The Skeleton Key Part 2

CHAPTER XII

THE BARON WALKS

(From the Bickerdike MS.)

I was still 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 key-hole—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.

CHAPTER XIII

ACCUMULATING EVIDENCE

Wednesday of 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 housekeeper, 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 he does honour 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 expediency was the motive of his tactics; perhaps, having virtually completed his case, he was keeping out of the way until the time came to expound it; perhaps a feature of its revision was that 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 same 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, if I owned 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 seems the profession 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 its founded on some experience.'

'I dare say you're right. It's comforting to know, in that case, that my valet has always fitted into his place 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 am 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, a subpœna binding 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.

CHAPTER XIV

THE EXPLOSION

The Magistrates 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 unquestionable alibi in 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 Marie, 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 extra-judicially, why had he not pleaded this alibi in 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, a prima facie case 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 recapitulate in extenso the 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 propos the 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 the post-mortem examination, 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 somewhere 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 you did entertain 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 shoot myself,' 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 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—her heart 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.

CHAPTER XV

THE FACE ON THE WALL

The morning 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 little fanfaron,' 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 committed him for 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 his petit pain and rich coffee and brioche, 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 is the death-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 the Petit 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.'

'I see no face on the wall, Ribault.'

'Alas, no, Monsieur! Alas, alas, no! When he returned, this strange relation, this vandal, after his brother's death, to arrange for the funeral and dispose of his effects, he saw the drawing and he denounced it. He did more: in his anger he seized a cloth, and, before I could interpose, that miracle, that dream, was but a featureless smudge upon the wall. And even then he would not be satisfied until the last rainbow tints had vanished.'

The frown on M. le Baron's brow was again darkening its habitual placidity.

'What excuse had the man to offer for an act so outrageous?' he demanded warmly.

The designer shrugged his shoulders. 'What excuse but of the jealous and coarse-grained! He said that the lady's permission should have been asked first; that anyhow the artist being dead it could not matter, and that he had no idea of leaving the portrait there to become the cynosure of common eyes. He was a hard man, Monsieur, and we came to words.'

The visitor grunted. 'M. Ribault, what was the name of this Goth?'

'It was the name of my friend, Monsieur.'

'What! Christian and surname the same?'

'Precisely one, Monsieur. They were beaux-frères, no more. With such it may be.'

'Indubitably. And the lady's name?'

'I could show you sooner than pronounce it. It was written by Jean under the portrait.'

'But the portrait is lost!'

'Nevertheless, it is not altogether forgotten. Before it was destroyed I had borrowed a camera from a friend and achieved a reproduction of it. Alas, Monsieur! but a cold shadow of the original—a sadness, a reflection, but, such as it is, a record I would not willingly let perish.'

The Baron's brow was smoother again; his eyes had recovered their good humour.

'But this is interesting, my friend,' he said. 'Might I be permitted to see it?'

'Who sooner!' cried the designer. 'Monsieur has only to command.'

He went to a cupboard, and presently produced from it a photograph mounted on brown paper, which he presented to his visitor.

'You must not judge from it,' he said, 'more than you would from the shadow of an apple tree the colour of its blossom. But is it not a beautiful face, Monsieur?'

'Beautiful, indeed,' answered Le Sage, profoundly pre-occupied. 'And did the brother know you had secured this transcript?' he asked presently.

'Of a truth not, Monsieur. Sooner would I have died than tell him.'

'Ah!' For minutes longer the Baron stood absorbed in contemplation of the photograph. Then suddenly he looked up.

'I want you to part with this to me, my friend.'

'Monsieur, it is yours. There is none to whom I would sooner confide it.'

'You have the negative?'

'Truly, yes.'

'Keep it, and print no more from it for the present. Above all, keep the knowledge of your possessing it from the Goth.'

Between wonder and sympathy the Frenchman acquiesced.

'No doubt he would want to destroy that too,' he said.

'Exactly,' answered Le Sage. 'Now, listen, my friend. I have a commission for you.'

It was a very handsome commission, the nature of which need not be specified, since it was in effect merely a delicate acknowledgment of a service rendered. And if the acknowledgment was out of all proportion with the service, that was M. le Baron's way, and one not to be resented by a poor man who was also a reasonably proud man. So the two parted very good friends, and the Baron went back to his hotel, in high good humour with himself and all the world. On the following night he was in London, ensconced in rooms in a private hotel in Bloomsbury, where he learnt from the papers of the latest startling development in what had come to be known as the 'Wildshott Murder Case' 'So,' he thought, 'it works according to plan.'

He had managed to procure, while in Paris, a personal introduction from a certain eminent official to a corresponding dignitary in the Metropolis; but for the present he kept that in his pocket. There were some smaller fry to be dealt with first: aids to the great approach.

CHAPTER XVI

THE BARON FINDS A CHAMPION

(From the Bickerdike MS.)

Who that was present at that scene could ever forget its anguish and pathos? Its fierce dramatic intensity will remain for all time indelibly seared on my soul. Could I believe in my friend's guilt? Knowing him, it was impossible: and yet that seemingly incontrovertible evidence as to when the shot was fired? If he had done it, if he had done it, not his own nature but some fiend temporarily in possession of it must have directed his hand. But I would not believe he had done it. I would not, until I had heard him confess to it with his own lips. However appearances might be against him, he should find an unshakable ally in me. And if the worst were to come to the worst, and the trial confirm his guilt beyond dispute, there would be that yet for me to plead in revision of my former evidence so cruelly surprised from me, to plead in virtue of my intimacy with the unhappy boy—that in the moods to which he was subject he was apt to lose complete control of himself, and to behave on occasions veritably like a madman. It might mitigate, extenuate—who could say? But in the meantime I would not believe—not though the world accused him.

Before he was taken away he and his father met in a room below the Court. Sir Calvin, coming across the floor after the committal, looked like a white figure of Death—Death stark, but in motion. He walked straight on, avoiding nobody; but a little stagger as he passed near me was eloquent of his true state. I was moved impulsively to hold out my arm to him, and he took it blindly, and we descended the stairs together. In a bare vault-like office we found my poor friend. He was in charge of the two policemen who had arrested him. His deadly pallor was all gone, and succeeded by a vivid flush. He held out his hand with a steadfast smiling look.

'Take it or not, sir,' he said.

It was taken, and hard wrung—just that one moment's understanding—and the two fell apart.

'Thank you, sir,' said the boy simply. 'I did not do it, of course.'

The father laughed; it wrung one to hear him, and to see his face.

'One of your judges, Hughie,' he said, wheezing hilariously—'old Crosson; you know him—told me not to lose heart—that appearances weren't always to be trusted. He ought to know, eh, after three attempts?'

'I wanted you just to hear me say,' said the other hurriedly, 'that I'm glad it's come—not the way it has, but the truth. I've behaved like a blackguard, sir, and it's been weighing on me; you don't know how it's been weighing. It's been making my life hell for some little time past. But now you know, and it's the worst of me—bad enough, but not the unutterable brute they'd make me out.' He turned to me. 'So they got at you, Viv.,' he said. 'Never mind, old boy; you meant the best.'

'It was an infamous breach of confidence,' I burst out. 'It was that Sergeant led me on.'

'Yes,' said Hugh: 'I supposed he was at the bottom of all this. But I can't help his witnesses. It was the truth I told.'

'He has betrayed the house,' I said hotly, 'he was engaged to serve.'

But to this Sir Calvin, greatly to my surprise and indignation, demurred, in a hoarse broken way: 'If he thought his duty lay this road, it was his business like an honest man to take it. We want no absolution on sufferance—eh, Hughie, my boy?'

'No, sir, no. You will see that I am properly advised as to the best way to go to clear myself. Thank God my mother isn't alive!'

It was said with the first shadow of a break in his voice, and the General could not stand it. He gave a little gasp, and turned away, his fingers working at his moustache.

'She'll see to it, Hughie,' he said indistinctly, 'that—that it's all made right. There was never a more truth-loving woman in the world. But you shall have your advice—for form's sake—the best that can be procured.'

'Thank you, sir.'

It was intimated that the interview must end. The two men just faced one another—an unforgetable look; and then the father turned, and, rigid as a sleep-walker, passed out of the room without another word. I lingered behind a moment, just to whisper my friend bonne chance; then hurried after the retreating figure. We entered the car in silence, and drove off alone together, leaving the household witnesses to follow later. All the way it must have lain in the mind of the stiff figure beside me with what other expectations, in what other company, we had made the outward journey. I thought it best not to disturb him; and we reached the house without a solitary sentence. I believe, having passed between us. Once there, Sir Calvin walked straight into his study, and I saw him no more that day.

What was the true thought in his heart? faith scornful and triumphant, or some secret misgiving? Who could tell? Perhaps for the first time some doubts as to his own qualifications as a father were beginning to move in him, some tragic self-searching for the seed of what might or might not be in this 'fruit of his blood.' The day stole by on hushed wings; a sense of still fatality brooded over the house. The voiceless, almost unpeopled quiet told upon my nerves, and kept me wandering, aimless and solitary, from room to room. Near evening, Audrey was sent for by her father. I saw her, and saw her for the first time since our return, as she disappeared into his study. What passed between them there one could only surmise, but at least it was marked by no audible sounds of emotion. In that dead oppression I would have welcomed even her company; but she never came near me, and I was left to batten as I would on my own poisonous reflections. They passed and passed in, review, with sickening iteration, the same wearisome problems—the evidence, my hateful and unwilling share in it, my friend's dreadful situation. Against the detective I felt a bitter animosity. No wonder that, conscious of his treachery to his employer, as I still persisted in regarding it, his manner had changed of late, and he had held himself aloof from us. Even that cynical official fibre, I supposed, could not be entirely insensitive to the indecency of eating the salt of him he was planning to betray. I was so wrath with him that I could have wished, if for no other reason than his discomfiture, to vindicate my friend's innocence. The thought sent me harking back once more over familiar ground. If Hugh were innocent, who was guilty? If another could be proved guilty, or even reasonably suspect, the whole evidence against the prisoner fell into discredit. Who, then?'

Now, not this overwhelming business itself had been enough to dismiss wholly from my mind its haunting suspicions regarding the Baron. So secret, so subtle, so inexplicable, could it still be possible that he was somehow implicated in the affair? If not, was it not at least remarkable that it should have coincided with his coming, involved his servant, been followed by that midnight theft of the paper? And then suddenly there came to me, with a little shock of the blood, a memory of our conversation in the keeper's cottage on the fatal day of the shoot. How curious he had been then on the subject of poachers, of their methods, of their proneness to violence on occasion! He had asked so innocently yet shown such shrewdness in his questions, that even Orsden had laughingly commented on the discrepancy. And that mention of the muffling properties of a mist in the matter of a gunshot! Why, it was as if he had wished to assure himself of the adequacy of some precaution already calculated and taken to mislead and bewilder in a certain issue!

The thought came upon me like a thunderclap. Was it, could it be possible that some blackguard poacher had been made the instrument of a diabolical plot—perhaps that fourth shadowy figure that had never materialised; perhaps Henstridge himself, who had volunteered the damning evidence, and whom it would be one's instinct to mistrust? Le Sage and Henstridge in collusion! Was it an inspiration? Did I stand on the threshold of a tremendous discovery? In spite of the feverish excitement which suddenly possessed me, I could still reason against my own theory. The motive? What possible motive in murdering an unoffending servant girl? Again, what time had been the Baron's in which to complot so elaborate a crime?

But, supposing it had all been arranged beforehand, before ever he came? I had not overlooked the mystery attaching to the girl herself. It might cover, for all one knew, a very labyrinthine intrigue of vengeance and spoliation.

And then in a moment my thought swerved, and the memory of Cleghorn returned to me—Cleghorn, white and abject, grasping the rail of the dock. Cleghorn fainting where he stood. What terrific emotion had thus prostrated the man, relieved from an intolerable oppression? Was mere revulsion of feeling enough to account for it, or was it conceivable that he too was, after all, concerned in the business, a third party, and overwhelmed under his sense of unexpected escape from what he had regarded as his certain doom?

