(From the Bickerdike MS.)
I wasstill in this resolved mood, when something happened one night which confirmed my worst suspicions, showing me how faithfully I had weighed and measured the character of the man posing as a benevolent guest in the house, the hospitality of which he was designing all the time, in some mysteriously villainous way, to abuse. On that night I had gone to bed rather late, outstaying, in fact, the entire family and household, whose early country ways my degenerate London habits found sometimes rather irksome. It was past midnight when I turned out the lights in the billiard room, and, taking a candle, made my way upstairs. There was a double flight rising from a pretty spacious hall, and both the Baron’s room and my own gave upon the corridor which opened west from the first-floor landing. As I passed his door I noticed that a thread of light showed under it, proving him to be either still awake, or fallen asleep with his candle unextinguished. Which? For some unaccountable reason a thrill of excitement overtook me. No sound came from behind the door; the whole house was dead quiet. I stooped to peer through the keyhole—a naked light burning beside one’s bed is a dangerous thing—but the key being in the lock prevented my seeing anything. Soft-footed I went on—but not to sleep. I determined to sit up and listen in my own room for any possible developments. I don’t know why it was, but my heart misgave me that there was some rascality afoot, and that I had only to wait patiently, and go warily, to unmask it. And I was not mistaken.
Time passed—enough to assure the watcher at last of my being long in bed and asleep—when I was aware of a stealthy sound in the corridor. All my blood leaped and tingled to the shock of it. I stole, and put my ear to my own keyhole; and at once the nature of the sound was made clear to me. He had noiselessly opened his door and come out into the passage, down which he was stealthily creeping in a direction away from me. I don’t know how I recognized all this, but there is a language in profound stillness. When silence is at its deathliest, one can hear almost the way the earth is moving on its axis. I waited until I felt that he had turned the corner to the stairs, then, with infinite care, manipulated, a fraction at a time, the handle of my own door, and, slipping off my pumps, emerged and followed, hardly breathing, in pursuit.
At the opening to the stairs I paused discreetly, to give my quarry “law,” and, with sovereign caution, peered round the corner—and saw him. He was in his pyjamas, and carried an electric torch in his hand, reminding me somehow, thus attired, of the actor Pellissier, only a little squatter in his build. He descended soundlessly, throwing the little beam of light before him, and, reaching the foot of the flight, turned to his left at the moment that I withdrew my head. But I could see from my eyrie the way he was going by the course of the travelling light, and I believed that he was making for Sir Calvin’s study. And the next moment there came to my ears the tiniest confirmatory sound—the minute bat-like screak of a rusty door-handle. I had noticed that very day how the one in question needed oiling, and the evidence left me no longer in doubt. It was for the study he was bound, and with what sinister purpose? That remained to see; but I remembered the hidden safe in the room. I had happened upon it once when left alone there.
A minute I paused, to allow him time to settle to his business; then descended the stairs cat-footed. At the newel post, crowned with a great carved wyvern, the Kennett device, I stood to reconnoitre, pressing my face to the wood and looking round it with one eye. And at once I perceived that I neither could nor need venture further. He stood, sure enough, at the desk in the study, fairly revealed in the diffused glow from his torch, whose little brilliant facula was turned upon a litter of papers that lay before him. But the door of the room—he had left it so in his fancied security—stood wide open, precluding any thought of a closer espionage on my part. I could only stay where I was, concentrating all my vision on the event.
Suddenly he seemed to find what he sought, and I saw a paper in his hand. Something appeared to tell me at the same moment that he was about to return, and I yielded and—judging discretion, for the occasion, to be the better part of valour—went up the stairs on my hands and feet as fast as I could paddle, in a soft hurry to regain my room and extinguish the light before so much as the ghost of a suspicion could occur to him. It would not have served my purpose to face him then and there, and I had learnt as much as for the time being I needed. To have detected our worthy friend in a secret midnight raid on his host’s papers was proof damning enough of the correctness of my judgment.
Listening intently, I heard him re-enter his room, as he had left it, with supreme caution. I was feeling a good deal agitated, and the moisture stood on my forehead. How was I to proceed; what course to take? My decision was not reached until after much debating within myself. It might be guided by the General’s chance assertion that some important document had been lost or mislaid in his room, in which case I must act at once; but if, on the other hand, he made no such statement, it might very well be days or weeks before his loss were brought home to him. In that event I would say nothing about my discovery, trusting to lead the criminal on, through his sense of immunity, to further depredations. By then I might have acquired, what at present I lacked, some insight into the nature and meaning of his designs, holding the key to which I could face him with any discovery. No, I would not tell Sir Calvin as yet. In such a case premature exposure might very easily prove more futile than unsuspicion itself. The keystone being wanting, all one’s structure might fall to pieces at the first test.
But what a stealthy villain it was! As I recovered, it was to plume myself a little, I confess, on my circumventing such a rogue. I would have given a good deal to know what was the character of the paper he had stolen. Hardly a draft, for such would not have been left about, not to speak of the crude futility of such a deed. No, there was some more subtle intention behind it—blackmail perhaps—but it was useless to speculate. He had not at least touched the safe, and that was so much to be thankful for.
Now I came to my resolution. I would speak to Sir Calvin on the subject when the moment was ripe, and not before: and then, having so far justified my remaining on as his guest, I would go. In the meanwhile I would make it my especial and individual province to expose this rascal, and thereby refute Audrey’s detestable calumny of me as a sort of unpleasant eavesdropper and hanger-on. Perhaps she would learn to regret her insult when she saw in what fashion I had retaliated on it.
Wednesdayof the third week following the Inquest was appointed for the magisterial inquiry, and during the interval Sergeant Ridgway was busily occupied, presumably in accumulating and piecing together various evidence. Of what it consisted no one but himself knew, nor did it appear whether or not its trend on the whole was favourable or disastrous to the unhappy prisoner, at the expense possibly of Cleghorn, or possibly to the complete exculpation of that injured man. The detective kept his own counsel, after the manner of his kind; and if any had thought to extract from the cover of that sealed book a hint of its contents, no reassuring message at least could have been gathered from its unlettered sombreness. But nobody asked, fearful of being thought to profane the majestic muteness of the oracle; and the labouring atmosphere lowered unlightened as the days went on. Even M. le Baron, most individually concerned in the fate of his henchman, made no attempt to plumb the official profundity, and that in spite of his curiosity about most things. He seemed, indeed, oddly passive about the whole business, never referring to it but indirectly, and, so far as appeared, taking no steps to interview the prisoner or supply him with the means of defence. If any sneering allusion was made to this insensibility by Mr. Bickerdike or another, Audrey, were she present, would be hot in her friend’s vindication. It may have been that, in the course of their queer association, he had confided to her sufficient reasons for his behaviour; old Viv, on the other hand, saw in her attitude only proof of the process of corruption he had suspected. But, whatever the case, cheerfully detached the Baron remained, asking no questions of the detective, and taking chess and life with as placid a gaiety as if no Louis Victor Cabanis lay caged a few miles away, awaiting his examination on a charge of wilful murder.
