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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Woman in Black, by Edmund Clerihew Bentley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Woman in Black
+
+Author: Edmund Clerihew Bentley
+
+Release Date: June 18, 2007 [EBook #21854]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMAN IN BLACK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Mary Meehan and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was made using scans of public domain works
+from the University of Michigan Digital Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                           THE WOMAN IN BLACK
+
+                       BY EDMUND CLERIHEW BENTLEY
+
+
+
+
+    Copyright, 1913, by
+    The Century Co.
+    NEW YORK
+    _Published, March, 1913_
+
+
+
+
+        "... So shall you hear
+    Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
+    Of deaths put on by cunning, and forc'd cause,
+    And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
+    Fall'n on the inventors' heads ..."
+
+    --_Hamlet_.
+
+
+
+
+TO GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON
+
+
+_My dear Gilbert_:
+
+I dedicate this story to you. First: because the only really noble
+motive I had in writing it was the hope that you would enjoy it. Second:
+because I owe you a book in return for "The Man Who Was Thursday."
+Third: because I said I would when I unfolded the plan of it to you,
+surrounded by Frenchmen, two years ago. Fourth: because I remember the
+past.
+
+I have been thinking again to-day of those astonishing times when
+neither of us ever looked at a newspaper; when we were purely happy in
+the boundless consumption of paper, pencils, tea and our elders'
+patience; when we embraced the most severe literature, and ourselves
+produced such light reading as was necessary; when (in the words of
+Canada's poet) we studied the works of nature, also those little frogs;
+when, in short, we were extremely young.
+
+For the sake of that age I offer you this book.
+
+    Yours always,
+      E. C. BENTLEY.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+Prologue
+
+I Knocking the Town Endways
+
+II Breakfast
+
+III Handcuffs in the Air
+
+IV Poking About
+
+V Mr. Brunner on the Case
+
+VI The Lady in Black
+
+VII The Inquest
+
+VIII A Hot Scent
+
+IX The Wife of Dives
+
+X Hitherto Unpublished
+
+XI Evil Days
+
+XII Eruption
+
+XIII Writing a Letter
+
+XIV Double Cunning
+
+XV The Last Straw
+
+
+
+
+THE WOMAN IN BLACK
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we
+know judge wisely?
+
+When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered
+by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single
+tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of
+such wealth as this dead man had piled up--without making one loyal
+friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to
+the least honor. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to those
+living in the great vortices of business as if the earth, too, shuddered
+under a blow.
+
+In all the lurid commercial history of his country there had been no
+figure that had so imposed itself upon the mind of the trading world. He
+had a niche apart in its temples. Financial giants, strong to direct and
+augment the forces of capital, and taking an approved toll in millions
+for so doing, had existed before; but in the case of Manderson there had
+been this singularity, that a pale halo of piratical romance, a thing
+especially dear to the hearts of his countrymen, had remained
+incongruously about his head through the years when he stood in every
+eye as the unquestioned guardian of stability, the stamper-out of
+manipulated crises, the foe of the raiding chieftains that infest the
+borders of Wall Street.
+
+The fortune left by his grandfather, who had been one of those
+chieftains, on the smaller scale of his day, had descended to him with
+accretion through his father, who during a long life had quietly
+continued to lend money and never had margined a stock. Manderson, who
+had at no time known what it was to be without large sums to his hand,
+should have been altogether of that newer American plutocracy which is
+steadied by the tradition and habit of great wealth. But it was not so.
+While his nurture and education had taught him European ideas of a rich
+man's proper external circumstance; while they had rooted in him an
+instinct for quiet magnificence, the larger costliness which does not
+shriek of itself with a thousand tongues; there had been handed on to
+him, nevertheless, much of the Forty-Niner and financial buccaneer, his
+forbear. During that first period of his business career which had been
+called his early bad manner he had been little more than a gambler of
+genius, his hand against every man's, an infant prodigy who brought to
+the enthralling pursuit of speculation a brain better endowed than any
+opposed to it. At St. Helena it was laid down that war is _une belle
+occupation_, and so the young Manderson had found the multitudinous and
+complicated dog-fight of the Stock Exchange of New York.
+
+Then came his change. At his father's death, when Manderson was thirty
+years old, some new revelation of the power and the glory of the god he
+served seemed to have come upon him. With the sudden, elastic
+adaptability of his nation he turned to steady labor in his father's
+banking business, closing his ears to the sound of the battles of the
+Street. In a few years he came to control all the activity of the great
+firm whose unimpeached conservatism, safety and financial weight lifted
+it like a cliff above the angry sea of the markets. All mistrust founded
+on the performances of his youth had vanished. He was quite plainly a
+different man. How the change came about none could with authority say,
+but there was a story of certain last words spoken by his father, whom
+alone he had respected and perhaps loved.
+
+He began to tower above the financial situation. Soon his name was
+current in the bourses of the world. One who spoke the name of Manderson
+called up a vision of all that was broad-based and firm in the vast
+wealth of the United States. He planned great combinations of capital,
+drew together and centralized industries of continental scope, financed
+with unerring judgment the large designs of state or of private
+enterprise. Many a time when he "took hold" to smash a strike, or to
+federate the ownership of some great field of labor, he sent ruin upon a
+multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or steel-workers or cattlemen
+defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and ruthless
+than they. But this was done in the pursuit of legitimate business ends.
+Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but the financier
+and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a hand to protect
+or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of the country.
+Forcible, cold and unerring, in all he did he ministered to the national
+lust for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him the Colossus.
+
+But there was an aspect of Manderson in this later period that lay long
+unknown and unsuspected save by a few, his secretaries and lieutenants
+and certain of the associates of his bygone hurling time. This little
+circle knew that Manderson, the pillar of sound business and stability
+in the markets, had his hours of nostalgia for the lively times when the
+Street had trembled at his name. It was, said one of them, as if
+Blackbeard had settled down as a decent merchant in Bristol on the
+spoils of the Main. Now and then the pirate would glare suddenly out,
+the knife in his teeth and the sulphur matches sputtering in his
+hat-band. During such spasms of reversion to type a score of tempestuous
+raids upon the market had been planned on paper in the inner room of the
+offices of Manderson, Colefax and Company. But they were never carried
+out. Blackbeard would quell the mutiny of his old self within him and go
+soberly down to his counting-house--humming a stave or two of "Spanish
+Ladies," perhaps, under his breath. Manderson would allow himself the
+harmless satisfaction, as soon as the time for action had gone by, of
+pointing out to some Rupert of the markets how a coup worth a million to
+the depredator might have been made. "Seems to me," he would say almost
+wistfully, "the Street is getting to be a mighty dull place since I
+quit." By slow degrees this amiable weakness of the Colossus became
+known to the business world, which exulted greatly in the knowledge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the news of his death, panic went through the markets like a
+hurricane; for it came at a luckless time. Prices tottered and crashed
+like towers in an earthquake. For two days Wall Street was a clamorous
+inferno of pale despair. All over the United States, wherever
+speculation had its devotees, went a waft of ruin, a plague of suicide.
+In Europe also not a few took with their own hands lives that had become
+pitiably linked to the destiny of a financier whom most of them had
+never seen. In Paris a well-known banker walked quietly out of the
+Bourse and fell dead upon the broad steps among the raving crowd of
+Jews, a phial crushed in his hand. In Frankfort one leaped from the
+Cathedral top, leaving a redder stain where he struck the red tower. Men
+stabbed and shot and strangled themselves, drank death or breathed it as
+the air, because in a lonely corner of England the life had departed
+from one cold heart vowed to the service of greed.
+
+The blow could not have fallen at a more disastrous moment. It came when
+Wall Street was in a condition of suppressed "scare." Suppressed:
+because for a week past the great interests known to act with or to be
+actually controlled by the Colossus had been desperately combating the
+effects of the sudden arrest of Lucas Hahn, and the exposure of his
+plundering of the Hahn banks. This bombshell, in its turn, had fallen at
+a time when the market had been "boosted" beyond its real strength. In
+the language of the place, a slump was due. Reports from the corn-lands
+had not been good, and there had been two or three railway statements
+which had been expected to be much better than they were. But at
+whatever point in the vast area of speculation the shudder of the
+threatened break had been felt, "the Manderson crowd" had stepped in and
+held the market up. All through the week the speculator's mind, as
+shallow as it is quick-witted, as sentimental as greedy, had seen in
+this the hand of the giant stretched out in protection from afar.
+Manderson, said the newspapers in chorus, was in hourly communication
+with his lieutenants in the Street. One journal was able to give, in
+round figures, the sum spent on cabling between New York and Marlstone
+in the past twenty-four hours; it told how a small staff of expert
+operators had been sent down by the Post Office authorities to Marlstone
+to deal with the flood of messages. Another revealed that Manderson, on
+the first news of the Hahn crash, had arranged to abandon his holiday
+and return home by the _Lusitania_; but that he soon had the situation
+so well in hand that he had determined to remain where he was.
+
+All this was falsehood, more or less consciously elaborated by the
+"finance editors," consciously initiated and encouraged by the shrewd
+business men of the Manderson group, who knew that nothing could better
+help their plans than this illusion of hero-worship--knew also that no
+word had come from Manderson in answer to their messages, and that
+Howard B. Jeffrey, of Steel and Iron fame, was the true organizer of
+victory. So they fought down apprehension through four feverish days,
+and minds grew calmer. On Saturday, though the ground beneath the feet
+of Mr. Jeffrey yet rumbled now and then with Ętna-mutterings of
+disquiet, he deemed his task almost done. The market was firm and slowly
+advancing. Wall Street turned to its sleep of Sunday, worn out but
+thankfully at peace.
+
+In the first trading hour of Monday a hideous rumor flew round the sixty
+acres of the financial district. It came into being as the lightning
+comes, a blink that seems to begin nowhere; though it is to be suspected
+that it was first whispered over the telephone--together with an urgent
+selling order--by some employee in the cable service. In five minutes
+the dull noise of the curbstone market in Broad Street had leaped to a
+high note of frantic interrogation. From within the hive of the Exchange
+itself could be heard a droning hubbub of fear and men rushed hatless in
+and out. Was it true? asked every man; and every man replied, with
+trembling lips, that it was a lie put out by some unscrupulous "short"
+interest seeking to cover itself. In another quarter of an hour news
+came of a sudden and ruinous collapse of "Yankees" in London at the
+close of the Stock Exchange day. It was enough. New York had still four
+hours' trading in front of her. The strategy of pointing to Manderson as
+the savior and warden of the market had recoiled upon its authors with
+annihilating force, and Jeffrey, his ear at his private telephone,
+listened to the tale of disaster with a set jaw. The new Napoleon had
+lost his Marengo. He saw the whole financial landscape sliding and
+falling into chaos before him. In half an hour the news of the finding
+of Manderson's body, with the inevitable rumor that it was suicide, was
+printing in a dozen newspaper offices; but before a copy reached Wall
+Street the tornado of the panic was in full fury, and Howard B. Jeffrey
+and his collaborators were whirled away like leaves before its breath.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All this sprang out of nothing.
+
+Nothing in the texture of the general life had changed. The corn had not
+ceased to ripen in the sun. The rivers bore their barges and gave power
+to a myriad engines. The flocks fattened on the pastures, the herds were
+unnumbered. Men labored everywhere in the various servitudes to which
+they were born, and chafed not more than usual in their bonds. Bellona
+tossed and murmured as ever, yet still slept her uneasy sleep. To all
+mankind save a million or two of half-crazed gamblers, blind to all
+reality, the death of Manderson meant nothing; the life and work of the
+world went on. Weeks before he died strong hands had been in control of
+every wire in the huge network of commerce and industry that he had
+supervised. Before his corpse was buried his countrymen had made a
+strange discovery: that the existence of the potent engine of monopoly
+that went by the name of Sigsbee Manderson had not been a condition of
+even material prosperity. The panic blew itself out in two days, the
+pieces were picked up, the bankrupts withdrew out of sight; the market
+"recovered a normal tone."
+
+While the brief delirium was yet subsiding there broke out a domestic
+scandal in England that suddenly fixed the attention of two continents.
+Next morning the Chicago Limited was wrecked, and the same day a notable
+politician was shot down in cold blood by his wife's brother in the
+streets of New Orleans. Within a week of its arising "the Manderson
+story," to the trained sense of editors throughout the Union, was
+"cold." The tide of American visitors pouring through Europe made eddies
+round the memorial or statue of many a man who had died in poverty; and
+never thought of their most famous plutocrat. Like the poet who died in
+Rome, so young and poor, a hundred years ago, he was buried far away
+from his own land; but for all the men and women of Manderson's people
+who flock round the tomb of Keats in the cemetery under the Monte
+Testaccio, there is not one, nor ever will be, to stand in reverence by
+the rich man's grave beside the little church of Marlstone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+KNOCKING THE TOWN ENDWAYS
+
+
+In the only comfortably furnished room in the offices of the _Record_,
+the telephone on Sir James Molloy's table buzzed. Sir James made a
+motion with his pen, and Mr. Silver, his secretary, left his work and
+came over to the instrument.
+
+"Who is that?" he said. "Who?... I can't hear you ... Oh, it's Mr.
+Bunner, is it? Yes, but ... I know, but he's fearfully busy this
+afternoon. Can't you ... Oh, really? Well, in that case--just hold on,
+will you?"
+
+He placed the receiver before Sir James. "It's Calvin Bunner, Sigsbee
+Manderson's right hand man," he said concisely. "He insists on speaking
+to you personally. Says it is the gravest piece of news. He is talking
+from the house down by Bishopsbridge, so it will be necessary to speak
+clearly."
+
+Sir James looked at the telephone, not affectionately, and took up the
+receiver. "Well?" he said in his strong voice; and listened. "Yes," he
+said. The next moment Mr. Silver, eagerly watching him, saw a look of
+amazement and horror. "Good God," murmured Sir James. Clutching the
+instrument, he slowly rose to his feet, still bending ear intently. At
+intervals he repeated, "Yes." Presently, as he listened, he glanced at
+the clock, and spoke quickly to Mr. Silver over the top of the
+transmitter. "Go and hunt up Figgis and young Williams. Hurry!" Mr.
+Silver darted from the room.
+
+The great journalist was a tall, strong, clever Irishman of fifty, swart
+and black-mustached, a man of untiring business energy, well known in
+the world, which he understood very thoroughly, and played upon with the
+half-cynical competence of his race. Yet was he without a touch of the
+charlatan: he made no mysteries, and no pretenses of knowledge, and he
+saw instantly through these in others. In his handsome, well-bred,
+well-dressed appearance there was something a little sinister when anger
+or intense occupation put its imprint about his eyes and brow; but when
+his generous nature was under no restraint he was the most cordial of
+men. He was managing director of the company which owned that most
+powerful morning paper, the _Record_, and also that most indispensable
+evening paper, the _Sun_, which had its offices on the other side of the
+street. He was moreover editor-in-chief of the _Record_, to which he had
+in the course of years attached the most variously capable personnel in
+the country. It was a maxim of his that where you could not get gifts,
+you must do the best you could with solid merit; and he employed a great
+deal of both. He was respected by his staff as few are respected in a
+profession not favorable to the growth of the sentiment of reverence.
+
+"You're sure that's all?" asked Sir James, after a few minutes of
+earnest listening and questioning. "And how long has this been
+known?... Yes, of course, the police are; but the servants? Surely
+it's all over the place down there by now.... Well, we'll have a
+try.... Look here, Bunner, I'm infinitely obliged to you about this.
+I owe you a good turn. You know I mean what I say. Come and see me the
+first day you get to town.... All right, that's understood. Now I must
+act on your news. Good-by."
+
+Sir James hung up the receiver, and seized a railway time-table from the
+rack before him. After a rapid consultation of this oracle, he flung it
+down with a forcible word as Mr. Silver hurried into the room, followed
+by a hard-featured man with spectacles, and a youth with an alert eye.
+
+"I want you to jot down some facts, Figgis," said Sir James, banishing
+all signs of agitation and speaking with a rapid calmness. "When you
+have them, put them into shape just as quick you can for a special
+edition of the _Sun_." The hard-featured man nodded and glanced at the
+clock, which pointed to a few minutes past three; he pulled out a
+notebook and drew a chair up to the big writing-table. "Silver," Sir
+James went on, "go and tell Jones to wire our local correspondent very
+urgently, to drop everything and get down to Marlstone at once. He is
+not to say why in the telegram. There must not be an unnecessary word
+about this news until the _Sun_ is on the streets with it--you all
+understand. Williams, cut across the way and tell Mr. Anthony to hold
+himself ready for a two-column opening that will knock the town endways.
+Just tell him that he must take all measures and precautions for a
+scoop. Say that Figgis will be over in five minutes with the facts, and
+that he had better let him write up the story in his private room. As
+you go, ask Miss Morgan to see me here at once and tell the telephone
+people to see if they can get Mr. Trent on the wire for me. After seeing
+Mr. Anthony, return here and stand by." The alert-eyed young man
+vanished like a spirit.
+
+Sir James turned instantly to Mr. Figgis, whose pencil was poised over
+the paper. "Sigsbee Manderson has been murdered," he began quickly and
+clearly, pacing the floor with his hands behind him. Mr. Figgis
+scratched down a line of shorthand with as much emotion as if he had
+been told that the day was fine--the pose of his craft. "He and his wife
+and two secretaries have been for the past fortnight at the house called
+White Gables, at Marlstone, near Bishopsbridge. He bought it four years
+ago. He and Mrs. Manderson have since spent a part of each summer there.
+Last night he went to bed about half-past eleven, just as usual. No one
+knows when he got up and left the house. He was not missed until this
+morning. About ten o'clock his body was found by a gardener. It was
+lying by a shed in the grounds. He was shot in the head, through the
+left eye. Death must have been instantaneous. The body was not robbed,
+but there were marks on the wrists which pointed to a struggle having
+taken place. Dr. Stock, of Marlstone, was at once sent for, and will
+conduct the post-mortem examination. The police from Bishopsbridge, who
+were soon on the spot, are reticent, but it is believed that they are
+quite without a clue to the identity of the murderer. There you are,
+Figgis. Mr. Anthony is expecting you. Now I must telephone him and
+arrange things."
+
+Mr. Figgis looked up. "One of the ablest detectives at Scotland Yard,"
+he suggested, "has been put in charge of the case. It's a safe
+statement."
+
+"If you like," said Sir James.
+
+"And Mrs. Manderson? Was she there?"
+
+"Yes. What about her?"
+
+"Prostrated by the shock," hinted the reporter, "and sees nobody. Human
+interest."
+
+"I wouldn't put that in, Mr. Figgis," said a quiet voice. It belonged to
+Miss Morgan, a pale, graceful woman, who had silently made her
+appearance while the dictation was going on. "I have seen Mrs.
+Manderson," she proceeded, turning to Sir James. "She looks quite
+healthy and intelligent. Has her husband been murdered? I don't think
+the shock would prostrate her. She is more likely to be doing all she
+can to help the police."
+
+"Something in your own style, then, Miss Morgan," he said with a
+momentary smile. Her imperturbable efficiency was an office proverb.
+"Cut it out, Figgis. Off you go! Now, madam, I expect you know what I
+want."
+
+"Our Manderson biography happens to be well up-to-date," replied Miss
+Morgan, drooping her dark eye-lashes as she considered the position. "I
+was looking over it only a few months ago. It is practically ready for
+to-morrow's paper. I should think the _Sun_ had better use the sketch of
+his life they had about two years ago, when he went to Berlin and
+settled the potash difficulty. I remember it was a very good sketch, and
+they won't be able to carry much more than that. As for our paper, of
+course we have a great quantity of cuttings, mostly rubbish. The
+sub-editors shall have them as soon as they come in. Then we have two
+very good portraits that are our own property; the best is a drawing Mr.
+Trent made when they were both on the same ship somewhere. It is better
+than any of the photographs; but you say the public prefers a bad
+photograph to a good drawing. I will send them down to you at once, and
+you can choose. As far as I can see, the _Record_ is well ahead of the
+situation, except that you will not be able to get a special man down
+there in time to be of any use for to-morrow's paper."
+
+Sir James sighed deeply. "What are we good for, anyhow?" he inquired
+dejectedly of Mr. Silver, who had returned to his desk. "She even knows
+Bradshaw by heart."
+
+Miss Morgan adjusted her cuffs with an air of patience. "Is there
+anything else?" she asked, as the telephone bell rang.
+
+"Yes, one thing," replied Sir James as he took up the receiver. "I want
+you to make a bad mistake some time, Miss Morgan; an everlasting
+bloomer--just to put us in countenance." She permitted herself the
+fraction of what would have been a charming smile as she went out.
+
+"Anthony?" asked Sir James; and was at once deep in consultation with
+the editor on the other side of the road. He seldom entered the _Sun_
+building in person: the atmosphere of an evening paper, he would say,
+was all very well if you liked that kind of thing. Mr. Anthony, the
+Murat of Fleet Street, who delighted in riding the whirlwind and
+fighting a tumultuous battle against time, would say the same of a
+morning paper.
+
+It was some five minutes later that a uniformed boy came in to say that
+Mr. Trent was on the wire. Sir James abruptly closed his talk with Mr.
+Anthony. "They can put him through at once," he said to the boy.
+
+"Hullo!" he cried into the telephone after a few moments. A voice in the
+instrument replied: "Hullo be blowed! What do you want?"
+
+"This is Molloy," said Sir James.
+
+"I know it is," the voice said. "This is Trent. He is in the middle of
+painting a picture, and he has been interrupted at a critical moment.
+Well, I hope it's something important, that's all!"
+
+"Trent," said Sir James impressively, "it is important. I want you to do
+some work for us."
+
+"Some play, you mean," replied the voice. "Believe me, I don't want a
+holiday. The working fit is very strong. I am doing some really decent
+things. Why can't you leave a man alone?"
+
+"Something very serious has happened."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Sigsbee Manderson has been murdered--shot through the brain--and they
+don't know who has done it. They found the body this morning. It
+happened at his place near Bishopsbridge." Sir James proceeded to tell
+his hearer, briefly and clearly, the facts that he had communicated to
+Mr. Figgis. "What do you think of it?" he ended.
+
+A considering grunt was the only answer.
+
+"Come now!" urged Sir James.
+
+"Tempter!"
+
+"You will go down?"
+
+There was a brief pause. "Are you there?" said Sir James.
+
+"Look here, Molloy," the voice broke out querulously, "the thing may be
+a case for me, or it may not. We can't possibly tell. It may be a
+mystery: it may be as simple as bread and cheese. The body not being
+robbed looks interesting, but he may have been outed by some wretched
+tramp whom he found sleeping in the grounds and tried to kick out. It's
+the sort of thing he would do. Such a murderer might easily have sense
+enough to know that to leave the money and valuables was the safest
+thing. I tell you frankly, I wouldn't have a hand in hanging a poor
+devil who had let daylight into a man like Sig Manderson as a measure of
+social protest."
+
+Sir James smiled at the telephone: a smile of success. "Come, my boy,
+you're getting feeble. Admit you want to go and have a look at the case.
+You know you do. If it's anything you don't want to handle, you're free
+to drop it. By the bye, where are you?"
+
+"I am blown along a wandering wind," replied the voice irresolutely,
+"and hollow, hollow, hollow all delight."
+
+"Can you get here within an hour?" persisted Sir James.
+
+"I suppose I can," the voice grumbled. "How much time have I?"
+
+"Good man! Well, there's time enough--that's just the worst of it. I've
+got to depend on our local correspondent for to-night. The only good
+train of the day went half an hour ago. The next is a slow one, leaving
+Paddington at midnight. You could have the Buster, if you like"--Sir
+James referred to a very fast motor-car of his--"but you wouldn't get
+down in time to do anything to-night."
+
+"And I'd miss my sleep. No, thanks. The train for me. I am quite fond of
+railway-traveling, you know; I have a gift for it. I am the stoker and
+the stoked, I am the song the porter sings."
+
+"What's that you say?"
+
+"It doesn't matter," said the voice sadly. "I say," it continued, "will
+your people look out a hotel near the scene of action, and telegraph for
+a room?"
+
+"At once," said Sir James. "Come here as soon as you can!" He replaced
+the receiver. As he turned to his papers again a shrill outcry burst
+forth in the street below. He walked to the open window. A band of
+excited boys was rushing down the steps of the Sun building and up the
+narrow thoroughfare toward Fleet Street. Each carried a bundle of
+newspapers and a large broadsheet with the simple legend:
+
+     MURDER OF SIGSBEE MANDERSON
+
+Sir James smiled and rattled the money in his pockets cheerfully.
+
+"It makes a good bill," he observed to Mr. Silver, who stood at his
+elbow.
+
+Such was Manderson's epitaph.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+BREAKFAST
+
+
+At about eight o'clock in the morning of the following day Mr. Nathaniel
+Burton Cupples stood on the veranda of the hotel at Marlstone. He was
+thinking about breakfast. In his case the colloquialism must be taken
+literally; he really was thinking about breakfast, as he thought about
+every conscious act of his life when time allowed deliberation. He
+reflected that on the preceding day the excitement and activity
+following upon the discovery of the corpse had disorganized his appetite
+and led to his taking considerably less nourishment than usual. This
+morning he was very hungry, having already been up and about for an
+hour; and he decided to allow himself a third piece of toast and an
+additional egg; the rest as usual. The remaining deficit must be made up
+at luncheon; but that could be gone into later.
+
+So much being determined, Mr. Cupples applied himself to the enjoyment
+of the view for a few minutes before ordering his meal. With a
+connoisseur's eye he explored the beauty of the rugged coast, where a
+great pierced rock rose from a glassy sea, and the ordered loveliness of
+the vast tilted levels of pasture and tillage and woodland that sloped
+gently up from the cliffs toward the distant moor. Mr. Cupples delighted
+in landscape.
+
+He was a man of middle height and spare figure, nearly sixty years old,
+by constitution rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his
+age. A sparse and straggling beard and mustache did not conceal a thin
+but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and
+narrow jaw gave him very much the air of a priest, and this impression
+was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. He was a
+man of unusually conscientious, industrious and orderly mind, with
+little imagination. His father's household had been used to recruit its
+domestic establishment by means of advertisements in which it was
+truthfully described as a serious family. From that fortress of gloom he
+had escaped with two saintly gifts somehow unspoiled: an inexhaustible
+kindness of heart and a capacity for innocent gaiety which owed nothing
+to humor. In an earlier day and with a clerical training he might have
+risen to the scarlet hat. He was, in fact, a highly regarded member of
+the London Positivist Society, a retired banker, a widower without
+children. His austere but not unhappy life was spent largely among books
+and in museums; his profound and patiently accumulated knowledge of a
+number of curiously disconnected subjects which had stirred his interest
+at different times had given him a place in the quiet, half-lit world of
+professors and curators and devotees of research; at their amiable,
+unconvivial dinner-parties he was most himself. His favorite author was
+Montaigne.
+
+Just as Mr. Cupples was finishing his meal at a little table on the
+veranda, a big motor-car turned into the drive before the hotel. "Who is
+this?" he inquired of the waiter. "Id is der manager," said the young
+man listlessly. "He have been to meed a gendleman by der train."
+
+The car drew up and the porter hurried from the entrance. Mr. Cupples
+uttered an exclamation of pleasure as a long, loosely-built man, much
+younger than himself, stepped from the car and mounted the veranda,
+flinging his hat on a chair. His high-boned Quixotic face wore a
+pleasant smile, his rough tweed clothes, his hair and short mustache
+were tolerably untidy.
+
+"Cupples, by all that's miraculous!" cried the man, pouncing upon Mr.
+Cupples before he could rise, and seizing his outstretched hand in a
+hard grip. "My luck is serving me to-day," the newcomer went on
+spasmodically. "This is the second slice within an hour. How are you, my
+best of friends? And why are you here? Why sit'st thou by that ruined
+breakfast? Dost thou its former pride recall, or ponder how it passed
+away? I _am_ glad to see you!"
+
+"I was half expecting you, Trent," Mr. Cupples replied, his face
+wreathed in smiles. "You are looking splendid, my dear fellow. I will
+tell you all about it. But you cannot have had your own breakfast yet.
+Will you have it at my table here?"
+
+"Rather!" said the man. "An enormous great breakfast, too--with refined
+conversation and tears of recognition never dry. Will you get young
+Siegfried to lay a place for me while I go and wash? I sha'n't be three
+minutes." He disappeared into the hotel, and Mr. Cupples, after a
+moment's thought, went to the telephone in the porter's office.
+
+He returned to find his friend already seated, pouring out tea, and
+showing an unaffected interest in the choice of food. "I expect this to
+be a hard day for me," he said, with the curious jerky utterance which
+seemed to be his habit. "I sha'n't eat again till the evening, very
+likely. You guess why I'm here, don't you?"