I was getting into deep waters. I stood aghast before my own imagination. How was I to deal with its creations?

It was an acute problem, my decision on which was reached only after long deliberation. It was this: I would keep all my suspicions and theories to myself until I could confide them to the ear of the Counsel engaged on Hugo's behalf.

In the meantime some relief from the moral stagnation of Wildshott had become apparent with the opening of the day succeeding the inquiry. That deadly lethargy which had followed the first stunning blow was in part shaken off, and the household, though in hushed vein, began to resume its ordinary duties. Sir Calvin himself reappeared, white and drawn, but showing no disposition to suffer commiseration in any form, or any relaxation from his iron discipline. The events of the next few days I will pass over at short length. They yielded some pathos, embraced some preparations, included a visit. I may mention here a decision of the General's which a little, in one direction, embarrassed my designs. Just or unjust to the man, he would not have Cleghorn back. One could not wonder, perhaps, over his determination; yet I could have preferred for the moment not to lose sight of my suspect. We heard later that the butler, as if anticipating his dismissal, had gone, directly after his release, up to London, where, no doubt, he could be found if wanted. I had to console myself with that reflection. The valet, Louis, we came to learn about the same time, had taken refuge, pending his master's return—he had got to hear somehow of the Baron's absence—with an excellent Roman Catholic lady, who had pitied his case and offered him employment. He had no desire, very certainly, to return to a house where he had suffered so much.

Of a visit I was allowed to pay my friend in the prison I do not wish to say a great deal. The interview took place in a room with a grating between us and a warder present. The circumstances were inexpressibly painful, but I think I felt them more than Hugo. He was cheery and optimistic—outspoken too in a way that touched me to the quick.

'I want to tell you everything, Viv.,' he said hurriedly, below his breath; 'I want to get it all off my chest. You guessed the truth, of course; but not the whole of it. There was one thing—I'd like you to tell my father, if you will—it makes me out a worse cur than I admitted, but I can't feel clean till I've said it. It began this way. I surprised the girl over some tricky business—God forgive her and me; that's enough said about it!—and I bargained with her for my silence on terms. I'll say for myself that I knew already she was fond of me; but it doesn't excuse my behaving like a damned cad. Anyhow, she fell to it easily enough; and then the fat was in the fire. It blazed up when she discovered—you know. It seemed to turn her mad. She must be made honest—my wife—or she would kill herself, she said. I believe in the end I should have married her, if—Viv., old man, I loved that girl, I loved her God knows with what passion; yet, I tell you, my first emotion on discovering her dead was one of horrible relief. Call me an inhuman beast, if you will. I dare say it's true, but there it is. I was in such a ghastly hole, and my nerves had gone all to pieces over it. If I had done what she wished, it meant the end of everything for her and me. I knew the old man, and that he would never forgive such an alliance—would ruin and beggar us. I had been on a hellish rack, and was suddenly off it, and the momentary sensation was beyond my own control. Does the admission seem to blacken the case against me? I believe I know you better than to think so. I'm only accounting in a way for my behaviour on the night of the—the——. Why, all the time, at the bottom of my soul, I was crying on my dead darling to come back to me, that I could not live without her. O, Viv.! why is it made so difficult for some men to go straight?'

He paused a moment, his head leaned down on his hands, which held on to the bars. I did not speak. His allusion to the 'tricky business' he had surprised the girl over was haunting my mind. How did it consort with my latent suspicion of a mystery somewhere?

'Hugh,' I said presently, 'you won't tell me what she was doing when you first——'

'No, I won't,' he interrupted me bluntly. 'Think what she became to me, and allow me a little decency. I've told you all that's necessary—more than I had ever intended to tell you when I promised you my confidence. I'm sorry for that, Viv. God knows if I had spoken to you at first it might have altered things. But I couldn't make up my mind while a chance existed—or I thought it did. She put me out of my last conceit that day, swearing she was going to expose the whole story. It was all true that I said. She may have been waiting there on the chance of my passing: I swear I didn't know it. We had our few words, and I gave my promise and passed on. The evidence about the shot was a black lie. I can say no more than that.'

I give his words, and leave them at that, making no comment and drawing no conclusions. If his admission as to his first emotion on learning of his release might repel some people, I can only plead that one man's psychology, like one man's meat, may be impossible of digestion by another. I found it, I confess, hard to stomach myself; but then I had never been a spoilt and wayward only son.

We talked some little time longer on another matter, which had indeed been the main object of my visit—the nature of, and Counsel for, his defence. I had undertaken, at Sir Calvin's instance, to go to London and interview his lawyers on the subject, thus sparing the father the bitter trial of a preliminary explanation, and I told Hugo of my intention.

'What a good fellow you are, Viv.,' he said fondly. 'I don't deserve that you should take all this trouble, about me.'

'If I can only appear to justify my own indecent persistence in remaining on to help,' I said stiffly, 'I shall feel satisfied.'

I could not forbear the little thrust: that wounding remark of his had never ceased to rankle in me.

'Well, I asked for it,' he said, with a flushed smile. 'But don't nurse a grudge any longer. I was hardly accountable for what I said in those days: a man hardly is, you know, when he's on the rack.'

'O! I forgive you,' I answered. 'There's a virtue sometimes in pretending to a thick skin——' and we parted on good terms.

My journey to London was arranged for the morrow after the interview. I had one of my passages with Audrey before going. I don't know what particular prejudice it was the girl cherished against me, but she would never let us be friends. I saw scarcely anything of her in these days, and when we did meet she would hardly speak to me. I could have wished even to propitiate her, because it was plain enough to me how the poor thing was suffering. Her pride and her affections—both of which, I think, were really deep-seated—were cruelly involved in the disgrace befallen them. They found some little compensation, perhaps, in the improved relations established between her father and herself. Circumstances had brought these two into closer and more sympathetic kinship; it was as if they had discovered between them a father and a daughter; and so far poor Hugo's catastrophe had wrought good. But still the girl's loneliness of heart was an evident thing. Pathetically grateful as she might be for the change in her father's attitude towards her, she could never get nearer to that despotic nature than its own limitations would permit.

'You are pining for your Baron, I suppose,' I said on this day, goaded at last to speak by her insufferable manner towards me. The taunt was effective, at least, in opening her mouth.

'You are always hinting unpleasant things about the Baron, Mr Bickerdike,' she answered, turning sharply on me. 'Don't you think it a little mean to be continually slandering him in that underhand way?'

I saw it was still to be battle, and prepared my guard.

'That is your perverse way of looking at it, Audrey,' I answered quietly. 'From my point of view, it is just trying to help my friends.'

'By maligning them to their enemies?' she answered. 'I suppose that was why you confided to Sergeant Ridgway all you knew about Hugh's affairs?'

It gave me a certain shock. I knew that she had read a full report of the proceedings, but not that she, or any one, had drawn such a cruel conclusion from it.

'Confided, is the word, Audrey,' I answered, with difficulty levelling my voice. 'I can't be held responsible for that breach of trust. Yes, thank you for that smile; but I know what was in my heart, and it was to help Hugh over a difficult place I foresaw for him. My weakness was in thinking other men as honourable as myself. But, anyhow, your stab is rather misplaced, since I wasn't "maligning," as you say, my friends to their enemies, but the other way about, as I see it.'

'Well, don't see it,' she said insolently. 'Perhaps—just consider it as possible—I may happen to know more about the Baron than you do.'

'O! I dare say he's been yarning to you' I answered, 'and quite plausibly enough to a credulous listener. But, if I were you, I wouldn't attach too much importance to what he tells you about himself. I'll say no more as to my own suspicions, though events have not modified them, I can assure you; but I will say that regard for your brother should at least incline you to go warily in a matter which may have a very strong bearing on his interests.'

She stood conning me a moment or two in silence.

'Please to be explicit,' she said then. 'Do you mean that you believe the Baron to be the real criminal?'

I positively jumped.

'Good Heavens!' I cried. 'Don't make me responsible for such wild statements. I mean only that, in the face of your brother's awful situation, you should be scrupulously careful to do nothing which might seem to impair the efforts of those who are working to throw new light on it. I don't say the Baron is the guilty one, but it is possible your brother is not.'

'Is that all?' she cried. She stepped right up to me, so that our faces were near touching. 'Mr Vivian Bickerdike,' she said, 'Hugh did not commit that murder. I tell you, in case you do not know.'

'I never said he did,' I answered, involuntarily backing a little, her eyes were so pugnacious. 'How you persist in misreading me! I only want to be prepared against all contingencies.'

'Amongst which, I suppose, is the Baron's wicked attempt to exculpate himself to me, by encouraging my suspicions against Hughie?' She laughed, with a sort of defiant sob in her voice. 'I'll tell you what I truly think: that he is a better friend to my brother than you are; and I hope he'll come back soon; and, when he does, I shall go on listening to and believing in him, as I do think I believe in no one else. And in the meantime I'll tell you this for your comfort: he is really English, and really the Baron Le Sage. He takes his title from an estate in the Cevennes, which was left him by a maternal uncle; and he is very rich, and I dare say very eccentric in wanting to do good with his money; and that is enough for the present.'

'And he plays chess for half-crowns and steals private papers!' I cried to myself scornfully, as she turned and left me.

Poor foolish creature. It was no good my trying to convince her, and I gave up the attempt then and there.

CHAPTER XVII

AND AUDREY

Audrey had been starting for a walk when detained by the interview recorded in the last chapter. She left it burning with indignation and passionate resentment. That this man could call himself a friend of Hughie, and conceive for one moment the possibility of his guilt! He pretended to be his intimate, and did not even know him. How she hated such Laodicean allies! And that he should dare to try to involve her in his doubts and half concessions! It was infamous. It had needed all her sense of the confidence her father placed in him, and of the authority to act for him which he had delegated to him, to stop her from saying something so cuttingly rude that even he could not have consented to swallow the insult and remain on.

She did Mr Bickerdike, as we know, a sad injustice. The truth was, one suspects, that in all this business of his friend's exoneration the unhappy gentleman was flying in the face of his own conscience, and doing it for pure loyalty's sake. He could not quite bring himself to argue against appearances in the Justice's sense; but he hoped, and he tried to take a rosy view of his own hopes. It was not to be expected of him, or of his disposition, that he should feel or express that blind and incorrigible staunchness to an ideal natural in a devoted blood-relation; yet it should be counted to him that he was staunch too, and on behalf of a cause which in his heart he mistrusted. Perhaps his suspicions anent the Baron were conceived more in a desperate attempt to discover a way out for his friend, than in any spirit of strong belief in their justification. But Audrey was prejudiced against him, and the prejudices of young people are like their loves, unreasoning and devastating.

She was very miserable, poor girl—proud, friendless, solitary. Essentially companionable by nature, the social restrictions of her state, man-administered, had deprived her of all warm intimacies among her own sex. She was not allowed to know those she would have liked to know; the few selected for her acquaintance she detested. There was none to whom she could appeal for understanding or sympathy. Repellent to them all in her pride, was it likely they would spare her in her humiliation? The very thought made her hold her head high, and filled her heart with a hard defiance. Nobody cared, nobody believed but herself and her father. Poor Hughie, to be so admired and courted in prosperity, so slandered and abandoned in adversity! Never mind; the truth would be known presently, and then the humiliation would be theirs who had unwittingly betrayed their own abject natures.

