shall have to go back to town early to-morrow morning, Theodore!”
“So soon. What an unquiet spirit you are! You’ll come back to us next Friday or Saturday, I hope.”
“I don’t know. I’ll try; but I’m rather afraid I can’t.”
Theodore did not press the point, and his friend kept his word, and left by the first train on Monday morning, after having been intolerably stupid on Sunday evening, according to the sisters, who were disposed to think themselves especially ill-used by Mr. Ramsay’s obvious infatuation for Lady Carmichael.
“I was beginning to respect Juanita for her conduct in the difficult position of a young widow,” said Sophia; “but I begin to fear that she is no better than the rest of them, and that her leaving off crape upon her last gowns is a sign that she means to marry again before the second year of her widowhood is over.”
Lady Cheriton’s roses were in danger from a failure of the water in that old-fashioned well which had hitherto supplied the flower-gardens. There had been an unusually long spell of dry weather since the beginning of July, and the gardeners were in despair.When Theodore went over to the Chase with his portmanteau, in accordance with an engagement made the previous week, he found that Lord Cheriton had that morning given an order for the sinking of the old well from twenty to thirty feet deeper.
“There is plenty of water, my lord,” said the head gardener, “if we only go deep enough for it.”
“Very well, Mackenzie, go as deep as you like, so long as you don’t go below the water-bearing strata. You had better put on plenty of hands. Her ladyship is uneasy about her roses, seeing how you have been stinting them lately.”
“It has been hard work, my lord, to do our duty by the roses, and keep the lawns in decent order. The ground would be as hard as iron if we didn’t use a good deal of water for the grass.”
“Get to work, Mackenzie, and don’t waste time in talking about it. Drive over to Gadby’s, and tell him to send some good men.”
This conversation took place upon the terrace directly after Theodore’s arrival; and when the gardener had gone off to the stables to get the dog-cart-of-all-work, Lord Cheriton and his cousin walked in the direction of the well.
The well was in one of the kitchen-gardens, quite the oldest bit of garden ground at Cheriton, a square garden of about two acres, shut in with high crumbling old red-brick walls, upon which grew blue gages and William pears, egg-plums and apricots, attaining more or less to perfection as the aspect favoured them. It was a pleasant garden to dream in upon a summer afternoon, for there was an air of superabundant growth that was almost tropical in the century-old espaliers, albeit they had long ceased to produce meritorious fruit, and in the sprawling leaves and yellow blossoms of the vegetable marrows which seemed to be grown for no purpose except to produce champion gourds or pumpkins, to be ultimately hung up as ornaments in the gardener’s cottage, or to rot in a corner of the greenhouse. There is always one old greenhouse in such a garden given over to preserving spiders and accumulating rubbish.
In the middle of a vegetable marrow warren stood the well—a well of eight feet in diameter, surrounded by a low brick wall, of that same bright red brick which crumbled behind the blue gages and the egg-plums, and which the birds pecked and perforated, for very wantonness. It was a well of the old pattern, with a ponderous wooden roller, and an iron spindle, which had wound up water from those same cool depths for over a hundred years. It had run dry often, in the time of the Strangways, that good old well; but no Strangway had ever thought of improving anything upon the estate; so in seasons of drought the flowers had drooped and the turf had withered unheeded by the proprietorial eye.
Mr. Gadby’s men appeared after their dinner, and got seriously to work by about three o’clock, at which hour Theodore and Lady Cheriton were strolling in the rose garden, while the master of the house sat in the library reading. Theodore had observed a marked change in his cousin since his last visit to the Chase. There was a worried look in Lord Cheriton’s face which had not been there even after the shock of the murder, a look of nervous apprehension which showed itself from time to time in a countenance where firmness of character and an absolute fearlessness had been hitherto the strongest characteristics.
He had not yet told his lordship the result of his interview with Mercy Porter. He had waited till an opportunity for quiet, confidential talk should come about naturally, and that opportunity now occurred. Lady Cheriton left him after half an hour’s review of the roses, and he went through the open window into the library where Lord Cheriton sat in his large arm-chair at his own particular table, reading the political summing-up in the lastQuarterly.
“Shall I be disturbing you if I sit here?” asked Theodore, taking a volume from the table where the newest books were always to be found.
“On the contrary, I shall be very glad of a little conversation. I have been struggling through an analysis of last session, which is all weariness and vexation of spirit. The session was dull, the commentary is duller. I am anxious to know how you got on with Mrs. Porter’s daughter.”