Whether it were in some apology for a darkness which he could not afford to illuminate, or to avoid teasing inquiries, or for any other reason, the Sergeant came gradually to give the house less and less of his company. He seemed rather to avoid contact with its inmates, and his manner, when he rarely appeared, was sombre and preoccupied. No one, perhaps, felt this withdrawal more than the house-keeper, Mrs. Bingley, with whom he had been accustomed to take his meals, and who had found him, when once her awe of his office was overcome, a most entertaining guest, full of intelligence, rich in anecdote, and deeply interested in everything appertaining to Wildshott, from its family portraits and accumulated collections to the beauty of its grounds and of the country in which it lay situated.
“It must have been,” she said one day to her master, to whom she was lamenting the Sergeant’s prolonged absences, “such a relief to a man of his occupations to be able to forget himself, even for an hour or two, in such noble surroundings. But perhaps he wants to show us that he’s taking no advantage of the attentions paid him, lest we might think he was trying to worm himself into our confidence.”
“Or can it be that he has already found out from you all that he wants to know?” observed Le Sage, who was present on the occasion, with a humorous look.
“I’m sure, sir,” said Mrs. Bingley with asperity, “that he is incapable of the meanness. If you had heard him express the sentiments that I have you would never hint such a charge. No, there is some delicacy of feeling, take my word for it, at the bottom of this change in him; and I can’t help fearing that it means he has found out something fresh, something even more distressful to the family, which makes him chary of accepting its hospitality. I only hope——” she paused, with a little sigh.
“You’re thinking of Cleghorn!” broke in her master. “Damme! I’ll never believe in respectability again if that man’s done it.”
“God forbid!” said the housekeeper. “But I wish Sergeant Ridgway would appear more, and more in his old way, when hedoeshonour me with his company.”
Her wish, however, was not to be fulfilled. The detective more and more absented himself as the days went on, and became more and more of an Asian mystery in the fleeting glimpses of his presence vouchsafed the household. Dark, taciturn, abysmal, he flitted, a casual shadow, through the labyrinthine mysteries of the crime, and could never be said to be here before an echo of his footfall was sounding in the hollows far away. A picturesque description of his processes, perhaps, but consorting in a way with the housekeeper’s fanciful rendering. Perhaps delicacy rather than expediencywasthe motive of his tactics; perhaps, having virtually completed his case, hewaskeeping out of the way until the time came to expound it; perhaps a feature of its revisionwasthat distressful something, menacing, appalling, foreseen by the housekeeper. He had plenty otherwise to do, no doubt, in the way of collecting evidence, consulting Counsel, and so forth, which alone gave plenty of reason for neglecting the social amenities. Whatever the explanation, however, the issue was not to be long delayed.
The Baron came upon him unexpectedly one morning in the upper grounds, where the fruit gardens were, and the espaliers, and all the signs of a prosperous vegetable order. There was a fair view of the estate to be gained from that elevation, and the Sergeant appeared to be absorbed for the moment in the gracious prospect. He waited unmoving for the other to join him, and nodded as he came up.
“It’s pleasant to snatch a minute, sir,” he said, “to give to a view like this. People of my profession don’t get many such.”
“I suppose not,” answered Le Sage, “nor of a good many other professions. Proprietary views, like incomes, are very unfairly distributed, don’t you think?”
“Well, that’s so, no doubt; and among the wrong sort of people often enough.”
Le Sage laughed.
“Are you one of the right sort of people, Sergeant?”
“I won’t go so far as to say that, sir, but I will go so far as to say that, ifIowned this property, I’d come to feast my eyes on it here more often than what Sir Calvin does.”
The Baron, without moving his head, took in the face of the speaker. He saw a glow, a subdued passion in it which interested him. What spirit of romance, to be sure, might lurk unsuspected under the hard official rind. Here was the last man in the world whom one would have credited with a sense of beauty, and he was wrought to emotion by a landscape!
“You talk,” said he, “of your profession not affording you many such moments as this. Now, to my mind, it seemstheprofession for a man romantically inclined.”
“Does it, indeed, sir?”
“Why, don’t you live in a perpetual atmosphere of romance? Think of the mysteries which are your daily food.”
“That’s it—my daily food, and lodging too. The men who pull on the ropes for a living don’t think much, or see much, of the fairy scene they’re setting. That’s all for the prosperous folks in front.”
“You’d rather be one of them?”
“Which would you rather, sir—be a police-officer, or the owner of an estate like this? If such things were properly distributed, as you say, there’d be no need perhaps for police-officers at all. You read the papers about a case like ours here, and you see only a romance: we, whose necessity puts us behind the scenes, see only, in nine cases out of ten, the dirty mishandling of Fate. Give a man his right position in the world, and he’ll commit no crimes. That’s my belief, and it’s founded on some experience.”
“I dare say you’re right. It’s comforting to know, in that case, that my valet has always fitted intohisplace like a stopper into a bottle.”
The detective stood silent a moment; then turned on the speaker with a queer enigmatic look.
“Well, I wouldn’t lose heart about him, if I was you,” he said drily.
“That’s good!” said Le Sage. “I can leave him with a tolerably safe conscience then.”
“What, sir—you’re going away before the inquiry?”
“I must, I’m afraid. I have business in London which I can no longer postpone.”
“But how about your evidence?”
“After what you have said, cannot you afford to do without it?”
The detective considered, frowning and rubbing his chin; then said simply, “Very well,” and made a movement to go.
They went down the garden together, and parted at the door in the wall. This was on the Saturday. On the following Monday the officer appeared for the last time to arrange for his witnesses on the Wednesday ensuing. He carried his handbag with him, and intimated that it was not his purpose to return again before the event. They were all—Mrs. Bingley perhaps excepted—glad to see the last of him, and the last of what his presence there implied, and welcomed the prospect of the one clean day which was to be theirs before their re-meeting in Court.
The Sergeant’s manner at his parting was restrained, and his countenance rigidly pale. Sir Calvin, receiving his formal thanks for the courtesy shown him, remarked upon it, and asked him if he were feeling overdone.
“No, sir,” he replied: “never better, thank you. I hope you yourself may never feel worse than I do at this moment.”
Something in his way of saying it, some significance of tone, or look, or emphasis, seemed to cast a sudden chill upon the air. The General turned away with a slightly wondering, puzzled expression, and shrugged his shoulders as if he were cold. There were one or two present who remembered that gesture afterwards, identifying it with some vague sensation in themselves.