She crossed the high road, and, entering the thickets beyond, proceeded in a direction almost due west. That way lay the least association with all the squalid events of the past few weeks, and she knew that if she pushed on over the boundaries of Wildshott, she would come presently to a place of quiet woods and streams and easeful solitudes. She wanted to avoid any possibility of Contact with her fellow-creatures, and to be alone. It was a glowing September day, when everything, save her own unquiet heart, seemed resolved into an eternal serenity of peace and happiness never again to be broken. The coney had lain down with the fox and the stoat; the ageing bracken had renewed its youth in a sparkling vesture of diamond-mist; the birds were singing as if a dream-spring had surprised them in the very thought of hybernating. Presently, going among trees, Audrey came out on the lip of a little shelving dingle, at whose foot ran a full bountiful stream watering a wooded valley. And at once she paused, because the figure of a small sturdy boy was visible below her, busy about a spot where a tiny fall plunged frothing and merry-making into a pool which it tried to brim and could not. She paused, watching the figure; and suddenly, driven by some inexplicable impulse, she was going quickly down the slope to speak to it. It was a revulsion of feeling, a sob for a voice in the wilderness, a cry to give herself just one more chance before she flung away the world and took loneliness for her eternal doom.

The boy, hearing her coming, lifted his head, then rose to his feet. He had been engaged over a fly rod, which he held in his hand.

'Mornin', Miss,' he said, grinning and saluting.

'Are you fishing, Jacob?'

'Me and the master, miss. He'll be back in a minute. He'n been whipping the stream up-ways.'

Her lip curled, ever so slightly. There might be better occupation than fishing for a man who cared.

'He's thinking,' said Jake.

'Thinking!' she echoed scornfully.

'Yes'm. He says to me, he says, "Jacob, fishing helps a man to think; and what d'you suppose I've been thinking about, Jacob?"'

'Well?'

'"Why, who it was as killed Annie Evans,"' he says. The boy looked up shyly. 'We knows anyhow as it weren't Master Hugo, Miss.'

'Do you? Did he say that, Jacob?' She spoke softly, with a wonderful new glow about her heart.

'Yes'm,' said the boy. 'He did that. You should ha' heard him yesterday giving Squire Redwood the lie. We was hunting otter, Miss, and was on to his spraints, when Squire said something bad about Master Hugo as caught Sir Francis's ear. He went up to him, he did, and he told him he'd lay his good ash-spear across his shoulders unless he withdrew the expression.'

'Redwood! That great powerful bully!' cried Miss Kennett.

'Yes'm. And Squire looked that frit, it might ha' been a boggle had sudden come to life and faced him. But he did what he was told, and saved his shoulders.'

'He did, he did?' She put her hands up to her throat a moment, as if to strangle the emotion that would not be suppressed, and in the act heard his footstep and turned.

He came with wonder and pleasure in his face.

'Audrey!' he exclaimed; 'what good luck has brought you here?'

'I don't know, Frank,' she answered a little wildly: 'but it is good luck, and I thank it. Why do you, who hate hunting, hunt otters, sir?'

'Because they kill my fish,' he replied promptly.

'And so spoil your thinking, I suppose,' she said.

He seemed to understand in a moment, and his face flushed.

'Jake has been t-talking, has he?' he said. 'Jake, I'm ashamed of you.'

'And did Redwood save his big shoulders?' she asked.

'Jake!' cried his master reproachfully.

She laughed and sobbed together.

'Frank, will you leave your things here, and come a little way with me, please?'

'O, Audrey! You know—not only a little way, if it could be.'

They walked together along the green bank of the stream, from sunlight into luminous shadow, and forth again, parting the branches sometimes, always with the water, like a merry child, running and talking beside them. Suddenly she stopped, and turned upon him.

'If it could be,' she said, repeating his words: 'that is to say, if I had not a murderer for a brother.'

He cried out: 'Good God! What do you mean? Hugh is not a murderer!'

'You declare it—in spite of all, Frank?'

'All what? I know him, and that's enough.'

'For me, for me, yes, and for you! O, Frank!——' she could not keep them back; they came irresistibly, and rolled down her cheeks—'you don't know what you have done, what you have lifted from my heart! And I said you were not a man—like him. O, forgive me, Frank dear!'

'Hush!' he said. He took her arm and tucked it close and comfortable under his, and led her on. 'I am not, if it comes to that,' he said.

'You don't mean that unkindly? No, you never would, of course. But I can be glad to think it now—glad that you are not. He is not good, Frank. I should hate him for what he has done—I can say it to you now—if he were not suffering so dreadfully for what he has not done.'

'I know, Audrey. Poor fellow—for what he has not done. That is the point. How are we going to p-prove it? I have been pushing some private inquiries, for my part, about that mysterious figure seen or not seen by Henstridge on the hill. I can't get it out of my head that there really was such a figure, and that, if we could only t-trace it, we should hold the clue to the riddle.'

'Have you been doing that, Frank? And I thought you had forsaken us like the rest.'

'That was ungenerous of you, Audrey, dear. I should have come and told you, only I was delicate of starting you, perhaps, on a false scent, and thought it better to w-wait till I had something definite to offer.'

'Frank, did you read of the Inquest?'

'I was present at it—in the background.'

'O! Do you remember the master of the poor man who was supposed then——'

'Le Sage? I should think I do. His b-benevolent truthfulness was a thing to wonder over.'

'I think it is. He and I are great friends. He is away for the moment; but when he comes back, I wish you would let me introduce you to him.'

'Why, Audrey, I know him already. Have you forgotten Hanson's cottage and our talk about the poachers? A r-remarkably shrewd old file I thought him.'

'So he is. I have such faith in him somehow. Somehow I feel that all will come right when he returns. I do wish he would. It is all so dreadful waiting. Will you tell him about your theory, when he does?'

'Of course I will. Don't go yet, Audrey.'

She had stopped.

'Yes, Frank, I am going. I feel that every moment taken from your fishing is robbing Hughie of a chance.'

'Audrey—after what you've said—poor Hugh—I'll not be thought a man at his expense—but—are you going to let me hope just a little again?'

'Are you serious, dear? His sister? Think.'

'A m-martyr's sister—the greater honour mine.'

She could not help a little laugh over the picture of Hugh a martyr.

'I love you, Frank,' she said, 'but not quite that way.'

'Well, I love you all ways,' he answered, 'so that any little defect in yours is provided for.'

'How good you are to me!' she sighed. 'If it's to be thought of, it must not be on any consideration till Hugh is cleared.'

'Agreed!' he cried joyously. 'Then we are as g-good as engaged already.'

'You dear!' she said, and jumped at him. 'I will kiss you once for that. No, put your hands down—handy-pandy-sugary-candy, and—there, sir! And now please to go back to your fishing.'

She smiled to him and hurried away, a fine pink on her cheek. After the rain, fine weather; after despair, reassurance. She was not alone; she had these two good staunch friends, Frank and little Jacob, to stand by her. Her heart was singing with the birds, sparkling with the mist. When she reached home she found another comfort to greet her. Mr Bickerdike had already started for London. Then she did a queer, shame-faced thing, in a queer shame-faced way. She got out some old dog's-eared music, long forgotten childish exercises, and sat down to the piano to try if she could remember them. She played very softly in a young stumbling fashion, all stiff fingers and whispering lips. It did not come naturally to her, and she had long arrears of neglect to make good. But she persevered. If it was a question of qualifying herself for the intellectual life, she must not throw up the sponge at the first round. After a strenuous hour she had more or less mastered No. 1 Exercise for two hands in Czerny's first course, and had got so far on the road to Audley.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE BARON RETURNS

(From the Bickerdike MS.)

I had a long and interesting interview with Sir Calvin's lawyers, when I used the occasion to unburden my mind of some of the misgivings which had been disturbing it. I spoke theoretically, of course, and without prejudice, and no doubt considerably impressed my hearers, who were very earnest with me to keep my own counsel in the matter until one of the partners could run down—which he would do in the course of a few days—to examine into all the circumstances of the case on the spot; and, above all, not to let the Baron guess that he was in any way an object of my suspicion. They had, of course, heard of the murder and its sequel, and had been expecting their client's instructions for the defence. They were very sympathetic, but naturally cautious about advancing any opinion one way or the other at this stage of the affair, and the gist of the matter was relegated for discussion in diem. I do not, however, describe the interview at greater length for the simple reason that, as things came to turn out, it bore no eventual fruit. But that will appear.

I stayed three nights in town, and returned to Wildshott on the fourth day from my leaving it. Going to Sir Calvin's study straightway, and being bidden to enter, what was my chagrin and astonishment to find the Baron already in the room before me, having anticipated my own return by some twelve hours or so. He was seated talking with his host—on some matter of grave import, I at once assumed, from the serious expression on the faces of the two. Even Le Sage's habitual levity appeared subdued, while as to the General, I thought he looked like a man in process of rallying from some great shock or recent illness. He sat with his head hunched into his shoulders, all the starch gone from him, and with a fixed white stare in his eyes, as if he were battling with some inward torment. What had the man been saying or doing to him? My gorge rose; I was seized with a fierce anger and foreboding. Was I witnessing the effects of that very villain blow so apprehended by me as in course of preparing when that significant journey to London was first announced? My eyes, instinctively hawking for evidence, pounced on the embrasure which contained the safe. The curtain was drawn aside, the door open; and on the table near Sir Calvin stood a packet of papers, the tape which had bound them fallen to the carpet. Had he by chance been learning for the first time of his loss—and too late? I was tired, and my temper, perhaps, was short. In my infinite disgust at discovering how this man had stolen a march on me, I made little attempt to control it. 'What, you back!' I exclaimed, for my only greeting.

'And you!' he responded placidly. 'This is a happy coincidence, Mr Bickerdike.'

I passed him, and went to shake Sir Calvin by the hand. The look of my poor friend as he gave me formal welcome inflamed my anger to that degree that I could contain myself no longer. I felt, too, that the moment had come; that it would be criminal in myself to postpone it longer; that I must give this fellow to understand that his villainy had not passed wholly undetected and unrecorded. Forgetting, I confess, in my exasperation, my promise to the lawyers, I turned on him in an irresistible impulse of passion.

'How, sir,' I said, 'have you succeeded in reducing my friend the General to this state?'

There followed a moment's startled silence, and then Sir Calvin stiffened, and sat up, and cleared his throat.

'Bickerdike,' he said, 'don't be a damned ass!'

'That's as it may be, sir,' I said, now in a towering rage. 'You shall judge of the extent of my folly when you have heard what I insist upon making known to you.'

He sat looking at me in a frowning, wondering sort of way; then shrugged his shoulders.

'Very well—if you insist,' he said.

'I have no alternative,' I answered. 'If I am to do my duty, as I consider it, at this crucial pass, when the life of a dear friend hangs in the balance, all stuff of punctilio must be let go to the winds. If I hold the opinion that an evil influence is at work in this house, operating somehow to sinister but mysterious ends, it would be wickedness on my part to withhold the evidence on which that opinion is founded. I do think such an influence is at work, and I claim the condition in which I now find you as some justification for my belief.'

'You are quite mistaken,' said my host, 'utterly mistaken.'

I bowed. 'Very well, sir; and I only wish I were as mistaken about the character of this gentleman whom you have admitted to your acquaintance and your hospitality.'

Sir Calvin looked at Le Sage, who sat still all this time with a perfectly unruffled countenance. He laughed now good humouredly, and bent forward to take a pinch of snuff.

'Come, come, Mr Bickerdike,' he expostulated, brushing the dust from his waistcoat; 'of what do you accuse me?'

'That is soon said,' I answered, 'and said more easily than one can explain the general impression of underhandedness one receives from you. I intend to be explicit, and I accuse you to your face of having secretly left your room one midnight, when the house was asleep' (I gave the date) 'and stolen a paper from Sir Calvin's desk here.'

He looked at me oddly.

'To be sure,' he said. 'Do you know, Mr Bickerdike, your half-face looking round the post that night reminded me so ludicrously of those divided portraits one sees in picture-restorers' shops that I was near bursting into laughter.'

'You may have eyes in your ears,' I cried, rallying from the shock; 'but that is not an answer to my charge.'

He turned to Sir Calvin: 'The sixty-four Knight move problem: you remember: I told you that, not being able to sleep, I had come down to borrow it from your desk, and work it out in the small hours.'

The General nodded, and looked at me.