“Very badly, I regret to say, from our point of view. She rejects your generous offer. She prefers her present hard life, with its independence. She will accept no obligation from any one.”
“Humph! She must be a curious young woman,” said Lord Cheriton, with a vexed air. “I should have liked very much to have made her life bright and easy, if she would have let me—for her father’s sake. On what ground did she refuse my offer?”
“On the ground of preferring to work for her living, and to live a hard life. She has taken that upon herself, I believe, as an expiation for her past errors, although she did not say that in so many words. She is wonderfully firm. I never saw such a resolute temper in so young—and so gentle-mannered—a woman.”
“You tried to overcome her objections, you represented to her how easy and pleasant her life might be in some picturesque village—among the hills and lakes, or by the sea—and how she might live among people who would know nothing of her past history, who would grow to be fond of her for her own sake?”
“I urged all this upon her. I am as anxious as you are that she should leave that dreary attic—that monotonous labour—but nothing I could say was of the least use. She was resolute—she would accept nothing from you.”
“From me—ah, that is it!” cried Lord Cheriton, suddenly. “Had the offer come from any one else she might have been less stubborn. But frommeshe will take nothing—not a loaf of bread if she were starving. That is the explanation of her hardness—it is to me she is adamant. Tell me the truth, Theodore. Don’t spare my feelings. This girl hates me, I suppose!”
“I fear she has a deeply-rooted prejudice against you. She may—most unjustly—blame you for her misery, because Colonel Tremayne was your friend.”
“Yes, that is her feeling, no doubt; it is on that account she hates me. Perhaps she is justified in her anger. I ought to have shot that scoundrel. Had we both lived fifty years sooner I suppose I should have shot him.”
“I don’t think you could have been called upon to do that even by the old code of honour. Mercy was not allied to you——”
“No; but she dwelt at my gates. She was under my protection—she had no other man living to defend her. I ought to have punished her seducer—it was incumbent on me to do it. Because there was no one else,” he added slowly, after a long pause.
“It may be on that account she rejects your generous offer. I cannot pretend to interpret her feelings; but there was certainly some strong personal prejudice on her part. She was deeply moved. She burst into a passion of sobs. ‘Not from him,’ she cried, ‘I will accept nothing from him. Of all the men upon this earth he shall be the last to help me!’”
Lord Cheriton flung theQuarterlyfrom him with a passionate gesture, as he started to his feet and began to walk up and down the long clear space in front of the windows.
“Theodore,” he said suddenly, “you have not yet come face to face with all the problems of life. Perhaps you have not yet found out how hard it is to help people. I would have given much to be able to help that girl—to assure her an easy and reputable existence—the refinements of life amidst pleasant surroundings. What would it matter to me whether I allowed her one hundred or two hundred a year? All I desire is that her life should be happy. And of deliberate malice—of sheer perversity—she rejects my help, she dooms herself to the seamstress’ slavery, and to a garret in Lambeth. My God, to think that with all the will and all the power to help her, I cannot come between her and that sordid misery. It is hard, Theodore, it is very hard upon a man like me. There is nothing I hold of this world’s goods that I have not worked for honestly; and when I want to do good for others with what I have won, I am barred by their folly. It is enough to make me mad.”
Never before had Theodore seen this self-abandonment in his stately cousin, the man who bore in every tone and every gesturethe impress of his acknowledged ascendency over his fellow-men. To see such a man as this so completely unhinged by a woman’s perversity was a new thing to Theodore Dalbrook; and his heart went out to his kinsman as it had never done before.
“My dear Cheriton, you have done all that was in your power to do for that mistaken young woman,” he said, holding out his hand, which the elder man grasped warmly. “Whatever wrong you may have unwittingly brought about by the presence of a blackguard under your roof, you have done your best to atone for that wrong. The most sensitive, the most punctilious of men could do no more.”
“I thank you, Theodore, for your sympathy. Yes, I have done my best for her—you will bear witness to that.”
“A father could scarcely do more for an erring daughter. I only wish her mother felt half as kindly towards her as you, upon whom her claim is so slight.”
“No, no; it is a substantial claim. She is fatherless, and her mother is dependent upon me. I stand, as it were,in loco parentis. Well, we will say no more about her; she must go her own way. Only, if ever you find an opportunity of helping her—for me, you will do me a great favour by taking prompt advantage of it.”
“I shall gladly do so. I am interested in her for her own sake, as well as for yours.”