That same night the Baron caused a considerable stir by announcing his intention of leaving them on the morrow. They all had something to say in the way of surprise and remonstrance except Mr. Bickerdike, and he judiciously held his tongue. Even Hugo showed a certain concern, as a man might who felt, without quite realizing what it was he felt, the giving way of some moral support on which he had been unconsciously leaning. He looked up and asked, as the detective had asked, “What about your evidence?”
“It is said to be immaterial,” answered Le Sage. “I am speaking on the authority of the Sergeant himself.”
Hugh said no more; but he eyed the Baron in a wistful, questioning way. He was in a rather moving mood, patently looking forward to Wednesday’s ordeal with considerable nervousness and apprehension, and not altogether without reason. The Inquest had been trying enough; yet that had been a mere local affair, conducted amid familiar surroundings. To stand up in public Court and repeat, perhaps be forced to amplify, the evidence he had already given was a far different and more agitating prospect. What was in his mind, who could know? There was something a little touching in the way he clung to his family, and in the slight embarrassment they showed over his unaccustomed attentions. Audrey, falling in for her share, laughed, and responded with only a bad grace; but the glow in her eyes testified to feelings not the less proud and exultant because their repression had been so long a necessity with her.
Coming upon the Baron in the hall by-and-by, as he was on his way upstairs to prepare for the morrow’s journey, she stopped and spoke to him.
“Can you manage without a valet, Baron?”
“As I have managed a hundred times before, my dear.”
“Must you really go?”
“I must, indeed.”
“Leaving Louis to shift for himself?”
“I leave him in the hands of Providence.”
“Yes, but Providence is not a lawyer.”
“Heaven forbid! God, you know, like no lawyer, tempers the wind to the shorn lamb—à brebis tondue Dieu mesure le vent. That is a good French proverb, and I am going to France in the faith of it.”
“But you will come back again?”
“Yes, I will come back. It will be all right about Louis—you will see.”
She did not answer. She had been holding him by the lapels of his coat, running her thumbs down the seams, and suddenly, feeling a little convulsive pressure there, he looked up in her face and saw that thick tears were running down her cheeks. Very softly but resolutely then he captured the two wandering hands and held them between his own.
“My dear,” he said, “my dear, I understand. But listen to this—have confidence in your friend the Baron.”
And on the morrow morning he left, accompanied by Mr. Vivian Bickerdike’s most private and most profound misgivings. That he was going to London on some business connected with the stolen document was that gentleman’s certain conviction. But what was he to do? Expose at once, or wait and learn more? On the whole it were better to wait, perhaps: the fellow was coming back—he had said so, and to the same unconsciousness of there being one on his track who at the right moment could put a spoke in his nefarious wheel.
He was still considering the question, when something happened which, for the time being, put all considerations but one out of his head. By the first post on the very morning of the inquiry he received, much to his astonishment, asubpœnabinding him to appear and give evidence in Court. About what? If any uneasy suspicion in his mind answered that question, to it was to be attributed, no doubt, his rather white conscience-troubled aspect as he presently joined the party waiting to be motored over to the Castle in the old city where the case was to be tried.
TheMagistrates assembled to hear the case were four in number, two of them being local magnates and personal friends of Sir Calvin, who was accorded a seat on the Bench. They took their places at eleven o’clock, the Court being then crowded to its utmost capacity. The case stood first on the list, and no delay was experienced in opening it. As before, Mr. Fyler appeared for the police, and Mr. Redstall for Sir Calvin. The prisoner was undefended.
At the outset of the proceedings a surprise awaited the public. The prisoner having been brought up from the cells beneath the Court, and placed in the dock, Sergeant Ridgway asked permission to speak. Addressing the Bench, he said that since the inquiry before the Coroner, which had ended, as their Worships were aware, in a verdict by the jury of wilful murder against the prisoner Louis Victor Cabanis, facts had come to his knowledge which entirely disposed of the theory of the prosecution, proving, as they did, an unquestionablealibiin the prisoner’s favour. Under these circumstances he proposed to offer no evidence against the accused, who, with their Worships’ permission would be discharged.
Smart in aspect, concise in phrase, the detective stood up and made his avowal, and again, though in an auguster atmosphere, with a marked impression upon his hearers. Some of them had already encountered him, no doubt, and were prepared to concede to his every statement the force and value of an official fiat.
“Very well, Sergeant,” was the reply, while the public wondered if they were going to be defrauded of their feast of sensation, or if some spicier substitute were about to be placed before them. They were not kept long in suspense.
Following the Sergeant’s declaration, brief evidence was given by Andrew Marle, shepherd, and Nicholas Penny, thatcher. The former deposed that on the afternoon in question he was setting hurdles on the uplands above Leighway, at a point about three miles north-east of Wildshott Park as the crow flies, when he saw prisoner. That was as near three o’clock as might be. Prisoner had stood watching him for a few minutes while exchanging a remark or two, and had then gone on in a northerly direction.
Penny gave evidence that, on the same afternoon, at three-thirty, he was working in the garden of his cottage at Milldown, two miles beyond the point mentioned by the last witness, when prisoner came by and asked him the time. He gave it him, and the prisoner thanked him and continued his way, still bearing north by east until he was out of sight. He was going leisurely, both witnesses affirmed, and there appeared nothing peculiar about him except his foreign looks and speech. Neither had the slightest hesitation in identifying the prisoner with the man they had seen. There was no possibility of mistaking him.
This evidence, said the detective, addressing the justices again at the end of it, precluded any idea of the prisoner’s being the guilty party, the case for the prosecution holding that the murder was committed at some time between three and four o’clock in the afternoon. At three o’clock the accused was proved to have been at a spot good three miles away from the scene of the crime, and again at 3.30 at a spot five miles away, representing a distance which, even on an extravagant estimate, he could hardly have covered within the period remaining to him if the theory of the prosecution was to be substantiated. There was no case, in fact, and the prosecution therefore withdrew the charge.
A magistrate put the question somewhat extrajudicially, why had he not pleaded thisalibiin the first instance. The accused, who appeared overwhelmed by the change in his situation, was understood to say, with much emotion and gesticulation, that he had not been advised, nor had he supposed that the deposition of a prisoner himself would count for anything, and, moreover, that he had been so bewildered by the labyrinth of suspicion in which he had got himself involved, that it had seemed hopeless to him to think of ever extricating himself from it. He seemed a simple soul, and the justices smiled, with some insular superiority, over his naïve declaration. He was then given to understand that he was discharged and might go, and with a joyous expression he stepped from the dock and vanished like a jocund goblin down the official trap.