'Upon my word, Bickerdike,' he said, 'you mustn't bring these unfounded charges. I don't know what's put this stuff about the Baron into your head; but you must understand that he's my very good friend, and much better known to me than he seems to be to you. Come, if I were you, I'd just apologize and say no more about it.'

It was the collapse of my life. I will own to it fairly, and save my credit at least for a sense of humour. To think that all this time I had been building such a structure on such a foundation! I was bitterly mortified, bitterly humbled; but I trust that I did the gentlemanly thing in at once accepting Sir Calvin's advice. I went straight up to the Baron and apologized.

'It seems I've been making a fool of myself,' I said.

'And I know how that must distress you,' he answered heartily. 'Think no more about it. Your motive has been all through an excellent one—to help your friend at somebody else's expense; and if I've failed you at a pinch, it's not for want of a real good try on your part. And as to my underhand ways——'

'O, they necessarily disappear with the rest,' I interrupted him. 'When one's moon-stricken one sees a bogey in every bush.'

'Well, well,' said Sir Calvin impatiently. 'That's enough said. We hadn't quite done our talk when you came in, Bickerdike. Shut the door when you go out, there's a good fellow.'

The hint was plain to starkness. I slunk away, feeling my tail between my legs. In the hall, to add to my discomfiture, I came upon Audrey. Her face fell on seeing me.

'O, have you come back?' she said in a discharmed voice, fairly paying me with my own bad coin.

'Yes,' I said: 'and now I have, everybody seems to love me.'

She looked at me queerly.

'The Baron has returned too: isn't that delightful?' She laughed and moved away, then came again, on a mischievous thought: 'O, by the by! There was another thing I might have told you about him the other day. All the half-crowns he wins at chess he puts into a benevolent fund for poor chess-players. He says a half-crown on a game is like a Benedictine—neither too much nor too little. It is just enough to bring out the brilliancy in a player without intoxicating him.'

I said meekly, 'Yes, Audrey. I expect he is very right; and it is a good thought of his for the poor Professors.'

She stood staring at me a moment, said 'What is the matter with you?' then turned away, moving much more slowly than before.

All the wind seemed knocked out of me by this blow, and I remained in a very depressed mood. It was my greatest mortification to realize on what vain and empty illusions I had been building a case for my friend. I will do myself so much justice. But whatever I planned seemed to go wrong. I had better retire, I thought, and leave it to better heads than mine to grapple with the problem. Nor did my amour-propre achieve any particular reinstatement for itself from my interview with Sir Calvin on the subject of my journey, made entirely on his behalf. I found him, when at length he called me to it, very distrait, and I thought not particularly interested in what I had to tell him. He seemed to listen attentively, but in fact his answers proved that he had done nothing of the sort. Everything since my return appeared somehow wrong and peculiar. It might have struck one almost as if a cloud had passed away, and a threatened tempest been forgotten. And yet Hugo was in his prison, and nothing new that I could see had happened. I told his father, as he had asked me to do, about the circumstances of his wrong-doing, and even in that failed greatly to interest the General. He did not appear to be particularly shocked. No doubt his principles in such respects were old-fashioned, and took for their text that licentious proverb which, in the name of love and war, exempts a gentleman from those bonds of truth and honour which alone make him one. He was in a strange state altogether, distraught, nervous, excited by turns, and yet always with a look about him which I should have described as exultant pride at high tension. What was the meaning of everything?

During the following day or two I kept myself studiously in the background, proffering no opinions on anything, and only pleading mutely to be put to any use I could reasonably serve. My attitude commended itself to Audrey at last. 'Frank and the Baron,' she once said to me, 'have been meeting and having a long talk together. I wonder if you will disapprove, Mr Bickerdike?'

'Two heads are better than one,' I answered, 'and as good as three when the Baron's is counted in. I'm not sure you weren't right, Audrey, and that I'm not a worse judge of character than I supposed.'

She looked at me in that queer way of hers.

'That's jolly decent of you,' she said; 'and so I'll say the same to you. It's something to be a gentleman, after all.'

Cryptic, but meant to be propitiatory. I forgave her. She had recovered her spirits wonderfully. She knew, or felt, I think, that something was in the air, though she could not tell what, and it made her confident and happy. I fancy it was her dear friend the Baron who kept her on that prick of expectancy, without quite letting her into the secret. Sometimes now she would even condescend to speak with me.

'Do you know,' she said one day, 'that Sergeant Ridgway is coming down again from Scotland Yard to see us?'

'No!' I exclaimed. 'He can't have the atrocious bad taste.'

'O, but he is!' she said. 'The First Commissioner, or the Public Prosecutor, or the Lord High Executioner, or somebody, isn't satisfied with Henstridge's evidence, and he's got to come down and go through all that part of it again. He's to be here to-morrow to see my father at two o'clock.'

'Well,' I said, 'I hope we shan't run across one another, that's all.'

'No,' she answered, in a rather funny way: 'I don't suppose you exactly love him.'

I will say no more, since I have reached the threshold of that extraordinary event which was to falsify at a blow every theory which I, in common with hundreds of others, had built up and elaborated about the Wildshott Murder Case.

CHAPTER XIX

THE DARK HORSE

Sergeant Ridgway, turning up punctually to his appointment, was shown into Sir Calvin's study, where he found, not his former employer, but the Baron Le Sage, seated alone. Characteristically, the detective showed as little surprise at seeing who awaited him as he did embarrassment over his return to a house whose hospitality he had, according to Mr Bickerdike, so cruelly abused. He could have understood, no doubt, no reason for his feeling any. His commission had been to discover the murderer of Annie Evans, and, according to the best of his lights, he had executed that commission. It was not his fault if it had led him in a direction tragically counter to the expectations of his employer. He had been engaged for a particular purpose, and he had dutifully pursued that purpose—inevitably, if unfortunately, to a regrettable end. But sentiment could not be allowed to affect the detectival philosophy, or the Law became a dead letter. In professional matters he was, and had to be, a simple automaton; wherefore no sign of uneasiness was visible in his expression as he entered the room, nor was there discernible there a trace of animus of any sort. He was quite prepared, if necessary, to own himself in the wrong. His high superiors had expressed themselves as dissatisfied with a certain portion of the evidence. Very well, he would bow to their scruples, and make a thorough re-investigation of that part of the case. He understood that the landlord of the Red Deer inn had been warned, and was to meet him here this afternoon. Personally, he did not hope much from the interview, or attach great importance to a rumour which he understood had got about since the Inquest. But whether that rumour embodied a fact, or proved on examination as unsubstantial as most canards of its kind, the finding of the murderer of Annie Evans remained, as it had been, his sole object and purpose in undertaking the case.

All this, or the moral gist of it, the detective took it upon himself to explain to the Baron in the course of the brief conversation which ensued between them. He spoke drily, deliberately, as if measuring out his words, rather with the air of plain-stating a professional view-point, and instructing Counsel, than of asking for sympathy. His hearer made a curious study of him the while, wondering and calculating why he was being chosen the recipient of this extra-judicial confidence. Perhaps, after all, there was a thought more embarrassment under the surface than the other cared to admit, perhaps just a hint of a human desire to make a friend in a difficult pass. For the rest, it was the familiar figure of their knowledge which had returned upon them—keen, handsome, dark-eyed, economical of speech, potent in suggestion of a certain inscrutable order of mentality, and exhibiting, as always, that faint discrepancy between mind and material—distinction in the one, a touch of theatricalism and vulgarity in the other.

Le Sage took him up on one point. The Baron, who was looking extraordinarily pink and cheery, had already explained that Sir Calvin was engaged with a visitor in another room, and had asked him to receive and entertain the Sergeant during the short period of his absence.

'Am I to be allowed to opine,' he said with a smile, 'that the rumour to which you refer bears upon your instructions, and is connected somehow with Mr Cleghorn's mysterious double?'

The detective looked at the speaker curiously.

'Meaning?' he said.

'Meaning that supposititious figure on the hill, about which Mr Fyler was so inquisitive at the Inquest, but which he seemed most unaccountably to overlook before the magistrates.'

'Ah!' said the detective drily, 'I expect he'd come to the conclusion, which was my own, that it wasn't really worth another thought.'

'O! so I'm mistaken in fancying any association between that and your particular mission? Well, well, it shall be a lesson to my self-sufficiency. By the by, Sergeant, we've never had our long-deferred game of chess. What do you say to a duel now while we're waiting?'

'No time, sir. Chess takes a lot of thought.'

'So it does. But it can be sampled in a problem. These tests are rather a weakness of mine. Look here,'—he led the way to the window, which, it being a mild warm day, stood wide open, and in which was placed the usual table with the board on it, and half a dozen pieces on the squares—'there's a neat one, I flatter myself. I was at work on it when you came in—black Knight (or dark horse, shall we call it?) to play, and mate in three moves. Take the opposition, and see if you can prevent it.'

He moved the Knight; mechanically the detective put down his hand and responded with a Bishop: at the Baron's third move the other looked up, and looked his adversary full in the face. Le Sage had stepped back. He had a way sometimes of thrusting his hands into the tail pockets of his coat, and bringing them round in front of him. So he stood now, with a curious smile on his lips.

'Dark horse wins,' said he. 'My mate, I think, Sergeant John Ridgway.'

The door opened with the word, spoken pretty loudly, and there came quickly into the room an inspector and two constables of the local police, followed by Sir Calvin and another gentleman.

'I have the pleasure,' said M. le Baron to the new-comers, 'of introducing to you the murderer of Annie Evans, alias Ivy Mellor.'

He had hardly spoken when the detective turned and leapt for the open window. The table, which stood between him and escape, went down with a crash: he had his foot on the sill, when a shot slammed out, and he stumbled and fell back into the room. The Baron's bullet had caught him neatly on the heel of his shoe, knocking his leg from under him at the critical moment. Before he could rise the police were on him, and he was handcuffed and helpless.

'A clean shot, though I say it,' said the Baron coolly, as he returned the revolver to his pocket. 'No, he's not hurt, though I may have galled his kibe. Look out for him there!'

They had need to. They had got the man to his feet, and were holding him as if in doubt whether he needed support or not, when he resolved the question for them, and in unmistakable fashion. This way and that, foaming, snarling, tearing with his manacled hands, now diving head-foremost, now nearly free, and caught back again into the human maelstrom—three stout men as they were, they had a hard ado to keep and restrain him. But they got him exhausted and quiet at last, and he stood among then torn and dishevelled, his chest heaving convulsively, dribbling at the mouth, his face like nothing human.

'You, you!' he gasped, glaring at his denouncer, 'if I had only guessed—if I had only known!'

'It would have been short shrift for me, I expect,' said the Baron shrewdly.

'It would,' said the prisoner—'that inn-keeper! It was you contrived the trap, was it! You damned, smiling traitor!'

The mortal vehemence he put into it! 'What I had always suspected, but could never quite unmask,' thought Le Sage. 'The dramatic fire, vicious and dangerous—banked down, but breaking loose now and again and roaring into uncontrollable flame!'

The second gentleman—who was in fact the Chief Constable of the County—put in a reproving word:—

'Come, Ridgway, keep a civil tongue in your head, my man.'

The detective laughed like a devil.

'Civility, you old fool! If words could blister him, I'd ransack hell's language for them till he curled and shrivelled up before me.'

'Well,' said the gentleman reasonably, 'you're not improving your case, you know, by all this.'

'My case!' cried the other. 'I've got none. It was always a gamble, and I knew it well enough from the first. But I'd have pulled it through, if it hadn't been for him—I'd have pulled it through and hanged my fine gentleman—his son there—as sure as there's a God of Vengeance in the world.'

He wrenched himself in the hold that gripped him, and, bare-chested, snarling like a dog in a leash, flung forward to denounce the father:—

'Curse you, do you hear? I'd have ruined and hanged that whelp of yours as surely as he ruined and murdered the girl that was mine till he debauched and stole her from me. When I put the shot into her, it was as truly his hand that fired it as if his finger had pulled on the trigger. She'd betrayed me, and it was him that led her to it, and by doing so made himself responsible for the consequences.'