“You are a good fellow, Theodore, and I know you wish us well. I will go a step further than that and say I know that I can trust you.”
This was said with an earnestness which impressed Theodore. It seemed to him almost as if his kinsman foresaw that inevitable hour in which there must be perfect unreserve between them—in which the younger man would have to say to his senior and superior in rank, “I know the secret of your earlier years. I know the dark cloud that has overshadowed your life.”
They talked for a little while of indifferent subjects, and then Lord Cheriton proposed a stroll in the direction of the well.
“I should like to see whether those fellows have begun work,” he said.
The old garden looked its sleepiest in the westering sunlight, but there was business going on there nevertheless, and a great heap of damp clay had been flung out by the side of the low brick parapet. Two men were at work below, and there were two men above, while a fifth, a foreman and leading light, looked on and gave directions.
“Glad to see you’ve tackled the job, Carter,” said Lord Cheriton.
“Yes, my lord, we’ve got on to it pretty well. Could I have a word with your lordship?”
“Certainly, as many words as you like. How mysterious youlook, Carter! There is nothing in your communication that Mr. Dalbrook is not to hear, I suppose?”
“No, my lord, Mr. Dalbrook don’t matter; but I thought you wouldn’t care for everybody to know, lest it should get round to her ladyship, and give her a scare.”
“What are you driving at, Carter, with your ladyships and your scares? Have you seen a ghost at the bottom of the well?”
“No, my lord, but the men found this in the surface clay, and I thought it might have some bearing upon—last year—the murder.”
He dropped out his words hesitatingly, as if he hardly dared approach that ghastly theme, and then took something out of his jacket pocket, and handed it to Lord Cheriton.
It was a Colt’s revolver, by no means of the newest make, rusted by lying long under water. The foreman had amused his leisure since the discovery in trying to rub off the rust with a large cotton handkerchief, assisted by his corduroy coat-sleeve, and had succeeded in polishing a small silver plate upon the butt of the pistol so as to make the initials “T. D.” engraved upon it easily decipherable.
There was not much in the discovery perhaps; but by the ghastly change in Lord Cheriton’s face Theodore saw that to him at least it appeared of fatal significance. His hand shook as it held the pistol, his eyes had a look of absolute horror as they scrutinized it; and nothing could be more obvious than the effort with which he controlled his agitation, and looked from the builder’s foreman to Theodore with an assumption of tranquillity.
“It may mean much, or nothing, Carter,” he said, putting the pistol in his coat pocket. “It was quite right of you to bring the matter before me.”
“I thought the initials on the pistol might lead to something being found out, my lord,” said the foreman. “I don’t think there can be much doubt the murderer chucked it in there.”
“Don’t you? I have gone into the subject of circumstantial evidence a little deeper than you have, Carter; it was my trade, don’t you know, just as laying bricks was yours, and I can tell you that the odds are ten to one against this pistol having belonged to the murderer. Do you think it likely that the man who shot Sir Godfrey Carmichael would have gone out of his way to throw his pistol down that particular well?”
“I don’t know about that, my lord; it would have been a safe hiding-place, if the water hadn’t given out—and it would be in his way if he were making for the West Gate. He could hardly have taken a shorter cut than across this garden.”
“Perhaps not—if both the garden doors were open that night.”
“I don’t think anybody ever saw them shut, my lord, night or day,” answered Carter, with respectful persistency.
Theodore knew by the very look of the clumsy wooden doors, pushed back against the old wall, with rusty hinges, and with the tendrils of vine or plum tree growing over their edges, that the man was right. The path across this garden and the next garden led in a direct line to the West Lodge, and it was this way by which the servants went on most of their errands to the village.
The one idea suggested by the choice of that hiding-place was that the person who threw away that pistol was familiar with the premises. The well was about thirty feet away from the path, and screened by the old espaliers. There was a gap in the espaliers where an ancient and cankered apple tree had been taken out, and it was by this opening that the gardeners generally went to draw water. They had trodden a hard foot-track in their going and coming.
It was always possible that a stranger exploring the grounds furtively and in haste might have been sharp enough to hit upon the well as a safe and handy hiding-place. It would, of course, have been vital to the murderer to get rid of his weapon as soon as possible after the deed was done, lest he should be taken red-handed and with that piece of evidence upon him.