+
+"Undoubtedly," said Mr. Cupples. "You have come down to write about the
+murder."
+
+"That is rather a colorless way of stating it," Trent replied, as he
+dissected a sole. "I should prefer to put it that I have come down in
+the character of avenger of blood, to hunt down the guilty and vindicate
+the honor of society. That is my line of business. Families waited on at
+their private residences. I say, Cupples, I have made a good beginning
+already. Wait a bit, and I'll tell you." There was a silence, during
+which the newcomer ate swiftly and abstractedly, while Mr. Cupples
+looked on happily.
+
+"Your manager here," said the tall man at last, "is a fellow of
+remarkable judgment. He is an admirer of mine. He knows more about my
+best cases than I do myself. The _Record_ wired last night to say I was
+coming, and when I got out of the train at seven o'clock this morning,
+there he was waiting for me with a motor-car the size of a haystack. He
+is beside himself with joy at having me here. It is fame." He drank a
+cup of tea and continued: "Almost his first words were to ask me if I
+would like to see the body of the murdered man--if so, he thought he
+could manage it for me. He is as keen as a razor. The body lies in Dr.
+Stock's surgery, you know, down in the village, exactly as it was when
+found. It's to be post-mortem'd this morning, by the way, so I was only
+just in time. Well, he ran me down here to the doctor's, giving me full
+particulars about the case all the way. I was pretty well _au fait_ by
+the time we arrived. I suppose the manager of a place like this has some
+sort of a pull with the doctor. Anyhow, he made no difficulties, nor did
+the constable on duty, though he was careful to insist on my not giving
+him away in the paper."
+
+"I saw the body before it was removed," remarked Mr. Cupples. "I should
+not have said there was anything remarkable about it, except that the
+shot in the eye had scarcely disfigured the face at all, and caused
+scarcely any effusion of blood, apparently. The wrists were scratched
+and bruised. I expect that, with your trained faculties, you were able
+to remark other details of a suggestive nature."
+
+"Other details, certainly; but I don't know that they suggest anything.
+They are merely odd. Take the wrists, for instance. How is it you could
+see bruises and scratches on them? I dare say you saw something of
+Manderson down here before the murder?"
+
+"Certainly," Mr. Cupples said.
+
+"Well, did you ever see his wrists?"
+
+Mr. Cupples reflected. "No. Now you raise the point, I am reminded that
+when I interviewed Manderson here he was wearing stiff cuffs, coming
+well down over his hands."
+
+"He always did," said Trent. "My friend the manager says so. I pointed
+out to him the fact you didn't observe, that there were no cuffs
+visible, and that they had indeed been dragged up inside the
+coat-sleeves, as yours would be if you hurried into a coat without
+pulling your cuffs down. That was why you saw his wrists."
+
+"Well, I call that suggestive," observed Mr. Cupples mildly. "You might
+infer, perhaps, that when he got up he hurried over his dressing."
+
+"Yes, but did he? The manager said just what you say. 'He was always a
+bit of a swell in his dress,' he told me, and he drew the inference that
+when Manderson got up in that mysterious way, before the house was
+stirring, and went out into the grounds, he was in a great hurry. 'Look
+at his shoes,' he said to me: 'Mr. Manderson was always specially neat
+about his foot-wear. But those shoe-laces were tied in a hurry.' I
+agreed. 'And he left his false teeth in his room,' said the manager.
+'Doesn't _that_ prove he was flustered and hurried?' I allowed that it
+looked like it. But I said, 'Look here: if he was so very much pressed,
+why did he part his hair so carefully? That parting is a work of art.
+Why did he put on so much?--for he had on a complete out-fit of
+underclothing, studs in his shirt, sock-suspenders, a watch and chain,
+money and keys and things in his pockets.' That's what I said to the
+manager. He couldn't find an explanation. Can you?"
+
+Mr. Cupples considered. "Those facts might suggest that he was hurried
+only at the end of his dressing. Coat and shoes would come last."
+
+"But not false teeth. You ask anybody who wears them. And besides, I'm
+told he hadn't washed at all on getting up, which in a neat man looks
+like his being in a violent hurry from the beginning. And here's another
+thing. One of his waistcoat pockets was lined with wash-leather for the
+reception of his gold watch. But he had put his watch into the pocket on
+the other side. Anybody who has settled habits can see how odd that is.
+The fact is, there are signs of great agitation and haste, and there are
+signs of exactly the opposite. For the present I am not guessing. I must
+reconnoiter the ground first, if I can manage to get the right side of
+the people of the house." Trent applied himself again to his breakfast.
+
+Mr. Cupples smiled at him benevolently. "That is precisely the point,"
+he said, "on which I can be of some assistance to you." Trent glanced up
+in surprise. "I told you I half expected you. I will explain the
+situation. Mrs. Manderson, who is my niece--"
+
+"What!" Trent laid down his knife and fork. "Cupples, you are jesting
+with me."
+
+"I am perfectly serious, Trent, really," returned Mr. Cupples earnestly.
+"Her father, John Peter Domecq, was my wife's brother. I never mentioned
+my niece or her marriage to you before, I suppose. To tell the truth, it
+has always been a painful subject to me, and I have avoided discussing
+it with anybody. To return to what I was about to say: last night, when
+I was over at the house--by the way, you can see it from here. You
+passed it in the car." He indicated a red roof among poplars some three
+hundred yards away, the only building in sight that stood separate from
+the tiny village in the gap below them.
+
+"Certainly I did," said Trent. "The manager told me all about it, among
+other things, as he drove me in from Bishopsbridge."
+
+"Other people here have heard of you and your performances," Mr. Cupples
+went on. "As I was saying, when I was over there last night, Mr. Bunner,
+who is one of Manderson's two secretaries, expressed a hope that the
+_Record_ would send you down to deal with the case, as the police seemed
+quite at a loss. He mentioned one or two of your past successes, and
+Mabel--my niece--was interested when I told her afterwards. She is
+bearing up wonderfully well, Trent; she has remarkable fortitude of
+character. She said she remembered reading your articles about the
+Abinger case. She has a great horror of the newspaper side of this sad
+business, and she had entreated me to do anything I could to keep
+journalists away from the place--I'm sure you can understand her
+feeling, Trent; it isn't really any reflection on that profession. But
+she said you appeared to have great powers as a detective, and she would
+not stand in the way of anything that might clear up the crime. Then I
+told her you were a personal friend of mine, and gave you a good
+character for tact and consideration of others' feelings; and it ended
+in her saying that if you should come, she would like you to be helped
+in every way."
+
+Trent leaned across the table and shook Mr. Cupples by the hand in
+silence. Mr. Cupples, much delighted with the way things were turning
+out, resumed:
+
+"I spoke to my niece on the telephone only just now, and she is glad you
+are here. She asks me to say that you may make any inquiries you like,
+and she puts the house and grounds at your disposal. She had rather not
+see you herself; she is keeping to her own sitting-room. She has already
+been interviewed by a detective officer who is there, and feels unequal
+to any more. She adds that she does not believe she could say anything
+that would be of the smallest use. The two secretaries and Martin, the
+butler (who is a most intelligent man) could tell you all you want to
+know, she thinks."
+
+Trent finished his breakfast with a thoughtful brow. He filled a pipe
+slowly, and seated himself on the rail of the veranda. "Cupples," he
+said quietly, "is there anything about this business that you know and
+would rather not tell me?"
+
+Mr. Cupples gave a slight start, and turned an astonished gaze on the
+questioner. "What do you mean?" he said.
+
+"I mean about the Mandersons. Look here! shall I tell you a thing that
+strikes me about this affair at the very beginning? Here's a man
+suddenly and violently killed; and nobody's heart seems to be broken
+about it, to say the least. The manager of this hotel spoke to me about
+him as coolly as if he'd never set eyes on him, though I understand
+they've been neighbors every summer for some years. Then you talk about
+the thing in the coldest of blood. And Mrs. Manderson--well, you won't
+mind my saying that I have heard of women being more cut up about their
+husbands being murdered than she seems to be. Is there something in
+this, Cupples, or is it my fancy? Was there something queer about
+Manderson? I traveled on the same boat with him once, but never spoke to
+him. I only know his public character, which was repulsive enough. You
+see, this may have a bearing on the case; that's the only reason why I
+ask."
+
+Mr. Cupples took time for thought. He fingered his sparse beard and
+looked out over the sea. At last he turned to Trent. "I see no reason,"
+he said, "why I shouldn't tell you as between ourselves, my dear fellow.
+I need not say that this must not be referred to, however distantly. The
+truth is that nobody really liked Manderson; and I think those who were
+nearest to him liked him least."
+
+"Why?" the other interjected.
+
+"Most people found a difficulty in explaining why. In trying to account
+to myself for my own sensations, I could only put it that one felt in
+the man a complete absence of the sympathetic faculty. There was nothing
+outwardly repellent about him. He was not ill-mannered, or vicious, or
+dull--indeed, he could be remarkably interesting. But I received the
+impression that there could be no human creature whom he would not
+sacrifice in the pursuit of his schemes, in his task of imposing himself
+and his will upon the world. Perhaps that was fanciful, but I think not
+altogether so. However, the point is that Mabel, I am sorry to say, was
+very unhappy. I am nearly twice your age, my dear boy, though you always
+so kindly try to make me feel as if we were contemporaries--I am getting
+to be an old man, and a great many people have been good enough to
+confide their matrimonial troubles to me; but I never knew another case
+like my niece's and her husband's. I have known her since she was a
+baby, Trent, and I know--you understand, I think, that I do not employ
+that word lightly--I _know_ that she is as amiable and honorable a
+woman, to say nothing of her other good gifts, as any man could wish.
+But Manderson, for some time past, had made her miserable."
+
+"What did he do?" asked Trent, as Mr. Cupples paused.
+
+"When I put that question to Mabel, her words were that he seemed to
+nurse a perpetual grievance. He maintained a distance between them, and
+he would say nothing. I don't know how it began or what was behind it;
+and all she would tell me on that point was that he had no cause in the
+world for his attitude. I think she knew what was in his mind, whatever
+it was; but she is full of pride. This seems to have gone on for months.
+At last, a week ago, she wrote to me. I am the only near relative she
+has. Her mother died when she was a child; and after John Peter died, I
+was something like a father to her until she married--that was five
+years ago. She asked me to come and help her, and I came at once. That
+is why I am here now."
+
+Mr. Cupples paused and drank some tea. Trent smoked and stared out at
+the hot June landscape.
+
+"I would not go to White Gables," Mr. Cupples resumed. "You know my
+views, I think, upon the economic constitution of society, and the
+proper relationship of the capitalist to the employee, and you know, no
+doubt, what use that person made of his vast economic power upon several
+very notorious occasions. I refer especially to the trouble in the
+Pennsylvania coal fields, three years ago. I regarded him, apart from
+all personal dislike, in the light of a criminal and a disgrace to
+society. I came to this hotel, and I saw my niece here. She told me what
+I have more briefly told you. She said that the worry and the
+humiliation of it, and the strain of trying to keep up appearances
+before the world, were telling upon her, and she asked for my advice. I
+said I thought she should face him and demand an explanation of his way
+of treating her. But she would not do that. She had always taken the
+line of affecting not to notice the change in his demeanor, and nothing,
+I knew, would persuade her to admit to him that she was injured, once
+pride had led her into that course. Life is quite full, my dear Trent,"
+said Mr. Cupples with a sigh, "of these obstinate silences and
+cultivated misunderstandings."
+
+"Did she love him?" Trent inquired abruptly. Mr. Cupples did not reply
+at once. "Had she any love left for him?" Trent amended.
+
+Mr. Cupples played with his teaspoon. "I am bound to say," he answered
+slowly, "that I think not. But you must not misunderstand the woman,
+Trent. No power on earth would have persuaded her to admit that to any
+one--even to herself, perhaps--so long as she considered herself bound
+to him. And I gather that, apart from this mysterious sulking of late,
+he had always been considerate and generous."
+
+"You were saying that she refused to have it out with him."
+
+"She did," replied Mr. Cupples. "And I knew by experience that it was
+quite useless to attempt to move a Domecq where the sense of dignity was
+involved. So I thought it over carefully, and next day I watched my
+opportunity and met Manderson as he passed by this hotel. I asked him to
+favor me with a few minutes' conversation, and he stepped inside the
+gate down there. We had held no communication of any kind since my
+niece's marriage, but he remembered me, of course. I put the matter to
+him at once and quite definitely. I told him what Mabel had confided to
+me. I said that I would neither approve nor condemn her action in
+bringing me into the business, but that she was suffering, and I
+considered it my right to ask how he could justify himself in placing
+her in such a position."
+
+"And how did he take that?" said Trent, smiling secretly at the
+landscape. The picture of this mildest of men calling the formidable
+Manderson to account pleased him.
+
+"Not very well," Mr. Cupples replied sadly. "In fact, far from well. I
+can tell you almost exactly what he said--it wasn't much. He said, 'See
+here, Cupples, you don't want to butt in. My wife can look after
+herself. I've found that out, along with other things.' He was perfectly
+quiet--you know he was said never to lose control of himself--though
+there was a light in his eyes that would have frightened a man who was
+in the wrong, I dare say. But I had been thoroughly roused by his last
+remark, and the tone of it, which I cannot reproduce. You see," said Mr.
+Cupples simply, "I love my niece. She is the only child that there has
+been in our--in my house. Moreover, my wife brought her up as a girl,
+and any reflection on Mabel I could not help feeling, in the heat of the
+moment, as an indirect reflection upon one who is gone."
+
+"You turned upon him," suggested Trent in a low tone. "You asked him to
+explain his words."
+
+"That is precisely what I did," said Mr. Cupples. "For a moment he only
+stared at me, and I could see a vein on his forehead swelling--an
+unpleasant sight. Then he said quite quietly: 'This thing has gone far
+enough, I guess,' and turned to go."
+
+"Did he mean your interview?" Trent asked thoughtfully.
+
+"From the words alone you would think so," Mr. Cupples answered. "But
+the way in which he uttered them gave me a strange and very apprehensive
+feeling. I received the impression that the man had formed some sinister
+resolve. But I regret to say I had lost the power of dispassionate
+thought. I fell into a great rage"--Mr. Cupples' tone was mildly
+apologetic--"and said a number of foolish things. I reminded him that
+the law allowed a measure of freedom to wives who received intolerable
+treatment. I made some utterly irrelevant references to his public
+record, and expressed the view that such men as he were unfit to live. I
+said these things, and others as ill-considered, under the eyes, and
+very possibly within earshot, of half a dozen persons sitting on this
+veranda. I noticed them, in spite of my agitation, looking at me as I
+walked up to the hotel again after relieving my mind--for it undoubtedly
+did relieve it," sighed Mr. Cupples, lying back in his chair.
+
+"And Manderson? Did he say no more?"
+
+"Not a word. He listened to me with his eyes on my face, as quiet as
+before. When I stopped he smiled very slightly, and at once turned away
+and strolled through the gate, making for White Gables."
+
+"And this happened--?"
+
+"On the Sunday morning."
+
+"Then I suppose you never saw him alive again?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Cupples. "Or rather, yes--once. It was later in the day,
+on the golf-course. But I did not speak to him. And next morning he was
+found dead."
+
+The two regarded each other in silence for a few moments. A party of
+guests who had been bathing came up the steps and seated themselves,
+with much chattering, at a table near them. The waiter approached. Mr.
+Cupples rose, and taking Trent's arm led him to a long tennis-lawn at
+the side of the hotel.
+
+"I have a reason for telling you all this," began Mr. Cupples as they
+paced slowly up and down.
+
+"Trust you for that," rejoined Trent, carefully filling his pipe again.
+He lit it, smoked a little and then said: "I'll try and guess what your
+reason is, if you like."
+
+Mr. Cupples' face of solemnity relaxed into a slight smile. He said
+nothing.
+
+"You thought it possible," said Trent meditatively, "may I say you
+thought it practically certain?--that I should find out for myself that
+there had been something deeper than a mere conjugal tiff between the
+Mandersons. You thought that my unwholesome imagination would begin at
+once to play with the idea of Mrs. Manderson having something to do with
+the crime. Rather than that I should lose myself in barren speculations
+about this, you decided to tell me exactly how matters stood, and
+incidentally to impress upon me, who know how excellent your judgment
+is, your opinion of your niece. Is that about right?"
+
+"It is perfectly right. Listen to me, my dear fellow," said Mr. Cupples
+earnestly, laying his hand on the other's arm. "I am going to be very
+frank. I am extremely glad that Manderson is dead. I believe him to have
+done nothing but harm in the world as an economic factor. I know that he
+was making a desert of the life of one who was like my own child to me.
+But I am under an intolerable dread of Mabel being involved in suspicion
+with regard to the murder. It is horrible to me to think of her delicacy
+and goodness being in contact, if only for a time, with the brutalities
+of the law. She is not fitted for it. It would mark her deeply. Many
+young women of twenty-five in these days could face such an ordeal, I
+suppose. I have observed a sort of imitative hardness about the products
+of the higher education of women to-day which would carry them through
+anything, perhaps. I am not prepared to say it is a bad thing in the
+conditions of feminine life prevailing at present. Mabel, however, is
+not like that. She is as unlike that as she is unlike the simpering
+misses that used to surround me as a child. She has plenty of brains;
+she is full of character; her mind and her tastes are cultivated; but it
+is all mixed up"--Mr. Cupples waved his hands in a vague gesture--"with
+ideals of refinement and reservation and womanly mystery. I fear she is
+not a child of the age. You never knew my wife, Trent. Mabel is my
+wife's child."
+
+The younger man bowed his head. They paced the length of the lawn before
+he asked gently: "Why did she marry him?"
+
+"I don't know," said Mr. Cupples briefly.
+
+"Admired him, I suppose," suggested Trent.
+
+Mr. Cupples shrugged his shoulders. "I have been told that a woman will
+usually be more or less attracted by the most successful man in her
+circle. Of course we cannot realize how a wilful, dominating personality
+like his would influence a girl whose affections were not bestowed
+elsewhere; especially if he laid himself out to win her. It is probably
+an overwhelming thing to be courted by a man whose name is known all
+over the world. She had heard of him, of course, as a financial great
+power, and she had no idea--she had lived mostly among people of
+artistic or literary propensities--how much soulless inhumanity that
+might involve. For all I know, she has no adequate idea of it to this
+day. When I first heard of the affair the mischief was done, and I knew
+better than to interpose my unsought opinions. She was of age, and there
+was absolutely nothing against him from the conventional point of view.
+Then I dare say his immense wealth would cast a spell over almost any
+woman. Mabel had some hundreds a year of her own; just enough, perhaps,
+to let her realize what millions really meant. But all this is
+conjecture. She certainly had not wanted to marry some scores of young
+fellows who, to my knowledge, had asked her; and though I don't believe,
+and never did believe, that she really loved this man of forty-five, she
+certainly did want to marry him. But if you ask me why, I can only say I
+don't know."
+
+Trent nodded, and after a few more paces looked at his watch. "You've
+interested me so much," he said, "that I had quite forgotten my main
+business. I mustn't waste my morning. I am going down the road to White
+Gables at once, and I dare say I shall be poking about there until
+mid-day. If you can meet me then, Cupples, I should like to talk over
+anything I find out with you, unless something detains me."
+
+"I am going for a walk this morning," Mr. Cupples replied. "I meant to
+have luncheon at a little inn near the golf-course, the Three Tuns. You
+had better join me there. It's further along the road, about a quarter
+of a mile beyond White Gables. You can just see the roof between those
+two trees. The food they give one there is very plain, but good."
+
+"So long as they have a cask of beer," said Trent, "they are all right.
+We will have bread and cheese, and oh, may Heaven our simple lives
+prevent from luxury's contagion, weak and vile! Till then, good-by." He
+strode off to recover his hat from the veranda, waved it to Mr. Cupples,
+and was gone.
+
+The old gentleman, seating himself in a deck-chair on the lawn, clasped
+his hands behind his head and gazed up into the speckless blue sky. "He
+is a dear fellow," he murmured. "The best of fellows. And a terribly
+acute fellow. Dear me! How curious it all is!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+HANDCUFFS IN THE AIR
+
+
+A painter and the son of a painter, Philip Trent had, while yet in his
+twenties, achieved some reputation within the world of English art.
+Moreover, his pictures sold. An original, forcible talent and a habit of
+leisurely but continuous working, broken by fits of strong creative
+enthusiasm, were at the bottom of it. His father's name had helped; a
+patrimony large enough to relieve him of the perilous imputation of
+being a struggling man had certainly not hindered. But his best aid to
+success had been an unconscious power of getting himself liked. Good
+spirits and a lively, humorous fancy will always be popular. Trent
+joined to these a genuine interest in others that gained him something
+deeper than popularity. His judgment of persons was penetrating, but its
+process was internal; no one felt on good behavior with a man who seemed
+always to be enjoying himself. Whether he was in a mood for floods of
+nonsense or applying himself vigorously to a task, his face seldom lost
+its expression of contained vivacity. Apart from a sound knowledge of
+his art and its history, his culture was large and loose, dominated by a
+love of poetry. At thirty-two he had not yet passed the age of laughter
+and adventure.
+
+His rise to a celebrity a hundred times greater than his proper work had
+won for him came of a momentary impulse. One day he had taken up a
+newspaper to find it chiefly concerned with a crime of a sort curiously
+rare in our country: a murder done in a railway train. The circumstances
+were puzzling; two persons were under arrest upon suspicion. Trent, to
+whom an interest in such affairs was a new sensation, heard the thing
+discussed among his friends, and set himself in a purposeless mood to
+read up the accounts given in several journals. He became intrigued; his
+imagination began to work, in a manner strange to him, upon facts; an
+excitement took hold of him such as he had only known before in his
+bursts of art-inspiration or of personal adventure. At the end of the
+day he wrote and despatched a long letter to the editor of the _Record_,
+which he chose only because it had contained the fullest and most
+intelligent version of the facts.
+
+In this letter he did very much what Poe had done in the case of the
+murder of Mary Rogers. With nothing but the newspapers to guide him, he
+drew attention to the significance of certain apparently negligible
+facts, and ranged the evidence in such a manner as to throw grave
+suspicion upon a man who had presented himself as a witness. Sir James
+Molloy had printed this letter in leaded type. The same evening he was
+able to announce in the _Sun_ the arrest and full confession of the
+incriminated man.
+
+Sir James, who knew all the worlds of London, had lost no time in making
+Trent's acquaintance. The two men got on well; for Trent possessed some
+secret of native tact which had the effect of almost abolishing
+differences of age between himself and others. The great rotary presses
+in the basement of the _Record_ building had filled him with a new
+enthusiasm: he had painted there, and Sir James had bought at sight,
+what he called a machinery-scape in the manner of Heinrich Kley.
+
+Then a few months later came the affair known as the Ilkley mystery. Sir
+James had invited Trent to an emollient dinner, and thereafter offered
+him what seemed to the young man a fantastically large sum for his
+temporary services as special representative of the _Record_ at Ilkley.
+"You could do it," the editor had urged. "You can write good stuff, and
+you know how to talk to people, and I can teach you all the
+technicalities of a reporter's job in half an hour. And you have a head
+for a mystery; you have imagination and cool judgment along with it.
+Think how it would feel if you pulled it off!" Trent had admitted that
+it would be rather a lark; he had smoked, frowned, and at last convinced
+himself that the only thing that held him back was fear of an unfamiliar
+task. To react against fear had become a fixed moral habit with him, and
+he had accepted Sir James's offer.
+
+He had pulled it off. For the second time he had given the authorities a
+start and a beating, and his name was on all tongues. He withdrew and
+painted pictures. He felt no leaning towards journalism, and Sir James,
+who knew a good deal about art, honorably refrained--as other editors
+did not--from tempting him with a good salary. But in the course of a
+few years he had applied to him perhaps thirty times for his services in
+the unraveling of similar problems at home and abroad. Sometimes Trent,
+busy with work that held him, had refused; sometimes he had been
+forestalled in the discovery of the truth. But the result of his
+irregular connection with the _Record_ had been to make his name one of
+the best-known in England. It was characteristic of him that his name
+was almost the only detail of his personality known to the public. He
+had imposed absolute silence about himself upon the Molloy papers; and
+the others were not going to advertise one of Sir James's men.
+
+The Manderson case, he told himself as he walked rapidly up the sloping
+road to White Gables, might turn out to be terribly simple. Cupples was
+a wise old boy, but it was probably impossible for him to have an
+impartial opinion about his niece. Yet it was true that the manager of
+the hotel, who had spoken of her beauty in terms that aroused his
+attention, had spoken even more emphatically of her goodness. Not an
+artist in words, the manager had yet conveyed a very definite idea to
+Trent's mind. "There isn't a child about here that don't brighten up at
+the sound of her voice," he had said, "nor yet a grown-up, for the
+matter of that. Everybody used to look forward to her coming over in the
+summer. I don't mean that she's one of those women that are all kind
+heart and nothing else. There's backbone with it, if you know what I
+mean--pluck--any amount of go. There's nobody in Marlstone that isn't
+sorry for the lady in her trouble--not but what some of us may think
+she's lucky at the last of it." Trent wanted very much to meet Mrs.
+Manderson.
+
+He could see now, beyond a spacious lawn and shrubbery, the front of the
+two-storied house of dull red brick, with the pair of great gables from
+which it had its name. He had had but a glimpse of it from the car that
+morning. A modern house, he saw; perhaps ten years old. The place was
+beautifully kept, with that air of opulent peace that clothes even the
+smallest houses of the well-to-do in an English country-side. Before it,
+beyond the road, the rich meadow-land ran down to the edge of the
+cliffs; behind it a woody landscape stretched away across a broad vale
+to the moors. That such a place could be the scene of a crime of
+violence seemed fantastic; it lay so quiet and well-ordered, so eloquent
+of disciplined service and gentle living. Yet there beyond the house,
+and near the hedge that rose between the garden and the hot, white road,
+stood the gardener's tool-shed, by which the body had been found, lying
+tumbled against the wooden wall.
+
+Trent walked past the gate of the drive and along the road until he was
+opposite this shed. Some forty yards further along, the road turned
+sharply away from the house, to run between thick plantations; and just
+before this turn the grounds of the house ended, with a small white gate
+at the angle of the boundary hedge. He approached this gate, which was
+plainly for the use of gardeners and the service of the establishment;
+it swung easily on its hinges, and he passed slowly up a path that led
+towards the back of the house between the outer hedge and a tall wall of
+rhododendrons. Through a gap in this wall a track led him to the little
+neatly-built erection of wood, which stood among trees that faced a
+corner of the front. The body had lain on the side away from the house;
+a servant, he thought, looking out of the nearer windows in the earlier
+hours of the day before, might have glanced unseeing at the hut, as she
+wondered what it could be like to be as rich as Manderson.
+
+He examined the place carefully, and ransacked the hut within, but he
+could note no more than the trodden appearance of the uncut grass where
+the body had lain. Crouching low, with keen eyes and feeling fingers, he
+searched the ground minutely over a wide area; but the search was
+fruitless.
+
+It was interrupted by the sound--the first he had heard from the
+house--of the closing of the front door. Trent unbent his long legs and
+stepped to the edge of the drive. A man was walking quickly away from
+the house in the direction of the great gate.
+
+At the noise of a footstep on the gravel, the man wheeled with nervous
+swiftness and looked earnestly at Trent. The sudden sight of his face
+was almost terrible, so white and worn it was. Yet it was a young man's
+face. There was not a wrinkle about the haggard blue eyes, for all their
+tale of strain and desperate fatigue. As the two approached each other,
+Trent noted with admiration the man's breadth of shoulder and lithe,
+strong figure. In his carriage, inelastic as weariness had made it, in
+his handsome, regular features, in his short, smooth yellow hair and in
+his voice as he addressed Trent, the influence of a special sort of
+training was confessed. "Oxford was your playground, I think, my young
+friend," said Trent to himself.
+
+"If you are Mr. Trent," said the young man pleasantly, "you are
+expected. Mr. Cupples 'phoned from the hotel. My name is Marlowe."
+
+"You were secretary to Mr. Manderson, I believe," said Trent. He was
+much inclined to like young Mr. Marlowe. Though he seemed so near a
+physical break-down, he gave out none the less that air of clean living
+and inward health that is the peculiar glory of his social type at his
+years. But there was something in the tired eyes that was a challenge to
+Trent's penetration; an habitual expression, as he took it to be, of
+meditating and weighing things not present to their sight. It was a look
+too intelligent, too steady and purposeful, to be called dreamy. Trent
+thought he had seen such a look before somewhere. He went on to say: "It
+is a terrible business for all of you. I fear it has upset you
+completely, Mr. Marlowe."