The Inspector thought it right here to utter the usual official warning. It was curious to note in his tone, as he did so, a suspicion of deference, almost of apology, such as might characterise a schoolboy forced to bear witness against his headmaster. Ridgway turned on him with a jeering oath:—

'You can save your breath, Cully. That devil spoke true. It was I killed Ivy Mellor; and him, that old dog's son, that ought to hang for it.'

M. le Baron spoke up: 'Is it necessary to go further, gentlemen, since he confesses to the double crime?'

'I think not,' said the Chief Constable. 'Remove him, Inspector.'

The three closed about the prisoner, who submitted quietly to being taken away. But he forced a stop a moment as he passed by Sir Calvin—who, greatly overcome, had sunk into a chair, the Baron leaning above him—and spoke, with some fault return to reason and self-control:—

'I don't know how much you think you've found out. You've got to prove it, mind. No confession counts to hang a man, unless there's proof to back it.'

'Par exemple,' said the Baron, looking up, 'a skeleton key, a coat button, a packet of letters, a false character, a falser impersonation, a proposed disinheritance, and, to end all, a confederate murdered, and the plot to hang an innocent man for the deed!—altogether a very pretty little list, my friend.'

Ridgway, to those who held him, seemed to stagger slightly. He stood gazing with haggard eyes into the face of this deadly jocular Nemesis, who, so utterly unsuspected by him, had all this time, it appeared, while he smiled and smiled, been silently weaving his toils about his feet. He had not a word to answer; but a sort of stupor of horror grew into his expression, as if for the first time a cold mortal fear were beginning to possess him. Then suddenly he stiffened erect, turned, and passed mutely out of the room.

The Chief Constable lingered behind a moment.

'Come, Calvin, old man,' he said: 'pull yourself together. The thing's over, and well over, thanks to your wonderful friend here—by George, as remarkable a shot, sir, as you are a strategist! I don't know which I admired most, the way you stalked your quarry, or the way you brought him down.'

'Really quite simple little matters of deduction and sighting,' answered the Baron, beaming deprecation, 'if you make a practice, as I do, of never loosening your bolt in either case till you're sure of your aim.'

'Ha!' said the gentleman. 'Well, I congratulate you, Calvin, and I congratulate us all, on this happy termination to a very distressing business. I hope now the order of release won't be long in coming, and that your poor unfortunate lad will be restored to you before many hours have passed.'

A pallid, but wondering, face peered round the door.

'May I come in?' said Mr Bickerdike.

CHAPTER XX

THE BARON LAYS HIS CARDS ON THE TABLE

Sir Francis Orsden and the Baron Le Sage walked slowly up the kitchen garden together. It was a windless autumn morning, such serene and gracious weather as had prevailed now for some days, and the primroses under the wall were already putting forth a little precocious blossom or two, feeling for the Spring. There was a balm in the air and a softness in the soil which communicated themselves to the human fibre, reawakening it as it were to a sense of new life out of old distress. Such feelings men might have who have landed from perilous seas upon a smiling shore.

The two talked earnestly as they strolled, on a subject necessarily the most prominent in their minds. Said Le Sage:—

'Are we not a little apt to judge a man by his business—as that a lawyer must be unfeeling, a butcher cruel, a doctor humane, and a sweep dishonest? But it is not his profession which makes a man what he is, but the man who makes his profession what it appears in him. A lawyer does not appropriate trust funds because he is a lawyer, but because he is a gambler: so, a detective is not impeccable because he is a detective, but because he is an honest man. You wonder that he can be at the same time a detective and a desperate criminal. Well, I don't.'

'Ah! You've got a reason?'

'Just this. What is in that lawyer's mind when he steals? Imagination. It leaps the dark abyss to wing for the golden peaks beyond, where, easy restitution passed, it sees its dreams fulfilled. What was in Ridgway's mind when he planned his tremendous venture? Imagination again. It may be the angel or the devil of a piece, spur a Pegasus or ride a broomstick. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker may any of them have it, and still be the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker. The last thing of which a lawyer, as a lawyer, would be guilty, would be the bringing himself within the grasp of the law: the last thing of which a detective, as a detective, would be guilty would be the making himself a subject for detection. What induces either of them, then, to sin against the logic of his own profession? Imagination alone and always, the primary impulse to everything that is good and bad in the world. A man may be blessed with it, or he may be cursed; contain it in his being like the seed of beauty or the seed of dipsomania.'

'And Ridgway like the latter?'

'It would seem so. The man is by nature a romantic. I once got a glimpse of the truth in a conversation I had with him. What flashed upon me, in that momentary lifting of the veil, was a revelation of fierce vision, immense passion. It was like taking a stethoscope to a man's heart and surprising its secret.'

'A d-diseased heart, eh?'

'One may say so—diseased with Imagination, which is like an aneurism, often unsuspected and undetectable, until, put to some sudden strain, it bursts in blood.'

'You mean, in this case——?'

'I mean that the murder was not premeditated; that is my sure conviction. It was the result of a sudden frenzied impulse finding the means ready to its hand. The man had plotted, but not that. Why should he, since it meant the ruin of his visions?'

'Ah! You forget, Baron——'

'We will come to that. What I want to impress upon you at the outset is that Ridgway was at soul a gambler. Circumstance, accident, may have made him a detective: if it had made him a bishop it would have been all the same. That fire, that energy, kept under and banked down, would as surely have roared into flame the moment Fate drew out the damper. That moment came, and with it the vision. He saw in it certain hazards, leading to certain ruin or certain fortune; like a gambler he counted the cost and took the odds, since they seemed worth to him. What he failed to count on was a certain contingency which a less imaginative man than he might have foreseen—the possible treachery of a confederate.'

'And such a confederate.'

'Exactly. It was to sin most vilely against all his instinctive code; and worse—it was to stab him with a double-edged dagger.'

'I th-think I can pity him for that.'

'And so can I; and for this reason. Coolness is, or should be, the first quality of a gambler; gamblers, for that reason, do not easily fall in love. But when they do fall they fall hard, they fall headlong, they do not so much fall as plunge, as a gambler plunges, all heaven or all hell the stake. There is no doubt that Ridgway's passion for this girl was a true gambler's passion. To gain or lose her meant heaven or hell to him.'

'I can quite believe it, Baron. But, d-damn it! how much longer are you going to keep me on tenter-hooks?'

Le Sage laughed. They had been strolling, and pausing, and strolling again, until they had approached by degrees the upper boundary of the estate, where, amid great bushes of lavender and sweet marjoram, stood a substantial thatched summer-house, cosily convenient for the view. 'Let us go and sit in there,' he said, 'and I will unfold my tale without further preamble.'

As he spoke a figure dodging about among the raspberry canes came into view.

'Hullo!' cried Orsden: 'Bickerdike. What's he doing here?'

'I think I know,' said the Baron. He went over to the elaborately unconscious gentleman—who, pretending to see him for the first time, glanced up with a start and an expression of surprise which would not have deceived a town-idiot—and accosted him genially:—

'Looking for anything, Mr Bickerdike?'

'Just the chance of a late raspberry the birds may have left' was the answer.

'O! I wonder if I can provide any fruit as much to your taste. You haven't a half-hour to spare, I suppose?'

Mr Bickerdike came promptly out from among the canes.

'Certainly,' he said. 'I am quite at your service. What is it?

'Only that I am under promise to Sir Francis to unfold for his delectation the story of a certain mystery, and the steps by which I came to arrive at its elucidation. It occurs to me—but, of course, if it would bore you——'

Not at all. I am all eagerness to hear.'

'Well, it occurs to me that you have a leading title to the information, if you care to claim it, since it was in your company that I found my first clue to the riddle.'

'Was it, indeed, Baron? You excite me immensely. What was that?'

'Let us all go in here, and I will tell you.'

They entered the summer-house, and seated themselves on the semi-hexagonal bench which enclosed a stout rustic table.

'Now,' said Sir Francis, his eyes sparkling, 'out with it every bit, Baron, and give our hungering souls to feed.'

Le Sage took a pinch of snuff, laid the box handy, dusted his plump knees with his handkerchief, and, leaning back and loosely twining his fingers before him, began:—

'I have this, my friends, to say to you both before I start. What I have to tell, my story—and not the most creditable part of it—is fundamentally concerned with one about whom, it might be thought, my obligations as his guest should keep me silent. That would be quite true, were it not for a single consideration so vital as to constitute in itself a complete moral justification of my candour. In a few days, or weeks, the whole will be common property, and that figure subjected, I fear, to a Pharisaic criticism,, which will be none the more bitter for his friends having anticipated it and rallied about him. Moreover, he himself has bound me to no sort of silence in the matter, but, on the contrary, has rather intimated to me that he leaves to my discretion the choice and manner of his defence—or apologia. It may be admitted, perhaps, that he does not see these things quite from our point of view: he derives from another generation and another code of morals: but for what he is, or has been, he has paid a very severe penalty, and we must judge him now by what he has suffered rather than by what he has deserved.

'So much for this confidence; which, I beg you to consider, is still, though unenforced, a confidence, due to you, Sir Francis, through your coming matrimonial connexion with the family'—(Mr Bickerdike, with a start and a positive gape, which lifted his eyebrows, looked across at the young Baronet, who grinned and nodded)—'and to you, my friend, for your unshakable loyalty to a much-tried member of it. And with that I will quit grace and get to the joint.'

The Macuba came once more into action, the box was again laid aside, and the two settled down finally to listen.

'In the following narrative,' said M. le Baron, 'what was and remains conjectural it must be left to events to substantiate. I claim so much, though, for myself, I entertain no doubt as to the truth.'

'My story opens in the Café l'Univers in Paris, where we two, Mr Bickerdike, strangers to one another, were sitting one September afternoon precisely a year ago. We got into talk on the subject of a neighbour, an artist, and an object of interest to us both, who was busily engaged in sketching into a book pencil-memoranda of the more noticeable hats worn by passing ladies. He worked fast and cleverly, and was manifestly an adept at his craft. Presently, after having watched him for some time, I asked you if you had observed anything peculiar about his hands. You had not, it seemed, and no more was said. But there was a peculiarity, and it was this: when he lifted his right hand, as artists will do, to measure the perspective value of an object, it was always the second finger of the hand which he interposed before his eye. I watched him do it over and over again, and it was persistently the same. Why, I found myself asking myself? Was the trick due to some malformation of the first finger, or to some congenital impulse? Not to the first, I was presently able to convince myself. To the alternative proposition I was fated to receive an answer both affirmative and illuminating: but it was not to come just yet.

'You remember what followed. The stranger suddenly closed his book, rose, started to cross the road, and was promptly knocked down and run over by a passing cab. I hurried to his assistance, and found that he was pretty badly injured. He was lifted into the cab, and, accompanied by myself and a gendarme, was conveyed to the St Antoine Hospital, in which he remained for some weeks. Both there, and in his own apartments after his discharge, I visited him frequently, and was able to show him some small attentions, such as, in our relative positions, mere humanity demanded of me. He was poor, in his art an enthusiast, and very little sympathy was needed to win his general confidence. His name was John Ridgway.'

The two listeners glanced at one another, in a puzzled, questioning way; but neither would venture to interrupt, and the Baron continued:—

'He was John, and Ridgway—pronounced Reedsvay—but for the sake of a necessary distinction I will call him henceforth Jean.

'Jean lived with a friend, Caliste Ribault, in two rooms in the Rue Bourbon-le-Château, a little dull out-of-the-way street in the Latin Quarter. They both worked for a living on the Petit Courrier des Dames; but with Jean it was a weariness and a humiliation, and always he had before his eyes the prospect of ultimate manumission and recognition. He was an artist from his soul outwards to his finger-tips. But, alas! his immortality was destined to be of sooner arrival. He never properly overcame the effects of his accident, and last June he succumbed to them and left his friend alone.