Theodore saw in that pistol with the initials “T. D.,” confirmatory evidence against the husband of Mrs. Danvers, the one person in the world who had ground for an undying hatred of Lord Cheriton and his race. He made no remark upon the discovery of the weapon, fearing to say too much; and he waited quietly to see how his kinsman would act in the matter. That ghastly change in Lord Cheriton’s countenance as he examined the pistol, suggested that he had come to the same conclusion as Theodore. Remorse and horror could hardly have been more plainly expressed by the human countenance; and what remorse could be more terrible than that of the man who saw the sin of his youth visited upon his innocent daughter?
“Shall you take any steps with reference to this discovery?” asked Theodore, when they had gone half-way back to the house in absolute silence.
“What steps can I take, do you think? Send for another London detective—or for the same man again—and give him this pistol? To what end? He would be no nearer finding the murderer because of the finding of the pistol.”
“The initials might lead to identification.”
“Did you never hear of such a thing as a second-hand pistol? And do you think an assassin would make use of a pistol with his own initials upon it to commit murder? I do not.”
“Not the professional assassin. But we are all agreed that thismurder was an act of vengeance—for some reason at present unknown—and the semi-lunatic who would commit murder for such a motive would not be likely to do his work very neatly. His brain would be fevered by passion or alcohol, in all probability, and he would go to work blindly.”
“That is no more than a theory, and my experience has shown me that such theories are generally falsified by fact. The murder was so far neatly done that the murderer got clear off, in spite of a most rigorous search. I doubt if the pistol, with initials which may belong to anybody in the world, will help us to track him after more than a year.”
“Then you mean to do nothing in the matter?”
“I think not. I cannot see my way to doing anything at present; but if you like to take the pistol to Scotland Yard and see what impression it makes upon the experts there——”
“I should much like to do so. I cannot ignore the fact that so long as Sir Godfrey’s murderer remains undiscovered, there is a possibility of peril for you and for Juanita, and for Juanita’s child. Who can tell whether that deadly hatred is appeased—whether the man who killed your daughter’s husband is not on the watch to kill you or your daughter—when he sees his opportunity?”
“As for myself, I must take my chance. I would to God that the ball had struck me instead of my son-in-law. It would have been better—a lighter chastisement. I have lived my life. I have done all I ever hoped to do in this world. A few years, more or less, could matter very little to me. And yet, life is sweet, Theodore, life is sweet! However heavily we are handicapped, we most of us would choose to finish our race.”
There was infinite melancholy in his tone, the melancholy of a man who sees the shadows of a great despair darkening round him, the melancholy of a man who gives up the contest of life, and feels that he is beaten.
“Do not say anything to my wife about this business,” he said; “let her be happy as long as she can. She has not forgotten last summer, but she is beginning to be something like what she was before that blow fell upon us. The advent of Juanita’s baby has worked wonders. There is something to look forward to in that child’s existence. Life is no longer a cul-de-sac.”
“There is one thing to be done,” said Theodore, after an interval of silence. “The bullet was kept, of course.”
“Yes, it is in the possession of the police, I believe.”
“Would it not be well to ascertain if it fits the pistol you have in your pocket?”
“Yes. I will go to the station to-morrow and look into that.”
There was no more said about the pistol that evening. Theodore felt that it would be cruelty to dwell upon the subject, seeing thathis kinsman had been deeply affected by the discovery, and that he was oppressed by a gloom which he strove in vain to shake off.
It was evident to Theodore that those initials on the pistol had a terrible meaning for Lord Cheriton, that he recognized in those initials the evidence of an injured husband’s vengeance, a hatred which had been undiminished by the lapse of years.
He told himself that the tardiness of that revenge might be accounted for by various contingencies, any one of which would lessen the improbability of that long interval between the wrong done and the retribution exacted. It might be that the murderer had been an exile in a distant world. It might be that he had been a criminal fretting himself against the bars of a felon’s prison, nursing his anger in the dull, dead days of penal servitude. Such things have been.
It was clear to Theodore Dalbrook that in those initials upon the Colt’s revolver lay the clue to the murderer, and that Lord Cheriton shrank with horror from the revelation which those two letters might bring about. Yet, whatever evil might come upon the master of Cheriton out of the secret past, it was vital that the murderer should be found, lest his second crime should be more hideous than his first; and Theodore was resolved that he would spare no effort in the endeavour to find him, living or dead.
“God grant that I may find a grave rather than the living man,” he thought, “for Cheriton’s sake. God grant that he may be spared the humiliation of having his story told to all the world.”