+
+"A little limp, that's all," replied the young man wearily. "I was
+driving the car all Sunday night and most of yesterday, and I didn't
+sleep last night, after hearing the news--who would? But I have an
+appointment now, Mr. Trent, down at the doctor's--arranging about the
+inquest. I expect it'll be to-morrow. If you will go up to the house and
+ask for Mr. Bunner, you'll find him expecting you; he will tell you all
+about things and show you round. He's the other secretary; an American,
+and the best of fellows; he'll look after you. There's a detective here,
+by the way; Inspector Murch, from Scotland Yard. He came yesterday."
+
+"Murch!" Trent exclaimed. "But he and I are old friends. How under the
+sun did he get here so soon?"
+
+"I have no idea," Mr. Marlowe answered. "But he was here last evening,
+before I got back from Southampton, interviewing everybody, and he's
+been about here since eight this morning. He's in the library
+now--that's where the open French window is that you see at the end of
+the house there. Perhaps you would like to step down there and talk
+about things."
+
+"I think I will," said Trent. Mr. Marlowe nodded and went on his way.
+The thick turf of the lawn round which the drive took its circular sweep
+made Trent's footsteps as noiseless as a cat's. In a few moments he was
+looking in through the open leaves of the window at the southward end of
+the house, considering with a smile a very broad back and a bent head
+covered with short grizzled hair. The man within was stooping over a
+number of papers laid out on the table.
+
+"'Twas ever thus," said Trent in a melancholy tone, at the first sound
+of which the man within turned round with startling swiftness. "From
+childhood's hour I've seen my fondest hopes decay. I did think I was
+ahead of Scotland Yard this time, and now here is the largest officer in
+the entire Metropolitan force already occupying the position."
+
+The detective smiled grimly and came to the window. "I was expecting
+you, Mr. Trent," he said. "This is the sort of case that you like."
+
+"Since my tastes were being considered," Trent replied, stepping into
+the room, "I wish they had followed up the idea by keeping my hated
+rival out of the business. You have got a long start, too--I know all
+about it." His eyes began to wander round the room. "How did you manage
+it? You are a quick mover, I know; the dun deer's hide on fleeter foot
+was never tied; but I don't see how you got here in time to be at work
+yesterday evening. Has Scotland Yard secretly started an aviation corps?
+Or is it in league with the infernal powers? In either case the Home
+Secretary should be called upon to make a statement."
+
+"It's simpler than that," said Mr. Murch with professional stolidity. "I
+happened to be on leave with the Missus at Halvey, which is only twelve
+mile or so along the coast. As soon as our people there heard of the
+murder they told me. I wired to the Chief, and was put in charge of the
+case at once. I bicycled over yesterday evening, and have been at it
+since then."
+
+"Arising out of that reply," said Trent inattentively, "how is Mrs.
+Inspector Murch?"
+
+"Never better, thank you," answered the inspector, "and frequently
+speaks of you and the games you used to have with our kids. But you'll
+excuse me saying, Mr. Trent, that you needn't trouble to talk your
+nonsense to me while you're using your eyes. I know your ways by now. I
+understand you've fallen on your feet as usual, and have the lady's
+permission to go over the place and make inquiries."
+
+"Such is the fact," said Trent. "I am going to cut you out again,
+Inspector. I owe you one for beating me over the Abinger case, you old
+fox. But if you really mean that you're not inclined for the social
+amenities just now, let us leave compliments and talk business." He
+stepped to the table, glanced through the papers arranged there in
+order, and then turned to the open roll-top desk. He looked into the
+drawers swiftly. "I see this has been cleared out. Well now, inspector,
+I suppose we play the game as before."
+
+Trent had found himself on several occasions in the past thrown into the
+company of Inspector Murch, who stood high in the councils of the
+Criminal Investigation Department. He was a quiet, tactful and very
+shrewd officer, a man of great courage, with a vivid history in
+connection with the more dangerous class of criminals. His humanity was
+as broad as his frame, which was large even for a policeman. Trent and
+he, through some obscure working of sympathy, had appreciated one
+another from the beginning, and had formed one of those curious
+friendships with which it was the younger man's delight to adorn his
+experience. The inspector would talk more freely to him than to any one,
+under the rose, and they would discuss details and possibilities of
+every case, to their mutual enlightenment. There were necessarily rules
+and limits. It was understood between them that Trent made no
+journalistic use of any point that could only have come to him from an
+official source. Each of them, moreover, for the honor and prestige of
+the institution he represented, openly reserved the right to withhold
+from the other any discovery or inspiration that might come to him which
+he considered vital to the solution of the difficulty. Trent had
+insisted on carefully formulating these principles of what he called
+detective sportsmanship. Mr. Murch, who loved a contest, and who only
+stood to gain by his association with the keen intelligence of the
+other, entered very heartily into "the game." In these strivings for the
+credit of the press and of the police, victory sometimes attended the
+experience and method of the officer, sometimes the quicker brain and
+livelier imagination of Trent, his gift of instinctively recognizing the
+significant through all disguises.
+
+The inspector, then, replied to Trent's last words with cordial
+agreement. Leaning on either side of the French window, with the deep
+peace and hazy splendor of the summer landscape before them, they
+reviewed the case.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Trent had taken out a thin notebook, and as they talked he began to
+make, with light, sure touches, a rough sketch plan of the room. It was
+a thing he did habitually on such occasions, and often quite idly, but
+now and then the habit had served him to good purpose.
+
+This was a large, light apartment at the corner of the house, with
+generous window-space in two walls. A broad table stood in the middle.
+As one entered by the window the roll-top desk stood just to the left of
+it against the wall. The inner door was in the wall to the left, at the
+farther end of the room; and was faced by a broad window divided into
+openings of the casement type. A beautifully carved old corner-cupboard
+rose high against the wall beyond the door, and another cupboard filled
+a recess beside the fireplace. Some colored prints of Harunobu, with
+which Trent promised himself a better acquaintance, hung on what little
+wall-space was unoccupied by books. These had a very uninspiring
+appearance of having been bought by the yard and never taken from their
+shelves. Bound with a sober luxury, the great English novelists,
+essayists, historians and poets stood ranged like an army struck dead in
+its ranks. There were a few chairs made, like the cupboard and table, of
+old carved oak; a modern arm-chair and a swivel office-chair before the
+desk. The room looked costly but very bare. Almost the only portable
+objects were a great porcelain bowl of a wonderful blue on the table, a
+clock and some cigar boxes on the mantel-shelf, and a movable telephone
+standard on the top of the desk.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Seen the body?" inquired the inspector.
+
+Trent nodded. "And the place where it lay," he said.
+
+"First impressions of this case rather puzzle me," said the inspector.
+"From what I heard at Halvey I guessed it might be common robbery and
+murder by some tramp, though such a thing is very far from common in
+these parts. But as soon as I began my inquiries I came on some curious
+points, which by this time I dare say you've noted for yourself. The man
+is shot in his own grounds, quite near the house, to begin with. Yet
+there's not the slightest trace of any attempt at burglary. And the body
+wasn't robbed. In fact, it would be as plain a case of suicide as you
+could wish to see, if it wasn't for certain facts. Here's another thing:
+for a month or so past, they tell me, Manderson had been in a queer
+state of mind. I expect you know already that he and his wife had some
+trouble between them. The servants had noticed a change in his manner to
+her for a long time, and for the past week he had scarcely spoken to
+her. They say he was a changed man, moody and silent--whether on account
+of that or something else. The lady's maid says he looked as if
+something was going to arrive. It's always easy to remember that people
+looked like that, after something has happened to them. Still, that's
+what they say. There you are again, then: suicide! Now, why wasn't it
+suicide, Mr. Trent?"
+
+"The facts, so far as I know them, are really all against it," Trent
+replied, sitting on the threshold of the window and clasping his knees.
+"First, of course, no weapon is to be found. I've searched, and you've
+searched, and there's no trace of any firearm anywhere within a stone's
+throw of where the body lay. Second, the marks on the wrists, flesh
+scratches and bruises, which we can only assume to have been done in a
+struggle with somebody. Third, who ever heard of anybody shooting
+himself in the eye? Then I heard from the manager of the hotel here
+another fact, which strikes me as the most curious detail in this
+affair. Manderson had dressed himself fully before going out there, but
+he forgot his false teeth. Now how could a suicide who dressed himself
+to make a decent appearance as a corpse forget his teeth?"
+
+"That last argument hadn't struck me," admitted Mr. Murch. "There's
+something in it. But on the strength of the other points, which had
+occurred to me, I am not considering suicide. I have been looking about
+for ideas in this house, this morning. I expect you were thinking of
+doing the same."
+
+"That is so. It is a case for ideas, it seems to me. Come, Murch, let us
+make an effort; let us bend our spirits to a temper of general
+suspicion. Let us suspect everybody in the house, to begin with. Listen:
+I will tell you whom I suspect. I suspect Mrs. Manderson, of course. I
+also suspect both the secretaries--I hear there are two, and I hardly
+know which of them I regard as more thoroughly open to suspicion. I
+suspect the butler and the lady's maid. I suspect the other domestics,
+and especially do I suspect the boot-boy. By the way, what domestics are
+there? I have more than enough suspicion to go round, whatever the size
+of the establishment; but as a matter of curiosity I should like to
+know."
+
+"All very well to laugh," replied the inspector, "but at the first stage
+of affairs it's the only safe principle, and you know that as well as I
+do, Mr. Trent. However, I've seen enough of the people here, last night
+and to-day, to put a few of them out of my mind for the present at
+least. You will form your own conclusions. As for the establishment,
+there's the butler and lady's maid, cook and three other maids, one a
+young girl. One chauffeur, who's away with a broken wrist. No boy."
+
+"What about the gardener? You say nothing about that shadowy and
+sinister figure, the gardener. You are keeping him in the background,
+Murch. Out with him!"
+
+"The garden is attended to by a man in the village, who comes twice a
+week. I've talked to him. He was here last on Friday."
+
+"Then I suspect him all the more," said Trent. "And now as to the house
+itself. What I propose to do, to begin with, is to sniff about a little
+in this room, where I am told Manderson spent a great deal of his time,
+and in his bedroom; especially the bedroom. But since we're in this
+room, let's start here. You seem to be at the same stage of the inquiry.
+Perhaps you've done the bedroom already?"
+
+The inspector nodded. "I've been through Manderson's and his wife's.
+Nothing to be got there, I think. Very simple and bare, no signs of any
+sort--that _I_ could see. Seems to have insisted on the simple life,
+does Manderson. Never employed a valet. The room's almost like a cell,
+except for the clothes and shoes. You'll find it all exactly as I found
+it; and they tell me that's exactly as Manderson left it at we don't
+know what o'clock yesterday morning. Opens into Mrs. Manderson's
+bedroom--not much of the cell about that, I can tell you. I should say
+the lady was as fond of pretty things as most. But she cleared out of it
+on the morning of the discovery--told the maid she could never sleep in
+a room opening into her murdered husband's room. Very natural feeling in
+a woman, Mr. Trent. She's camping out, so to say, in one of the spare
+bedrooms now."
+
+"Come, my friend," Trent was saying to himself, as he made a few notes
+in his little book. "Have you got your eye on Mrs. Manderson? Or haven't
+you? I know that colorless tone of the inspectorial voice. I wish I had
+seen her. Either you've got something against her and you don't want me
+to get hold of it; or else you've made up your mind she's innocent, but
+have no objection to my wasting my time over her. Well, it's all in the
+game; which begins to look extremely interesting as we go on." To Mr.
+Murch he said aloud: "Well, I'll draw the bedroom later on. What about
+this?"
+
+"They call it the library," said the inspector. "Manderson used to do
+his writing and that in here; passed most of the time he spent indoors
+here. Since he and his wife ceased to hit it off together, he had taken
+to spending his evenings alone, and when at this house he always spent
+'em in here. He was last seen alive, as far as the servants are
+concerned, in this room."
+
+Trent rose and glanced again through the papers set out on the table.
+"Business letters and documents, mostly," said Mr. Murch. "Reports,
+prospectuses, and that. A few letters on private matters, nothing in
+them that I can see. The American secretary--Bunner his name is, and a
+queerer card I never saw turned--he's been through this desk with me
+this morning. He had got it into his head that Manderson had been
+receiving threatening letters, and that the murder was the outcome of
+that. But there's no trace of any such thing; and we looked at every
+blessed paper. The only unusual things we found were some packets of
+bank-notes to a very considerable amount, and a couple of little bags of
+unset diamonds. I asked Mr. Bunner to put them in a safer place. It
+appears that Manderson had begun buying diamonds lately as a
+speculation--it was a new game to him, the secretary said, and it seemed
+to amuse him."
+
+"What about these secretaries?" Trent inquired. "I met one called
+Marlowe just now outside; a nice-looking chap with singular eyes,
+unquestionably English. The other, it seems, is an American. What did
+Manderson want with an English secretary?"
+
+"Mr. Marlowe explained to me how that was. The American was his
+right-hand business man, one of his office staff, who never left him.
+Mr. Marlowe had nothing to do with Manderson's business as a financier,
+knew nothing of it. His job was to look after Manderson's horses and
+motors and yacht and sporting arrangements and that--make himself
+generally useful, as you might say. He had the spending of a lot of
+money, I should think. The other was confined entirely to the office
+affairs, and I dare say he had his hands full. As for his being English,
+it was just a fad of Manderson's to have an English secretary. He'd had
+several before Mr. Marlowe."
+
+"He showed his taste," observed Trent. "It might be more than
+interesting, don't you think, to be minister to the pleasures of a
+modern plutocrat with a large P? Only they say that Manderson's were
+exclusively of an innocent kind. Certainly Marlowe gives me the
+impression that he would be weak in the part of Petronius. But to return
+to the matter in hand." He looked at his notes. "You said just now that
+he was last seen alive here, 'so far as the servants were concerned.'
+That meant--?"
+
+"He had a conversation with his wife on going to bed. But for that, the
+man-servant, Martin by name, last saw him in this room. I had his story
+last night, and very glad he was to tell it. An affair like this is meat
+and drink to the servants of the house."
+
+Trent considered for some moments, gazing through the open window over
+the sun-flooded slopes. "Would it bore you to hear what he has to say
+again?" he asked at length. For reply, Mr. Murch rang the bell. A spare,
+clean-shaven, middle-aged man, having the servant's manner in its most
+distinguished form, answered it.
+
+"This is Mr. Trent, who is authorized by Mrs. Manderson to go over the
+house and make inquiries," explained the detective. "He would like to
+hear your story." Martin bowed distantly. He recognized Trent for a
+gentleman. Time would show whether he was what Martin called a gentleman
+in every sense of the word.
+
+"I observed you approaching the house, sir," said Martin with impassive
+courtesy. He spoke with a slow and measured utterance. "My instructions
+are to assist you in every possible way. Should you wish me to recall
+the circumstances of Sunday night?"
+
+"Please," said Trent with ponderous gravity. Martin's style was making
+clamorous appeal to his sense of comedy. He banished with an effort all
+vivacity of expression from his face.
+
+"I last saw Mr. Manderson--"
+
+"No, not that yet," Trent checked him quietly. "Tell me all you saw of
+him that evening--after dinner, say. Try to recollect every little
+detail."
+
+"After dinner, sir?--yes. I remember that after dinner Mr. Manderson and
+Mr. Marlowe walked up and down the path through the orchard, talking. If
+you ask me for details, it struck me they were talking about something
+important, because I heard Mr. Manderson say something when they came in
+through the back entrance. He said, as near as I can remember: 'If
+Harris is there, every minute is of importance. You want to start right
+away. And not a word to a soul.' Mr. Marlowe answered: 'Very well. I
+will just change out of these clothes and then I'm ready'--or words to
+that effect. I heard this plainly as they passed the window of my
+pantry. Then Mr. Marlowe went up to his bedroom and Mr. Manderson
+entered the library and rang for me. He handed me some letters for the
+postman in the morning and directed me to sit up, as Mr. Marlowe had
+persuaded him to go for a drive in the car by moonlight."
+
+"That was curious," remarked Trent.
+
+"I thought so, sir. But I recollected what I had heard about 'not a word
+to a soul,' and I concluded that this about a moonlight drive was
+intended to mislead."
+
+"What time was this?"
+
+"It would be about ten, sir, I should say. After speaking to me, Mr.
+Manderson waited until Mr. Marlowe had come down and brought round the
+car. He then went into the drawing-room, where Mrs. Manderson was."
+
+"Did that strike you as curious?"
+
+Martin looked down his nose. "If you ask me the question, sir," he said
+with reserve, "I had not known him enter that room since we came here
+this year. He preferred to sit in the library in the evenings. That
+evening he only remained with Mrs. Manderson for a few minutes. Then he
+and Mr. Marlowe started immediately."
+
+"You saw them start?"
+
+"Yes, sir. They took the direction of Bishopsbridge."
+
+"And you saw Mr. Manderson again later?"
+
+"After an hour or thereabouts, sir, in the library. That would have been
+about a quarter past eleven, I should say; I had noticed eleven striking
+from the church. I may say I am peculiarly quick of hearing, sir."
+
+"Mr. Manderson had rung the bell for you, I suppose. Yes? And what
+passed when you answered it?"
+
+"Mr. Manderson had put out the decanter of whisky and a syphon and
+glass, sir, from the cupboard where he kept them--"
+
+Trent held up his hand. "While we are on that point, Martin, I want to
+ask you plainly, did Mr. Manderson drink very much? You understand this
+is not impertinent curiosity on my part. I want you to tell me because
+it may possibly help in the clearing up of this case."
+
+"Perfectly, sir," replied Martin gravely. "I have no hesitation in
+telling you what I have already told the inspector. Mr. Manderson was,
+considering his position in life, a remarkably abstemious man. In my
+four years of service with him I never knew anything of an alcoholic
+nature pass his lips except a glass or two of wine at dinner, very
+rarely a little at luncheon, and from time to time a whisky-and-soda
+before going to bed. He never seemed to form a habit of it. Often I used
+to find his glass in the morning with only a little soda water in it;
+sometimes he would have been having whisky with it, but never much. He
+never was particular about his drinks; ordinary soda was what he
+preferred, though I had ventured to suggest some of the natural
+minerals, having personally acquired a taste for them in my previous
+service. He used to keep them in the cupboard here because he had a
+great dislike of being waited on more than was necessary. It was an
+understood thing that I never came near him after dinner unless sent
+for. And when he sent for anything, he liked it brought quick, and to be
+left alone again at once. He hated to be asked if he required anything
+more. Amazingly simple in his tastes, sir, Mr. Manderson was."
+
+"Very well; and he rang for you that night about a quarter past eleven.
+Now can you remember exactly what he said?"
+
+"I think I can tell you with some approach to accuracy, sir. It was not
+much. First he asked me if Mr. Bunner had gone to bed, and I replied
+that he had been gone up some time. He then said that he wanted someone
+to sit up until twelve-thirty, in case an important message should come
+by telephone, and that Mr. Marlowe having gone to Southampton for him in
+the motor, he wished me to do this, and that I was to take down the
+message if it came, and not disturb him. He also ordered a fresh syphon
+of soda-water. I believe that was all, sir."
+
+"You noticed nothing unusual about him, I suppose."
+
+"No, sir, nothing unusual. When I answered the ring, he was seated at
+the desk listening at the telephone, waiting for a number, as I
+supposed. He gave his orders and went on listening at the same time.
+When I returned with the syphon he was engaged in conversation over the
+wire."
+
+"Do you remember anything of what he was saying?"
+
+"Very little, sir; it was something about somebody being at some
+hotel--of no interest to me. I was only in the room just time enough to
+place the syphon on the table and withdraw. As I closed the door he was
+saying: 'You're sure he isn't in the hotel?' or words to that effect."
+
+"And that was the last you saw and heard of him alive?"
+
+"No, sir. A little later, at half-past eleven, when I had settled down
+in my pantry with the door ajar, and a book to pass the time, I heard
+Mr. Manderson go upstairs to bed. I immediately went to close the
+library window, and slipped the lock of the front door. I did not hear
+anything more."
+
+Trent considered. "I suppose you didn't doze at all," he said
+tentatively, "while you were sitting up waiting for the telephone
+message."
+
+"Oh, no, sir! I am always very wakeful about that time. I'm a bad
+sleeper, especially in the neighborhood of the sea, and I generally read
+in bed until somewhere about midnight."
+
+"And did any message come?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"No. And I suppose you sleep with your window open, these warm nights."
+
+"It is never closed at night, sir."
+
+Trent added a last note; then he looked thoughtfully through those he
+had taken. He rose and paced up and down the room for some moments with
+a downcast eye. At length he paused opposite Martin. "It all seems
+perfectly ordinary and simple," he said. "I just want to get a few
+details clear. You went to shut the windows in the library before going
+to bed. Which windows?"
+
+"The French window, sir. It had been open all day. The windows opposite
+the door were seldom opened."
+
+"And what about the curtains? I am wondering whether anyone outside the
+house could have seen into the room."
+
+"Easily, sir, I should say, if he had got into the grounds on that side.
+The curtains were never drawn in the hot weather. Mr. Manderson would
+often sit right in the doorway at nights, smoking and looking out into
+the darkness. But nobody could have seen him who had any business to be
+there."
+
+"I see. And now tell me this. Your hearing is very acute, you say, and
+you heard Mr. Manderson enter the house when he came in after dinner
+from the garden. Did you hear him re-enter it after returning from the
+motor-drive?"
+
+Martin paused. "Now you mention it, sir, I remember that I did not. His
+ringing the bell in this room was the first I knew of his being back. I
+should have heard him come in, if he had come in by the front. I should
+have heard the door go. But he must have come in by the window." The man
+reflected for a moment, then added: "As a general rule, Mr. Manderson
+would come in by the front, hang up his hat and coat in the hall, and
+pass down the hall into the study. It seems likely to me that he was in
+a great hurry to use the telephone, and so went straight across the lawn
+to the window--he was like that, sir, when there was anything important
+to be done. He had on his hat, now I remember, and had thrown his
+great-coat over the end of the table. He gave his order very sharp, too,
+as he always did when busy. A very precipitate man indeed, was Mr.
+Manderson; a hustler, as they say."
+
+"Ah! He appeared to be busy. But didn't you say just now that you
+noticed nothing unusual about him?"
+
+A melancholy smile flitted momentarily over Martin's face. "That
+observation shows that you did not know Mr. Manderson, sir, if you will
+pardon my saying so. His being like that was nothing unusual; quite the
+contrary. It took me long enough to get used to it. Either he would be
+sitting quite still and smoking a cigar, thinking or reading, or else he
+would be writing, dictating, and sending off wires all at the same time,
+till it almost made one dizzy to see it, sometimes for an hour or more
+at a stretch. As for being in a hurry over a telephone message, I may
+say it wasn't in him to be anything else."
+
+Trent turned to the inspector, who met his eye with a look of answering
+intelligence. Not sorry to show his understanding of the line of inquiry
+opened by Trent, Mr. Murch for the first time put a question:
+
+"Then you left him telephoning by the open window, with the lights on,
+and the drinks on the table; is that it?"
+
+"That is so, Mr. Murch." The delicacy of the change in Martin's manner
+when called upon to answer the detective momentarily distracted Trent's
+appreciative mind. But the big man's next question brought it back to
+the problem at once.
+
+"About those drinks. You say Mr. Manderson often took no whisky before
+going to bed. Did he have any that night?"
+
+"I could not say. The room was put to rights in the morning by one of
+the maids, and the glass washed, I presume, as usual. I know that the
+decanter was nearly full that evening; I had refilled it a few days
+before, and I glanced at it when I brought the fresh syphon, just out of
+habit, to make sure there was a decent-looking amount."
+
+The inspector went to the tall corner-cupboard and opened it. He took
+out a decanter of cut glass, and set it on the table before Martin. "Was
+it fuller than that?" he asked quietly. "That's how I found it this
+morning." The decanter was more than half empty.
+
+For the first time Martin's self-possession wavered. He took up the
+decanter quickly, tilted it before his eyes, and then stared amazedly at
+the others. He said slowly: "There's not much short of half a bottle
+gone out of this since I last set eyes on it--and that was Sunday
+night."
+
+"Nobody in the house, I suppose--" suggested Trent discreetly.
+
+"Out of the question," replied Martin briefly. Then he added: "I beg
+pardon, sir, but this is a most extraordinary thing to me. Such a thing
+never happened in all my experience of Mr. Manderson. As for the
+women-servants, they never touch anything. I can answer for it; and as
+for me, when I want a drink I can help myself without going to the
+decanters." He took up the decanter again, and aimlessly renewed his
+observation of the contents, while the inspector eyed him with a look of
+serene satisfaction, as a master contemplates his handiwork.
+
+Trent turned to a fresh page of his notebook, and tapped it thoughtfully
+with his pencil. Then he looked up and said: "I suppose Mr. Manderson
+had dressed for dinner that night."
+
+"Certainly, sir. He had on a suit with a dress-jacket, what he used to
+refer to as a Tuxedo, which he usually wore when dining at home or
+informally."
+
+"And he was dressed like that when you saw him last?"
+
+"All but the jacket, sir. When he spent the evening in the library, as
+usually happened, he would change it for an old shooting-jacket after
+dinner, a light-colored tweed, a little too loud in pattern for English
+tastes, perhaps. He had it on when I saw him last. It used to hang in
+this cupboard here"--Martin opened the door of it as he spoke--"along
+with Mr. Manderson's fishing-rods and such things, so that he could slip
+it on after dinner without going upstairs."
+
+"Leaving the dinner-jacket in the cupboard?"
+
+"Yes, sir. The housemaid used to take it upstairs in the morning."
+
+"In the morning," Trent repeated slowly. "And now that we are speaking
+of the morning, will you tell me exactly what you know about that. I
+understand that Mr. Manderson was not missed until the body was found
+about ten o'clock."
+
+"That is so, sir. Mr. Manderson would never be called, or have anything
+brought to him in the morning. He occupied a separate bedroom. Usually
+he would get up about eight and go round to the bathroom, and he would
+come down some time before nine. But often he would sleep till nine or
+ten o'clock. Mrs. Manderson was always called at seven. The maid would
+take in tea to her. Yesterday morning Mrs. Manderson took breakfast
+about eight in her sitting-room as usual, and everyone supposed that Mr.
+Manderson was still in bed and asleep when Evans came rushing up to the
+house with the shocking intelligence."
+
+"I see," said Trent. "And now another thing. You say you slipped the
+lock of the front door before going to bed. Was that all the locking-up
+you did?"
+
+"To the front-door, sir, yes; I slipped the lock. No more is considered
+necessary in these parts. But I had locked both the doors at the back,
+and seen to the fastenings of all the windows on the ground-floor. In
+the morning everything was as I had left it."
+
+"As you had left it. Now here is another point--the last, I think. Were
+the clothes in which the body was found the clothes that Mr. Manderson
+would naturally have worn that day?"
+
+Martin rubbed his chin. "You remind me how surprised I was when I first
+set eyes on the body, sir. At first I couldn't make out what was unusual
+about the clothes, and then I saw what it was. The collar was a shape of
+collar Mr. Manderson never wore except with evening dress. Then I found
+that he had put on all the same things that he had worn the night
+before--large-fronted shirt and all--except just the coat and waistcoat
+and trousers, and the brown shoes and blue tie. As for the suit, it was
+one of half a dozen he might have worn. But for him to have simply put
+on all the rest just because they were there, instead of getting out the
+kind of shirt and things he always wore by day--well, sir, it was
+unprecedented. It shows, like some other things, what a hurry he must
+have been in when getting up."
+
+"Of course," said Trent. "Well, I think that's all I wanted to know. You
+have put everything with admirable clearness, Martin. If we want to ask
+any more questions later on, I suppose you will be somewhere about."
+
+"I shall be at your disposal, sir." Martin bowed and went out quietly.
+
+Trent flung himself into the arm-chair and exhaled a long breath.
+"Martin is a great creature," he said. "He is far, far better than a
+play. There is none like him, none--nor will be when our summers have
+deceased. Straight, too: not an atom of harm in dear old Martin. Do you
+know, Murch, you are wrong in suspecting that man."
+
+"I never said a word about suspecting him." The inspector was taken
+aback. "_You_ know, Mr. Trent, he would never have told his story like
+that if he thought I suspected him."