'Now, in the course of our conversations, Jean had told me a strange story about himself—a story which I never knew at the time whether to credit, or to part credit, or to attribute entirely to the invention of an imaginative nature. Born ostensibly of humble parentage, he was in reality, he said, the legitimate son of an English officer of wealth and distinction, whose name he could claim, and whose heir he could prove himself to be, contingent on the production of certain documentary evidence which he knew to exist, but which, since it remained in the possession of the putative father, it was impossible to cite. This alleged evidence touched upon the question of a sham marriage, a clerical impostor officiating, which had turned out to be a true marriage; and the names of the contracting parties were recorded, with that of the clergyman in question as witness, on the fly-leaf of a little Roman Catholic vade-mecum, which had belonged to Jean's mother but of which her would-be wronger had secured possession, and which he retained to this day.

'So much Jean told me, omitting only the father's name, which he withheld, he queerly stated, from a feeling of jealous pride for the honour of that which was his own honour, but which was presently to be suggested to me in a very singular fashion. You may perhaps recall, Mr Bickerdike, how at dinner on the night of our first arrival here, our host, in answer to some observation of mine about a certain picture hanging on the wall, raised the second finger of his right hand before his eye to test an alleged misproportion in one of the figures of the composition. The action—though, of course, I was already familiar with Sir Calvin's injury—instantly arrested my attention. A vision of the Café l'Univers and of the busy hat-sketcher leapt irresistibly into my mind: I saw again the lifted second finger, and I saw, with astonishment, what, lacking that clue, had never yet so much as occurred or suggested itself to me—the existence of a subtle but definite family likeness between the two men. That sign-manual had solved the problem of paternity, and given some colour, at least, to my friend's romantic tale. Let me put it quite clearly. Before me sat, as I was convinced, the father of the man in Paris calling himself John Ridgway, but who claimed the right, on whatever disputable grounds, to call himself, if he would, John Kennett.

'Judge of my feelings. From that moment I was possessed of a piece of knowledge whose significance I could not then foresee, but which was already half consciously associating itself in my mind with that other curious discovery—that a well-known detective, who bore the very same name as my friend, was operating on a case somewhere in the neighbourhood.

'To return now to Jean's story, and my natural comments thereon. I asked him, assuming for the occasion the truth of his statement, if he had never made an endeavour to assert his rights, and if not why not. His answer did not strike me then as convincing, though I had full reason later to alter my opinion. To attempt and fail, he said, would be merely to disinter a long-buried scandal, and expose to renewed odium the character of a mother whom he fondly loved. Moreover, for himself he had no ambitions save such as centred in his art, to which he was wholly devoted, nor any nerve or desire to take that position in the world to which his birth entitled him. She had told him the story one day, on the occasion of one of his rare visits to England—where she lived—when she was lying very ill, thinking it right that he should know, and leaving it to him to decide for himself what action, in the event of her death, he should take or not take in the matter. She was, I understood, a woman of French origin, in modest circumstances, and many years the widow of a quartermaster-sergeant in the British army. From that necessitous household Jean himself had early broken away, to follow his bent in Paris, in which city he had remained, working and struggling for a livelihood, ever since the days of his adolescence. He was a man of twenty-eight when I knew him.

'There for the present I will leave Jean's story, turning from it to a subject of more immediate interest to you—namely, the murder of Ivy Mellor, and the methods by which I was enabled to bring the crime home to the actual delinquent. I can claim no particular credit for my part in the business. Destiny, acting blindly or providentially as you will, had woven about me, as a web is woven about a spider, a most extraordinary concatenation of coincidences, from whose central observation-point I was able, as it were, to command all strands of the design. My casual encounter with Mr Bickerdike in Paris; the discovery that he was there to meet Mr Kennett, the son of a gentleman already slightly known to me; the accident witnessed by us; my subsequent visits to the patient, and his confiding to me of his story; my second meeting with Mr Bickerdike in London, and the coincidence of our common invitation to Wildshott; the act which betrayed Jean's father to me, and seemed to confirm the truth of the man's story; the news that a second John Ridgway was at work in the neighbourhood—in all this, considered alone, there lay some grounds, perhaps, for wondering entertainment, but surely none for suspicion. It was only when the murder occurred that any thought of a connexion amongst the parts flashed inevitably into my mind; and since Fate had placed, if in any hands, in mine, what clues might exist to the truth, I was determined from that moment to pursue them to the end. The Key to it I found in a skeleton key.'

Again the Macuba came into requisition, and again the Baron savoured, over a refreshing pinch, the excitement of his hearers.

'A skeleton key,' he repeated. 'I discovered it before ever Sergeant John Ridgway had had a chance of looking for it, on the very spot where the poor thing's body had lain. It must have been jerked from her hand—she had probably just produced it from her pocket—by the shot which killed her, and had remained there undetected during and after her removal. I was fortunate in securing it only a few minutes before the Sergeant came down to examine the place of the crime.

'Now, what had Annie Evans to do with a skeleton key—she, a modest servant girl of irreproachable character, as the housekeeper had just informed us? I examined the key. It was of the usual burglarious pattern, seemed newly turned, had a slight flaw, or projection, on the barrel end, and was splashed with an ugly Bluebeard red. Had Annie, after all, been quite the impeccable person Mrs Bingley supposed? I wondered. I thought of the manner of her engagement, of her untraceable connexions, and I wondered. I wondered still at the Inquest, when, as it seemed, those same relations were still hopelessly to seek. I wondered no longer when, on the day following the inquiry, I came upon the Sergeant intently examining the ground about the scene of the crime. I came upon him unexpectedly, and surprised him. What was he looking for? He had already overhauled every detail of the girl's belongings. Had he missed something which he had expected to find among them? A skeleton key possibly. But how could he have known she possessed such a thing? Obviously, there was only one answer—because he himself had provided her with it. For what reason—he, John Ridgway? Naturally, my mind flew off at a tangent to the other John Ridgway, my Parisian Jean, and his extraordinary story. A reputedly sham marriage which nevertheless had turned out genuine; documents in proof, and their possessor my host? Was it conceivable that this John Ridgway was interested in the recovery of those documents, and had employed a female confederate to steal them for him?

'It was quite conceivable, and quite true, for that, as appeared by degrees, was actually the case. But why was this John Ridgway interested in the recovery of those papers? We shall see.

'In the meanwhile, to what conviction had my reflections led me? That the detective and the girl were in collusion for a certain purpose. But much was to be deduced from that conviction—that the girl was an impostor, that she had secured her situation very possibly by means of a false character written by herself or her confederate, that, quite certainly, her name was not Annie Evans at all. Hence the calculated impossibility of tracing out her connexions.

'So far, then, so good. We come now to the frustrated business f the theft, and the crime which was its terrible consequence. It had inevitably occurred to me that the safe in Sir Calvin's study must be the repository, and known by the confederates to be the repository, of the papers in question; else, if of easier access, they had long ago been abstracted and used to serve their purpose. Probably, as it appeared to me, the girl's first business had been to secure an impression of the keyhole in wax, which she had despatched to Ridgway, receiving back from him in exchange the master-key. I seized an opportunity to examine the safe, and detected about the spot in question certain faint marks or scratches in the paint, which I had once before taken some curious stock of, and which I now perceived might well correspond with that little sharp projection I spoke of at the end of the key. I even once tried the key in the lock myself (that was on the night, Mr Bickerdike, when you stalked me)'—poor Vivian looked unutterably foolish—'but without detecting me in my second descent, which occurred after you had returned to your room) and found it easy to manipulate. Then the girl had already been secretly at work there, fumbling her job maybe? But why, in that case, had she not secured the plunder, given notice to leave, and at once cleared out? Because—as it was perfectly legitimate to infer from the evidence at the inquest—she had, in the meantime, fallen desperately in love with our young friend, and had refused to take any further part in a transaction designed to dispossess him of his name and inheritance.

'Now, that is to anticipate matters a little, perhaps; but grant my deduction sound as, indeed, it proved to be—and what followed? Necessarily, a breach between the two confederates of a very violent nature. To the detective it meant betrayal and the ruin of his plans. Would that consideration be enough in itself to goad him on to murder? With a man of Ridgway's character and trained cautiousness of disposition I did not think it probable. Assuming, then, that the murder were his act, what more overmastering motive could have driven him to it? What but jealousy, the one passion uncontrollable by even the most self-disciplining nature. He was himself passionately enamoured of his own beautiful decoy, and she had betrayed not only his interests but his love. The crime had been, in the expressive French phrase, and in the fullest sense, a crime passionel. I had it.

'To figure the course of events, even, was now no difficult task for the imagination. We will begin with Mrs Bingley's timely advertisement for a housemaid, upon which the confederates happened, and which gave them—perhaps suggested to them—the very opportunity they desired. Once the girl was established in the house, the two corresponded. We know that she received letters, though none could be found after her death. Of course not. She would have taken scrupulous care to destroy all such incriminating evidence, including the fraudulent "character." But they corresponded, and probably, on her part, very early in a tone which gave her accomplice to suspect, with growing uneasiness, that all was not right with her. Accident—it could have been nothing else—brought him down professionally and opportunely into this part of the country. He took the occasion to write and arrange for a secret personal interview with her—we had it from the housekeeper that a letter was received by Annie quite shortly before her death—and she answered appointing the Bishop's Walk for their place of meeting. Of that I have no doubt. She was there to keep her engagement with Ridgway, and not to waylay the other. His appearance on the scene was quite fortuitous, and, as it turned out, the most fateful contretemps that could have happened. He came, and we know from his own confession what passed between them, with what she upbraided him, and with what threatened. Ridgway had overheard it all. He had arrived at the place duly to his appointment, and, on his first entering the copse, had probably heard, or perhaps caught distant sight of, the other male figure coming his way, and had slipped into the thick undergrowth for concealment. His propinquity unsuspected by the girl, she had delivered herself in his hearing of her deadly secret, and he knew at last of her double treachery to him. The lover gone, he came out of his ambush, and damned her with the truth. Likely, even then, it was the presence of the gun, so adversely left to his hand, which compelled him to the deed. It was the act of a demented moment, unthinking and unpremeditated. It was not until reason had returned to him that the idea of the diabolical vengeance it might be in his power to wreak on the seducer began to form in his mind. To bring the murder home to him! What a frenzy of triumph in the very thought! It possessed him devilishly, and verily from that moment it was as if the man had bargained away his soul to the evil one. Everything appeared to favour him—the mood, the motive, the conduct of his hated rival; most of all the fact that to his own hands, by some extraordinary freak of opportunism, had been committed the control of the case. How near he came to success in his inhuman design needs no retelling.

'But meanwhile, there was the murder committed in that instant of madness. Probably he had not much hope at the time of escaping its consequences; probably, in his desperate state, with all his schemes gone to wreck, he did not much care. He had had his bloody revenge for an intolerable wrong, and the rest was indifference to him. He replaced the gun where it had stood, and left the spot. Possibly, as sanity returned to him, some instinct of self-preservation may have induced in him a certain mood of precaution. There is evidence to show, I think, that he lurked for a time in the woods before leaving them for the open hillside. But that he did leave them eventually to make his way up the hill, we have Henstridge's evidence to testify.

'Now, from the first I had never succeeded in convincing myself that that hypothetical figure on the hill was as wholly a figment of the imagination as most people seemed to consider it. The cap pulled over the eyes and the turned-up collar—what butler ever turned up his coat collar?—were strong presumptions in my mind that Mr Cleghorn had not been their wearer. Then the figure had been described as advancing hurriedly; yet it had taken twenty minutes or so to cover a distance of two hundred yards. You may object, possibly, that, in all your experience of Sergeant Ridgway, you have never seen him wear on his head other than a black plush Homburg hat. I answer that on the day of the murder he was wearing a cloth cap, easily, in the distance, to be mistaken for the cap worn by Mr Cleghorn. I know this, because, in the course of one of my drives about the country in the company of a very charming young lady, I had made a point of calling at the Sergeant's one-time lodgings at Antonferry—I had procured the address from Sir Calvin—where, at the cost of a little insinuative word-play, I was able to ascertain that the Sergeant had gone out, wearing a cloth cap, fairly early on the day of the murder, and that he had returned late, and seemingly in an exhausted condition, from a long walk. He had, and that hypothetical figure hurrying over the hill—at the moment with little concern for its safety—had been the figure of Sergeant Ridgway, tramping back to his lodgings in Antonferry after the murder. He had passed by the inn, making north by west, and had long turned the bend of the lonely road before Mr Cleghorn, mistaken by Henstridge for the same figure, had arrived at the Red Deer and turned in at the tap.'