Counsel for the prosecution then rose, and stated that, the charge against Cabanis being withdrawn, it was proposed to put in his place Samuel Cleghorn, against whom, although no definite charge had as yet been preferred by the police, aprima faciecase existed. His examination, and the examination of the witnesses concerned, would probably prove a lengthy affair, and he asked therefore that the case might be taken next on the list. The justices concurring, Samuel Cleghorn was brought up from the cells, and stood to undergo his examination.
Confinement and anxiety, it was evident, had told upon the prisoner, whose aspect since the Inquest had undergone a noticeable change. He looked limp and deteriorated, like a worn banknote, and his lips were tremulous. Respectability in a sidesman caught pilfering from the plate could not have appeared more self-conscious of its fall. He bowed deferentially to the Bench, with a slight start on seeing his master seated there, and, making some ineffectual effort to appear at ease, clasped his plump white hands before him and fixed a glassy eye on the wall. The public, reassured, settled down, like a music-hall audience to a new exciting “turn,” the Bench assumed its most judicial expression, and Counsel, adjusting its wig for the fray, proceeded to open the case.
It is not proposed to recapitulatein extensothe evidence already given. In bulk and essentials the two hardly differed, the only marked changes being in the order of the witnesses examined, and in the absence from their list of the Baron Le Sage, who, however, inasmuch as his sole use had been to testify to the character of his servant, was no longer needed. There was the same reference to the insuperable difficulty—experienced and still unsurmounted—in tracing out the deceased’s connexions, the same statement by Sergeant Ridgway as to the fruitlessness of the measures taken, and the same request that, in default of further information, such evidence of identification as was at present available should be provisionally accepted. The Bench agreed, the detective sat down, and Counsel rose once more, this time with a formidable eye to business.
Mr. Fyler began by reconstructing, so far as was possible, the history of the crime from the evidence already adduced, into the particulars of which it is unnecessary to follow him. In summarising the known facts, he made no especial point, it was observed, of bringing them to bear on the presumptive guilt of the prisoner, but used him rather as a convenient model or framework about which to shape his story. Indeed, when he sat down again, it might have been given as even odds whether the conviction or acquittal of the accused man was the thing foreshadowed. And what then? After two attempts, was the whole business to end in a fiasco? Incredible! Some one must have killed the girl. The very atmosphere of the Court, moreover, fateful, ominous—derided such a conclusion. “Attend and wait!” it seemed to whisper.
Counsel was no sooner down than he was up again, and calling now upon his witnesses to appear. They came one by one, as summoned—Mrs. Bingley, Jane Ketchlove, Jessie Ellis, Kate Vokes, Mabel Wheelband; and there the order was broken. The examination of these five was in all essentials a replica of that conducted at the Inquest, but, to the observant, with one significant note added. For the first time Counsel showed, as it were, a corner of the card up his sleeve by suggesting tentatively, insinuatively,à proposthe question of a guilty intrigue, that one or other of them might possibly have her suspicions as to the identity of the second party implicated in it. The hint was disowned as soon as rejected; but it had left a curious impression here and there of more to come, of its having only been proffered to open and prepare the way to evidence, the stronger, perhaps, for some such moral corroboration. Not one of the women, however, would own to the subtle impeachment, and the question for the moment was dropped.
But it was dropped only tactically, in accordance with a pre-arranged plan, as became increasingly apparent with the choice of the next witness. This was Dr. Harding, who had made thepost-mortemexamination, and whose evidence repeated exactly what he had formerly stated. It added, moreover, a detail which, touching upon a question of time, showed yet a little more plainly which way the wind was setting; and it included an admission, or correction, no less suggestive in its import. The question was asked witness: “At the Inquest you stated, I believe, that death must have occurred at 3.30 o’clock, or thereabouts. Is that so?”
A.I said “approximately,” judging by the indications.
Q.Just so. I am aware that, in these cases, a certain latitude must be granted. It might then, in fact, have occurred somewhat earlier or somewhat later?
A.Yes. By preference, somewhat earlier.
Q.How much earlier?
Witness, refusing to submit to any brow-beating on the question, finally, at the end of a highly technical disputation, conceded a half hour as the extreme limit of his approximation; and with that the matter ended. As he stepped from the box the name of a new witness—a witness not formerly included in the inquiry—was called, and public interest, already deeply stimulated, grew intensified.
Margaret Hopkins, widow, deposed on oath. She was landlady of the Brewer’s Dray inn at Longbridge. The inn was situated to the east of the town and a little outside it on the Winton Road. One afternoon, about five weeks ago, a lady and gentleman had called at her inn, wanting tea, and a private room to drink it in. They were shown up to a chamber on the first floor, where the gentleman ordered a fire to be lighted. Tea was brought them by witness herself, and they had remained there shut in a long time together—a couple of hours perhaps. They were very affectionate with one another, and had gone away, when they did go, very lovingly arm in arm. The gentleman was Mr. Hugo Kennett, whom she now saw in Court, and whom she had recognised for the male stranger at once. The name of the lady accompanying him she had had no means of ascertaining, but her companion had addressed her as Annie.
Mr. Redstall, rising to cross-examine witness, put the following questions:—
Q.Will you swear to Mr. Kennett having been the gentleman in question?
A.Yes, on my oath, sir.
Q.You already knew Mr. Kennett by sight, eh?
A.No, I did not, sir. I had never seen him before, and have never seen him since till to-day. I hadn’t been settled in Longbridge not a two-month at the time he come.
Q.You say the two appeared to be on affectionate terms. On companionable terms would perhaps be the truer expression, eh?
A.As you choose, sir, if that means behaving like lovers together. (Laughter.)
Q.What do you mean by like lovers? They would hardly have made a display of their sentiments before you.
A.Not intentional perhaps, sir; but I come upon them unexpected when I brought in the tea; and there they was a’sitting on the sofy together, as close and as fond as two turtle-doves. (Laughter.)
Mrs. Bingley, recalled, reluctantly admitted having given deceased an afternoon off about the date in question. The girl had returned to the house before six o’clock.
Reuben Henstridge called, repeated his evidence given on the day of the Inquest, omitting only, or abridging, such parts of it as bore on the movements of the Frenchman, and excluding altogether—by tacit consent, it seemed—those references to the butler’s approach which had brought such a confusion of cross-questioning about his ears. The following bodeful catechism then ensued:—
Q.You say it was ten minutes past two when you saw Cabanis break from the copse and go down towards the road?
A.Aye.
Q.And that, having hung about after seeing him, you eventually returned to the Red Deer inn, reaching it at about 3.30?
A.That’s it.
Q.At what time did you start to return to the inn?
A.Three o’clock, or a bit after.