+
+"I dare say he doesn't think so. He is a wonderful creature, a great
+artist; but in spite of that he is not at all a sensitive type. It has
+never occurred to his mind that you, Murch, could suspect him, Martin,
+the complete, the accomplished. But I know it. You must understand,
+inspector, that I have made a special study of the psychology of
+officers of the law. It is a grossly neglected branch of knowledge. They
+are far more interesting than criminals, and not nearly so easy. All the
+time I was questioning him I saw handcuffs in your eye. Your lips were
+mutely framing the syllables of those tremendous words: 'It is my duty
+to tell you that anything you now say will be taken down and used in
+evidence against you.' Your manner would have deceived most men, but it
+could not deceive me."
+
+Mr. Murch laughed heartily. Trent's nonsense never made any sort of
+impression on his mind, but he took it as a mark of esteem, which indeed
+it was; so it never failed to please him. "Well, Mr. Trent," he said,
+"you're perfectly right. There's no point in denying it. I have got my
+eye on him. Not that there's anything definite; but you know, as well as
+I do, how often servants are mixed up in affairs of this kind, and this
+man is such a very quiet customer. You remember the case of Lord William
+Russell's valet, who went in as usual in the morning to draw up the
+blinds in his master's bedroom, as quiet and starchy as you please, a
+few hours after he had murdered him in his bed. I've talked to all the
+women of the house, and I don't believe there's a morsel of harm in one
+of them. But Martin's not so easy set aside. I don't like his manner; I
+believe he's hiding something. If so, I shall find it out."
+
+"Cease!" said Trent. "Drain not to its dregs the urn of bitter prophecy.
+Let us get back to facts. Have you, as a matter of evidence, anything at
+all to bring against Martin's story as he has told it to us?"
+
+"Nothing whatever at present. As for his suggestion that Manderson came
+in by way of the window after leaving Marlowe and the car, that's right
+enough, I should say. I questioned the servant who swept the room next
+morning, and she tells me there were gravelly marks near the window, on
+this plain drugget that goes round the carpet. And there's a footprint
+in this soft new gravel just outside." The inspector took a folding rule
+from his pocket and with it pointed out the traces. "One of the patent
+shoes Manderson was wearing that night exactly fits that print--you'll
+find them," he added, "on the top shelf in the bedroom, near the
+window-end, the only patents in the row. The girl who polished them in
+the morning picked them out for me."
+
+Trent bent down and studied the faint marks keenly. "Good!" he said.
+"You have covered a lot of ground, Murch, I must say. That was excellent
+about the whisky--you made your point finely. I felt inclined to shout
+'Encore!' It's a thing that I shall have to think over."
+
+"I thought you might have fitted it in already," said Mr. Murch. "Come,
+Mr. Trent, we're only at the beginning of our inquiries, but what do you
+say to this for a preliminary theory? There's a plan of burglary--say a
+couple of men in it and Martin squared. They know where the plate is,
+and all about the handy little bits of stuff in the drawing-room and
+elsewhere. They watch the house; see Manderson off to bed; Martin comes
+to shut the window, and leaves it ajar--accidentally on purpose. They
+wait till Martin goes to bed at twelve-thirty; then they just walk into
+the library, and begin to sample the whisky first thing. Now suppose
+Manderson isn't asleep, and suppose they make a noise opening the
+window, or however it might be. He hears it; thinks of burglars; gets up
+very quietly to see if anything's wrong; creeps down on them, perhaps,
+just as they're getting ready for work. They cut and run; he chases them
+down to the shed, and collars one; there's a fight; one of them loses
+his temper and his head, and makes a swinging job of it. Now, Mr. Trent,
+pick that to pieces."
+
+"Very well," said Trent. "Just to oblige you, Murch--especially as I
+know you don't believe a word of it. First: no traces of any kind left
+by your burglar or burglars, and the window found fastened in the
+morning--according to Martin. Not much force in that, I allow. Next:
+nobody in the house hears anything of this stampede through the library,
+nor hears any shout from Manderson either inside the house or outside.
+Next: Manderson goes down without a word to anybody, though Bunner and
+Martin are both at hand. Next: did you ever hear in your long experience
+of a householder getting up in the night to pounce on burglars, who
+dressed himself fully, with underclothing, shirt, collar and tie,
+trousers, waistcoat and coat, socks and hard leather shoes; and who gave
+the finishing touches to a somewhat dandified toilet by doing his hair
+and putting on his watch and chain? Personally, I call that
+over-dressing the part. The only decorative detail he seems to have
+forgotten is his teeth."
+
+The inspector leaned forward thinking, his large hands clasped before
+him. "No," he said at last. "Of course there's no help in that theory. I
+rather expect we have some way to go before we find out why a man gets
+up before the servants are awake, dresses himself fully, and is murdered
+within sight of his house early enough to be cold and stiff by ten in
+the morning."
+
+Trent shook his head. "We can't build anything on that last
+consideration. I've gone into the subject with people who know. I
+shouldn't wonder," he added, "if the traditional notions about loss of
+temperature and rigor after death had occasionally brought an innocent
+man to the gallows, or near it. Dr. Stock has them all, I feel sure:
+most general practitioners of the older generation have. That Dr. Stock
+will make an ass of himself at the inquest is almost as certain as that
+to-morrow's sun will rise. I've seen him. He will say the body must have
+been dead about so long, because of the degree of coldness and _rigor
+mortis_. I can see him nosing it all out in some text-book that was out
+of date when he was a student. Listen, Murch, and I will tell you some
+facts which will be a great hindrance to you in your professional
+career. There are many things that may hasten or retard the cooling of
+the body. This one was lying in the long dewy grass on the shady side of
+the shed. As for rigidity, if Manderson died in a struggle, or laboring
+under sudden emotion, his corpse might stiffen practically
+instantaneously: there are dozens of cases noted, particularly in cases
+of injury to the skull, like this one. On the other hand, the stiffening
+might not have begun until eight or ten hours after death. You can't
+hang anybody on _rigor mortis_ nowadays, inspector, much as you may
+resent the limitation. No; what we _can_ say is this. If he had been
+shot after the hour at which the world begins to get up and go about its
+business, it would have been heard and very likely seen, too. In fact,
+we must reason--to begin with, at any rate--on the assumption that he
+wasn't shot at a time when people might be awake--it isn't done in these
+parts. Put that time at six-thirty A. M. Manderson went up to bed at
+eleven P. M. and Martin sat up till twelve-thirty. Assuming that he went
+to sleep at once on turning in, that leaves us something like six hours
+for the crime to be committed in; and that is a long time. But whenever
+it took place, I wish you would suggest a reason why Manderson, who was a
+fairly late riser, was up and dressed at or before six-thirty; and why
+neither Martin, who sleeps lightly, nor Bunner, nor his wife heard him
+moving about, or letting himself out of the house. He must have been
+careful. He must have crept about like a cat.... Do you feel as I do,
+Murch, about all this: that it is very, very strange and baffling?"
+
+"That's how it looks," agreed the inspector.
+
+"And now," said Trent, rising to his feet, "I'll leave you to your
+meditations, and take a look at the bedrooms. Perhaps the explanation of
+all this will suddenly burst upon you while I am poking about up there.
+But," concluded Trent in a voice of sudden exasperation, turning round
+in the doorway, "if you can tell me at any time how under the sun a man
+who put on all those clothes could forget to put in his teeth, you may
+kick me from here to the nearest lunatic asylum, and hand me over as an
+incipient dement."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+POKING ABOUT
+
+
+There are moments in life, as one might think, when that which is within
+us, busy about its secret affair, lets escape into consciousness some
+hint of a fortunate thing ordained. Who does not know what it is to feel
+at times a wave of unaccountable persuasion that it is about to go well
+with him?--not the feverish confidence of men in danger of a blow from
+fate, not the persistent illusion of the optimist, but an unsought
+conviction, springing up like a bird from the heather, that success is
+at hand in some great or little thing. The general suddenly knows at
+dawn that the day will bring him victory; the man on the green suddenly
+knows that he will put down the long putt. As Trent mounted the stairway
+outside the library door he seemed to rise into certainty of
+achievement.
+
+A host of guesses and inferences swarmed apparently unsorted through his
+mind; a few secret observations that he had made, and which he felt must
+have significance, still stood unrelated to any plausible theory of the
+crime; yet as he went up he seemed to know indubitably that light was
+going to appear.
+
+The bedrooms lay on either side of a broad carpeted passage, lighted by
+a tall end-window. It went the length of the house until it ran at right
+angles into a narrower passage, out of which the servants' rooms opened.
+Martin's room was the exception: it opened out of a small landing
+halfway to the upper floor. As Trent passed it, he glanced within. A
+little square room, clean and commonplace. In going up the rest of the
+stairway he stepped with elaborate precaution against noise, hugging the
+wall closely and placing each foot with care; but a series of very
+audible creaks marked his passage.
+
+He knew that Manderson's room was the first on the right hand when the
+bedroom floor was reached, and he went to it at once. He tried the latch
+and the lock, which worked normally, and examined the wards of the key.
+Then he turned to the room.
+
+It was a small apartment, strangely bare. The plutocrat's toilet
+appointments were of the simplest. All remained just as it had been on
+the morning of the ghastly discovery in the grounds. The sheets and
+blankets of the unmade bed lay tumbled over a narrow wooden bedstead,
+and the sun shone brightly through the window upon them. It gleamed,
+too, upon the gold parts of the delicate work of dentistry that lay in
+water in a shallow bowl of glass placed on a small, plain table by the
+bedside. On this also stood a wrought-iron candlestick. Some clothing
+lay untidily over one of the two rush-bottomed chairs. Various objects
+on the top of a chest of drawers, which had been used as a dressing
+table, lay in such disorder as a hurried man might make--toilet
+articles, a book of flies, an empty pocket-book with a burst strap, a
+pocket compass and other trifles. Trent looked them over with a
+questioning eye. He noted also that the occupant of the room had neither
+washed nor shaved. With his finger he turned over the dental plate in
+the bowl, and frowned again at its incomprehensible presence.
+
+The emptiness and disarray of the little room, flooded by the sunbeams,
+were producing in Trent a sense of gruesomeness. His fancy called up a
+picture of a haggard man dressing himself in careful silence by the
+first light of dawn, glancing constantly at the inner door behind which
+his wife slept, his eyes full of some terror.
+
+Trent shivered, and to fix his mind again on actualities opened two tall
+cupboards in the wall on either side of the bed. They contained
+clothing, a large choice of which had evidently been one of the very few
+conditions of comfort for the man who had slept there.
+
+In the matter of shoes, also, Manderson had allowed himself the
+advantage of wealth. An extraordinary number of these, treed and
+carefully kept, was ranged on two long low shelves against the wall.
+Trent, himself an amateur of good shoe-leather, now turned to them, and
+glanced over the collection with an appreciative eye. It was to be seen
+that Manderson had been inclined to pride himself on a rather small and
+well-formed foot. The shoes were of a distinctive shape, narrow and
+round-toed, beautifully made; all were evidently from the same last.
+
+Suddenly his eyes narrowed themselves over a pair of patent-leather
+shoes on the upper shelf.
+
+These were the shoes of which the inspector had already described the
+position to him; the shoes worn by Manderson the night before his death.
+They were a well-worn pair, he saw at once; he saw, too, that they had
+been very recently polished. Something about the uppers of these shoes
+had seized his attention. He bent lower and frowned over them, comparing
+what he saw with the appearance of the neighboring shoes. Then he took
+them up and examined the line of juncture of the uppers with the soles.
+
+As he did this, Trent began unconsciously to whistle faintly, and with
+great precision, an air which Inspector Murch, if he had been present,
+would have recognized.
+
+Most men who have the habit of self-control have also some involuntary
+trick which tells those who know them that they are suppressing
+excitement. The inspector had noted that, when Trent had picked up a
+strong scent, he whistled faintly a certain melodious passage; though
+the inspector could not have told you that it was, in fact, the opening
+movement of Mendelssohn's _Lied ohne Wörter_ in A major.
+
+He turned the shoes over, made some measurements with a marked tape, and
+looked minutely at the bottoms. On each, in the angle between the heel
+and the instep, he detected a faint trace of red gravel.
+
+Trent placed the shoes on the floor, and walked with his hands behind
+him to the window, out of which, still faintly whistling, he gazed with
+eyes that saw nothing. Once his lips opened to emit mechanically the
+Englishman's expletive of sudden enlightenment. At length he turned to
+the shelves again, and swiftly but carefully examined every one of the
+shoes there.
+
+This done, he took up the garments from the chair, looked them over
+closely and replaced them. He turned to the wardrobe cupboards again,
+and hunted through them carefully. The litter on the dressing table now
+engaged his attention for the second time. Then he sat down on the empty
+chair, took his head in his hands, and remained in that attitude,
+staring at the carpet, for some minutes. He rose at last and opened the
+inner door leading to Mrs. Manderson's room.
+
+It was evident at a glance that the big room had been hurriedly put down
+from its place as the lady's bower. All the array of objects that belong
+to a woman's dressing table had been removed; on bed and chairs and
+smaller tables there were no garments or hats, bags or boxes; no trace
+remained of the obstinate conspiracy of gloves and veils, handkerchiefs
+and ribbons, to break the captivity of the drawer. The room was like an
+unoccupied guest-chamber. Yet in every detail of furniture and
+decoration it spoke of an unconventional but exacting taste. Trent, as
+his expert eye noted the various perfection of color and form amid which
+the ill-mated lady dreamed her dreams and thought her loneliest
+thoughts, knew that she had at least the resources of an artistic
+nature. His interest in this unknown personality grew stronger; and his
+brows came down heavily as he thought of the burdens laid upon it, and
+of the deed of which the history was now shaping itself with more and
+more of substance before his busy mind.
+
+He went first to the tall French window in the middle of the wall that
+faced the door, and opening it, stepped out upon a small balcony with an
+iron railing. He looked down on a broad stretch of lawn that began
+immediately beneath him, separated from the house-wall only by a narrow
+flower-bed, and stretched away with an abrupt dip at the farther end,
+toward the orchard. The other window opened with a sash above the
+garden-entrance to the library. In the further inside corner of the room
+was a second door giving upon the passage; the door by which the maid
+was wont to come in, and her mistress to go out, in the morning.
+
+Trent, seated on the bed, quickly sketched in his notebook a plan of the
+room and its neighbor. The bed stood in the angle between the
+communicating-door and the sash-window, its head against the wall
+dividing the room from Manderson's. Trent stared at the pillows; then he
+lay down with deliberation on the bed and looked through the open door
+into the adjoining room.
+
+This observation taken, he rose again and proceeded to note on his plan
+that on either side of the bed was a small table with a cover. Upon that
+farthest from the door was a graceful electric-lamp standard of copper
+connected by a free wire with the wall. Trent looked at it thoughtfully,
+then at the switches connected with the other lights in the room. They
+were, as usual, on the wall just within the door, and some way out of
+his reach as he sat on the bed. He rose, and satisfied himself that the
+lights were all in order. Then he turned on his heel, walked quickly
+into Manderson's room, and rang the bell.
+
+"I want your help again, Martin," he said, as the butler presented
+himself, upright and impassive, in the doorway. "I want you to prevail
+upon Mrs. Manderson's maid to grant me an interview."
+
+"Certainly, sir," said Martin.
+
+"What sort of a woman is she? Has she her wits about her?"
+
+"She's French, sir," replied Martin succinctly; adding after a pause:
+"She has not been with us long, sir, but I have formed the impression
+that the young woman knows as much of the world as is good for
+her--since you ask me."
+
+"You think butter might possibly melt in her mouth, do you?" said Trent.
+"Well, I am not afraid. I want to put some questions to her."
+
+"I will send her up immediately, sir." The butler withdrew, and Trent
+wandered round the little room with his hands at his back. Sooner than
+he had expected, a small, neat figure in black appeared quietly before
+him.
+
+The lady's maid, with her large brown eyes, had taken favorable notice
+of Trent from a window when he had crossed the lawn, and had been hoping
+desperately that the resolver of mysteries (whose reputation was as
+great below-stairs as elsewhere) would send for her. For one thing, she
+felt the need to make a scene; her nerves were overwrought. But her
+scenes were at a discount with the other domestics, and as for Mr.
+Murch, he had chilled her into self-control with his official manner.
+Trent, her glimpse of him had told her, had not the air of a policeman,
+and at a distance he had appeared _sympathetique_.
+
+As she entered the room, however, instinct decided for her that any
+approach to coquetry would be a mistake, if she sought to make a good
+impression at the beginning. It was with an air of amiable candor, then,
+that she said, "Monsieur desire to speak with me?" She added helpfully,
+"I am called Célestine."
+
+"Naturally," said Trent with businesslike calm. "Now what I want you to
+tell me, Célestine, is this: when you took tea to your mistress
+yesterday morning at seven o'clock, was the door between the two
+bedrooms--this door here--open?"
+
+Célestine became intensely animated in an instant. "Oh, yes," she said,
+using her favorite English idiom. "The door was open as always,
+monsieur, and I shut it as always. But it is necessary to explain.
+Listen! When I enter the room of madame from the other door in
+there--ah! but if monsieur will give himself the pain to enter the other
+room, all explains itself." She tripped across to the door, and urged
+Trent before her into the larger bedroom with a hand on his arm. "See! I
+enter the room with the tea like this. I approach the bed. Before I come
+quite near the bed, here is the door to my right hand--open, always--so!
+But monsieur can perceive that I see nothing in the room of Monsieur
+Manderson. The door opens to the bed, not to me who approach from down
+there. I shut it without seeing in. It is the order. Yesterday it was as
+ordinary. I see nothing of the next room. Madame sleep like an
+angel--she see nothing. I shut the door. I place the plateau--I open the
+curtains--I prepare the toilette--I retire--voilą!" Célestine paused for
+breath, and spread her hands abroad.
+
+Trent, who had followed her movements and gesticulations with deepening
+gravity, nodded his head. "I see exactly how it was now," he said.
+"Thank you, Célestine. So Mr. Manderson was supposed to be still in his
+room while your mistress was getting up, and dressing, and having
+breakfast in her boudoir."
+
+"Oui, monsieur."
+
+"Nobody missed him, in fact," remarked Trent. "Well, Célestine, I am
+very much obliged to you." He re-opened the door to the outer bedroom.
+
+"It is nothing, monsieur," said Célestine, as she crossed the small
+room. "I hope that monsieur will catch the assassin of Monsieur
+Manderson.... But I not regret him too much," she added with sudden and
+amazing violence, turning round with her hand on the knob of the outer
+door. She set her teeth with an audible sound, and the color rose in her
+small, dark face. English departed from her. "Je ne le regrette pas du
+tout, du tout!" she cried with a flood of words. "Madame--ah! je me
+jetterais au feu pour madame--une femme si charmante, si adorable. Mais
+un homme comme, monsieur--maussade, boudeur, impassible! Ah, non!--de ma
+vie! J'en avais pardessus la tźte, de monsieur! Ah! vrai! Est-ce
+insupportable, tout de mźme, qu'il existe des types comme ēa? Je vous
+jure que--"
+
+"Finissez ce chahut, Célestine!" Trent broke in sharply. Célestine's
+tirade had brought back the memory of his student days in Paris with a
+rush. "En voilą une scčne! C'est rasant, vous savez. Faut rentrer ēa,
+mademoiselle. Du reste, c'est bien imprudent, croyez-moi. Hang it! have
+some common sense! If the inspector downstairs heard you saying that
+kind of thing, you would get into trouble. And don't wave your fists
+about so much; you might hit something. You seem," he went on more
+pleasantly, as Célestine grew calmer under his authoritative eye, "to be
+even more glad than other people that Mr. Manderson is out of the way. I
+could almost suspect, Célestine, that Mr. Manderson did not take as much
+notice of you, as you thought necessary and right."
+
+"A peine s'il m'avait regardé!" Célestine answered simply.
+
+"Ca, c'est un comble!" observed Trent. "You are a nice young woman for a
+small tea-party, I don't think. A star upon your birthday burned, whose
+fierce, serene, red, pulseless planet never yearned in heaven,
+Célestine. Mademoiselle, I am busy. Bon jour. You certainly are a
+beauty!"
+
+Célestine took this as a scarcely-expected compliment. The surprise
+restored her balance. With a sudden flash of her eyes and teeth at Trent
+over her shoulder, the lady's maid opened the door and swiftly
+disappeared.
+
+Trent, left alone in the little bedroom, relieved his mind with two
+forcible descriptive terms in Célestine's language, and turned to his
+problem.
+
+He took the pair of shoes which he had already examined, and placed them
+on one of the two chairs in the room, then seated himself on the other
+opposite to this. With his hands in his pockets he sat with eyes fixed
+upon those two dumb witnesses. Now and then he whistled, almost
+inaudibly, a few bars. It was very still in the room. A subdued
+twittering came from the trees through the open window. From time to
+time a breeze rustled in the leaves of the thick creeper about the sill.
+But the man in the room, his face grown hard and somber now with his
+thoughts, never moved.
+
+So he sat for the space of half an hour. Then he rose quickly to his
+feet. He replaced the shoes on their shelf with care, and stepped out
+upon the landing.
+
+Two bedroom doors faced him on the other side of the passage. He opened
+that which was immediately opposite, and entered a bedroom by no means
+austerely tidy. Some sticks and fishing-rods stood confusedly in one
+corner, a pile of books in another. The housemaid's hand had failed to
+give a look of order to the jumble of heterogeneous objects left on the
+dressing-table and the mantel-shelf--pipes, pen-knives, pencils, keys,
+golf-balls, old letters, photographs, small boxes, tins and bottles. Two
+fine etchings and some water-color sketches hung on the walls; leaning
+against the end of the wardrobe, unhung, were a few framed engravings. A
+row of shoes and boots was ranged beneath the window. Trent crossed the
+room and studied them intently; then he measured some of them with his
+tape, whistling very softly. This done, he sat on the side of the bed,
+and his eyes roamed gloomily about the room.
+
+The photographs on the mantel-shelf attracted him presently. He rose and
+examined one representing Marlowe and Manderson on horseback. Two others
+were views of famous peaks in the Alps. There was a faded print of three
+youths--one of them unmistakably his acquaintance of the haggard blue
+eyes--clothed in tatterdemalion soldier's gear of the sixteenth century.
+Another was a portrait of a majestic old lady, slightly resembling
+Marlowe. Trent, mechanically taking a cigarette from an open box on the
+mantel-shelf, lit it and stared at the photographs. Next he turned his
+attention to a flat leathern case that lay by the cigarette-box.
+
+It opened easily. A small and light revolver of beautiful workmanship
+was disclosed, with a score or so of loose cartridges. On the stock were
+engraved the initials "J. M."
+
+A step was heard on the stairs, and as Trent opened the breech and
+peered into the barrel of the weapon, Inspector Murch appeared at the
+open door of the room. "I was wondering"--he began; then stopped as he
+saw what the other was about. His intelligent eyes opened slightly.
+"Whose is the revolver, Mr. Trent?" he asked in a conversational tone.
+
+"Evidently it belongs to the occupant of the room, Mr. Marlowe," replied
+Trent with similar lightness, pointing to the initials. "I found this
+lying about on the mantel-piece. It seems a handy little pistol to me,
+and it has been very carefully cleaned, I should say, since the last
+time it was used. But I know little about firearms."
+
+"Well, I know a good deal," rejoined the inspector quietly, taking the
+revolver from Trent's outstretched hand. "It's a bit of a specialty with
+me, is firearms, as I think you know, Mr. Trent. But it don't require an
+expert to tell one thing." He replaced the revolver in its case on the
+mantel-shelf, took out one of the cartridges, and laid it on the
+spacious palm of one hand; then, taking a small object from his
+waistcoat pocket, he laid it beside the cartridge. It was a little
+leaden bullet, slightly battered about the nose, and having upon it some
+bright new scratches.
+
+"Is that _the_ one?" Trent murmured as he bent over the inspector's
+hand.
+
+"That's him," replied Mr. Murch. "Lodged in the bone at the back of the
+skull. Dr. Stock got it out within the last hour, and handed it to the
+local officer, who has just sent it on to me. These bright scratches you
+see, were made by the doctor's instruments. These other marks were made
+by the rifling of the barrel--a barrel like this one." He tapped the
+revolver. "Same make, same caliber."
+
+With the pistol in its case between them, Trent and the inspector looked
+into each other's eyes for some moments. Trent was the first to speak.
+"This mystery is all wrong," he observed. "It is insanity. The symptoms
+of mania are very marked. Let us see how we stand. We were not in any
+doubt, I believe, about Manderson having despatched Marlowe in the car
+to Southampton, or about Marlowe having gone, returning late last night,
+many hours after the murder was committed."
+
+"There _is_ no doubt whatever about all that," said Mr. Murch, with a
+slight emphasis on the verb.
+
+"And now," pursued Trent, "we are invited by this polished and
+insinuating firearm to believe the following line of propositions: that
+Marlowe never went to Southampton; that he returned to the house in the
+night; that he somehow, without waking Mrs. Manderson or anybody else,
+got Manderson to get up, dress himself, and go out into the grounds;
+that he then and there shot the said Manderson with his incriminating
+pistol; that he carefully cleaned the said pistol, returned to the house
+and, again without disturbing any one, replaced it in its case in a
+favorable position to be found by the officers of the law; that he then
+withdrew and spent the rest of the day in hiding--_with_ a large
+motor-car; and that he turned up, feigning ignorance of the whole
+affair, at--what time was it?"
+
+"A little after nine P. M." The inspector still stared moodily
+at Trent. "As you say, Mr. Trent, that is the first theory suggested by
+this find, and it seems wild enough--at least it would do, if it didn't
+fall to pieces at the very start. When the murder was done Marlowe must
+have been fifty to a hundred miles away. He _did_ go to Southampton."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"I questioned him last night, and took down his story. He arrived in
+Southampton about six-thirty on the Monday morning."
+
+"Come off!" exclaimed Trent bitterly. "What do I care about his story?
+What do you care about his story? I want to know how you _know_ he went
+to Southampton."
+
+Mr. Murch chuckled. "I thought I should take a rise out of you, Mr.
+Trent," he said. "Well, there's no harm in telling you. After I arrived
+yesterday evening, as soon as I had got the outlines of the story from
+Mrs. Manderson and the servants, the first thing I did was to go to the
+telegraph office and wire to our people in Southampton. Manderson had
+told his wife when he went to bed that he had changed his mind, and sent
+Marlowe to Southampton to get some important information from someone
+who was crossing by the next day's boat. It seemed right enough; but you
+see, Marlowe was the only one of the household who wasn't under my hand,
+so to speak; he didn't return in the car until later in the evening; so
+before thinking the matter out any further, I wired to Southampton
+making certain inquiries. Early this morning I got this reply." He
+handed a series of telegraph slips to Trent, who read:
+
+     Person answering description in motor answering description arrived
+     Bedford Hotel here 6:30 this morning gave name Marlowe left car
+     hotel garage told attendant car belonged Manderson had bath and
+     breakfast went out heard of later at docks inquiring for passenger
+     name Harris on Havre boat inquired repeatedly until boat left at
+     noon next heard of at hotel where he lunched about 1:15, left soon
+     afterwards in car company's agents inform berth was booked name
+     Harris last week but Harris did not travel by boat. Burke
+     Inspector.
+
+"Simple and satisfactory," observed Mr. Murch as Trent, after twice
+reading the message, returned it to him. "His own story corroborated in
+every particular. He told me he hung about the dock for half an hour or
+so on the chance of Harris turning up late, then strolled back, lunched
+and decided to return at once. He sent a wire to Manderson: 'Harris not
+turned up missed boat returning Marlowe,' which was duly delivered here
+in the afternoon, and placed among the dead man's letters. He motored
+back at a good rate, and arrived dog-tired. When he heard of Manderson's
+death from Martin, he nearly fainted. What with that and the being
+without sleep for so long, he was rather a wreck when I came to
+interview him last night; but he was perfectly coherent."
+
+Trent picked up the revolver and twirled the cylinder idly for a few
+moments. "It was unlucky for Manderson that Marlowe left his pistol and
+cartridges about so carelessly," he remarked at length, as he put it
+back in the case. "It was throwing temptation in somebody's way, don't
+you think?"
+
+Mr. Murch shook his head. "There isn't really much to lay hold of about
+the revolver, when you come to think. That particular make of revolver
+is common enough in England. It was introduced from the States. Half the
+people who buy a revolver to-day for self-defense or mischief provide
+themselves with that make, of that caliber. It is very reliable, and
+easily carried in the hip-pocket. There must be thousands of them in the
+possession of crooks and honest men. For instance," continued the
+inspector with an air of unconcern, "Manderson himself had one, the
+double of this. I found it in one of the top drawers of the desk
+downstairs, and it's in my overcoat pocket now."