The Baron paused for refreshment, while Sir Francis applauded softly, his whole face beaming delight and approval.

'Have I convinced you so far,' continued the narrator, 'of the efficiency of the toils in which I was manœuvring to entangle my "suspect"? Very well: here was another little pièce de conviction. In spying about the scene of the crime I had picked up, in addition to the skeleton key—a button. It was a common horn coat-button, and was lying on the spot whence the gun had been fired—jerked off, probably, by the recoil. Now the Sergeant's overcoat was one of those light covert coats which button under an overlapping hem. I took occasion to examine it one day, when, occupied with Sir Calvin, he had left it in the hall: It had been fitted, I observed, with a set of brand-new buttons, which nevertheless did not correspond with the little buttons on the cuffs. Those exactly matched the button I had found, while the others were of a distinctly different pattern. Obviously he had discovered his loss, had failed again to make it good, and so, for precaution's sake, had renewed the entire set. It was an unpardonable oversight in such a man to have forgotten the sleeves. I made the button over to him—or could it be an exact duplicate of it which I had procured?—telling him in all innocence where I had found it. He took the little blow very well, without a wince, but I could see how it disturbed him. He never suspected me, I think, of more than an amiable curiosity. I have often wondered why.'

'Because he wasn't a fool,' interposed Mr Bickerdike, with a slight groan. Le Sage laughed.

'Or because I am more of a knave than I appear,' said he. 'So let bygones be bygones.' He helped himself to a weighty pinch of rappee, and put down the box with a grave expression. 'I come now,' he said, 'to the supreme crux of all—the apparently damning evidence as to when the fatal shot was fired. If it were fired somewhere about three o'clock, at the time stated by two witnesses, then Hugo Kennett, and none but Hugo Kennett, must be, despite all specious arguments to the contrary, the actual murderer. But it was not fired at three o'clock, as I believe I shall find reason to convince you: it was fired a good twenty or twenty-five minutes later; and this is my justification for saying so. You will remember that, at the magisterial inquiry, the witness Daniel Groome, revising his former evidence, stated that he had heard the clock in his master's study strike the quarter past three—he, by then, having gone round to the back of the house—thereby proving that the report of the gun, which had reached him while he was still at the front, must have occurred during the first quarter of the hour. Now I have taken the pains, since my return, to question Daniel Groome very closely on this matter, and with what result? You will be surprised to hear. The stable clock, to which Daniel is accustomed to listen, strikes the quarters—one for the first, two for the second, and so on. The study clock, to which Daniel is not accustomed to listen, strikes the half-hour only—a single stroke. But the single stroke represented to Daniel the quarter past, and therefore he concluded, when he heard that single stroke sound from his master's study, that it was recording the first quarter, instead of, as it actually was, the second. And on this ingenuous evidence—not realizing in the least what he was doing—was that simple man prepared to tighten the noose about his young master's neck.

'But, if Daniel Groome was wrong, it followed of necessity that Henstridge must be wrong also—as of course he was. He had been simply got at by the detective, and officially bullied and threatened into stating what was wanted of him. As a matter of fact, he had bad no idea of what the time was at all, but had taken any suggestion offered him. The fellow is a blackguard and a coward, and would swear any man's life away for thirty pieces of silver. I did a little persuasion with him on my own account—again during one of those refreshing drives, Sir Francis—and, taking a leaf out of Ridgway's book, had little difficulty in bringing him to his knees. He was abject when I had finished with him. (Parenthetically, I may suggest here—what I am convinced was the case—that our murdering friend had also "got at" Mr Fyler, but in another sense. He had persuaded, I mean, that astute lawyer into believing that there really was nothing worth considering in that hypothetical figure, which we may name the fourth dimension; and that was why, I take it, the point was not taken up again by Counsel before the magistrates.)

'Very well, now: we have got so far as to convict Sergeant Ridgway of murder, following on a plot to disinherit, with the help of a confederate, the very man whom he schemed to charge with the crime. So we arrive necessarily at the question, who was this Annie Evans, whom he had chosen for his accomplice in the business, and whom he had ended by so foully doing to death? To get at the whole truth of the story, it was essential that the mystery of their connexion should be traced to its source.

'To any one, not possessed of the clues which Fortune had placed in my hands, it must have appeared nothing less than astonishing that, with all the wide publicity given to the case, the victim should have remained virtually unidentified and unclaimed. She was beautiful, she was in domestic service—two facts, one might have thought, favourable to an easy solution of the riddle. Still her origin remained a mystery, and so remains, to all but the few instructed, to this day.

'But that very mystery which, to those wanting the master-key, appeared so insolvable, was to me who possessed the key, illuminating. That the girl was in domestic service at the time of her death was no proof that she had ever been in domestic service before. It would be much more in accord with my conception of the astute and far-seeing detective to suppose that he had anticipated that danger of recognition by assigning to his confederate a part through which it would be impracticable, should difficulties arise, to trace her. She had not been in service before, in fact. The business of the photograph confirmed me in that view. You will remember that travesty of Annie's likeness which appeared, enlarged and reproduced from a snap-shot, in the official prints? It was completely unrecognizable, and was intended by Ridgway to be unrecognizable. He knew that no other recent photograph of her existed at all, and for the very good reason that she had not for some time been in a position to be photographed. You will understand why in a moment. It was of paramount importance to him, both first and last, that his accomplice should be and remain unidentifiable. Essential to that condition were her innocence of former service, the absence of any photographic record, and the employment of a false name.

'It was of no use, consequently, my thinking of running Annie Evans, so called, to earth: I must look for her under another title. How was I to ascertain that title?

'It was here again that chance, or Providence, came—I will not say in a totally unforeseen way, but at least in a most obliging way—to my assistance. It occurred to me that at this stage of the proceedings it would be well for me to pay a visit to my Parisian John Ridgway, and endeavour to extract from him, if he could be persuaded to part with them, the fullest details possible of the story with whose outline he had already acquainted me. Something, it might be much, I felt, had remained untold which, if revealed, would possibly throw such. a light upon the obscure places of my quest as would enable me from that moment to present my case without a flaw. I went—to Paris, Mr Bickerdike; not to London, as you supposed—only to learn from Jean's bosom friend—that Caliste Ribault, of whom I have already spoken—that his loved comrade had departed this life in June of this year. That was a blow, I confess: my hopes seemed baffled, my journey in vain. Yet it was so far from being the case that not the artist's living lips could have more shouted the truth into my soul than did the evidence of his dead hand. I will tell you how:—

'One day, shortly before Jean's death, Caliste informed me, there had come to visit him a step-brother, an Englishman, of whom he, Caliste, had never before heard nor Jean spoken. This step-brother bore the same Christian and surname as Jean, and he had come accompanied by a girl of such beauty that the dying man could not dismiss the thought of her face from his mind until he had made from memory a coloured drawing of it on the white-washed wall, writing her name beneath. Now, his step-brother being dead, John Ridgway had come once more to arrange about the funeral and the disposition of the deceased's effects, and, perceiving the face on the wall, had been very angry—so angry, that he had immediately seized a cloth and completely effaced the drawing, so that not a vestige of it remained. Why, you ask? You will understand later.

'Thus again Fortune seemed to laugh at me; but it was laughter like that of a mother who dangles over the mouth of her child a cherry—to be his in a moment. And sure enough in such a moment Caliste informed me that, though the picture was destroyed, a copy of it remained in the shape of a photograph which he himself had taken of the original. He showed me the photograph; and the face I saw was the face of Annie Evans, but Ivy Mellor was the name written underneath.

'I had found out what I wanted—and more. I had discovered that the two John Ridgways were step-brothers, and light and still light broadened on the path before me. I got Ribault to part with the photograph to me, cautioning him to say nothing about his possessing the negative to any one, and with my prize I came on the following day to London. Thereafter my task was an easy one. Possessing that face and that name, and associating both with the name of a famous Scotland Yard detective, I had only to place the matter in the hands of a very clever and trustworthy private inquiry agent of my acquaintance to find out all that I needed. His investigations—with the details of which I need not trouble you—yielded the following information:—

'Ivy Mellor had been not many months discharged from a reformatory, to which she had been committed for three years for procuring a situation as nursery governess with a forged character, and obtaining goods by false pretences. She was the illegitimate daughter of an actress now dead, and was possessed herself of some decided histrionic ability. Upon her discharge, Ridgway had somehow got hold of her, or had been got hold of by her, with the result that he had fallen a complete slave to her attractions. It was probably she who had been his evil genius from the first; probably she who had planned and perpetrated the "written character" which had procured her an entrée to Wildshott. He promised her great things in the event of success, and, in view of those great things, she held him at arms' length; there were to be no questionable relations between them. The man was hopelessly infatuated; he used to visit her under an assumed name; probably "kept her," in the unequivocal sense. I am giving here not only the agent's report, but some of my own conclusions drawn therefrom. Summarized, they showed my case complete, so far as effect was concerned. I had only now to penetrate to the cause. It could be fathomed, I believed, but fathomed in one direction alone. I determined to go boldly to the fountain-head, and challenge there a decision. In Sir Calvin's hands lay the final verdict. I could hardly doubt what it would be, or that for the sake of the whole truth he would yield at last to daylight the guarded secret of a long-past episode. I judged him rightly, and I need say no more. He told me the story, produced for my examination the written evidence, and left me to deal with the matter as I would.

'But one remark more I have to make before running, as briefly as I can, through the main points of the narrative unfolded to me. While in Paris I had procured from my very good friend, M. Despard, the head of the secret police, an introduction to our own First Commissioner. I saw the latter, confided to his interested, and rather horrified, ears the whole truth of the case, so far as I had then conceived and mastered it, and arranged with him the little trap which was to entice John Ridgway into our midst again—conditional always on my procuring that supplementary evidence which was to prove his guilt beyond any possibility of doubt. The rest you know.