Q.What had you been doing in the interval?
A.(Sulkily.) That’s my business.
Q.I ask you again. You had better answer.
A.(After a scowling pause.) Setting snares, then. (Defiantly.) Weren’t it the open downs?
Q.I’m not entering into that question. We’ll assume, if you like, that the downs and your behaviour were equally open. You were setting snares, that’s enough. Did anything suddenly occur to interrupt you at your task?
A.Yes, it did.
Q.What was that?
A.The sound of a gun going off.
Q.From what direction?
A.From down among the trees near the road.
Q.Quite so. Now will you tell the Bench exactly what time it was when you heard that sound?
A.The time when I started to go home.
Q.About three o’clock or a little after?
A.That’s it.
Q.You state that on your oath?
A.Yes, I do.
It was as if a conscious tremor, like the excitement of many hearts leaping in unison, passed through the Court, dimly foretelling some approaching crisis. The examination was resumed:—
Q.What makes you so certain of the time?
A.The stable clock had just gone three.
Q.And, following on the sound of the gun, you left your snare-setting and made for home?
A.Aye.
Q.For what reason?
A.Because I thought they might be working round my way.
Q.Whom do you mean by “they”?
A.The party as was out shooting. I made sure at first it come from them.
Q.What made you alter your opinion?
A.I see them, as I went up the hill, afar off nigh Asholt wood.
Q.Now, tell me: why didn’t you mention all this at the Inquest?
A.Because I weren’t asked.
Q.Or was it because you feared having to confess to what made you bolt, and from what occupation, when the shot startled you? (No answer.) Very well. Now attend to this. You have heard it propounded, or assumed, that the murder took place some time between 3.15 and 4 o’clock. Do you still adhere to your statement that it was just after three when you heard the sound of the gun?
A.Aye.
Q.You are on your oath, remember.
A.All right, master.
Q.And you adhere to it?
A.Yes, I do.
Q.That is enough. You can stand down.
A sibilation, a momentary rustling and shuffling, as on the close of an engrossing sermon when tension is relaxed and the hymn being prepared for, followed the dismissal of the witness. A few glanced furtively, hardly realizing yet why they were moved to do so, at a rigid soldierly figure, seated upright and motionless beside the justices on the Bench. But the sense of curious perplexity was hardly theirs when the next witness was claiming their attention. This was Daniel Groome, the gardener, whose evidence, generally a repetition of what he had formerly stated, was marked by a single amendment, the significance of which he himself hardly seemed to realize. It appeared as follows:—
Q.You stated before the Coroner that this louder shot heard by you occurred at a time which you roughly estimated to be anything between three and half-past three o’clock. Is that so?
A.No, sir.
Q.What do you mean by “no”?
A.I’ve thought it over since, sir, and I’ve come to the conclusion that my first impression was nearer the correct one.
Q.Your impression, that is to say, that the shot was fired somewhat about three o’clock?
A.Yes, sir.
Q.What is your reason for this change of opinion?
A.Because I remembered afterwards, sir, having heard the clock in the master’s study strike the quarter past. I had gone round by then to the back of the house.
Q.And you had heard the shot fired while at the front?
A.Yes, sir.
This witness was stiffly cross-examined by Mr. Redstall, who sought to shake his evidence on the grounds that he was, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to adapt it to what was expected of him. But the poor fellow’s honesty was so transparent, and his incomprehension of the gravity of his statement so ingenuous, that the only result of his harrying was to increase the impression of his disinterested probity. He said what he believed to be the truth, and he adhered to it.
He went, and the usher, tapping with his wand on the floor, called in a loud voice on Vivian Bickerdike to appear and give evidence.
A famous writer has asserted that there are two kinds of witness to whom lawyers take particular exception, the reluctant witness and the too-willing witness. To these may be added a third, the anxious witness, who, being oppressed with a sense of responsibility of his position, fears at once to say too much or too little, and ends by saying both. Bickerdike entered the box an acutely anxious witness. The trend of some recent evidence had left him in no doubt as to the lines on which his own examination was destined to run, and he foresaw at once the use to which a certain conversation of his with the detective was going to be put. Now it was all very well to hold the Sergeant guilty in this of a gross breach of confidence, but his conscience would not thereby allow him to maintain himself blameless in the matter. He should have known quite well, being no fool, that a detective did not ask questions or invite communications from a purely altruistic point of view, and that the apparent transparency of such a man’s sentiments was the least indication of their depth. By permitting pique a little to obscure that fact to him he had done his friend—for whom he had a real, very warm regard—a disservice, to which he had now, in that friend’s hearing, to confess. So far, then, it only remained to him to endeavour to repair, through his sworn evidence, the mischief to which he had made himself a party.
But could any reparation stultify now a certain issue, to which—he had seen it suddenly, aghast—that too-open candour of his had been seduced into contributing? What horrible thing was it which was being approached, threatened, in the shadow of his friend’s secret? The thing was monstrous, damnable; yet he could not forget how it had appeared momentarily adumbrated to himself on his first hearing of the murder. But he had rejected the thought with incredulous scorn then, as he would reject it now. Of whatever sinful weakness Hugh might be capable, a crime so detestable, so cruel, was utterly impossible to him. He swore it in his heart; but his faith could not relieve him of the weight of responsibility which went with him into the witness box. It was like a physical oppression, and he seemed to bend under it. Counsel took the witness’s measure with a rolling relish of the lips, as he prepared, giving a satisfied shift to his gown, to open his inquisitions:—
Q.You are on very intimate terms, I believe, Mr. Bickerdike, with Sir Calvin and his family?
A.With Sir Calvin’s permission, I think I may say yes.
Q.You have seen the prisoner before?
A.Many times.
Q.Could you, as a guest, speak to his general character?
A.It has always appeared to me quite unexceptionable.
Q.Not a violent man?
A.O! dear, no.
Q.At dinner, on the night before the murder, did you notice anything peculiar about him?
A.He appeared to me to be upset about something.
Q.And you wondered, perhaps—having only arrived that afternoon, as I understand—what domestic tribulation could have discomposed so stately a character? (Laughter.)
A.I may have. I had always considered Cleghorn as immovable an institution as the Monument.
The laughter which greeted this sally appeared to reassure witness somewhat, as did the unexpected lines on which his rather irregular examination seemed to be developing. But his confidence was of short duration. The very next question brought him aware of the true purpose of this preliminary catechism, which was merely to constitute a pretext for getting him into the witness-box at all.
Q.Was your arrival that afternoon, may I ask, in response to a long invitation or a sudden call?
A.(With a sudden stiffening of his shoulders, as if rallying his energies to meet an ordeal foreseen.) A sudden call. I came down in response to a letter from my friend Mr. Hugo Kennett, inviting me to a few days’ shooting.