+
+"Aha! so you were going to keep that little detail to yourself."
+
+"I was," said the inspector, "but as you've found one revolver, you may
+as well know about the other. As I say, neither of them may do us any
+good. The people in the house--"
+
+Both men started, and the inspector checked his speech abruptly, as the
+half-closed door of the bedroom was slowly pushed open, and a man stood
+in the doorway. His eyes turned from the pistol in its open case to the
+faces of Trent and the inspector. They, who had not heard a sound to
+herald this entrance, simultaneously looked at his long, narrow feet. He
+wore rubber-soled tennis shoes.
+
+"You must be Mr. Bunner," said Trent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+MR. BUNNER ON THE CASE
+
+
+"Calvin C. Bunner, at your service," amended the newcomer, with a touch
+of punctilio, as he removed an unlighted cigar from his mouth. He was
+used to finding Englishmen slow and ceremonious with strangers, and
+Trent's quick remark plainly disconcerted him a little. "You are Mr.
+Trent, I expect," he went on. "Mrs. Manderson was telling me a while
+ago. Captain, good-morning." Mr. Murch acknowledged the greeting with a
+nod. "I was coming up to my room, and I heard a strange voice in here,
+so I thought I would take a look in." Mr. Bunner laughed easily. "You
+thought I might have been eavesdropping, perhaps," he said. "No, sir; I
+heard a word or two about a pistol--this one, I guess--and that's all."
+
+Mr. Bunner was a thin, rather short young man with a shaven, pale, bony,
+almost girlish face and large, dark, intelligent eyes. His waving dark
+hair was parted in the middle. His lips, usually occupied with a cigar,
+in its absence were always half open with a curious expression as of
+permanent eagerness. By smoking or chewing a cigar this expression was
+banished, and Mr. Bunner then looked the consummately cool and sagacious
+Yankee that he was.
+
+Born in Connecticut, he had gone into a broker's office on leaving
+college, and had attracted the notice of Manderson, whose business with
+his firm he had often handled. The Colossus had watched him for some
+time, and at length offered him the post of private secretary. Mr.
+Bunner was a pattern business man, trustworthy, long-headed, methodical
+and accurate. Manderson could have found many men with those virtues:
+but he engaged Mr. Bunner because he was also swift and secret, and had
+besides a singular natural instinct in regard to the movements of the
+stock market.
+
+Trent and the American measured one another coolly with their eyes. Both
+appeared satisfied with what they saw. "I was having it explained to
+me," said Trent pleasantly, "that my discovery of a pistol that might
+have shot Manderson does not amount to very much. I am told it is a
+favorite weapon among your people, and has become quite popular over
+here."
+
+Mr. Bunner stretched out a bony hand and took the pistol from its case.
+"Yes, sir," he said, handling it with an air of familiarity, "the
+captain is right. This is what we call out home a Little Arthur, and I
+dare say there are duplicates of it in a hundred thousand hip-pockets
+this minute. I consider it too light in the hand myself," Mr. Bunner
+went on, mechanically feeling under the tail of his jacket, and
+producing an ugly-looking weapon. "Feel of that, now, Mr. Trent--it's
+loaded, by the way. Now this Little Arthur--Marlowe bought it just
+before we came over this year, to please the old man. Manderson said it
+was ridiculous for a man to be without a pistol in the twentieth
+century. So he went out and bought what they offered him, I guess--never
+consulted me. Not but what it's a good gun," Mr. Bunner conceded,
+squinting along the sights. "Marlowe was poor with it at first, but I've
+coached him some in the last month or so, and he's practised until he is
+pretty good. But he never could get the habit of carrying it around.
+Why, it's as natural to me as wearing my pants. I have carried one for
+some years now, because there was always likely to be somebody laying
+for Manderson. And now," Mr. Bunner concluded sadly, "they got him when
+I wasn't around. Well, gentlemen, you must excuse me. I am going in to
+Bishopsbridge. There is a lot to do these days, and I have to send off a
+bunch of cables big enough to choke a cow."
+
+"I must be off, too," said Trent. "I have an appointment at the Three
+Tuns inn."
+
+"Let me give you a lift in the automobile," said Mr. Bunner cordially.
+"I go right by that joint. Say, Cap, are you coming my way, too? No?
+Then come along, Mr. Trent, and help me get out the car. The chauffeur
+is out of action, and we have to do 'most everything ourselves except
+clean the dirt off her."
+
+Still tirelessly talking in his measured drawl, Mr. Bunner led Trent
+downstairs and through the house to the garage at the back. It stood at
+a little distance from the house, and made a cool retreat from the blaze
+of the mid-day sun.
+
+Mr. Bunner seemed to be in no hurry to get out the car. He offered Trent
+a cigar, which was accepted, and for the first time lit his own. Then he
+seated himself on the foot-board of the car, his thin hands clasped
+between his knees, and looked keenly at the other.
+
+"See here, Mr. Trent," he said after a few moments. "There are some
+things I can tell you that may be useful to you. I know your record. You
+are a smart man, and I like dealing with smart men. I don't know if I
+have that detective sized up right, but he strikes me as a mutt. I would
+answer any questions he had the gumption to ask me--I have done so, in
+fact--but I don't feel encouraged to give him any notions of mine
+without his asking. See?"
+
+Trent nodded. "That is a feeling many people have in the presence of our
+police," he said. "It's the official manner, I suppose. But let me tell
+you Murch is anything but what you think. He is one of the shrewdest
+officers in Europe. He is not very quick with his mind, but he is very
+sure. And his experience is immense. My forte is imagination, but I
+assure you in police work experience outweighs it by a great deal."
+
+"Outweighs nothing!" replied Mr. Bunner crisply. "This is no ordinary
+case, Mr. Trent. I will tell you one reason why. I believe the old man
+knew there was something coming to him. Another thing. I believe it was
+something he thought he couldn't dodge."
+
+Trent pulled a crate opposite to Mr. Bunner's place on the foot-board
+and seated himself. "This sounds like business," he said. "Tell me your
+ideas."
+
+"I say what I do because of the change in the old man's manner this last
+few weeks. I dare say you have heard, Mr. Trent, that he was a man who
+always kept himself well in hand. That was so. I have always considered
+him the coolest and hardest head in business. That man's calm was just
+deadly--I never saw anything to beat it. And I knew Manderson as nobody
+else did. I was with him in the work he really lived for. I guess I knew
+him a heap better than his wife did, poor woman. I knew him better than
+Marlowe could--he never saw Manderson in his office when there was a big
+thing on. I knew him better than any of his friends."
+
+"Had he any friends?" interjected Trent.
+
+Mr. Bunner glanced at him sharply. "Somebody has been putting you next,
+I see that," he remarked. "No: properly speaking, I should say not. He
+had many acquaintances among the big men, people he saw 'most every day;
+they would even go yachting or hunting together. But I don't believe
+there ever was a man that Manderson opened a corner of his heart to. But
+what I was going to say was this: some months ago the old man began to
+get like I never knew him before--gloomy and sullen, just as if he was
+everlastingly brooding over something bad, something that he couldn't
+fix. This went on without any break; it was the same down town as it was
+up home, he acted just as if there was something lying heavy on his
+mind. But it wasn't until a few weeks back that his self-restraint began
+to go; and let me tell you this, Mr. Trent"--the American laid his bony
+claw on the other's knee--"I'm the only man that knows it. With everyone
+else he would be just morose and dull; but when he was alone with me in
+his office, or anywhere where we would be working together, if the least
+little thing went wrong, by George! he would fly off the handle to beat
+the Dutch. In this library here I have seen him open a letter with
+something that didn't just suit him in it, and he would rip around and
+carry on like an Indian, saying he wished he had the man that wrote it
+here, he wouldn't do a thing to him, and so on, till it was just
+pitiful. I never saw such a change. And here's another thing. For a week
+before he died Manderson neglected his work, for the first time in my
+experience. He wouldn't answer a letter or a cable, though things looked
+like going all to pieces over there. I supposed that this anxiety of
+his, whatever it was, had got onto his nerves till they were worn out.
+Once I advised him to see a doctor, and he told me to go to hell. But
+nobody saw this side of him but me. If he was having one of these rages
+in the library here, for example, and Mrs. Manderson would come into the
+room, he would be all calm and cold again in an instant."
+
+"And you put this down to some secret anxiety, a fear that somebody had
+designs on his life?" asked Trent.
+
+The American nodded.
+
+"I suppose," Trent resumed, "you had considered the idea of there being
+something wrong with his mind--a break-down from overstrain, say. That
+is the first thought that your account suggests to me. Besides, it is
+what is always happening to your big business men in America, isn't it?
+That is the impression one gets from the newspapers."
+
+"Don't let them slip you any of that bunk," said Mr. Bunner earnestly.
+"It's only the ones who have got rich too quick, and can't make good,
+who go crazy. Think of all our really big men--the men anywhere near
+Manderson's size: did you ever hear of any one of them losing his
+senses? They don't do it--believe _me_. I know they say every man has
+his loco point," Mr. Bunner added reflectively, "but that doesn't mean
+genuine, sure-enough craziness; it just means some personal eccentricity
+in a man ... like hating cats ... or my own weakness of not being able
+to touch any kind of fish-food."
+
+"Well, what was Manderson's?"
+
+"He was full of them--the old man. There was his objection to all the
+unnecessary fuss and luxury that wealthy people don't kick at much, as a
+general rule. He didn't have any use for expensive trifles and
+ornaments. He wouldn't have anybody do little things for him; he hated
+to have servants tag around after him unless he wanted them. And
+although Manderson was as careful about his clothes as any man I ever
+knew, and his shoes--well, sir, the amount of money he spent on shoes
+was sinful--in spite of that, I tell you, he never had a valet. He never
+liked to have anybody touch him. All his life nobody ever shaved him."
+
+"I've heard something of that," Trent remarked. "Why was it, do you
+think?"
+
+"Well," Mr. Bunner answered slowly, "it was the Manderson habit of mind,
+I guess; a sort of temper of general suspicion and jealousy. They say
+his father and grandfather were just the same.... Like a dog with a
+bone, you know, acting as if all the rest of creation was laying for a
+chance to steal it. He didn't really _think_ the barber would start in
+to saw his head off; he just felt there was a possibility that he
+_might_, and he was taking no risks. Then again in business he was
+always convinced that somebody else was after his bone--which was true
+enough a good deal of the time; but not all the time. The consequence of
+that was that the old man was the most cautious and secret worker in the
+world of finance; and that had a lot to do with his success, too.... But
+that doesn't amount to being a lunatic, Mr. Trent; not by a long way.
+You ask me if Manderson was losing his mind before he died. I say I
+believe he was just worn out with worrying over something, and was
+losing his nerve."
+
+Trent smoked thoughtfully. He wondered how much Mr. Bunner knew of the
+domestic difficulty in his chief's household, and decided to put out a
+feeler. "I understood that he had trouble with his wife."
+
+"Sure," replied Mr. Bunner. "But do you suppose a thing like that was
+going to upset Sig Manderson that way? No, sir! He was a sight too big a
+man to be all broken up by any worry of that kind."
+
+Trent looked half-incredulously into the eyes of the young man. But
+behind all their shrewdness and intensity he saw a massive innocence.
+Mr. Bunner really believed a serious breach between husband and wife to
+be a minor source of trouble for a big man.
+
+"What _was_ the trouble between them?" Trent inquired.
+
+"You can search me," Mr. Bunner replied briefly. He puffed at his cigar.
+"Marlowe and I have often talked about it, and we could never make out a
+solution. I had a notion at first," said Mr. Bunner in a lower voice,
+leaning forward, "that the old man was disappointed and vexed because he
+had expected a child; but Marlowe told me that the disappointment on
+that score was the other way around, likely as not. His idea was all
+right, I guess; he gathered it from something said by Mrs. Manderson's
+French maid."
+
+Trent looked up at him quickly. "Célestine!" he said; and his thought
+was: "So that was what she was getting at!"
+
+Mr. Bunner misunderstood his glance. "Don't you think I'm giving a man
+away, Mr. Trent," he said. "Marlowe isn't that kind. Célestine just took
+a fancy to him because he talks French like a native, and she would
+always be holding him up for a gossip. French servants are quite unlike
+English that way. And servant or no servant," added Mr. Bunner with
+emphasis, "I don't see how a woman could mention such a subject to a
+man. But the French beat me." He shook his head slowly.
+
+"But to come back to what you were telling me just now," Trent said.
+"You believe that Manderson was going in terror of his life for some
+time. Who should threaten it? I am quite in the dark."
+
+"Terror--I don't know," replied Mr. Bunner meditatively. "Anxiety, if
+you like ... or suspense--that's rather my idea of it. The old man was
+hard to terrify, anyway; and more than that, he wasn't taking any
+precautions--he was actually avoiding them. It looked more like he was
+asking for a quick finish--supposing there's any truth in my idea. Why,
+he would sit in that library window, nights, looking out into the dark,
+with his white shirt just a target for anybody's gun. As for who should
+threaten his life--well, sir," said Mr. Bunner with a faint smile, "it's
+certain you have not lived in the States. To take the Pennsylvania coal
+hold-up alone, there were thirty thousand men, with women and children
+to keep, who would have jumped at the chance of drilling a hole through
+the man who fixed it so that they must starve or give in to his terms.
+Thirty thousand of the toughest aliens in the country, Mr. Trent.
+There's a type of desperado you find in that kind of push who has been
+known to lay for a man for years, and kill him when he had forgotten
+what he did. They have been known to dynamite a man in Idaho who had
+done them dirt in New Jersey ten years before. Do you suppose the
+Atlantic is going to stop them?... It takes some sand, I tell you, to be
+a big business man in our country. No, sir: the old man knew--had always
+known--that there was a whole crowd of dangerous men scattered up and
+down the States who had it in for him. My belief is that he had somehow
+got to know that some of them were definitely after him at last. What
+licks me altogether is why he should have just laid himself open to them
+the way he did--why he never tried to dodge, but walked right down into
+the garden yesterday morning to be shot at."
+
+Mr. Bunner ceased to speak, and for a little while both men sat with
+wrinkled brows, faint blue vapors rising from their cigars. Then Trent
+rose. "Your theory is quite fresh to me," he said. "It's perfectly
+rational, and it's only a question of whether it fits all the facts. I
+mustn't give away what I'm doing for my newspaper, Mr. Bunner, but I
+will say this: I have already satisfied myself that this was a
+premeditated crime, and an extraordinarily cunning one at that. I'm
+deeply obliged to you. We must talk it over again." He looked at his
+watch. "I have been expected for some time by my friend. Shall we make a
+move?"
+
+"Two o'clock," said Mr. Bunner, consulting his own as he got up from the
+foot-board. "Ten A. M. in little old New York. You don't know Wall
+Street, Mr. Trent. Let's you and I hope we never see anything nearer
+hell than what's loose in the Street this minute."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE LADY IN BLACK
+
+
+The sea broke raging upon the foot of the cliff under a good breeze; the
+sun flooded the land with life from a dappled blue sky. In this
+perfection of English weather, Trent, who had slept ill, went down
+before eight o'clock to a pool among the rocks, the direction of which
+had been given him, and dived deep into clear water. Between vast gray
+boulders he swam out to the tossing open, forced himself some little way
+against a coast-wise current, and then returned to his refuge battered
+and refreshed. Ten minutes later he was scaling the cliff again, and his
+mind, cleared for the moment of a heavy disgust for the affair he had in
+hand, was turning over his plans for the morning.
+
+It was the day of the inquest, the day after his arrival in the place.
+He had carried matters not much farther after parting with the American
+on the road to Bishopsbridge. In the afternoon he had walked from the
+inn into the town, accompanied by Mr. Cupples, and had there made
+certain purchases at a chemist's shop, conferred privately for some time
+with a photographer, sent off a reply-paid telegram, and made an inquiry
+at the telephone-exchange. He had said but little about the case to Mr.
+Cupples, who seemed incurious on his side, and nothing at all about the
+results of his investigation or the steps he was about to take. After
+their return from Bishopsbridge, Trent had written a long dispatch for
+the _Record_, and sent it to be telegraphed by the proud hands of the
+paper's local representative.
+
+This morning as he scaled the cliff he told himself that he had never
+taken up a case he liked so little, or which absorbed him so much. The
+more he contemplated it in the golden sunshine of this new day, the more
+evil and the more challenging it appeared. All that he suspected and all
+that he almost knew had occupied his questing brain for hours to the
+exclusion of sleep; and in this glorious light and air, though washed in
+body and spirit by the fierce purity of the sea, he only saw the more
+clearly the darkness of the guilt in which he believed, and was more
+bitterly repelled by the motive at which he guessed. But now at least
+his zeal was awake again, and the sense of the hunt quickened. He would
+neither slacken nor spare; here need be no compunction. In the course of
+the day, he hoped, his net would be complete. He had work to do in the
+morning; and with very vivid expectancy, though not much serious hope,
+he awaited the answer to the telegram which he had shot into the sky, as
+it were, the day before.
+
+The path back to the hotel wound for some way along the top of the
+cliff, and on nearing a spot he had marked from the sea-level, where the
+face had fallen away long ago, he approached the edge and looked down,
+hoping to follow with his eyes the most delicately beautiful of all the
+movements of water, the wash of a light sea over broken rock. But no
+rock was there. A few feet below him a broad ledge stood out, a rough
+platform as large as a great room, thickly grown with wiry grass and
+walled in steeply on three sides. There, close to the verge where the
+cliff at last dropped sheer, a woman was sitting, her arms about her
+drawn-up knees, her eyes fixed on the trailing smoke of a distant liner,
+her face full of some dream.
+
+This woman seemed to Trent, whose training had taught him to live in his
+eyes, to make the most beautiful picture he had ever seen. Her face of
+Southern pallor, touched by the kiss of the wind with color on the
+cheek, presented to him a profile of delicate regularity in which there
+was nothing hard; nevertheless the black brows bending down toward the
+point where they almost met gave her in repose a look of something like
+severity, strangely redeemed by the open curves of the mouth. Trent said
+to himself that the absurdity or otherwise of a lover writing sonnets to
+his mistress's eyebrow depended after all on the quality of the eyebrow.
+Her nose was of the straight and fine sort, exquisitely escaping the
+perdition of too much length. Her hat lay pinned to the grass beside
+her, and the lively breeze played with her thick dark hair, blowing
+backward the two broad bandeaux that should have covered much of her
+forehead, and agitating a hundred tiny curls from the mass gathered at
+the nape.
+
+Everything about this lady was black, from her shoes of sučde to the hat
+that she had discarded; lusterless black covered her to her bare throat.
+All she wore was fine and well put on. Dreamy and delicate of spirit as
+her looks declared her, it was very plain that she was long-practised as
+only a woman grown can be in dressing well, the oldest of the arts, and
+had her touch of primal joy in the excellence of the body that was so
+admirably curved now in the attitude of embraced knees. With the
+suggestion of French taste in her clothes, she made a very modern figure
+seated there, until one looked at her face and saw the glow and triumph
+of all vigorous beings that ever faced sun and wind and sea together in
+the prime of the year. One saw, too, a womanhood unmixed and vigorous,
+unconsciously sure of itself.
+
+Trent, who had halted only for a moment in the surprise of seeing the
+woman in black, had passed by on the cliff above her, perceiving and
+feeling as he went the things set down. At all times his keen vision and
+active brain took in and tasted details with an easy swiftness that was
+marvelous to men of slower chemistry; the need to stare, he held, was
+evidence of blindness. Now the feeling of beauty was awakened and
+exultant, and doubled the power of his sense. In these instants a
+picture was printed on his memory that would never pass away.
+
+As he went by unheard on the turf the woman, still alone with her
+thoughts, suddenly moved. She unclasped her long hands from about her
+knees, stretched her limbs and body with feline grace, then slowly
+raised her head and extended her arms with open, curving fingers, as if
+to gather to her all the glory and overwhelming sanity of the morning.
+This was a gesture not to be mistaken: it was a gesture of freedom, the
+movement of a soul's resolution to be, to possess, to go forward,
+perhaps to enjoy.
+
+So he saw her for an instant as he passed, and he did not turn. He knew
+suddenly who the woman must be, and it was as if a curtain of gloom were
+drawn between him and the splendor of the day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You were planning to go to White Gables before the inquest, I think,"
+remarked Trent to Mr. Cupples as they finished their breakfast. "You
+ought to be off, if you are to get back to the court in time. I have
+something to attend to there myself, so we might walk up together. I
+will just go and get my camera."
+
+"By all means," Mr. Cupples answered; and they set off at once in the
+ever-growing warmth of the morning. The roof of White Gables, a surly
+patch of dull red against the dark trees, seemed to harmonize with
+Trent's mood; he felt heavy, sinister and troubled. If a blow must fall
+that might strike down that creature radiant of beauty and life whom he
+had seen that morning, he did not wish it to come from his hand. An
+exaggerated chivalry had lived in him since the first teachings of his
+mother; but at this moment the horror of bruising anything so lovely was
+almost as much the artist's revulsion as the gentleman's. On the other
+hand, was the hunt to end in nothing? The quality of the affair was such
+that the thought of forbearance was an agony. There never was such a
+case; and he alone, he was confident, held the truth of it under his
+hand. At least, he determined, that day should show whether what he
+believed was a delusion. He would trample his compunction underfoot
+until he was quite sure that there was any call for it. That same
+morning he would know.
+
+As they entered at the gate of the drive they saw Marlowe and the
+American standing in talk before the front door. In the shadow of the
+porch was the lady in black.
+
+She saw them, and came gravely forward over the lawn, moving as Trent
+had known that she would move, erect and balanced, stepping lightly.
+When she welcomed him on Mr. Cupples' presentation, her eyes of
+golden-flecked brown observed him kindly. In her pale composure, worn as
+the mask of distress, there was no trace of the emotion that had seemed
+a halo about her head on the ledge of the cliff. She spoke the
+appropriate commonplace in a low and even voice. After a few words to
+Mr. Cupples she turned her eyes on Trent again.
+
+"I hope you will succeed," she said earnestly. "Do you think you will
+succeed?"
+
+He made his mind up as the words left her lips. He said: "I believe I
+shall do so, Mrs. Manderson. When I have the case sufficiently complete
+I shall ask you to let me see you and tell you about it. It may be
+necessary to consult you before the facts are published."
+
+She looked puzzled, and distress showed for an instant in her eyes. "If
+it is necessary, of course you shall do so," she said.
+
+On the brink of his next speech Trent hesitated. He remembered that the
+lady had not wished to repeat to him the story already given to the
+inspector-or to be questioned at all. He was not unconscious that he
+desired to hear her voice and watch her face a little longer, if it
+might be; but the matter he had to mention really troubled his mind, it
+was a queer thing that fitted nowhere into the pattern within whose
+corners he had by this time brought the other queer things in the case.
+It was very possible that she could explain it away in a breath: it was
+unlikely that any one else could. He summoned his resolution.
+
+"You have been so kind," he said, "in allowing me access to the house
+and every opportunity of studying the case, that I am going to ask leave
+to put a question or two to yourself--nothing that you would rather not
+answer, I think. May I?"
+
+She glanced at him wearily. "It would be stupid of me to refuse. Ask
+your questions, Mr. Trent."
+
+"It's only this," said Trent hurriedly. "We know that your husband
+lately drew an unusually large sum of ready money from his London
+bankers, and was keeping it here. It is here now, in fact. Have you any
+idea why he should have done that?"
+
+She opened her eyes in astonishment. "I cannot imagine," she said. "I
+did not know he had done so. I am very much surprised to hear it."
+
+"Why is it surprising?"
+
+"I thought my husband had very little money in the house. On Sunday
+night, just before he went out in the motor, he came into the
+drawing-room where I was sitting. He seemed to be irritated about
+something, and asked me at once if I had any notes or gold I could let
+him have until next day. I was surprised at that, because he was never
+without money; he made it a rule to carry a hundred pounds or so about
+him always in a note-case. I unlocked my escritoire, and gave him all I
+had by me. It was nearly thirty pounds."
+
+"And he did not tell you why he wanted it?"
+
+"No. He put it in his pocket, and then said that Mr. Marlowe had
+persuaded him to go for a run in the motor by moonlight, and he thought
+it might help him to sleep. He had been sleeping badly, as perhaps you
+know. Then he went off with Mr. Marlowe. I thought it odd he should need
+money on Sunday night, but I soon forgot about it. I never remembered it
+again until now."
+
+"It was curious, certainly," said Trent, staring into the distance. Mr.
+Cupples began to speak to his niece of the arrangements for the inquest,
+and Trent moved away to where Marlowe was pacing slowly upon the lawn.
+The young man seemed relieved to talk about the coming business of the
+day. Though he still seemed tired out and nervous, he showed himself not
+without a quiet humor in describing the pomposities of the local police
+and the portentous airs of Dr. Stock. Trent turned the conversation
+gradually toward the problem of the crime, and all Marlowe's gravity
+returned.
+
+"Bunner has told me what he thinks," he said when Trent referred to the
+American's theory. "I don't find myself convinced by it, because it
+doesn't really explain some of the oddest facts. But I have lived long
+enough in the United States to know that such a stroke of revenge, done
+in a secret, melodramatic way, is not an unlikely thing. It is quite a
+characteristic feature of certain sections of the labor movement there.
+Americans have a taste and a talent for that sort of business. Do you
+know 'Huckleberry Finn?'"
+
+"Do I know my own name?" exclaimed Trent.
+
+"Well, I think the most American thing in that great American epic is
+Tom Sawyer's elaboration of an extremely difficult and romantic scheme,
+taking days to carry out, for securing the escape of the nigger Jim,
+which could have been managed quite easily in twenty minutes. You know
+how fond they are of lodges and brotherhoods. Every college club has its
+secret signs and handgrips. You've heard of the Know-Nothing movement in
+politics, I dare say, and the Ku Klux Klan. Then look at Brigham Young's
+penny-dreadful tyranny in Utah, with real blood. The founders of the
+Mormon state were of the purest Yankee stock in America; and you know
+what they did. It's all part of the same mental tendency. Americans make
+fun of it among themselves. For my part, I take it very seriously."
+
+"It can have a very hideous side to it, certainly," said Trent, "when
+you get it in connection with crime. Or with vice. Or even mere luxury.
+But I have a sort of sneaking respect for the determination to make life
+interesting and lively in spite of civilization. To return to the matter
+in hand, however: has it struck you as a possibility that Manderson's
+mind was affected to some extent by this menace that Bunner believes in?
+For instance, it was rather an extraordinary thing to send you posting
+off like that in the middle of the night."
+
+"About ten o'clock, to be exact," replied Marlowe. "Though mind you, if
+he'd actually roused me out of my bed at midnight I shouldn't have been
+very much surprised. It all chimes in with what we've just been saying.
+Manderson wasn't mad in the least, but he had a strong streak of the
+national taste for dramatic proceedings; he was rather fond of his
+well-earned reputation for unexpected strokes and for going for his
+object with ruthless directness through every opposing consideration. He
+had decided suddenly that he wanted to have word from this man Harris--"
+
+"Who is Harris?" interjected Trent.
+
+"Nobody knows. Even Bunner never heard of him, and can't imagine what
+the business in hand was. All I know is that when I went up to London
+last week to attend to various things I booked a deck-cabin, at
+Manderson's request, for a Mr. George Harris on the boat that sailed on
+Monday. It seems that Manderson suddenly found he wanted news from
+Harris which presumably was of a character too secret for the telegraph;
+and there was no train that served; so I was sent off as you know."
+
+Trent looked round to make sure that they were not overheard, then faced
+the other gravely. "There is one thing I may tell you," he said quietly,
+"that I don't think you know. Martin the butler caught a few words at
+the end of your conversation with Manderson in the orchard before you
+started with him in the car. He heard him say: 'If Harris is there every
+moment is of importance.' Now, Mr. Marlowe, you know my business here. I
+am sent to make inquiries, and you mustn't take offense. I want to ask
+you if, in the face of that sentence, you will repeat that you know
+nothing of what the business was."
+
+Marlowe shook his head. "I know nothing, indeed. I'm not easily
+offended, and your question is quite fair. What passed during that
+conversation I have already told the detective. Manderson plainly said
+to me that he could not tell me what it was all about. He simply wanted
+me to find Harris, tell him that he desired to know how matters stood,
+and bring back a letter or message from him. Harris, I was further told,
+might not turn up. If he did, 'every moment was of importance.' And now
+you know as much as I do."
+
+"That talk took place _before_ he told his wife that you were taking him
+for a moonlight run. Why did he conceal your errand in that way, I
+wonder."
+
+The young man made a gesture of helplessness. "Why? I can guess no
+better than you."