He went into Cheriton village early upon the following afternoon, and dropped in upon the doctor, an old inhabitant, whose father and grandfather before him had prescribed for all the parish, rich and poor. Mr. Dolby,par excellenceDr. Dolby, was a bachelor, a spare, sharp-visaged man of about forty, social and expansive, a keen sportsman, and a good billiard player, a man whose lines had been set in pleasant places, for he had inherited a roomy old cottage, with capacious stabling, and twenty acres of the fattest meadow-land in Cheriton parish, and he led exactly that kind of life which his soul loved. It would have been no gain to such a man to have changed places with Baron Rothschild or Lord Salisbury. He would have been in all that constitutes human happiness a loser by such an exchange. So cheery a person was naturally popular in a narrow world like Cheriton, and Mr. Dolby was a general favourite, a favourite in polite society, and in the billiard-room at the Cheriton Arms, which, in default of a club, served as the afternoon and evening rendezvous for lawyer, doctor, and the tenant-farmers of a gentlemanly class—the smock-frock farmers and tradespeople having their own particular meeting place at the Old House at Home, a public-house at the other end of the village. Theodore had known Mr. Dolby from his childhood, and the medical adviser of Cheritonwas an occasional dropper-in at the luncheon table in Cornhill, when business transactions with his tailor or his banker took him to the county town. There was nothing unusual, therefore, in Theodore’s afternoon call at Dovecotes, a somewhat picturesque name which had been given to the doctor’s domicile by his predecessor, who had devoted his later years to an ardent cultivation of Barbs and Jacobins and other aristocratic birds, and who had covered a quarter of an acre of garden ground with pigeon-houses of various construction.
Theodore found Mr. Dolby smoking his afternoon pipe in the seclusion of his surgery. He had made a long morning round, had driven something between twenty and thirty miles, and considered himself entitled to what he called his otium cum whisky and water, which refreshment stood on a small table at his elbow while he lolled in his capacious easy chair.
He welcomed his visitor with effusion, and insisted on calling for another syphon, and having another little table arranged at the elbow of the other easy chair.
“Make yourself comfortable, old chap, and let us have a jaw,” he said. “I haven’t seen you for ages. Are you at the Chase?”
They talked of the usual village topics, glanced at the great world of politics, speculated upon the prospects of the shooting season, and then Theodore approached the real business of his visit.
“There is a fellow I am interested in from a business point of view,” he began, “who has been hanging about this place, off and on, for the last five and twenty years, I believe, though I have never happened to meet him. He is a drinking man, and altogether a bad lot; but it is my business to hunt him down.”
“On account of some property, I suppose?”
“Yes, on account of some property. Now, I know what an observer you are, Dolby, and what a wonderful memory you have——”
“I haven’t wasted it up in London,” interjected Dolby. “A week in Oxford Street and the Strand would take ten years off my memory. It’s pretty clear at present, thank God. Well, now, what about this fellow, what kind of a fellow is he—a gentleman or a cad?”
“He was once a gentleman, but he may have tumbled pretty low by this time. He was going down hill at a good pace five and twenty years ago.”
“Egad, then he must be at the bottom of the hill, I take it. What is he like—fat or lean, dark or fair, short or tall?”
“A tall man, fair complexion, a man who has once been handsome, a showy-looking man,” answered Theodore, quoting the house-agent.
“That will do. Yes, just such a man as that was at the Arms one night—six—eight—upon my word I believe it must have been ten years ago. A man who put on a good deal of side, though his clothes were no end seedy—ragged edges to his trousers, don’t you know—and though his hand shook like an aspen leaf. I played a fifty game with him, and I should say, though I beat him easy, that he had once been a fine player. He was in wretched form, poor creature, but——”
“Ten years ago, do you really think it was as long ago you saw him?”
“I know it was. It would be in seventy-four, that was the year Potter was returned for Screwmouth. I remember we were all talking of the election the night that fellow was there. Yes, I remember him perfectly; a tall, fair man, a wreck, but with the traces of former good looks. I fancy he must have been a soldier. He slept at the Arms that night, and I met him rather early next morning, before nine o’clock, coming away from the Chase—met him within ten yards of the West Lodge.”
“Did he talk about Lord Cheriton?”
“A good deal—talked rather wild, too—and would have blackguarded your cousin if we hadn’t shut him up pretty sharply. He pretended to have been intimate with him before he made his way at the Bar, and he talked in the venomous way a man who has been a failure very often does talk about a man who has been a success. It’s only human nature, I suppose. There’s a spice of venom in human nature.”