Q.Mr. Hugo Kennett is a particular friend of yours, is he not?
A.We have known one another a long time.
Q.Intimate to that degree, I mean, that you have few secrets from one another?
A.That may be.
Q.And can depend upon one another in any emergency?
A.I hope so.
Q.There was a question of emergency, perhaps, in this case?
A.I am bound to say there often is with Mr. Kennett.
Q.Will you explain what you mean by that?
A.I mean—I hope he will forgive my saying it—that his imagination is a little wont to create emergencies which nothing but his friends’ immediate advice and assistance can overcome. He is apt to be in the depths one moment and on the heights the next. He is built that way, that’s all.
Q.Was this a case of an emergency due to his imagination?
A.I won’t go quite so far as to say that.
Q.Then there was really a reason this time for his having you down at short notice?
A.I may have thought so.
Q.We will come to that. Had he mentioned the reason in his letter to you?
A.No. The letter only said that he badly wanted “bucking,” and asked me to come down at once.
Q.He gave no explanation?
A.None whatever.
Q.In the letter, or afterwards when you met?
A.No.
Q.You found him in an uncommunicative mood?
A.Somewhat.
Q.Kindly say what you mean by “somewhat.”
A.I mean that, while he told me nothing definite about his reason for having me down, he did seem to hint that there was trouble somewhere.
Q.What were his exact words?
A.I can’t remember.
Q.Were they to the effect that he was in a devil of a fix with a girl, and could only see one way out of it? (Sensation.)
A.(Aghast.) Nothing of the sort. Now I recall, he described himself as sitting on a barrel of gunpowder, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the explosion that was to come.
Q.Thank you. Another effort or two, Mr. Bickerdike, and your memory may need no refreshing. Did you find your friend’s manner, now, as strange as his talk?
A.It might often have seemed strange on such occasions to those who did not know him.
Q.Answer my question, please.
A.(Reluctantly.) Well, it was strange.
Q.Stranger than you had ever known it to be before?
A.Perhaps so.
Q.I suggest that it was wild and reckless to a degree—the manner of a man who had got himself into a hopeless scrape, and saw no way out of it but social and material ruin?
A.It was very strange: I can say no more.
Q.Would you have considered his state compatible with that of a young man of good position and prospects, who had entangled himself with a girl greatly his social inferior, and was threatened by her with exposure unless he, in the common phrase, made an honest woman of her?
Mr. Redstall rising to object, the Bench ruled that the question was inadmissible. It had created, however, a profound impression in Court, which from that moment never abated. Counsel, accepting their worships’ decision, resumed:—
Q.Had you any reason to suspect a woman in the case?
A.It was pure conjecture on my part.
Q.Then youdidentertain such a suspicion?
A.Not at that time. Later perhaps.
Q.After the murder?
A.Yes, after the murder.
Q.When?
A.The moment I heard it had been committed. I was told by a groom.
Q.About the woman or the murder?
A.About the murder.
Q.When was that?
A.When I returned from shooting that day.
Q.You returned alone, I believe?
A.Yes.
Q.Mr. Kennett having left you shortly before three o’clock?
A.I fancy about that time.
Q.And at the moment you heard there had been this murder committed, that conjecture, that association between your friend and the murdered girl came into your mind?
A.It was wholly preposterous, of course. I dismissed the idea the moment it occurred to me.
Q.You dismissed the idea of Mr. Kennett’s having been involved with the girl?
A.No, of his having committed the murder. (Sensation.)
Q.But you still thought the entanglement possible?
A.I thought it might account for his state.
Q.Why did the first idea, associating Mr. Kennett with the crime, occur to you? (Witness hesitating, the question was repeated.)
A.(In a low voice.) O! just because of something—nothing important—that had happened at the shoot—that, and the extraordinary state I had found him in.
Q.Will you tell the Bench what was this unimportant something that happened at the shoot?
A.(With emotion.) It was nothing—probably my fancy—and he denied it utterly.
Q.Now, Mr. Bickerdike, if you please?
A.I thought that in—in pulling his gun through a particular hedge that morning, he might have done it with less risk to himself, that was all.
Q.You suspected him, in short, of wanting to kill himself under the guise of an accident?
A.I swear he never admitted it. I swear he denied it.
Q.And you accepted his denial so implicitly that you asked him to go home, leaving his gun with the keeper. Is that not so?
A.Yes.
Q.He refused?
A.Yes, he did.
Q.Did not much the same thing occur again, later in the afternoon?
A.Nothing of the sort at all. Shortly before three he came to me, and said he was no good and was going home.
Q.What did he mean by “no good”? No good in life?
A.No good at shooting.
Q.And again you asked him to leave his gun with you?
A.No, I did not—not directly, at least.
Q.Please explain what you mean by “not directly”?
A.He may have understood what was in my mind. I can’t say. He just laughed, and called out that he wasn’t going to shoot himself, and wasn’t going to let me make an ass of him; and with that he marched off.
Q.And that is all?
A.All.
Q.He didn’t, by chance, in saying “I’m not going to shootmyself,” lay any particular emphasis on the last word?
A.Certainly not that I distinguished. The whole suggestion is too impossible to any one who knows my friend.
Q.Thank you, Mr. Bickerdike. That will do.
If witness had entered the box like an oppressed man, he left it like a beaten. His cheeks were flushed, his head bowed; it was observed that he purposely avoided looking his friend in the face as he passed him by on his way to the rear of the Court.
The excitement was now extreme. All attention, in the midst of a profound stillness, was concentrated on a figure come more and more, with each adjustment of the legal spy-glass, into a definite focus. It was felt that the supreme moment was approaching; and, when the expected name was called, a sigh like that of a sleeper turning seemed to sound through the hall. The prisoner in the dock had already long been overlooked—forgotten. He had been put up, it seemed, as a mere medium for this deadlier manifestation, and his purpose served, had ceased to be of interest. He stood pallid with his hands on the rail before him, rolling his one mobile eye, the only apparently mystified man in Court.
As Hugo entered the box, he was seen to be deadly pale, but he held his head high, and stood like a soldier, morally and physically upright, facing his court-martial. He folded his arms, and looked his inquisitor steadily in the eyes. Mr. Fyler retorted with an expression of well-assured suavity. He was in no hurry. Having netted his fowl, he could afford to let him flutter awhile. He began by leading his witness, only more briefly, the way he had already conducted him at the Inquest, but with what new menace of pitfalls by the road! The discovery of the body; the incident of the gun (prejudiced now in the light of the possible moral to be drawn from witness’s hurry to get rid of it, and his loathing of the weapon), the marked agitation of his aspect when seen by the gardener; the interval in the house, with its suggestion of nervous collapse and desperate rallying to face the inevitable ordeal; that significant outburst of his at the Inquest, when he had exclaimed against an implication of guilt which had never been made; his admission of having bantered the deceased about an assignation—an admission fraught with suspicion of the scene of passion and recrimination which had perhaps more truthfully described their encounter—all these points were retraversed, but in a spirit ominously differing from that in which they had formerly been reviewed. And then at last, in a series of swift stabbing questions and hypotheses, issued the mortal moral of all this sinister exordium:—
Q.You chaffed the deceased, you say, sir, with being where she was for an assignation?