'We come now to the final chapter, which, like the postscript to a lady's letter, contains, in Hazlitt's phrase, the pith of the whole. In relating it I choose my own words, and must not be understood to aim at reproducing the actual terms in which it was revealed to me by Sir Calvin. I wish to give a mere brief or abstract of a painful story, and I wish, moreover, to warn you once more that certain reflections and conclusions of mine, not affecting the main body of the narrative, were and are conjectural, and must so remain unless and until the accused himself shall confirm their accuracy; and that, in my soul I anticipate, will be the case. Here, then, is the story:—

'In the early part of the year 1882, Sir Calvin Kennett, then a young cavalry officer of twenty-six, unmarried, and only latterly succeeded to his inheritance, was living in Cairo, attached as military representative to the British legation there. While in that situation he made the acquaintance of a very beautiful young Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle Desilles, the daughter of a tobacconist in a modest way of business, between whom and himself a mutual attachment sprang up, pure and sincere on her part, passionate and unscrupulous on his. Madly enamoured, yet hopeless of prevailing against the virtue of the lady, young Kennett had recourse to the vile and dishonourable strategem of a sham marriage, which he effected through the instrumentality of a worthless acquaintance, one Barry Skelton, who had come abroad in connexion with some Oxford Missionary Society, and who, though not yet in Holy Orders, was supposed to be qualifying himself for the priesthood. With the aid of this scamp the cruel fraud was perpetrated, and Mademoiselle Desilles became the wife, as she supposed, of Sir Calvin. The union, for reasons seeming sufficient as urged by the pseudo-husband, was kept a present secret—even from the girl's father, whose death about this time greatly facilitated the success of the imposture. In July of that year occurred the definite revolt of Arabi Pasha, and the landing at Alexandria of a considerable British force; and Sir Calvin was called upon to rejoin his regiment in view of the operations pending. He went, leaving his wife, as I will call her, in the distant way to become a mother. In a skirmish near Mahmoudieh he lost the first finger of his right hand—a casualty not without its bearing on subsequent events. He was present at Tel-el-Kebir in mid-September, and again, two days later, at the entry of the British troops into Cairo, when he took the occasion—his passion in the interval having burned itself out, as such mere animal transports will—to break the truth to Mademoiselle Desilles of the fraud he had practised on her. I make it no part of my business to comment on his behaviour, then or previously, or to imagine the spirit in which his revelation was received by his unfortunate victim. No doubt each of you can supply the probable text for himself, as his sympathy or his indignation may dictate. It is enough to state the compromise by way of which the deceiver could find the heart to propose to condone his offence. This was no other than that, in order to save her credit and that of her unborn infant, a marriage should be instantly contrived between his unhappy dupe and a certain Quartermaster-Sergeant George Ridgway—a widower with a single young child, a boy—who had been in the secret, yet who, strangely enough, had no more inherent vice in him than was consistent with good nature, a weakness for beauty in distress, and a conscience of the easiest capacity in the matter of hush-money. This man was no doubt a personable fellow; the woman's situation very certainly desperate and deplorable. Anyhow, following whatever distressful scenes, she was brought to consent, the two were married, and shortly afterwards the child was born in London, whither the couple had removed in the interval.

'I am quite prepared to believe that George Ridgway made his wife a good husband during the few years which remained to them in company, for he did not very long survive his marriage. Moreover, Sir Calvin's liberality had placed the two in such comfortable circumstances that no excuse for discontent existed. The Quartermaster-Sergeant adhered honourably to his part of the bargain, and it was not until long after his death that the question arose in the widow's mind as to whether or not she was justified in continuing to mislead her son in the matter of his origin. Of that in a moment.

'In the meantime the two children, step-brothers in fact, were brought up together, and considered themselves as half brothers. They were both christened John—the younger through some unconquerable perversity of the mother in insisting on calling him after her seducer's second name—an anomaly which, however open to curious comment at first, was soon no doubt lost sight of in the inevitable nicknames which affection would come to bestow on the pair. Still, for the purposes of distinction, I will continue to call the one John and the other Jean. Jean was popularly regarded as the Ridgways' child, though in truth no child was born of their union.

'John, though the elder by some three years, was frequently, as time went on, mistaken, by those who did not know, for the younger of the two boys—an error also not without its bearing on subsequent events. Jean from the outset betrayed, if it could have been guessed, an unmistakable sign of his origin in the use of his second for his digit finger—an inherited trick due to the shock caused to his mother by the sight of Sir Calvin's mutilation, associated as it had been with all the agony and despair of that time. He was a dreamy boy, and early developed artistic proclivities. I have no means or intention of tracing the career of either of the children up to and beyond manhood. At some period, as we know, Jean went to Paris; at some period John joined the Metropolitan Police force, with subsequent promotion to a valued position in the Criminal Investigation Department. I pass from these ascertained facts to an estimate of the circumstances which first engendered in the latter's mind a thought of the daring project which has ended by bringing him to his present situation.

'Now I have already told you how Jean, on the occasion of a visit to England, had been at last made acquainted by his mother with the true story of his paternity. She told it him, being herself under the fear of death at the time; and there is no doubt that the poor woman still believed perfectly honestly in the legality of her first marriage, not only before heaven, but on the practical testimony of the little Catholic vade-mecum in which the names of the contracting parties, with their clerical witness, had been inscribed. She believed, moreover, on the strength of some muddled innuendo gathered from the Quartermaster-Sergeant, that the creature Barry Skelton had deceived, as much as she herself had been deceived by, Sir Calvin, and that he had actually been an ordained priest at the time of the marriage. It was not true, I think, the ordination having occurred subsequently, as the General took pains to make known to her; for she wrote to him on the subject of the vade-mecum, begging him to return it to her hands, whence he had appropriated it when he deserted her. Why, you may ask, had he, after securing possession of, persisted in retaining through all these years that damning witness to his guilt? For the very same reason of the evidence it contained, which to her stood for proof, to him for disproof, of the legality of the marriage. Wherefore he could not make up his mind to destroy it. But he thought it well to pay a visit to his correspondent, to assure her that she was completely mistaken in her surmise, and that the continuance of his support depended upon the utter future abandonment by her of any such attempts on his forbearance.

'Still thinking for her boy, the fond soul was not convinced. So little was she convinced that, when her death came actually to be imminent, she called John to her side and confided to him the whole story, begging him to look after his step-brother's interests, and to vindicate, if possible, his true claim to the name and estates of Kennett, something about which, she told him, Jean already knew. And John promised she was not his mother, remember; he may have been, for all we are aware to the contrary, a cold and undutiful stepson. But he promised, we know; for he went after her death to Paris, to visit the other, to acquaint him of his mother's end, and to discuss with him the strange story she had committed to his keeping: he went accompanied by a beautiful young creature of his acquaintance—whom he had brought with him probably for no other reason than her pleasure and his own infatuation—only to find Jean himself at the point of death.

'Was it then for the first time that a daring idea began to germinate in his mind? I think so. Whether spontaneously, or at his companion's instance, I believe the conception of the plot dated from that moment. Jean dead, what was to prevent him, John, from personating his step-brother, from claiming himself to be Sir Calvin's son, from profiting by the evidence which was said to prove that son's legitimacy? As to that he had only Mrs Ridgway's word, but it had been uttered with such solemnity and conviction, by a dying woman, as to leave little doubt of its truth. At worst the thing would be a gamble; but there was that in the very romantic hazard of it to appeal to his imagination: at best it would be prosperity beyond his dreams. And what were the odds? To consider them was to find them already curiously in his favour. The similarity of their names; the fact that he himself had always been regarded as the younger; the early death of the Quartermaster-Sergeant, and the consequent long removal of the one most damaging witness to the truth; Jean's prolonged absence from home in a foreign city; his own more apparent devotion to the woman to be claimed as his mother—he could find nothing in it all inimical to the success of the plot. Only the first essential would be to obtain possession of the vade-mecum. There was full reason to believe, from what Sir Calvin had told Mrs Ridgway, that the book to this day was jealously retained by him, for the reason stated, in his secure keeping. How to recover it?

'So the conspiracy was hatched. Ivy Mellor was to be the means, the condition of her success the bestowal of her spotless hand upon the rightful heir of Wildshott—a splendid dream, a transpontine melodrama. But John saw at once that a first condition of its success lay in a scrupulous obliteration of all clues pointing to the identity of his confederate: hence his anger on discovering the portrait, and the immediate measures taken by him to wipe it out of existence.

'Well, we know the rest—how the beautiful accomplice betrayed her trust; how she developed a passion for the very man whom she was scheming to disinherit; how, to be sure, she came to recognize that she could much more fully and satisfactorily realize her own ambitions by baulking than by furthering the designs of her fellow-plotter. To be the wife of the problematic heir of Wildshott might be a good thing; to be the wife of the heir of Wildshott in esse, a gentleman, a soldier and an Antinous, was certainly a better. So, having surrendered to love, she played for the greater stake—and she lost. We can pity her: she was frankly an adventuress. We could pity him, were it not for the thought of that inhuman revenge. Yet he had provocation perhaps beyond a gambler's endurance. To find the very woman, for worship of whom he had been scheming away his position, his reputation, his soul of truth and honour, not only turned traitor to his best interests, but faithless in the worst sense, and for his rival's sake, to her pledge to him—well, one must pause before utterly condemning. And after all it was only a moment's madness served by opportunity. Yes, I can pity him. I have a notion, too, that she told him what was not the truth—that she had already destroyed for her love's sake the evidence of the prayer-book. If she had—it was the last touch. Yes, I can pity him.

'Gentlemen, that is the story.'

M. le Baron ceased speaking, and for a time a silence held among them all. Then presently Mr Bickerdike asked:—

'There is only one thing, Baron, which remains to puzzle me a little. Was not Ridgway's employment in the case originally agreed to by Sir Calvin in response to a suggestion of yours?'

'That is quite true.'

'Was Sir Calvin himself, then, never moved to any sort of emotion or curiosity over the association which the detective's name would naturally awaken in his mind?'

'Emotion?—I think not. It would hardly describe a psychology so little superstitious as that of the General. The similarity of the names would have struck him as no more than an inconsiderable coincidence. With all his practical qualities, imagination is the last thing he would care to be accused of. But curiosity?—well, perhaps to a certain extent—though neither deep-seated nor lasting. You have to remember that from first to last, I suppose, he never knew, or troubled to know, what the Sergeant's Christian name was; and even had he learned it, it would have conveyed nothing to him, as he knew no better; nor again, probably, had ever troubled to know, by what name his own disowned son was called. And very certainly he had never condescended to note the name of the Quartermaster-Sergeant's individual offspring.'

'I see. And had you yourself, in suggesting the Sergeant for the case, any arrière pensée at that time, connecting——?'

'I had merely a curiosity, my friend, to observe the owner of a name—really ipsissima verba to me—so oddly associated in my mind with the teller of a certain fantastic story in Paris.'

'Then you did not know—but of course you didn't.' He turned to the Baronet: 'I congratulate you with all my heart, Orsden.'

'Thanks, old fellow,' said Sir Francis. 'It's all due to him there. I'll give his health, in B-Bob Cratchit's words. Here's to M. le Baron, "the Founder of the Feast"!'

CHAPTER XXI

A LAST WORD

Miss Kennett, still in process of qualifying herself for a musician, was at work on Czerny's fifth exercise which, like the pons asinorum of an earlier strategist could present an insuperable problem to an intelligence already painful master of the four preceding. To pick up one note with her was, like the clown with the packages, to drop half a dozen others; to give its proper value to the right hand was to leave the left struggling in a partial paralysis. Still she persevered, lips counting, eyes glued to the page, pretty fingers sprawling, until a sudden laugh at the open door of the room startled her efforts into a shiver of unexpected harmony. She looked up with a shake and a smile that suggested somehow to the observer a bird scattering water from its wings in a sunshiny basin.

'O, Frank!' she exclaimed, and stretched herself with glistening easefulness.

'You p-poor goose,' he answered. 'You'll never play, you know.'

She jumped up with a cry, and ran to him.

'Do you mean it? Are you sure?'

'Absolutely.'

'Would you mind if I didn't?'

'Not half so m-much as I should if you did.'

'But I tried, to please you, you know.'

'But it doesn't please me, you know.'

She looked at him doubtfully. He took her hands, his eyes glowing.

'I love you for trying, you dear,' he said, 'but I shouldn't love you if I let you go on trying—nor, I expect, would any one else.'

'Pig!' she exclaimed.

'Audrey,' he said, 'you couldn't play when I fell in love with you, so why should I wish you to now? It would never be yourself; and that's what I want of all things. Let every one develop the best that's in him, and leave affectation to the donkeys. So you'll just come over to Barton's farm with me, to give me your advice about the loveliest litter of bull-pups you ever saw.'

He had something to say to her, and when they were on their way he came out with it soberly.

'I wanted just to tell you—he left a full confession; and—and it showed how the Baron had been right in almost every particular.'

She made no answer for a little; but presently she said softly, 'I think I should like to be the one, Frank, to write and tell him so.'

'Yes, Audrey.'

Again the silence fell between them, and again she broke it in the same tone.

'We heard from Hughie this morning—only a short letter. He wrote from Karachi, where they had just landed. They were going straight on to Rawul Pindi.'

He nodded.

'Now let us talk of something else.'

GLASGOW; W. COLLINS SONS AND CO. LTD.

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