+
+"Why," muttered Trent as if to himself, gazing on the ground, "did he
+conceal it--from Mrs. Manderson?" He looked up at Marlowe.
+
+"And from Martin," the other amended coolly. "He was told the same
+thing."
+
+With a sudden movement of his head Trent seemed to dismiss the subject.
+He drew from his breast-pocket a letter-case, and thence extracted two
+small leaves of clean, fresh paper.
+
+"Just look at these two slips, Mr. Marlowe," he said. "Did you ever see
+them before? Have you any idea where they come from?" he added, as
+Marlowe took one in each hand and examined them curiously.
+
+"They seem to have been cut with a knife or scissors from a small diary
+for this year--from the October pages," Marlowe observed, looking them
+over on both sides. "I see no writing of any kind on them. Nobody here
+has any such diary so far as I know. What about them?"
+
+"There may be nothing in it," Trent said dubiously. "Any one in the
+house, of course, might have such a diary without your having seen it.
+But I didn't much expect you would be able to identify the leaves--in
+fact, I should have been surprised if you had."
+
+He stopped speaking as Mrs. Manderson came towards them. "My uncle
+thinks we should be going now," she said.
+
+"I think I will walk on with Mr. Bunner," Mr. Cupples said as he joined
+them. "There are certain business matters that must be disposed of as
+soon as possible. Will you come on with these two gentlemen, Mabel? We
+will wait for you before we reach the place."
+
+Trent turned to her. "Mrs. Manderson will excuse me, I hope," he said.
+"I really came up this morning in order to look about me here for some
+indications I thought I might possibly find. I had not thought of
+attending the--the court just yet."
+
+She looked at him with eyes of perfect candor. "Of course, Mr. Trent.
+Please do exactly as you wish. We are all relying upon you. If you will
+wait a few moments, Mr. Marlowe, I shall be ready."
+
+She entered the house. Her uncle and the American had already strolled
+towards the gate.
+
+Trent looked into the eyes of his companion. "That is a wonderful
+woman," he said in a lowered voice.
+
+"You say so without knowing her," replied Marlowe in a similar tone.
+"She is more than that."
+
+Trent said nothing to this. He stared out over the fields towards the
+sea. In the silence a noise of hobnailed haste rose on the still air. A
+little distance down the road a boy appeared trotting towards them from
+the direction of the hotel. In his hand was the orange envelope,
+unmistakable afar off, of a telegram. Trent watched him with a carefully
+indifferent eye as he met and passed the two others. Then he turned to
+Marlowe. "Apropos of nothing in particular," he said, "were you at
+Oxford?"
+
+"Yes," said the young man. "Why do you ask?"
+
+"I just wondered if I was right in my guess. It's one of the things you
+can very often tell about a man, isn't it?"
+
+"I suppose so," Marlowe admitted. "Well, each of us is marked in one way
+or another, perhaps. I should have said you were an artist, if I hadn't
+known it."
+
+"Why? Does my hair want cutting?"
+
+"Oh, no! It's only that you look at things and people as I've seen
+artists do, with an eye that moves steadily from detail to
+detail--rather looking them over than looking at them."
+
+The boy came up panting. "Telegram for you, sir," he said to Trent.
+"Just come, sir."
+
+Trent tore open the envelop with an apology, and his eyes lighted up so
+visibly as he read the slip that Marlowe's tired face softened in a
+smile.
+
+"It must be good news," he murmured half to himself.
+
+Trent turned on him a glance in which nothing could be read. "Not
+exactly news," he said. "It only tells me that another little guess of
+mine was a good one."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE INQUEST
+
+
+The coroner, who fully realized that for that one day of his life as a
+provincial solicitor he was living in the gaze of the world, had
+resolved to be worthy of the fleeting eminence. He was a large man of
+jovial temper, with a strong interest in the dramatic aspects of his
+work, and the news of Manderson's mysterious death within his
+jurisdiction had made him the happiest coroner in England. A respectable
+capacity for marshaling facts was fortified in him by a copiousness of
+impressive language that made juries as clay in his hands and sometimes
+disguised a doubtful interpretation of the rules of evidence.
+
+The court was held in a long unfurnished room lately built onto the
+hotel, and intended to serve as a ball-room or concert-hall. A regiment
+of reporters was entrenched in the front seats, and those who were to be
+called on to give evidence occupied chairs to one side of the table
+behind which the coroner sat, while the jury, in double row, with
+plastered hair and a spurious ease of manner, flanked him on the other
+side. An undistinguished public filled the rest of the space, and
+listened, in an awed silence, to the opening solemnities. The newspaper
+men, well used to these, muttered among themselves. Those of them who
+knew Trent by sight, assured the rest that he was not in the court.
+
+The identity of the dead man was proved by his wife, the first witness
+called, from whom the coroner, after some inquiry into the health and
+circumstances of the deceased, proceeded to draw an account of the last
+occasion on which she had seen her husband alive. Mrs. Manderson was
+taken through her evidence by the coroner with the sympathy which every
+man felt for that dark figure of grief. She lifted her thick veil before
+beginning to speak, and the extreme paleness and unbroken composure of
+the lady produced a singular impression. This was not an impression of
+hardness. Interesting femininity was the first thing to be felt in her
+presence. She was not even enigmatic. It was only clear that the force
+of a powerful character was at work to master the emotions of her
+situation. Once or twice as she spoke she touched her eyes with her
+handkerchief, but her voice was low and clear to the end.
+
+Her husband, she said, had come up to his bedroom about his usual hour
+for retiring on the Sunday night. His room was really a dressing-room
+attached to her own bedroom, communicating with it by a door which was
+usually kept open during the night. Both dressing-room and bedroom were
+entered by other doors giving on the passage. Her husband had always had
+a preference for the greatest simplicity in his bedroom arrangements,
+and liked to sleep in a small room. She had not been awake when he came
+up, but had been half-aroused, as usually happened, when the light was
+switched on in her husband's room. She had spoken to him. She had no
+clear recollection of what she had said, as she had been very drowsy at
+the time; but she had remembered that he had been out for a moonlight
+run in the car, and she believed she had asked whether he had had a good
+run, and what time it was. She had asked what the time was because she
+felt as if she had only been a very short time asleep, and she had
+expected her husband to be out very late. In answer to her question he
+had told her it was half-past eleven, and had gone on to say that he had
+changed his mind about going for a run.
+
+"Did he say why?" the coroner asked.
+
+"Yes," replied the lady, "he did explain why. I remember very well what
+he said, because--" she stopped with a little appearance of confusion.
+
+"Because--" the coroner insisted gently.
+
+"Because my husband was not as a rule communicative about his business
+affairs," answered the witness, raising her chin with a faint touch of
+defiance. "He did not--did not think they would interest me, and as a
+rule referred to them as little as possible. That is why I was rather
+surprised when he told me that he had sent Mr. Marlowe to Southampton to
+bring back some important information from a man who was leaving for
+Paris by the next day's boat. He said that Mr. Marlowe could do it quite
+easily if he had no accident. He said that he had started in the car,
+and then walked back home a mile or so, and felt all the better for it."
+
+"Did he say any more?"
+
+"Nothing, as well as I remember," the witness said. "I was very sleepy,
+and I dropped off again in a few moments. I just remember my husband
+turning his light out, and that is all. I never saw him again alive."
+
+"And you heard nothing in the night?"
+
+"No; I never woke until my maid brought my tea in the morning at seven
+o'clock. She closed the door leading to my husband's room, as she always
+did, and I supposed him to be still there. He always needed a great deal
+of sleep. He sometimes slept until quite late in the morning. I had
+breakfast in my sitting-room. It was about ten when I heard that my
+husband's body had been found." The witness dropped her head and
+silently waited for her dismissal.
+
+But it was not to be yet.
+
+"Mrs. Manderson." The coroner's voice was sympathetic, but it had a hint
+of firmness in it now. "The question I am going to put to you must, in
+these sad circumstances, be a painful one; but it is my duty to ask it.
+Is it the fact that your relations with your late husband had not been,
+for some time past, relations of mutual affection and confidence? Is it
+the fact that there was an estrangement between you?"
+
+The lady drew herself up again and faced her questioner, the color
+rising in her cheeks. "If that question is necessary," she said with
+cold distinctness, "I will answer it so that there shall be no
+misunderstanding. During the last few months of my husband's life his
+attitude towards me had given me great anxiety and sorrow. He had
+changed towards me; he had become very reserved and seemed mistrustful.
+I saw much less of him than before; he seemed to prefer to be alone. I
+can give no explanation at all of the change. I tried to work against
+it; I did all I could with justice to my own dignity, as I thought.
+Something was between us, I did not know what, and he never told me. My
+own obstinate pride prevented me from asking what it was in so many
+words; I only made a point of being to him exactly as I had always been,
+so far as he would allow me. I suppose I shall never know now what it
+was." The witness, whose voice had trembled in spite of her
+self-control, over the last few sentences, drew down her veil when she
+had said this, and stood erect and quiet.
+
+One of the jury asked a question, not without obvious hesitation. "Then
+was there never anything of the nature of what they call Words between
+you and your husband, ma'am?"
+
+"Never." The word was colorlessly spoken; but everyone felt that a crass
+misunderstanding of the possibilities of conduct in the case of a person
+like Mrs. Manderson had been visited with some severity.
+
+Did she know, the coroner asked, of any other matter which might have
+been preying upon her husband's mind recently?
+
+Mrs. Manderson knew of none whatever. The coroner intimated that her
+ordeal was at an end, and the veiled lady made her way to the door. The
+general attention, which followed her for a few moments, was now eagerly
+directed upon Martin, whom the coroner had proceeded to call.
+
+It was at this moment that Trent appeared at the doorway, and edged his
+way into the great room. But he did not look at Martin. He was observing
+the well-balanced figure that came quickly toward him along an opening
+path in the crowd, and his eye was gloomy. He started, as he stood aside
+from the door with a slight bow, to hear Mrs. Manderson address him by
+name in a low voice. He followed her a pace or two into the hall.
+
+"I wanted to ask you," she said in a voice now weak and oddly broken,
+"if you would give me your arm a part of the way to the house. I could
+not see my uncle near the door, and I suddenly felt rather faint.... I
+shall be better in the air.... No, no! I cannot stay here--please, Mr.
+Trent!" she said, as he began to make an obvious suggestion. "I must go
+to the house." Her hand tightened momentarily on his arm as if, for all
+her weakness, she could drag him from the place; then again she leaned
+heavily upon it, and with that support, and with bent head, she walked
+slowly from the hotel and along the oak-shaded path toward White Gables.
+
+Trent went in silence, his thoughts whirling, dancing insanely to a
+chorus of "Fool! fool!" All that he alone knew, all that he guessed and
+suspected of this affair rushed through his brain in a rout; but the
+touch of her unnerved hand upon his arm never for an instant left his
+consciousness, filling him with an exaltation that enraged and
+bewildered him. He was still cursing himself furiously behind the mask
+of conventional solicitude that he turned to the lady when he had
+attended her to the house, and seen her sink upon a couch in the morning
+room. Raising her veil, she thanked him gravely and frankly, with a look
+of sincere gratitude in her eyes. She was much better now, she said, and
+a cup of tea would work a miracle upon her. She hoped she had not taken
+him away from anything important. She was ashamed of herself; she
+thought she could go through with it, but she had not expected those
+last questions. "I am glad you did not hear me," she said when he
+explained. "But of course you will read it all in the reports. It shook
+me so to have to speak of that," she added simply, "and to keep from
+making an exhibition of myself took it out of me. And all those staring
+men by the door! Thank you again for helping me when I asked you.... I
+thought I might," she ended queerly, with a little tired smile; and
+Trent took himself away, his hand still quivering from the cool touch of
+her fingers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A HOT SCENT
+
+
+"Come in," called Trent.
+
+Mr. Cupples entered his sitting-room at the hotel. It was the early
+evening of the day on which the coroner's jury, without leaving the box,
+had pronounced the expected denunciation of a person or persons unknown.
+Trent, with a hasty glance upward, continued his intent study of what
+lay in a photographic dish of enameled metal, which he moved slowly
+about in the light of the window. He looked very pale and his movements
+were nervous.
+
+"Sit on the sofa," he advised. "The chairs are a job lot bought at the
+sale after the suppression of the Holy Inquisition in Spain. This is a
+pretty good negative," he went on, holding it up to the light with his
+head at the angle of discriminating judgment. "Washed enough now, I
+think. Let us leave it to dry, and get rid of all this mess."
+
+Mr. Cupples, as the other busily cleared the table of a confusion of
+basins, dishes, racks, boxes and bottles, picked up first one and then
+another of the objects and studied them with innocent curiosity.
+
+"That is called hypo-eliminator," said Trent as Mr. Cupples uncorked and
+smelled at one of the bottles. "Very useful when you're in a hurry with
+a negative. I shouldn't drink it, though, all the same. It eliminates
+sodium hypophosphite, but I shouldn't wonder if it would eliminate human
+beings too." He found a place for the last of the litter on the crowded
+mantel-shelf, and came to sit before Mr. Cupples on the table. "The
+great thing about a hotel sitting-room is that its beauty does not
+distract the mind from work. It is no place for the May-fly pleasures of
+a mind at ease. Have you ever been in this room before, Cupples? I have,
+hundreds of times. It has pursued me all over England for years. I
+should feel lost without it if, in some fantastic, far-off hotel, they
+were to give me some other sitting-room. Look at this table-cover; there
+is the ink I spilled on it when I had this room in Halifax. I burnt that
+hole in the carpet when I had it in Ipswich. But I see they have mended
+the glass over the picture of 'Silent Sympathy,' which I threw a boot at
+in Banbury. I do all my best work here. This afternoon, for instance,
+since the inquest, I have finished several excellent negatives. There is
+a very good dark-room downstairs."
+
+"The inquest--that reminds me," said Mr. Cupples, who knew that this
+sort of talk in Trent meant the excitement of action, and was wondering
+what he could be about. "I came in to thank you, my dear fellow, for
+looking after Mabel this morning. I had no idea she was going to feel
+ill after leaving the box; she seemed quite unmoved, and really she is a
+woman of such extraordinary self-command, I thought I could leave her to
+her own devices and hear out the evidence, which I thought it important
+I should do. It was a very fortunate thing she found a friend to assist
+her, and she is most grateful. She is quite herself again now."
+
+Trent, with his hands in his pockets and a slight frown on his brow,
+made no reply to this. "I tell you what," he said after a short pause,
+"I was just getting to the really interesting part of the job when you
+came in. Come: would you like to see a little bit of high-class police
+work? It's the very same kind of work that old Murch ought to be doing
+at this moment. Perhaps he is; but I hope to glory he isn't." He sprang
+off the table and disappeared into his bedroom. Presently he came out
+with a large drawing-board on which a number of heterogeneous objects
+was ranged.
+
+"First I must introduce you to these little things," he said, setting
+them out on the table. "Here is a big ivory paper-knife; here are two
+leaves cut out of a diary--my own diary; here is a bottle containing
+dentifrice; here is a little case of polished walnut. Some of these
+things have to be put back where they belong in somebody's bedroom at
+White Gables before night. That's the sort of man I am--nothing stops
+me. I borrowed them this very morning when everyone was down at the
+inquest, and I dare say some people would think it rather an odd
+proceeding if they knew. Now there remains one object on the board. Can
+you tell me, without touching it, what it is?"
+
+"Certainly I can," said Mr. Cupples, peering at it with great interest.
+"It is an ordinary glass bowl. It looks like a finger-bowl. I see
+nothing odd about it," he added after some moments of close scrutiny.
+
+"That," replied Trent, "is exactly where the fun comes in. Now take this
+little fat bottle, Cupples, and pull out the cork. Do you recognize that
+powder inside it? You have swallowed pounds of it in your time, I
+expect. They give it to babies. Gray powder is its ordinary
+name--mercury and chalk. It is great stuff. Now while I hold the basin
+side-ways over this sheet of paper, I want you to pour a little powder
+out of the bottle over this part of the bowl--just here.... Perfect! Sir
+Edward Henry himself could not have handled the powder better. You have
+done this before, Cupples, I can see. You are an old hand."
+
+"I really am not," said Mr. Cupples seriously, as Trent returned the
+fallen powder to the bottle. "I assure you it is all a complete mystery
+to me. What did I do then?"
+
+"I brush the powdered part of the bowl lightly with this camel-hair
+brush. Now look at it again. You saw nothing odd about it before. Do you
+see anything now?"
+
+Mr. Cupples peered again. "How curious," he said. "Yes, there are two
+large gray finger-marks on the bowl. They were not there before."
+
+"I am Hawkshaw the detective," observed Trent. "Would it interest you to
+hear a short lecture on the subject of glass finger-bowls? When you take
+one up with your hand you leave traces upon it, usually practically
+invisible, which may remain for days or months. You leave the marks of
+your fingers. The human hand, even when quite clean, is never quite dry,
+and sometimes--in moments of great anxiety, for instance, Cupples--it is
+very moist. It leaves a mark on any cold smooth surface it may touch.
+That bowl was moved by somebody with a rather moist hand quite lately."
+He sprinkled the powder again. "Here on the other side, you see, is the
+thumb-mark--very good impressions all of them." He spoke without raising
+his voice, but Mr. Cupples could perceive that he was ablaze with
+excitement as he stared at the faint gray marks. "This one should be the
+index finger. I need not tell a man of your knowledge of the world that
+the pattern of it is a single-spiral whorl, with deltas symmetrically
+disposed. This, the print of the second finger, is a simple loop, with a
+staple core and fifteen counts. I know there are fifteen, because I have
+just the same two prints on this negative, which I have examined in
+detail. Look--!" he held one of the negatives up to the light of the
+declining sun and demonstrated with a pencil point. "You can see they're
+the same. You see the bifurcation of that ridge. There it is in the
+other. You see that little scar near the center. There it is in the
+other. There are a score of ridge-characteristics on which an expert
+would swear in the witness-box that the marks on that bowl and the marks
+I have photographed on this negative were made by the same hand."
+
+"And where did you photograph them? What does it all mean?" asked Mr.
+Cupples, wide-eyed.
+
+"I found them on the inside of the left-hand leaf of the front-window in
+Mrs. Manderson's bedroom. As I could not bring the window with me, I
+photographed them, sticking a bit of black paper on the other side of
+the glass for the purpose. The bowl comes from Manderson's room. It is
+the bowl in which his false teeth were placed at night. I could bring
+that away, so I did."
+
+"But those cannot be Mabel's finger-marks."
+
+"I should think not!" said Trent with decision. "They are twice the size
+of any print Mrs. Manderson could make."
+
+"Then they must be her husband's."
+
+"Perhaps they are. Now shall we see if we can match them once more? I
+believe we can." Whistling faintly, and very white in the face, Trent
+opened another small squat bottle containing a dense black powder.
+"Lamp-black," he explained. "Hold a bit of paper in your hand for a
+second or two, and this little chap will show you the pattern of your
+fingers." He carefully took up with a pair of tweezers one of the leaves
+cut from his diary, and held it out for the other to examine. No marks
+appeared on the leaf. He tilted some of the powder out upon one surface
+of the paper, then, turning it over, upon the other; then shook the leaf
+gently to rid it of the loose powder. He held it out to Mr. Cupples in
+silence. On one side of the paper appeared unmistakably, clearly printed
+in black, the same two finger-prints that he had already seen on the
+bowl and on the photographic plate. He took up the bowl and compared
+them. Trent turned the paper over, and on the other side was a bold
+black replica of the thumb-mark that was printed in gray on the glass in
+his hand.
+
+"Same man, you see," Trent said with a short laugh. "I felt that it must
+be so, and now I know." He walked to the window and looked out. "Now I
+know," he repeated in a low voice, as if to himself. His tone was
+bitter. Mr. Cupples, understanding nothing, stared at his motionless
+back for a few moments.
+
+"I am still completely in the dark," he ventured presently. "I have
+often heard of this finger-print business, and wondered how the police
+went to work about it. It is of extraordinary interest to me, but upon
+my life I cannot see how in this case Manderson's finger-prints are
+going--"
+
+"I am very sorry, Cupples," Trent broke in upon his meditative speech
+with a swift return to the table. "When I began this investigation I
+meant to take you with me every step of the way. You mustn't think I
+have any doubts about your discretion if I say now that I must hold my
+tongue about the whole thing, at least for a time. I will tell you this:
+I have come upon a fact that looks too much like having terrible
+consequences if it is discovered by any one else." He looked at the
+other with a hard and darkened face, and struck the table with his hand.
+"It is terrible for me here and now. Up to this moment I was hoping
+against hope that I was wrong about the fact. I may still be wrong in
+the surmise that I base upon that fact. There is only one way of finding
+out that is open to me, and I must nerve myself to take it." He smiled
+suddenly at Mr. Cupples' face of consternation. "All right--I'm not
+going to be tragic any more, and I'll tell you all about it when I can.
+Look here, I'm not half through my game with the powder-bottles yet."
+
+He drew one of the defamed chairs to the table and sat down to test the
+broad ivory blade of the paper knife. Mr. Cupples, swallowing his
+amazement, bent forward in an attitude of deep interest and handed Trent
+the bottle of lamp-black.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE WIFE OF DIVES
+
+
+Mrs. Manderson stood at the window of her sitting-room at White Gables
+gazing out upon a wavering landscape of fine rain and mist. The weather
+had broken as it seldom does in that part in June. White wreathings
+drifted up the fields from the sullen sea; the sky was an unbroken gray
+deadness shedding pin-point moisture that was now and then blown against
+the panes with a crepitation of despair. The lady looked out on the dim
+and chilling prospect with a woeful face. It was a bad day for a woman
+bereaved, alone and without a purpose in life.
+
+There was a knock, and she called, "Come in!" drawing herself up with an
+unconscious gesture that always came when she realized that the
+weariness of the world had been gaining upon her spirit. Mr. Trent had
+called, the maid said; he apologized for coming at such an early hour,
+but hoped that Mrs. Manderson would see him on a matter of urgent
+importance. Mrs. Manderson would see Mr. Trent. She walked to a mirror,
+looked into the olive face she saw reflected there, shook her head at
+herself with the flicker of a grimace, and turned to the door as Trent
+was shown in.
+
+His appearance, she noted, was changed. He had the jaded look of the
+sleepless, and a new and reserved expression, in which her quick
+sensibilities felt something not propitious, took the place of his
+half-smile of fixed good-humor.
+
+"May I come to the point at once?" he said when she had given him her
+hand. "There is a train I ought to catch at Bishopsbridge at twelve
+o'clock, but I cannot go until I have settled this thing, which concerns
+you only, Mrs. Manderson. I have been working half the night, and
+thinking the rest; and I know now what I ought to do."
+
+"You look wretchedly tired," she said kindly. "Won't you sit down?--this
+is a very restful chair. Of course it is about this terrible business
+and your work as correspondent. Please ask me anything you think I can
+properly tell you, Mr. Trent. I know that you won't make it worse for me
+than you can help in doing your duty here. If you say you must see me
+about something, I know it must be because, as you say, you ought to do
+it."
+
+"Mrs. Manderson," said Trent, slowly measuring his words, "I won't make
+it worse for you than I can help. But I am bound to make it bad for
+you--only between ourselves, I hope. As to whether you can properly tell
+me what I shall ask you, you will decide that; but I tell you this on my
+word of honor: I shall ask you only as much as will decide me whether to
+publish or to withhold certain grave things that I have found out about
+your husband's death, things not suspected by any one else, nor, I
+think, likely to be so. What I have discovered--what I believe that I
+have practically proved--will be a great shock to you in any case. But
+it may be worse for you than that; and if you give me reason to think it
+would be so, then I shall destroy this manuscript"--he laid a long
+envelop on the small table beside him--"and nothing of what it has to
+tell shall ever be printed. It consists, I may tell you, of a short
+private note to my editor, followed by a long despatch for publication
+in the _Record_. Now you may refuse to say anything to me. If you do
+refuse, my duty to my employers, as I see it, is to take this up to
+London with me to-day and leave it with my editor to be dealt with at
+his discretion. My view is, you understand, that I am not entitled to
+suppress it on the strength of a mere possibility that presents itself
+to my imagination. But if I gather from you--and I can gather it from no
+other person--that there is substance in that imaginary possibility I
+speak of, then I have only one thing to do as a gentleman and as one
+who"--he hesitated for a phrase--"wishes you well. I shall suppress that
+despatch of mine. In some directions I decline to assist the police.
+Have you followed me so far?" he asked with a touch of anxiety in his
+careful coldness; for her face, but for its pallor, gave no sign as she
+regarded him, her hands clasped before her and her shoulders drawn back
+in a pose of rigid calm. She looked precisely as she had looked at the
+inquest.
+
+"I understand quite well," said Mrs. Manderson in a low voice. She drew
+a deep breath, and went on: "I don't know what dreadful thing you have
+found out, or what the possibility that has occurred to you can be, but
+it was good--it was honorable of you to come to me about it. Now will
+you please tell me?"
+
+"I cannot do that," Trent replied. "The secret is my newspaper's, if it
+is not yours. If I find it is yours, you shall have my manuscript to
+read and destroy. Believe me," he broke out with something of his old
+warmth, "I detest such mystery-making from the bottom of my soul, but it
+is not I who have made this mystery. This is the most painful hour of my
+life, and you make it worse by not treating me like a hound. The first
+thing I ask you to tell me"--he reverted with an effort to his colorless
+tone--"is this: is it true, as you stated at the inquest, that you had
+no idea at all of the reason why your late husband had changed his
+attitude toward you, and become mistrustful and reserved, during the
+last few months of his life?"
+
+Mrs. Manderson's dark brows lifted and her eyes flamed; she quickly rose
+from her chair. Trent got up at the same moment, and took his envelop
+from the table; his manner said that he perceived the interview to be at
+an end. But she held up a hand, and there was color in her cheeks and
+quick breathing in her voice as she said: "Do you know what you ask, Mr.
+Trent? You ask me if I perjured myself."
+
+"I do," he answered unmoved; and he added after a pause: "You knew
+already that I had not come here to preserve the polite fictions, Mrs.
+Manderson. The theory that no reputable person, being on oath, could
+withhold a part of the truth under any circumstances is a polite
+fiction." He still stood as awaiting dismissal; but she was silent. She
+walked to the window, and he stood miserably watching the slight
+movement of her shoulders until it subsided. Then with face averted,
+looking out on the dismal weather, she spoke at last clearly.
+
+"Mr. Trent," she said, "you inspire confidence in people, and I feel
+that things which I don't want known or talked about are safe with you.
+And I know you must have a very serious reason for doing what you are
+doing, though I don't know what it is. I suppose it would be assisting
+justice in some way if I told you the truth about what you asked me just
+now. To understand that truth you ought to know about what went before;
+I mean about my marriage. After all, a good many people could tell you
+as well as I can that it was not ... a very successful union. I was only
+twenty. I admired his force and courage and certainty; he was the only
+strong man I had ever known. But it did not take me long to find out
+that he cared for his business more than for me, and I think I found out
+even sooner that I had been deceiving myself and blinding myself,
+promising myself impossible things and wilfully misunderstanding my own
+feelings, because I was dazzled by the idea of having more money to
+spend than an English girl ever dreams of. I have been despising myself
+for that for five years. My husband's feeling for me ... well, I cannot
+speak of that ... what I want to say is that along with it there had
+always been a belief of his that I was the sort of woman to take a great
+place in society, and that I should throw myself into it with enjoyment
+and become a sort of personage and do him great credit--that was his
+idea; and the idea remained with him after other delusions had
+gone. I was a part of his ambition. That was his really bitter
+disappointment--that I failed him as a social success. I think he was
+too shrewd not to have known in his heart that such a man as he was,
+twenty years older than I, with great business responsibilities that
+filled every hour of his life, and caring for nothing else--he must have
+felt that there was a risk of great unhappiness in marrying the sort of
+girl I was, brought up to music and books and unpractical ideas, always
+enjoying myself in my own way. But he had really reckoned on me as a
+wife who would do the honors of his position in the world; and I found I
+couldn't."
+
+Mrs. Manderson had talked herself into a more emotional mood than she
+had yet shown to Trent. Her words flowed freely, and her voice had begun
+to ring and give play to a natural expressiveness that must hitherto
+have been dulled, he thought, by the shock and self-restraint of the
+past few days. Now she turned swiftly from the window and faced him as
+she went on, her beautiful face flushed and animated, her eyes gleaming,
+her hands moving in slight emphatic gestures, as she surrendered herself
+to the impulse of giving speech to things long pent up.