A.Something of the sort.
Q.Something of the sort may be nothing of the sort. I suggest that this so-called chaff is better described as a quarrel between you. Will you swear that that was not the case?
A.No, I will not.
Q.Then your statement was a fabrication?
A.I accused her of being there to meet some one.
Q.You accused her. I am your debtor for the word. Will you swear that she was not there to keep an assignation, and that assignation with yourself?
A.I swear it most positively. Our meeting was quite accidental.
Q.On your part?
A.On my part.
Q.But not on hers?
A.I am not here to answer for that.
Q.Pardon me; I think you are. I suggest that, expecting you to return by the Bishop’s Walk, she was waiting there to waylay you?
A.She might have been, on the chance.
Q.I suggest you knew that she was?
A.I say I did not know.
Q.Well, you took that way at least, and you met and quarrelled. I suggest that the person you accused her of being there to meet was yourself, and that the dispute between you turned upon the question of her thus importuning you? Is that so?
A.(After a pause.) Yes.
Q.And I suggest further that the reason for her so importuning you lay in her condition, for which you were responsible?
A.Yes. It is true. (Sensation.)
Q.She entreated you, perhaps, to repair the wrong you had done her in the only way possible to an honourable man?
A.(Witness seeming to stiffen, as if resolved to face the whole music at last.) She had already urged that; she pressed to know, that was all, if I had made up my mind to marry her. I refused to give a definite answer just then, since my whole career was at stake; but I promised her one within twenty-four hours. I was very much bothered over the business, and I dare say a bit impatient with her. She may have upbraided me a little in return, but there was no actual quarrel between us. I went on after a few minutes, leaving her there by herself. And that is the whole truth.
Q.We will judge of that. You say the meeting was none of your seeking?
A.I do say it.
Q.Now, please attend to me. You were on your way back, when you met deceased, from the shooting party which you had abandoned?
A.Yes.
Q.You have heard what the last witness stated as to a certain incident connected with that morning. Was his statement substantially true?
A.I can’t deny it. It was a momentary mad impulse.
Q.And, being forestalled, was replaced possibly by an alternative suggestion, pointing to another way out of your difficulties?
A.I don’t know what you mean. It was just the culmination, as it were, of a desperate mood, and was regretted by me the next instant.
Q.Was it because of your desperate mood that you refused to be parted from your gun when you finally left the shoot and returned home?
A.No; but because I declined to be made to look a fool.
Q.I put it to you once more that you knew, when you went home, carrying against all persuasion, your gun with you, that the deceased would be waiting for you in the copse?
A.It is utterly false. I knew nothing about it.
Q.Very well. Now, as to the time of your meeting with the deceased. I have it stated on your sworn evidence that that was at three o’clock or thereabouts, and that after spending some ten minutes in conversation with her, you resumed your way to the house, which you reached at about 3.15, appearing then, according to the evidence of a witness, in a very agitated state.
A.I was upset, I own—naturally, under the circumstances.
Q.What circumstances?
A.Having just promised to do or not to do what would affect my whole life.
Q.No other reason?
A.No.
Q.Did you hear the sworn statement of the witness Henstridge and another that the report of the shot, which could have been none other than the fatal shot, was heard and fixed by them at a time estimated at a few minutes after three o’clock, that is to say, at a time when, according to your own admission, you were in the deceased’s company?
A.It is an absolute lie.
The crisis had come, the long-expected blow fallen; but, even in the shock and echo of it, there were some who found nerve to glance from son to father, and wonder what super-dramatic incident yet remained to them to cap the day’s excitement. They were disappointed. Not by one sign or movement did the stiff grey figure on the Bench betray the torture racking it, or concede to their expectations the evidence of an emotion—not even when, as if in response to some outspoken direction, a couple of policemen were seen to move silently forward, and take their stand on either side the witness box. And then, suddenly, Counsel was speaking again.
He addressed the Bench with an apology for the course imposed upon him, since it must have become apparent, as the case proceeded, that the tendency of the prosecution had been to turn more and more from its nominal objective in the dock. There had been a reason for that, however, and he must state it. The inquiries of the police, and more especially of the distinguished detective officer, Sergeant Ridgway, had latterly, gradually but certainly, led them to the conclusion that the motive for the crime, and the name of its perpetrator, must be looked for in another direction than that originally, and seemingly inevitably, indicated. This change of direction had necessarily exculpated the two men concerned in to-day’s proceedings; but it had been thought best to submit one of them to examination for the purpose of exposing through the evidence affecting him the guilt of the presumptive criminal. That having been done, the police raised no objection to Cleghorn, like the other accused, being discharged.
He then went on to summarize the evidence, as it had come, by gradual degrees, to involve the witness Kennett in its meshes—the scrape into which the young man had got himself, his dread of exposure, the wildness of his talk and behaviour, the incriminating business of the gun, and, finally, the sworn testimony as to the time of the shot—and he ended by drawing a fanciful picture of what had occurred in the copse.
“I ask your worships,” he said, “to picture to yourselves the probable scene. Here has this young Lothario returned, his heart full of death and desperation since the frustration of his first mad impulse to end his difficulties with his life, knowing, or not knowing—we must form our own conclusions as to that—that his destined victim awaits him at the tryst—if tryst it is—herheart burning with bitterness against the seducer who has betrayed her; each resolved on its own way out of the trouble. She upbraids him with her ruin, and threatens in her turn to ruin him, unless he consents to right the wrong he has done her. He refuses, or temporizes; and she turns to leave him. Thinking she is about to put her threat into immediate execution, goaded to desperation, the gun in his hand—only tentatively adhered to at first, perhaps—decides him. He fires at and kills her. The deed perpetrated, he has to consider, after the first shock of horror, how best to conceal the evidences of his guilt. He decides to rest the lethal weapon against a tree (with the intention of asserting—or, at least, not denying, if subsequently questioned—that he had left it with one of its barrels loaded), concocts in his mind a plausible story of a cigarette and an oversight, and hurries on to the house, where, in his private room, he spends such a three-quarters of an hour of horror and remorse as none of us need envy him. His nerve by then somewhat restored, he decides to take the initiative in the necessary discovery, and, affecting a sudden recollection of his oversight, returns to the copse to fetch his gun, with the result we know. All that it is open to us to surmise; what we may not surmise is the depth of depravity in a nature which could so plan to cast the burden of its own guilt upon the shoulders of an innocent man.”