“Have you never seen this man at Cheriton since that occasion—never within the last ten years?”
“Never, and I should be inclined, looking at the gentleman from a professional point of view, to believe that he must have been under the turf for a considerable portion of that period. I don’t think there could have been three years’ life in the man I played billiards with that evening. Hard lines for him, poor beggar, if there was property coming to him. He looked as if he wanted it bad enough.”
“What had he been doing at the Chase, do you suppose?”
“I haven’t the least idea. I was driving in my cart when I passed him. I looked back and watched him for two or three minutes. He was walking very slowly, and with a languid air, like a man who was not used to walking. Ten years—no, Theodore—I don’t think it’s possible such a shaky subject as that could have lasted ten years. One certainly does see very miserable creatures crawling on for years after they have been ticketed for the undertaker—but this man—no—I don’t think he could hold out long after that October morning. I fancy he was booked for a quick passage.”
“He may have pulled himself together, and turned over a new leaf.”
“Too old, and too far gone for that.”
“Or what if he had done something bad and got himself shut up for a few years?”
“Penal servitude do you mean? Well, that might do something! It’s a very severe regimen for the habitual drunkard—and it means kill or cure. In this case I should say decidedly kill.”
“But it might cure.”
“I should think the chances of cure were as two in two hundred. I won’t say it would be impossible, not having examined the patient—but so far as observation can teach a man anything, observation taught me that the case was hopeless.”
“And yet it is my belief that this man was at Cheriton some time last year. You know everybody, and talk to everybody, my dear Dolby. I wish you’d find out for me whether I am right?”
“I’ll do my best,” answered Mr. Dolby cheerfully. “If the man has been seen by anybody in the village I ought to be able to hear about him. Everybody was tremendously on the lookout last year, after the murder, and no stranger could have escaped observation.”
“Perhaps not—but before the murder——”
“Anybody who had been seen shortly before the murder would have been remembered and talked about. You can have no idea of the intense excitement that event caused among us. We seemed to talk of nothing else, and to think of nothing else for months.”
“And you suppose that if the man I want had been about—for a few hours only, just long enough to come and go away again on that fatal night, he would have been remembered?”
“I am sure of it. He would have inevitably been taken for the murderer. Remember, we were all on the alert, ready to fix upon the first suspicious-looking person our memory could suggest to us.”
“Do you think Johnson would remember the man?”
Johnson was the proprietor of the Cheriton Arms.
“My dear fellow, did you ever find Johnson’s memory available about any transaction six months old? Johnson’s memory is steeped in beer, buried in flesh. Johnson is a perambulating barrel of forgetfulness—a circumambulatory hogshead of stupidity. Ask Johnson to tell you the Christian name of his grandmother, and I would venture a new hat he would be unable to answer you. There is nothing to be got out of mine host of the Cheriton Arms. Be sure of that.”
“I’m afraid you are right,” said Theodore.
He felt as if he had come to a point at which there was no thoroughfare. There was the pistol, with the initials “T. D.,” andhe had made up his mind that the man for whom those initials had been engraved was the man who gave his name as Danvers when he called upon the house-agent, the man whose wife had been known for years as Mrs. Danvers. He had made up his mind that this man and no other had murdered Godfrey Carmichael—that many years after the wife’s death the husband had returned from exile or imprisonment, embittered so much the more, so much the more vindictive, so much the more malignant for all that he had suffered in that interval, and had taken the first opportunity to attack a hated household. That he would strike again if he should be allowed to live and be at large Theodore had no doubt. A second murder, and a third murder, seemed the natural sequence of the first. He remembered the murders of the Jermys at Stanfield Hall—the savage hatred which tried to slay four people, two of whom were utterly unconnected with the wrong that called for vengeance. In the face of such a story as that of the murderer Rush, who could say that Theodore’s apprehension of an insatiable malignity, wreaking itself in further bloodshed, was groundless?
He left Dovecotes disheartened, hardly knowing what his next step was to be, and very hopeless of tracking a man who had so contrived as to be unseen upon his deadly errand. He must have come and gone verily like a thief in the night, sheltered by darkness, meeting no one; and yet there was the evidence of the servants at the inquest, who swore to having heard mysterious footsteps outside the house late at night upon more than one occasion shortly before the murder. If the murderer had been about upon several nights, creeping round by the open windows of the reception rooms, watching his opportunity, what had he done with himself in the day? Where had he hidden himself; how had he evaded the prying eyes of a village, which is all eyes, all ears for the unexplained stranger?