+
+"The people!" she said. "Oh, those people! Can you imagine what it must
+be for any one who has lived in a world where there was always creative
+work in the background, work with some dignity about it, men and women
+with professions or arts to follow, with ideals and things to believe in
+and quarrel about, some of them wealthy, some of them quite poor,--can
+you think what it means to step out of that into another world where you
+_have_ to be very rich, shamefully rich, to exist at all--where money is
+the only thing that counts and the first thing in everybody's
+thoughts--where the men who make the millions are so jaded by the work
+that sport is the only thing they can occupy themselves with when they
+have any leisure, and the men who don't have to work are even duller
+than the men who do, and vicious as well; and the women live for display
+and silly amusements and silly immoralities--do you know how awful that
+life is?... Of course I know there are clever people and people of taste
+in that set, but they're swamped and spoiled, and it's the same thing in
+the end--empty, empty! Oh! I suppose I'm exaggerating, and I did make
+friends and have some happy times; but that's how I feel after it all.
+The seasons in New York and London! How I hated them! And our
+house-parties and cruises in the yacht and the rest--the same people,
+the same emptiness!
+
+"And you see, don't you, that my husband couldn't have an idea of all
+this? _His_ life was never empty. He did not live it in society, and
+when he was in society he had always his business plans and difficulties
+to occupy his mind. He hadn't a suspicion of what I felt, and I never
+let him know--I couldn't; it wouldn't have been fair. I felt I must do
+_something_ to justify myself as his wife, sharing his position and
+fortune; and the only thing I could do was to try, and try, to live up
+to his idea about my social qualities.... I did try. I acted my best.
+And it became harder year by year.... I never was what they call a
+popular hostess--how could I be? I was a failure; but I went on
+trying.... I used to steal holidays now and then. I used to feel as if I
+was not doing my part of a bargain--it sounds horrid to put it like
+that, I know, but it _was_ so--when I took one of my old school-friends,
+who couldn't afford to travel, away to Italy for a month or two, and we
+went about cheaply all by ourselves and were quite happy; or when I went
+and made a long stay in London with some quiet people who had known me
+all my life, and we all lived just as in the old days, when we had to
+think twice about seats at the theater, and told each other about cheap
+dress-makers. Those and a few other expeditions of the same sort were my
+best times after I was married, and they helped me to go through with it
+the rest of the time. But I felt my husband would have hated to know how
+much I enjoyed every hour of those returns to the old life.
+
+"And in the end, in spite of everything I could do, he came to
+know.... He could see through anything, I think, once his attention was
+turned to it. He had always been able to see that I was not fulfilling
+his idea of me as a figure in the social world, and I suppose he thought
+it was my misfortune rather than my fault. But the moment he began to
+see, in spite of my pretending, that I wasn't playing my part with any
+spirit, he knew the whole story; he divined how I loathed and was weary
+of the luxury and the brilliancy and the masses of money just because
+of the people who lived among them--who were made so by them, I
+suppose.... It happened last year. I don't know just how or when. It may
+have been suggested to him by some woman--for _they_ all understood, of
+course. He said nothing to me, and I think he tried not to change in his
+manner to me at first; but such things hurt--and it was working in both
+of us. I knew that he knew. After a time we were just being polite and
+considerate to each other. Before he found me out we had been on a
+footing of--how can I express it to you?--of intelligent companionship,
+I might say. We talked without restraint of many things of the kind we
+could agree or disagree about without its going very deep ... if you
+understand. And then that came to an end. I felt that the only possible
+basis of our living in each other's company was going under my feet. And
+at last it was gone.
+
+"It had been like that," she ended simply, "for months before he died."
+She sank into the corner of a sofa by the window, as though relaxing her
+body after an effort. For a few moments both were silent. Trent was
+hastily sorting out a tangle of impressions. He was amazed at the
+frankness of Mrs. Manderson's story. He was amazed at the vigorous
+expressiveness in her telling of it. In this vivid being, carried away
+by an impulse to speak, talking with her whole personality, he had seen
+the real woman in a temper of activity, as he had already seen the real
+woman by chance in a temper of reverie and unguarded emotion. In both
+she was very unlike the pale, self-disciplined creature of majesty that
+she had been to the world. With that amazement of his went something
+like terror of her dark beauty, which excitement kindled into an
+appearance scarcely mortal in his eyes. Incongruously there rushed into
+his mind, occupied as it was with the affair of the moment, a little
+knot of ideas ... she was unique not because of her beauty but because
+of its being united with intensity of nature; in England all the very
+beautiful women were placid, all the fiery women seemed to have burnt up
+the best of their beauty; that was why no beautiful woman had ever cast
+this sort of spell on him before; when it was a question of wit in women
+he had preferred the brighter flame to the duller, without much
+regarding the lamp. "All this is very disputable," said his reason; and
+instinct answered, "Yes--except that I am under a spell"; and a deeper
+instinct cried out, "Away with it!" He forced his mind back to her
+story, and found growing swiftly in him an irrepressible conviction. It
+was all very fine; but it would not do.
+
+"I feel as if I had led you into saying more than you meant to say, or
+than I wanted to learn," he said slowly. "But there is one brutal
+question which is the whole point of my inquiry." He braced his frame
+like one preparing for a plunge into cold waters. "Mrs. Manderson, will
+you assure me that your husband's change toward you had nothing to do
+with John Marlowe?"
+
+And what he had dreaded came. "Oh!" she cried with a sound of anguish,
+her face thrown up and open hands stretched out as if for pity; and then
+the hands covered the burning face, and she flung herself aside among
+the cushions at her elbow, so that he saw nothing but her heavy crown of
+black hair and her body moving with sobs that stabbed his heart, and a
+foot turned inward gracefully in an abandonment of misery. Like a tall
+tower suddenly breaking apart she had fallen in ruins, helplessly
+weeping.
+
+Trent stood up, his face white and calm. With a senseless particularity
+he placed his envelop exactly in the center of the little polished
+table. He walked to the door, closed it noiselessly as he went out, and
+in a few minutes was tramping through the rain out of sight of White
+Gables, going nowhere, seeing nothing, his soul shaken in the fierce
+effort to kill and trample the raving impulse that had seized him in the
+presence of her shame, that clamored to him to drag himself before her
+feet, to pray for pardon, to pour out words--he knew not what words, but
+he knew that they had been straining at his lips--to wreck his
+self-respect forever, and hopelessly defeat even the crazy purpose that
+had almost possessed him, by drowning her wretchedness in disgust, by
+babbling with the tongue of infatuation to a woman with a husband not
+yet buried, to a woman who loved another man.
+
+Such was the magic of her tears, quickening in a moment the thing which,
+as his heart had known, he must not let come to life. For Philip Trent
+was a young man, younger in nature even than his years, and a way of
+life that kept his edge keen and his spirit volcanic had prepared him
+very ill for the meeting that comes once in the early manhood of most of
+us, usually--as in his case, he told himself harshly--to no purpose but
+the testing of virtue and the power of the will.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+"HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED"
+
+
+(_Being the report which was not sent to the Record._)
+
+
+     _Marlstone, June 16th._
+
+     My Dear Molloy: This is in case I don't find you at your office. I
+     have found out who killed Manderson, as this despatch will show.
+     That was my problem; yours is to decide what use to make of it. It
+     definitely charges an unsuspected person with having a hand in the
+     crime, and practically accuses him of being the murderer, so I
+     don't suppose you will publish it before his arrest, and I believe
+     it is illegal to do so afterwards until he has been tried and found
+     guilty. You may decide to publish it then; and you may find it
+     possible to make some use or other before then of the facts I have
+     given. That is your affair. Meanwhile, will you communicate with
+     Scotland Yard, and let them see what I have written? I have done
+     with the Manderson mystery, and I wish to God I had never touched
+     it. Here follows my despatch.
+
+     P. T.
+
+I begin this, my third and probably my final despatch to the _Record_
+upon the Manderson murder, with conflicting feelings. I have a strong
+sense of relief, because in my two previous despatches I was obliged, in
+the interests of justice, to withhold facts ascertained by me which
+would, if published then, have put a certain person upon his guard and
+possibly have led to his escape; for he is a man of no common boldness
+and resource. Those facts I shall now set forth. But I have, I confess,
+no liking for the story of treachery and perverted cleverness which I
+have to tell. It leaves an evil taste in the mouth, a savor of something
+revolting in the deeper puzzle of motive underlying the puzzle of the
+crime itself, which I believe I have solved.
+
+It will be remembered that in my first despatch I described the
+situation as I found it on reaching this place early on Tuesday morning.
+I told how the body was found, and in what state; dwelt upon the
+complete mystery surrounding the crime and mentioned one or two local
+theories about it; gave some account of the dead man's domestic
+surroundings; and furnished a somewhat detailed description of his
+movements on the evening before his death. I gave, too, a little fact
+which may or may not have seemed irrelevant: that a quantity of whisky
+much larger than Manderson habitually drank at night had disappeared
+from his private decanter since the last time he was seen alive. On the
+following day, the day of the inquest, I wired little more than an
+abstract of the proceedings in the coroner's court, of which a verbatim
+report was made at my request by other representatives of the _Record_;
+and it will be remembered that the police evidence showed that two
+revolvers, with either of which the crime might have been committed, had
+been found--one in Manderson's bureau and the other in the room of the
+secretary, Marlowe; but that no importance could be attached to this, as
+the weapons were of an extremely popular make. I write these lines in
+the last hours of the same day; and I have now completed an
+investigation which has led me directly to the man who must be called
+upon to clear himself of the guilt of the death of Manderson.
+
+Apart from the central mystery of Manderson's having arisen long before
+his usual hour to go out and meet his death, there were two minor points
+of oddity about this affair which, I suppose, must have occurred to
+thousands of those who have read the accounts in the newspapers; points
+apparent from the very beginning. The first of these was that, whereas
+the body was found at a spot not thirty yards from the house, all the
+people of the house declared that they had heard no cry or other noise
+in the night. Manderson had not been gagged; the marks on his wrists
+pointed to a struggle with his assailant; and there had been at least
+one pistol-shot. (I say at least one, because it is the fact that in
+murders with firearms, especially if there has been a struggle, the
+criminal commonly misses his victim at least once.) This odd fact seemed
+all the more odd to me when I learned that Martin, the butler, was a bad
+sleeper, very keen of hearing, and that his bedroom, with the window
+open, faced almost directly toward the shed by which the body was found.
+
+The second odd little fact that was apparent from the outset was
+Manderson's leaving his dental plate by the bedside. It appeared that he
+had risen and dressed himself fully, down to his necktie and watch and
+chain, and had gone out-of-doors without remembering to put in this
+plate, which he had carried in his mouth every day for years, and which
+contained all the visible teeth of the upper jaw. It had evidently not
+been a case of frantic hurry; and even if it had been, he would have
+been more likely to forget almost anything than this denture. Any one
+who wears such a removable plate will agree that the putting it in on
+rising is a matter of second nature. Speaking as well as eating, to say
+nothing of appearances, depend upon it.
+
+Neither of these queer details, however, seemed to lead to anything at
+the moment. They only awakened in me a suspicion of something lurking in
+the shadows, something that lent more mystery to the already mysterious
+question how and why and through whom Manderson met his end.
+
+With this much of preamble I come at once to the discovery which, in the
+first few hours of my investigation, set me upon the path which so much
+ingenuity had been directed to concealing.
+
+I have already described Manderson's bedroom, the rigorous simplicity of
+its furnishings, contrasted so strangely with the multitude of clothes
+and shoes, and the manner of its communication with Mrs. Manderson's
+room. On the upper of the two long shelves on which the shoes were
+ranged I found, where I had been told I should find them, the pair of
+patent leather shoes which Manderson had worn on the evening before his
+death. I had glanced over the row, not with any idea of their giving me
+a clue, but merely because it happens that I am a judge of shoes, and
+all these shoes were of the very best workmanship.
+
+But my attention was at once caught by a little peculiarity in this
+particular pair. They were the lightest kind of lace-up dress shoes,
+very thin in the sole, without toe-caps, and beautifully made, like all
+the rest. These shoes were old and well-worn; but being carefully
+polished and fitted, as all the shoes were, upon their trees, they
+looked neat enough. What caught my eye was a slight splitting of the
+leather in that part of the upper known as the vamp, a splitting at the
+point where the two laced parts of the shoe rise from the upper. It is
+at this point that the strain comes when a tight shoe of this sort is
+forced upon the foot, and it is usually guarded with a strong stitching
+across the bottom of the opening. In both the shoes I was examining this
+stitching had parted, and the leather below had given way. The splitting
+was a tiny affair in each case, not an eighth of an inch long, and the
+torn edges having come together again on the removal of the strain,
+there was nothing that a person who was not something of a connoisseur
+of shoe-leather would have noticed. Even less noticeable, and indeed not
+to be seen at all unless one were looking for it, was a slight straining
+of the stitches uniting the upper to the sole. At the toe and on the
+outer side of each shoe this stitching had been dragged until it was
+visible on a close inspection of the joining.
+
+These indications, of course, could mean only one thing. The shoes had
+been worn by someone for whom they were too small.
+
+Now it was clear at a glance that Manderson was always thoroughly well
+shod and careful, perhaps a little vain, of his small and narrow feet.
+Not one of the other shoes in the collection, as I soon ascertained,
+bore similar marks; they had not belonged to a man who squeezed himself
+into tight shoe-leather. Someone who was not Manderson had worn these
+shoes, and worn them recently; the edges of the tears were quite fresh.
+
+The possibility of someone having worn them since Manderson's death was
+not worth considering; the body had only been found about twenty-six
+hours when I was examining the shoes; besides, why should any one wear
+them? The possibility of someone having borrowed Manderson's shoes and
+spoiled them for him, while he was alive, seemed about as negligible.
+With others to choose from he would not have worn these. Besides, the
+only men in the place were the butler and the two secretaries. But I do
+not say that I gave those possibilities even as much consideration as
+they deserved; for my thoughts were running away with me; and I have
+always found it good policy, in cases of this sort, to let them have
+their heads. Ever since I had got out of the train at Marlstone early
+that morning I had been steeped in details of the Manderson affair; the
+thing had not once been out of my head. Suddenly the moment had come
+when the dęmon wakes and begins to range.
+
+Let me put it less fancifully. After all, it is a detail of psychology
+familiar enough to all whose business or inclination brings them in
+contact with difficult affairs of any sort. Swiftly and spontaneously,
+when chance or effort puts one in possession of the key-fact in any
+system of baffling circumstances, one's ideas seem to rush to group
+themselves anew in relation to that fact, so that they are suddenly
+rearranged almost before one has consciously grasped the significance of
+the key-fact itself. In the present instance, my brain had scarcely
+formulated within itself the thought, 'Somebody who was not Manderson
+has been wearing those shoes,' when there flew into my mind a flock of
+ideas, all of the same character and all bearing upon this new notion.
+It was unheard-of for Manderson to drink much whisky at night. It was
+very unlike him to be untidily dressed, as the body was when found--the
+cuffs dragged up inside the sleeves, the shoes unevenly laced; very
+unlike him not to wash, when he rose, and to put on last night's evening
+shirt and collar and underclothing; very unlike him to have his watch in
+the waistcoat pocket that was not lined with leather for its reception.
+(In my first despatch I mentioned all these points, but neither I nor
+any one else saw anything significant in them, when examining the body.)
+It was very strange, in the existing domestic situation, that Manderson
+should be communicative to his wife about his doings, especially at the
+time of his going to bed, when he seldom spoke to her at all. It was
+extraordinary that Manderson should leave his bedroom without his false
+teeth.
+
+All these thoughts, as I say, came flocking into my mind together, drawn
+from various parts of my memory of the morning's inquiries and
+observations. They had all presented themselves, in far less time than
+it takes to read them as set down here, as I was turning over the shoes,
+confirming my own certainty on the main point. And yet when I confronted
+the definite idea that had sprung up suddenly and unsupported before
+me,--_It was not Manderson who was in the house that night_--it seemed a
+stark absurdity at the first formulating. It was certainly Manderson who
+had dined at the house and gone out with Marlowe in the car. People had
+seen him at close quarters. But was it he who returned at ten? That
+question too seemed absurd enough. But I could not set it aside. It
+seemed to me as if a faint light was beginning to creep over the whole
+expanse of my mind, as it does over land at dawn, and that presently the
+sun would be rising. I set myself to think over, one by one, the points
+that had just occurred to me, so as to make out, if possible, why any
+man masquerading as Manderson should have done these things that
+Manderson would not have done.
+
+I had not to cast about very long for the motive a man might have in
+forcing his feet into Manderson's narrow shoes. The examination of
+footmarks is very well understood by the police. But not only was the
+man concerned to leave no footmarks of his own. He was concerned to
+leave Manderson's, if any; his whole plan, if my guess was right, must
+have been directed to producing the belief that Manderson was in the
+place that night. Moreover, his plan did not turn upon leaving
+footmarks. He meant to leave the shoes themselves, and he did so. The
+maidservant had found them outside the bedroom door, as Manderson always
+left his shoes, and had polished them, replacing them on the
+shoe-shelves later in the morning, after the body had been found.
+
+When I came to consider in this new light the leaving of the false
+teeth, an explanation of what had seemed the maddest part of the affair
+broke upon me at once. A dental plate is not inseparable from its owner.
+If my guess was right, the unknown had brought the denture to the house
+with him, and left it in the bedroom, with the same object as he had in
+leaving the shoes; to make it impossible that any one should doubt that
+Manderson had been in the house and had gone to bed there. This, of
+course, led me to the inference that _Manderson was dead before the
+false Manderson came to the house_; and other things confirmed this.
+
+For instance, the clothing, to which I now turned in my review of the
+position: if my guess was right, the unknown in Manderson's shoes had
+certainly had possession of Manderson's trousers, waistcoat and shooting
+jacket. They were there before my eyes in the bedroom; and Martin had
+seen the jacket--which nobody could have mistaken--upon the man who sat
+at the telephone in the library. It was now quite plain (if my guess was
+right) that this unmistakable garment was a cardinal feature of the
+unknown's plan. He knew that Martin would take him for Manderson at the
+first glance.
+
+And there my thinking was interrupted by the realization of a thing that
+had escaped me before. So strong had been the influence of the
+unquestioned assumption that it was Manderson who was present that
+night, that neither I nor, so far as I know, any one else had noted the
+point. _Martin had not seen the man's face; nor had Mrs. Manderson._
+
+Mrs. Manderson (judging by her evidence at the inquest, of which, as I
+have said, I had a full report made by the _Record_ stenographers in
+court) had not seen the man at all. She hardly could have done, as I
+shall show presently. She had merely spoken with him as she lay half
+asleep, resuming a conversation which she had had with her living
+husband about an hour before. Martin, I perceived, could only have seen
+the man's back, as he sat crouching over the telephone; no doubt a
+characteristic pose was imitated there. And the man had worn his hat,
+Manderson's broad-brimmed hat! There is too much character in the back
+of a head and neck. The unknown, in fact, supposing him to have been of
+about Manderson's build, had had no need for any disguise, apart from
+the jacket and the hat and his powers of mimicry.
+
+I paused there to contemplate the coolness and ingenuity of the man. The
+thing, I now began to see, was so safe and easy, provided that his
+mimicry was good enough, and that his nerve held. Those two points
+assured, only some wholly unlikely accident could unmask him.
+
+To come back to my puzzling out of the matter as I sat in the dead man's
+bedroom with the tell-tale shoes before me:--the reason for the entrance
+by the window instead of by the front-door will already have occurred to
+any one reading this. Entering by the door, the man would almost
+certainly have been heard by the sharp-eared Martin in his pantry just
+across the hall; he might have met him face to face.
+
+Then there was the problem of the whisky. I had not attached much
+importance to it; whisky will sometimes vanish in very queer ways in a
+household of eight or nine persons; but it had seemed strange that it
+should go in that way on that evening. Martin had been plainly quite
+dumfounded by the fact. It seemed to me now that many a man--fresh, as
+this man in all likelihood was, from a bloody business, from the
+unclothing of a corpse, and with a desperate part still to play--would
+turn to that decanter as to a friend. No doubt he had a drink before
+sending for Martin; after making that trick with ease and success, he
+probably drank more.
+
+But he had known when to stop. The worst part of the enterprise was
+before him, the business--clearly of such vital importance to him, for
+whatever reason--of shutting himself in Manderson's room and preparing a
+mass of convincing evidence of its having been occupied by Manderson;
+and this with the risk--very slight, as no doubt he understood, but how
+unnerving!--of the woman on the other side of the half-open door awaking
+and somehow discovering him. True, if he kept out of her limited field
+of vision from the bed, she could only see him by getting up and going
+to the door. I found that to a person lying in her bed, which stood with
+its head to the wall a little beyond the door, nothing was visible
+through the doorway but one of the cupboards by Manderson's bed-head.
+Moreover, since this man knew the ways of the household, he would think
+it most likely that Mrs. Manderson was asleep. Another point with him, I
+guessed, might have been the estrangement between the husband and wife,
+which they had tried to cloak by keeping up, among other things, their
+usual practice of sleeping in connected rooms, but which was well known
+to all who had anything to do with them. He would hope from this that if
+Mrs. Manderson heard him, she would take no notice of the supposed
+presence of her husband.
+
+So, pursuing my hypothesis, I followed the unknown up to the bedroom,
+and saw him setting about his work. And it was with a catch in my own
+breath that I thought of the hideous shock with which he must have heard
+the sound of all others he was dreading most: the drowsy voice from the
+adjoining room.
+
+What Mrs. Manderson actually said, she was unable to recollect at the
+inquest. She thinks she asked her supposed husband whether he had had a
+good run in the car. And now what does the unknown do? Here, I think, we
+come to a supremely significant point. Not only does he--standing rigid
+there, as I picture him, before the dressing-table, listening to the
+sound of his own leaping heart--not only does he answer the lady in the
+voice of Manderson; he volunteers an explanatory statement. He tells her
+that he has, on a sudden inspiration, sent Marlowe in the car to
+Southampton; that he has sent him to bring back some important
+information from a man leaving for Paris by the steamboat that morning.
+Why these details from a man who had long been uncommunicative to his
+wife, and that upon a point scarcely likely to interest her? Why these
+details _about Marlowe_?
+
+Having taken my story so far, I now put forward the following definite
+propositions: that between a time somewhere about ten, when the car
+started, and a time somewhere about eleven, Manderson was shot--probably
+at a considerable distance from the house, as no shot was heard; that
+the body was brought back, left by the shed, and stripped of its outer
+clothing, while the car was left in hiding somewhere at hand; that at
+some time round about eleven o'clock a man who was not Manderson,
+wearing Manderson's shoes, hat and jacket, entered the library by the
+garden-window; that he had with him Manderson's black trousers,
+waistcoat and motor-coat, the denture taken from Manderson's mouth, and
+the weapon with which he had been murdered; that he concealed these,
+rang the bell for the butler, and sat down at the telephone with his hat
+on and his back to the door; that he was occupied with the telephone all
+the time Martin was in the room; that on going up to the bedroom-floor
+he quietly entered Marlowe's room and placed the revolver with which the
+crime had been committed--Marlowe's revolver--in the case on the
+mantel-piece from which it had been taken; and that he then went to
+Manderson's room, placed Manderson's shoes outside the door, threw
+Manderson's garments on a chair, placed the denture in the bowl by the
+bedside, and selected a suit of clothes, a pair of shoes and a tie from
+those in the bedroom.
+
+Here I will pause in my statement of this man's proceedings to go into a
+question for which the way is now sufficiently prepared.
+
+_Who was the false Manderson?_
+
+Reviewing what was known to me, or might almost with certainty be
+surmised, about that person, I set down the following five conclusions:
+
+(1) He had been in close relations with the dead man. In his acting
+before Martin and his speaking to Mrs. Manderson he had made no mistake.
+
+(2) He was of a build not unlike Manderson's, especially as to height
+and breadth of shoulder, which mainly determine the character of the
+back of a seated figure when the head is concealed and the body loosely
+clothed. But his feet were larger, though not greatly larger, than
+Manderson's.
+
+(3) He had considerable aptitude for mimicry and acting--probably some
+experience too.
+
+(4) He had a minute acquaintance with the ways of the Manderson
+household.
+
+(5) He was under a vital necessity of creating the belief that Manderson
+was alive and in that house until some time after midnight on the Sunday
+night.
+
+So much I took as either certain or next door to it. It was as far as I
+could see. And it was far enough.
+
+I proceed to give, in an order corresponding with the numbered
+paragraphs above, such relevant facts as I was able to obtain about Mr.
+John Marlowe, from himself and other sources.
+
+(1) He had been Manderson's private secretary, upon a footing of great
+intimacy, for nearly three years.
+
+(2) The two men were nearly of the same height, about five feet, eleven
+inches; both were powerfully built and heavy in the shoulder; Marlowe,
+who was the younger by some twenty years, was slighter about the body,
+though Manderson was a man in good physical condition. Marlowe's shoes
+(of which I examined several pairs) were roughly about one shoemaker's
+size longer and broader than Manderson's.
+
+(3) In the afternoon of the first day of my investigation, after
+arriving at the results already detailed, I sent a telegram to a
+personal friend, a fellow of a college at Oxford, whom I knew to be
+interested in theatrical matters, in these terms:
+
+     Please wire John Marlowe's record in connection with acting at
+     Oxford some time past decade very urgent and confidential.
+
+My friend replied in the following telegram, which reached me next
+morning (the morning of the inquest):
+
+     Marlowe was member O.U.D.S. for three years and president 19--
+     played Bardolph Cleon and Mercutio excelled in character acting and
+     imitations in great demand at smokers was hero of some historic
+     hoaxes.
+
+I had been led to send the telegram which brought this very helpful
+answer by seeing on the mantel-shelf in Marlowe's bedroom a photograph
+of himself and two others in the costume of Falstaff's three followers,
+with an inscription from _The Merry Wives_, and by noting that it bore
+the imprint of an Oxford firm of photographers.
+
+(4) During his connection with Manderson, Marlowe had lived as one of
+the family. No other person, apart from the servants, had his
+opportunities for knowing the domestic life of the Mandersons in detail.
+
+(5) I ascertained beyond doubt that Marlowe arrived at a hotel in
+Southampton on the Monday morning at six-thirty, and there proceeded to
+carry out the commission which, according to his story, and to the
+statement made to Mrs. Manderson in the bedroom by the false Manderson,
+had been entrusted to him by his employer. He had then returned in the
+car to Marlstone, where he had shown great amazement and horror at the
+news of the murder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These, I say, are the relevant facts about Marlowe. We must now examine
+fact number _five_ (as set out above) in connection with conclusion
+number _five_ about the false Manderson.
+
+I would first draw attention to one important fact. _The only person who
+professed to have heard Manderson mention Southampton at all before he
+started in the car was Marlowe._ His story--confirmed to some extent by
+what the butler overheard--was that the journey was all arranged in a
+private talk before they set out, and he could not say, when I put the
+question to him, why Manderson should have concealed his intentions by
+giving out that he was going with Marlowe for a moonlight drive. This
+point, however, attracted no attention. Marlowe had an absolutely
+air-tight alibi in his presence at Southampton by six-thirty; nobody
+thought of him in connection with a murder which must have been
+committed after twelve-thirty--the hour at which Martin, the butler, had
+gone to bed. But it was the Manderson who came back from the drive who
+went out of his way to mention Southampton openly to two persons. _He
+even went so far as to ring up a hotel at Southampton and ask questions
+which bore out Marlowe's story of his errand._ This was the call he was
+busy with when Martin was in the library.
+
+Now let us consider the alibi. If Manderson was in the house that night,
+and if he did not leave it until some time after twelve-thirty, Marlowe
+could not by any possibility have had a direct hand in the murder. It is
+a question of the distance between Marlstone and Southampton. If he had
+left Marlstone in the car at the hour when he is supposed to have done
+so--between ten and ten-thirty--with a message from Manderson, the run
+would be quite an easy one to do in the time. But it would be physically
+impossible for the car--a fifteen horse-power four-cylinder
+Northumberland, an average medium-power car--to get to Southampton by
+half-past six unless it left Marlstone by midnight at latest. Motorists
+who will examine the road-map and make the calculations required, as I
+did in Manderson's library that day, will agree that on the facts as
+they appeared there was absolutely no case against Marlowe.
+
+But even if they were not as they appeared; if Manderson was dead by
+eleven o'clock, and if at about that time Marlowe impersonated him at
+White Gables; if Marlowe retired to Manderson's bedroom--how can all
+this be reconciled with his appearance next morning at Southampton? _He
+had to get out of the house, unseen and unheard, and away in the car by
+midnight._ And Martin, the sharp-eared Martin, was sitting up until
+twelve-thirty in his pantry, with the door open, listening for the
+telephone bell. Practically he was standing sentry over the foot of the
+staircase, the only staircase leading down from the bedroom floor.