One dumb, white look here did the son turn on the father; who met it steadfastly, as white and unflinching.
“We have heard some loose talk, your worships,” went on Counsel, “as to the appearance of a mysterious fourth figure in this tragedy. We may dismiss, I think, that individual as purely chimerical—a maggot, if I may so describe it, of the witness Henstridge’s brain. There is no need, I think you will agree with me, for looking beyond this Court for a solution of the problem which has been occupying its attention. Painful as the task is to me, I must now do my duty—without fear or favour in the face of any considerations, social or sentimental, whatsoever—by asking you to commit for trial, on the capital charge of murdering Annie Evans, the witness Hugo Staveley Kennett, a warrant for whose arrest the police already hold in their hands.”
Not a sound broke the stillness as Counsel ended—only a muffled rumble, like that of a death-drum, from the wheels of a passing wagon in the street outside. And then the blue-clad janissaries closed in; the Magistrates, without leaving the Bench, put their heads together, and the vote was cast.
“Hugo Staveley Kennett, we have no alternative but to commit you to take your trial on the capital charge.”
A sudden crash and thump broke in upon the verdict. Cleghorn had fainted in the dock.
Themorning of the inquiry found M. le Baron in Paris, in his old rooms at the Montesquieu. He was in very good spirits, smiling and buoyant, and not at all conscience-smitten over his desertion of his servant in his hour of need. “It will be a not unwholesome lesson for the littlefanfaron,” he thought, “teaching him in the future to keep a guard on his tongue and temper.” He foresaw, be it observed, that certain issue, and felt no anxiety about it. But his face fell somewhat to an added reflection: “I wonder if they have committedhimfor trial by now. Poor girl!” and he shrugged his shoulders with a tiny sigh.
Having crossed by the night boat from Southampton, one might have looked for a certain staleness in the Baron’s aspect. On the contrary, he was as chirpy as a sparrow, having slept well throughout a pretty bad crossing, and since had a refreshing tub and brush-up. He sat down—though very late, with an excellent appetite—to hispetit painand rich coffee andbrioche, and, having consumed them, took snuff at short intervals for half an hour, and then prepared to go out.
M. le Baron’s movements seemed carelessly casual, but he had, in fact, a definite objective, and he made for it at his leisure. It lay on the left bank of the river, in or near the district calling itself loosely the Latin or Students’ Quarter. He crossed the river by the Pont des Arts, and went straight down the Rue de Seine as far as the Rue de Tournon, where he turned off in the direction of St. Sulpice. The great bell up in the high tower was crashing and booming for a funeral, and its enormous reverberations swayed like Atlantic rollers across the fields of air. In all the world St. Sulpice bell isthedeath-bell, so solemn, so deep, and so overwhelming it sounds. M. le Baron paused to listen a moment. “Is it an omen?” thought he, “and am I going to hear bad news?”
Somewhere at the back of the church, in a little street called the Rue Bourbon-le-Château, he came to the shop of a small dealer in prayer-books and holy pictures and pious images. It was a poor shop in a faded district, and suggestive of scant returns and lean commons for its inmates. A door, as gaunt and attenuated in appearance, stood open to one side of the shop, and by this the visitor entered, with the manner of one who knew the place. A flight of bare wooden stairs rose before him, and up these he went, to the first, to the second floor, where he paused, a little breathless, to knock on a door. “Que diable!” cried a hoarse voice from within. “Who’s that?”
For answer the Baron turned the handle and presented himself. It was a ragged, comfortless room he entered, frowzy, chill, without a carpet and with dirty whitewashed walls. A table stood in the dingy window, and at it was seated the solitary figure of a man—emaciated, melancholy eyed—Ribault his name, a designer on the staff of thePetit Courrier des Dames. Some of his work lay before him now: he looked up from it with a startled exclamation, and rose to his feet. Those were clad in list slippers: for the rest he wore a rusty frock-coat, and at his neck a weeping black bow.
“M. le Baron!” he exclaimed, in wonder and welcome. “Who would have thought to see you again!”
“Am I that sort, then?” answered Le Sage with a smile. “I am sorry I left so poor an impression.”
“Ah, but what an impression!” cried the other fervently. “An angel of goodness; a Samaritan; a comforter, and a healer in one!”
“Well, well, M. Ribault!” said the Baron. “You are still at the old toil, I observe?”
“Always at it, Monsieur; but in my plodding, uninspired way—not like my friend’s. Ah, he was a great artist was Jean.”
“Truly, he had a wonderful facility. Has he left you?”
“But for the grave, Monsieur. We had not otherwise been parted.”
Tears gathered in the poor creature’s eyes; he sighed, with a forlorn, resigned gesture. Hearing his words, a shadow crossed the visitor’s face. “That foreboding bell!” he muttered. He was genuinely concerned, and not for one only reason. “You will tell me all about it, perhaps, M. Ribault?” he said.
“He was never himself again after that accident,” answered the designer. “All your tenderness, your care, your disinterested help could do no more than earn for him a little respite from a sentence already pronounced. He was virtually a dying man when you last left him, Monsieur. The light of your healing presence withdrawn, the shadow came out and was visible to me. Ah, but he would talk of you often and often, and of how you had smoothed the bitter way for him. He confided in you much: he told you his little history?”
“Something of it, Ribault.”
“It was the history of a brave man, Monsieur: of patient merit eternally struggling against adversity; of conscious power having to submit itself to necessity. There was that in him could he but have indulged it—ah, if you had only seen!”
“Seen what, my poor friend?”
“Monsieur, he died in June; but before he died, he drew in pastel on that wall, on that bare wall, a face that was like the fine blossom of the aloe, crowning and vindicating with its immortal beauty the harsh and thorny ugliness of those long necessitous years. It was his testament, his swan-song. Less than its perfection would have made a smaller artist; and it was produced by him from memory, as he sat there dying in his chair.”
“From a memory of whom, Ribault?”
“I will tell you. One day, shortly before his death, there had come to see him a step-brother of his, an Englishman, of whom I had never heard nor he spoken. He had a lady with him, this brother, one of the most beautiful you could picture, and her loveliness entered into Jean’s heart. He could not forget it; he had no ease from it until his art came to dispossess him of its haunting. I watched him at work; it was marvellous: the wall broke into song and flower under my eyes. That was the man, Monsieur; that was the man; it was his own soul blossoming; and, having done what he must, he grew once more at peace. Two days later he was dead.”