+
+With this difficulty we arrive at the last and crucial phase of my
+investigation. Having the foregoing points clearly in mind, I spent the
+rest of the day before the inquest in talking to various persons and in
+going over my story, testing it link by link. I could only find the one
+weakness which seemed to be involved in Martin's sitting up until
+twelve-thirty; and since his having been instructed to do so was
+certainly a part of the plan, meant to clinch the alibi for Marlowe, I
+knew there must be an explanation somewhere. If I could not find that
+explanation my theory was valueless. I must be able to show that at the
+time Martin went up to bed, the man who had shut himself in Manderson's
+bedroom might have been many miles away on the road to Southampton.
+
+I had, however, a pretty good idea already--as perhaps the reader of
+these lines has by this time, if I have made myself clear--of how the
+escape of the false Manderson before midnight had been contrived. But I
+did not want what I was now about to do to be known. If I had chanced to
+be discovered at work, there would have been no concealing the direction
+of my suspicions. I resolved not to test them on this point until the
+next day, during the opening proceedings at the inquest. This was to be
+held, I knew, at the hotel, and I reckoned upon having White Gables to
+myself so far as the principal inmates were concerned.
+
+So in fact it happened. By the time the proceedings at the hotel had
+begun, I was hard at work at White Gables. I had a camera with me. I
+made search, on principles well known to and commonly practised by the
+police, and often enough by myself, for certain indications. Without
+describing my search, I may say at once that I found and was able to
+photograph two fresh finger-prints, very large and distinct, on the
+polished front of the right-hand top drawer of the chest of drawers in
+Manderson's bedroom; five more (among a number of smaller and less
+recent impressions made by other hands) on the glasses of the French
+window in Mrs. Manderson's room, a window which always stood open at
+night with a curtain before it; and three more upon the glass bowl in
+which Manderson's dental plate had been found lying.
+
+I took the bowl with me from White Gables. I took also a few articles
+which I selected from Marlowe's bedroom, as bearing the most distinct of
+the innumerable finger-prints which are always to be found upon
+toilet-articles in daily use. I already had in my possession, made upon
+leaves cut from my pocket diary, some excellent finger-prints of
+Marlowe's, which he had made in my presence without knowing it. I had
+shown him the leaves, asking if he recognized them; and the few seconds
+during which he had held them in his fingers had sufficed to leave
+impressions which I was afterward able to bring out.
+
+By six o'clock in the evening, two hours after the jury had brought in
+their verdict against a person or persons unknown, I had completed my
+work, and was in a position to state that two of the five large prints
+made on the window-glasses, and the three on the bowl, were made by the
+left hand of Marlowe; that the remaining three on the window and the two
+on the drawer were made by his right hand.
+
+By eight o'clock I had made at the establishment of Mr. H. T. Copper,
+photographer, of Bishopsbridge, and with his assistance, a dozen
+enlarged prints of the finger-marks of Marlowe, clearly showing the
+identity of those which he unknowingly made in my presence and those
+left upon articles in his bedroom, with those found by me as I have
+described, and thus establishing the facts that Marlowe was recently in
+Manderson's bedroom, where he had in the ordinary way no business, and
+in Mrs. Manderson's room, where he had still less. I hope it may be
+possible to reproduce these prints for publication with this despatch.
+
+At nine o'clock I was back in my room at the hotel and sitting down to
+begin this manuscript. I had my story complete.
+
+I bring it to a close by advancing these further propositions: that on
+the night of the murder the impersonator of Manderson, being in
+Manderson's bedroom, told Mrs. Manderson, as he had already told Martin,
+that Marlowe was at that moment on his way to Southampton; that having
+made his dispositions in the room, he switched off the light, and lay in
+the bed in his clothes; that he waited until he was assured that Mrs.
+Manderson was asleep; that he then arose and stealthily crossed Mrs.
+Manderson's bedroom in his stocking feet, having under his arm the
+bundle of clothing and shoes for the body; that he stepped behind the
+curtain, pushing the doors of the window a little further open with his
+hands, strode over the iron railing of the balcony, and let himself down
+until only a drop of a few feet separated him from the soft turf of the
+lawn.
+
+All this might very well have been accomplished within half an hour of
+his entering Manderson's bedroom, which according to Martin he did at
+about half-past eleven.
+
+What followed your readers and the authorities may conjecture for
+themselves. The corpse was found next morning clothed--rather untidily.
+Marlowe in the car appeared at Southampton by half-past six.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I bring this manuscript to an end in my sitting-room at the hotel at
+Marlstone. It is four o'clock in the morning. I leave for London by the
+noon train from Bishopsbridge. By this evening these pages will be in
+your hands, and I ask you to communicate the substance of them to the
+Criminal Investigation Department.
+
+PHILIP TRENT.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+EVIL DAYS
+
+
+"I am returning the check you sent for what I did on the Manderson
+case," Trent wrote to Sir James Molloy from Munich, whither he had gone
+immediately after handing in at the _Record_ office a brief despatch
+bringing his work on the case to an unexciting close. "What I sent you
+wasn't worth one-tenth of the amount; but I should have no scruple about
+pocketing it, if I hadn't taken a fancy--never mind why--not to touch
+any money at all for this business. I should like you, if there is no
+objection, to pay for the stuff at your ordinary space-rate, and hand
+the money to some charity which does not devote itself to bullying
+people, if you know of any such. I have come to this place to see some
+old friends and arrange my ideas, and the idea that comes out upper-most
+is that for a little while I want some employment with activity in it. I
+find I can't paint at all; I couldn't paint a fence. Will you try me as
+your Own Correspondent somewhere? If you can find me a good adventure I
+will send you good accounts. After that I could settle down and work."
+
+Sir James sent him instructions by telegram to proceed at once to
+Kurland and Livonia, where Citizen Browning was abroad again, and town
+and country-side blazed in revolt. It was a roving commission, and for
+two months Trent followed his luck. It served him not less well than
+usual. He was the only correspondent who saw General Dragilew killed in
+the street at Volmar by a girl of eighteen. He saw burnings, lynchings,
+fusillades, hangings; each day his soul sickened afresh at the
+imbecilities born of misrule. Many nights he lay down in danger. Many
+days he went fasting. But there was never an evening or a morning when
+he did not see the face of the woman whom he hopelessly loved.
+
+He discovered in himself an unhappy pride at the lasting force of this
+infatuation. It interested him as a phenomenon; it amazed and
+enlightened him. Such a thing had not visited him before; it confirmed
+so much that he had found dubious in the recorded experience of men.
+
+It was not that, at thirty-two, he could pretend to ignorance of this
+world of emotion. About his knowledge, let it be enough to say that what
+he had learned had come unpursued and unpurchased, and was without
+intolerable memories; broken to the realities of sex, he was still
+troubled by its inscrutable history; he went through life full of a
+strange respect for certain feminine weakness and a very simple terror
+of certain feminine strength. He had held to a rather lukewarm faith
+that something remained in him to be called forth, and that the voice
+that should call would be heard in its own time, if ever, and not
+through any seeking.
+
+But he had not thought of the possibility that, if this proved true some
+day, the truth might come in a sinister shape. The two things that had
+taken him utterly by surprise in the matter of his feeling towards Mabel
+Manderson were the insane suddenness of its uprising in full strength
+and its extravagant hopelessness. Before it came, he had been much
+disposed to laugh at the permanence of unrequited passion as a generous
+boyish delusion. He knew now that he had been wrong, and he was living
+bitterly in the knowledge.
+
+Before the eye of his fancy the woman always came just as she was when
+he had first had sight of her, with the gesture which he had surprised
+as he walked past unseen on the edge of the cliff; that great gesture of
+passionate joy in her new liberty which had told him more plainly than
+speech that her widowhood was a release from torment, and had confirmed
+with terrible force the suspicion, active in his mind before, that it
+was her passport to happiness with a man whom she loved. He could not
+with certainty name to himself the moment when he had first suspected
+that it might be so. The seed of the thought must have been sown, he
+believed, at his first meeting with Marlowe; his mind would have noted
+automatically that such evident strength and grace, with the sort of
+looks and manners that the tall young man possessed, might go far with
+any woman of unfixed affections. And the connection of this with what
+Mr. Cupples had told him of the Mandersons' married life must have
+formed itself in the unconscious depths of his mind. Certainly it had
+presented itself as an already established thing when he began, after
+satisfying himself of the identity of the murderer, to cast about for
+the motive of the crime. Motive, motive! How desperately he had sought
+for another, turning his back upon that grim thought, that
+Marlowe--obsessed by passion like himself, and privy perhaps to
+maddening truths about the wife's unhappiness--had taken a leaf, the
+guiltiest, from the book of Bothwell. But in all his investigations at
+the time, in all his broodings on the matter afterwards, he had been
+able to discover nothing else that could prompt Marlowe to such a
+deed--nothing but that temptation, the whole strength of which he could
+not know, but which if it had existed must have pressed urgently upon a
+bold spirit in which scruple had been somehow paralyzed. If he could
+trust his senses at all, the young man was neither insane nor by nature
+evil. But that could not clear him. Murder for a woman's sake, he
+thought, was not a rare crime, Heaven knew! If the modern feebleness of
+impulse in the comfortable classes, and their respect for the modern
+apparatus of detection, had made it rare among them, it was yet far from
+impossible; it only needed a man of equal daring and intelligence, his
+soul drugged with the vapors of an intoxicating intrigue, to plan and
+perform such a deed.
+
+A thousand times, with a heart full of anguish, he had sought to reason
+away the dread that Mabel Manderson had known too much of what had been
+intended against her husband's life. That she knew all the truth after
+the thing was done, he could not doubt; her unforgettable collapse in
+his presence when the question about Marlowe was suddenly and bluntly
+put had swept away his last hope that there was no love between the
+pair, and had seemed to him, moreover, to speak of dread of discovery.
+In any case, she knew the truth after reading what he had left with her;
+and it was certain that no public suspicion had been cast upon Marlowe
+since. She had destroyed his manuscript, then, and taken him at his word
+to keep the secret that threatened her lover's life.
+
+But it was the monstrous thought that she might have known murder was
+brewing, and guiltily kept silence, that haunted Trent's mind. She might
+have suspected, have guessed something; was it conceivable that she was
+aware of the whole plot, that she connived? He could never forget that
+his first suspicion of Marlowe's motive in the crime had been roused by
+the fact that his escape was made through the lady's room. At that time,
+when he had not yet seen her, he had been ready enough to entertain the
+idea of her equal guilt and her coöperation. He had figured to himself
+some passionate _hystérique_, merciless as a tiger in her hate and her
+love, a zealous abettor, perhaps even the ruling spirit in the crime.
+
+Then he had seen her, had spoken with her, had helped her in her
+weakness; and such suspicions, since their first meeting, had seemed the
+vilest of infamy. He had seen her eyes and her mouth; he had breathed
+the woman's atmosphere. Trent was one of those who fancy they can scent
+true wickedness in the air. In her presence he had felt an inward
+certainty of her ultimate goodness of heart; and it was nothing against
+this, that she had abandoned herself a moment, that day on the cliff, to
+the sentiment of relief at the ending of her bondage, of her years of
+starved sympathy and unquickened motherhood. That she had turned to
+Marlowe in her destitution he believed; that she had any knowledge of
+his deadly purpose he did not believe.
+
+And yet, morning and evening, the sickening doubts returned, and he
+recalled again that it was almost in her very presence that Marlowe had
+made his preparations in the bedroom of the murdered man, that it was
+from the window of her own chamber that he had escaped from the house.
+Had he forgotten his cunning and taken the risk of telling her then? Or
+had he, as Trent thought more likely, still played his part with her
+then, and stolen off while she slept? He did not think she had known of
+the masquerade when she gave evidence at the inquest; it read like
+honest evidence. Or--the question would never be silenced, though he
+scorned it--had she lain expecting the footstep in the room and the
+whisper that should tell her it was done? Among the foul possibilities
+of human nature, was it possible that black ruthlessness and black
+deceit as well were hidden behind that good and straight and gentle
+seeming?
+
+These thoughts would scarcely leave him when he was alone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Trent served Sir James, well earning his pay, for six months, and then
+returned to Paris, where he went to work again with a better heart. His
+powers had returned to him, and he began to live more happily than he
+had expected among a tribe of strangely-assorted friends, French,
+English and American, artists, poets, journalists, policemen,
+hotel-keepers, soldiers, lawyers, business men and others. His old
+faculty of sympathetic interest in his fellows won for him, just as in
+his student days, privileges seldom extended to the Briton. He enjoyed
+again the rare experience of being taken into the bosom of a Frenchman's
+family. He was admitted to the momentous confidence of _les jeunes_, and
+found them as sure that they had surprised the secrets of art and life
+as the departed _jeunes_ of ten years before had been.
+
+One morning in June, as he descended the slope of the Rue des Martyrs,
+he saw approaching a figure that he remembered. He glanced quickly
+round, for the thought of meeting Mr. Bunner again was unacceptable. For
+some time he had recognized that his wound was healing under the spell
+of creative work; he thought less often of the woman he loved, and with
+less pain. He would not have the memory of those three days re-opened.
+
+But the straight and narrow thoroughfare offered no refuge, and the
+American saw him almost at once.
+
+His unforced geniality made Trent ashamed, for he had liked the man.
+They sat long over a meal, and Mr. Bunner talked. Trent listened to him,
+now that he was in for it, with genuine pleasure, now and then
+contributing a question or remark. Besides liking his companion, he
+enjoyed his conversation for its own sake.
+
+Mr. Bunner was, it appeared, resident in Paris as the chief Continental
+agent of the Manderson firm, and fully satisfied with his position and
+prospects. He discoursed on these for some twenty minutes. This subject
+at length exhausted, he went on to tell Trent, who confessed that he had
+been away from England for a year, that Marlowe had shortly after the
+death of Manderson entered his father's business, which was now again in
+a flourishing state, and had already come to be virtually in control of
+it. They had kept up their intimacy, and were even now planning a
+holiday for the summer. Mr. Bunner spoke with generous admiration of his
+friend's talent for affairs. "Jack Marlowe has a natural big head," he
+declared, "and if he had more experience, I wouldn't want to have him up
+against me. He would put a crimp in me every time."
+
+As the American's talk flowed on, Trent listened with growing surprise
+and anxiety. It became more and more plain that something was very wrong
+in his theory of the situation; there was no mention of its central
+figure. Presently Mr. Bunner mentioned that Marlowe was engaged to be
+married to an Irish girl, whose charms he celebrated with native
+enthusiasm.
+
+Trent clasped his hands savagely together beneath the table. What could
+have happened? His ideas were sliding and shifting. At last he forced
+himself to put a direct question.
+
+Mr. Bunner was not very fully informed. He knew that Mrs. Manderson had
+left England immediately after the settlement of her husband's affairs,
+and had lived for some time in Italy. She had returned not long ago to
+London, where she had decided not to live in the house in Mayfair, and
+had bought a smaller one in the Hampstead neighborhood; also, he
+understood, one somewhere in the country. She was said to go but little
+into society. "And all the good hard dollars just waiting for someone to
+spraddle them around!" said Mr. Bunner with a note of pathos in his
+voice. "Why, she has money to burn--money to feed to the birds--and
+nothing doing! The old man left her more than half his wad. And think of
+the figure she might make in the world! She is beautiful, and she is the
+best woman I ever met, too. But she couldn't ever seem to get the habit
+of spending money the way it ought to be spent."
+
+His words now became a soliloquy: Trent's thoughts were occupying all
+his attention. He pleaded business soon, and the two men parted with
+cordiality.
+
+Half an hour later Trent was in his studio, swiftly and mechanically
+"cleaning up." He wanted to know what had happened; somehow he must find
+out. He could never approach herself, he knew; he would never bring back
+to her the shame of that last encounter with him; it was scarcely likely
+that he would even set eyes on her. But he must know!... Cupples was in
+London, Marlowe was there.... And anyhow he was sick of Paris.
+
+Such thoughts came, and went; and below them all strained the fibers of
+an unseen cord that dragged mercilessly at his heart, and that he cursed
+bitterly in the moments when he could not deny to himself that it was
+there.... The folly, the useless, pitiable folly of it!
+
+In twenty-four hours his feeble roots in Paris had been torn out. He was
+looking over a leaden sea at the shining fortress-wall of the Dover
+cliffs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But though he had instinctively picked out the lines of a set purpose
+from among the welter of promptings in his mind, he found it delayed at
+the very outset.
+
+He had decided that he must first see Mr. Cupples, who would be in a
+position to tell him much more than the American knew. But Mr. Cupples
+was away on his travels, not expected to come back for a month; and
+Trent had no reasonable excuse for hastening his return. Marlowe he
+would not confront until he had tried at least to reconnoiter the
+position. He constrained himself not to commit the crowning folly of
+seeking out Mrs. Manderson's house in Hampstead; he could not enter it,
+and the thought of the possibility of being seen by her lurking in its
+neighborhood brought the blood to his face.
+
+He stayed at a hotel, took a studio, and while he awaited Mr. Cupples'
+return attempted vainly to lose himself in work.
+
+At the end of a week he had an idea that he acted upon with eager
+precipitancy. She had let fall some word, at their last meeting, of a
+taste for music. Trent went that evening, and thenceforward regularly,
+to the opera. He might see her; and if, in spite of his caution, she
+caught sight of him, they could be blind to each other's
+presence--anybody might happen to go to the opera.
+
+So he went alone each evening, passing as quickly as he might through
+the people in the vestibule; and each evening he came away knowing that
+she had not been in the house. It was a habit that yielded him a sort of
+satisfaction along with the guilty excitement of his search; for he too
+loved music, and nothing gave him so much peace while its magic endured.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One night as he entered, hurrying through the brilliant crowd, he felt a
+touch on his arm. Flooded with an incredible certainty at the touch, he
+turned.
+
+It was she: so much more radiant in the absence of grief and anxiety, in
+the fact that she was smiling, and in the allurement of evening dress,
+that he could not speak. She, too, breathed a little quickly, and there
+was a light of daring in her eyes and cheeks as she greeted him.
+
+Her words were few. "I wouldn't miss a note of _Tristan_," she said,
+"nor must you. Come and see me in the interval." She gave him the number
+of the box.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ERUPTION
+
+
+The following two months were a period in Trent's life that he has never
+since remembered without shuddering. He met Mrs. Manderson half a dozen
+times, and each time her cool friendliness, a nicely calculated mean
+between mere acquaintance and the first stage of intimacy, baffled and
+maddened him. At the opera he had found her, to his further amazement,
+with a certain Mrs. Wallace, a frisky matron whom he had known from
+childhood. Mrs. Manderson, it appeared, on her return from Italy, had
+somehow wandered into circles to which he belonged by nurture and
+disposition. It came, she said, of her having pitched her tent in their
+hunting-grounds; several of his friends were near neighbors.
+
+He had a dim but horrid recollection of having been on that occasion
+unlike himself, ill at ease, burning in the face, talking with idiot
+loquacity of his adventures in the Baltic provinces, and finding from
+time to time that he was addressing himself exclusively to Mrs. Wallace.
+The other lady, when he joined them, had completely lost the slight
+appearance of agitation with which she had stopped him in the vestibule.
+She had spoken pleasantly to him of her travels, of her settlement in
+London and of people whom they both knew.
+
+During the last half of the opera, which he had stayed in the box to
+hear, he had been conscious of nothing, as he sat behind them, but the
+angle of her cheek and the mass of her hair, the lines of her shoulder
+and arm, her hand upon the cushion. The black hair had seemed at last a
+forest, immeasurable, pathless and enchanted, luring him to a fatal
+adventure. At the end he had been pale and subdued, parting with them
+rather formally.
+
+The next time he saw her--it was at a country house where both were
+guests--and the subsequent times, he had had himself in hand. He had
+matched her manner and had acquitted himself, he thought, decently,
+considering ... considering that he lived in an agony of bewilderment
+and remorse and longing. He could make nothing, absolutely nothing, of
+her attitude. That she had read his manuscript, and understood the
+suspicion indicated in his last question to her at White Gables, was
+beyond the possibility of doubt. Then how could she treat him thus
+amiably and frankly, as she treated all the world of men who had done
+her no injury?
+
+For it had become clear to his intuitive sense, for all the absence of
+any shade of differentiation in her outward manner, that an injury had
+been done, and that she had felt it. Several times, on the rare and
+brief occasions when they had talked apart, he had warning from the same
+sense that she was approaching this subject; and each time he had turned
+the conversation with the ingenuity born of fear. Two resolutions he
+made. The first was that when he had completed a commissioned work which
+tied him to London he would go away, and stay away. The strain was too
+great. He no longer burned to know the truth; he wanted nothing to
+confirm his fixed internal conviction by faith, that he had blundered,
+that he had misread the situation, misinterpreted her tears, written
+himself down a slanderous fool. He speculated no more on Marlowe's
+motive in the killing of Manderson. Mr. Cupples returned to London, and
+Trent asked him nothing. He knew now that he had been right in those
+words--Trent remembered them for the emphasis with which they were
+spoken--"So long as she considered herself bound to him ... no power on
+earth could have persuaded her." He met Mrs. Manderson at dinner at her
+uncle's large and tomb-like house in Bloomsbury, and there he conversed
+most of the evening with a professor of archaeology from Berlin.
+
+His other resolution was that he would not be with her alone.
+
+But when, a few days after, she wrote asking him to come and see her on
+the following afternoon, he made no attempt to excuse himself. This was
+a formal challenge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While she celebrated the rites of tea, and for some little time
+thereafter, she joined with such natural ease in his slightly fevered
+conversation on matters of the day that he began to hope she had changed
+what he could not doubt had been her resolve, to corner him and speak to
+him gravely. She was to all appearances careless now, smiling so that he
+recalled, not for the first time since that night at the opera, what was
+written long ago of a Princess of Brunswick: "Her mouth has ten thousand
+charms that touch the soul." She made a tour of the beautiful room where
+she had received him, singling out this treasure or that from the spoils
+of a hundred bric-ą-brac shops, laughing over her quests, discoveries
+and bargainings. And when he asked if she would delight him again with a
+favorite piece of his which he had heard her play at another house, she
+consented at once.
+
+She played with a perfection of execution and feeling that moved him now
+as it had moved him before. "You are a musician born," he said quietly
+when she had finished, and the last tremor of the music had passed away.
+"I knew that before I first heard you play."
+
+"I have played a great deal ever since I can remember. It has been a
+great comfort to me," she said simply, and half-turned to him smiling.
+"When did you first detect music in me? Oh, of course! I was at the
+opera. But that wouldn't prove much, would it?"
+
+"No," he said, abstractedly, his sense still busy with the music that
+had just ended. "I think I knew it the first time I saw you." Then
+understanding of his own words came to him, and turned him rigid. For
+the first time the past had been invoked.
+
+There was a short silence. Mrs. Manderson looked at Trent, then hastily
+looked away. Color began to rise in her cheeks, and she pursed her lips
+as if for whistling. Then with a defiant gesture of the shoulders which
+he remembered she rose suddenly from the piano and placed herself in a
+chair opposite to him.
+
+"That speech of yours will do as well as anything," she began slowly,
+looking at the point of her shoe, "to bring us to what I wanted to say.
+I asked you here to-day on purpose, Mr. Trent, because I couldn't bear
+it any longer. Ever since the day you left me at White Gables I have
+been saying to myself that it didn't matter what you thought of me in
+that affair; that you were certainly not the kind of man to speak to
+others of what you believed about me, after what you had told me of your
+reasons for suppressing your manuscript. I asked myself how it could
+matter. But all the time, of course, I knew it did matter. It mattered
+horribly. Because what you thought was not true." She raised her eyes
+and met his gaze calmly. Trent, with a completely expressionless face,
+returned her look.
+
+"Since I began to know you," he said, "I have ceased to think it."
+
+"Thank you," said Mrs. Manderson; and blushed suddenly and deeply. Then,
+playing with a glove, she added: "But I want you to know what _was_
+true."
+
+"I did not know if I should ever see you again," she went on in a lower
+voice, "but I felt that if I did I must speak to you about this. I
+thought it would not be hard to do so, because you seemed to me an
+understanding person, and besides, a woman who has been married isn't
+expected to have the same sort of difficulty as a young girl in speaking
+about such things when it is necessary. And then we did meet again, and
+I discovered that it was very difficult indeed. You made it difficult."
+
+"How?" he asked quietly.
+
+"I don't know," said the lady. "But yes--I do know. It was just because
+you treated me exactly as if you had never thought or imagined anything
+of that sort about me. I had always supposed that if I saw you again you
+would turn on me that hard, horrible sort of look you had when you asked
+me that last question--do you remember?--at White Gables. Instead of
+that you were just like any other acquaintance. You were just"--she
+hesitated and spread her hands--"nice. You know. After that first time
+at the opera when I spoke to you I went home positively wondering if you
+had really recognized me. I mean, I thought you might have recognized my
+face without remembering who it was."
+
+A short laugh broke from Trent in spite of himself, but he said nothing.
+
+She smiled deprecatingly. "Well, I couldn't remember if you had spoken
+my name; and I thought it might be so. But the next time, at the
+Wallaces', you did speak it, so I knew; and a dozen times during those
+few days I almost brought myself to tell you, but never quite. I began
+to feel that you wouldn't let me, that you would slip away from the
+subject if I approached it. Wasn't I right? Tell me, please." He nodded.
+"But why?" He remained silent.
+
+"Well," she said, "I will finish what I had to say, and then you will
+tell me, I hope, why you had to make it so hard. When I began to
+understand that you wouldn't let me talk of the matter to you, it made
+me more determined than ever. I suppose you didn't realize that I would
+insist on speaking even if you were quite discouraging. I dare say I
+couldn't have done it if I had been guilty, as you thought. You walked
+into my parlor to-day, never thinking I should dare. Well, now you see."
+
+Mrs. Manderson had lost all her air of hesitancy. She had, as she was
+wont to say, talked herself enthusiastic, and in the ardor of her
+purpose to annihilate the misunderstanding that had troubled her so long
+she felt herself mistress of the situation.
+
+"I am going to tell you the story of the mistake you made," she
+continued, as Trent, his hands clasped between his knees, still looked
+at her enigmatically. "You will have to believe it, Mr. Trent; it is so
+utterly true to life, with its confusions and hidden things and
+cross-purposes and perfectly natural mistakes that nobody thinks twice
+about taking for facts. Please understand that I don't blame you in the
+least, and never did, for jumping to the conclusion you did. You knew
+that I had no love for my husband, and you knew what that so often
+means. You knew before I told you, I expect, that he had taken up an
+injured attitude towards me; and I was silly enough to try and explain
+it away. I gave you the explanation of it that I had given myself at
+first, before I realized the wretched truth; I told you he was
+disappointed in me because I couldn't take a brilliant lead in society.
+Well, that was true. He was so. But I could see you weren't convinced.
+You had guessed what it took me much longer to see, because I knew how
+irrational it was. Yes; my husband was jealous of John Marlowe; you had
+divined that.
+
+"Then I behaved like a fool when you let me see you had divined it; it
+was such a blow, you understand, when I had supposed all the humiliation
+and strain was at an end, and that his delusion had died with him. You
+practically asked me if my husband's secretary was not my lover, Mr.
+Trent--I _have_ to say it, because I want you to understand why I broke
+down and made a scene. You took that for a confession; you thought I was
+guilty of that, and I think you even thought I might be a party to the
+crime, that I had consented.... That did hurt me; but perhaps you
+couldn't have thought anything else--I don't know."
+
+Trent, who had not hitherto taken his eyes from her face, hung his head
+at the words. He did not raise it again as she continued. "But really it
+was simple shock and distress that made me give way, and the memory of
+all the misery that mad suspicion had meant to me. And when I pulled
+myself together again you had gone."
+
+She rose and went to an escritoire beside the window, unlocked a drawer,
+and drew out a long, sealed envelop.
+
+"This is the manuscript you left with me," she said. "I have read it
+through again and again. I have always wondered, as everybody does, at
+your cleverness in things of this kind." A faintly mischievous smile
+flashed upon her face and was gone. "I thought it was splendid, Mr.
+Trent--I almost forgot that the story was my own, I was so interested.
+And I want to say now, while I have this in my hand, how much I thank
+you for your generous, chivalrous act in sacrificing this triumph of
+yours rather than put a woman's reputation in peril. If all had been as
+you supposed, the facts must have come out when the police took up the
+case you put in their hands. Believe me, I understood just what you had
+done, and I never ceased to be grateful even when I felt most crushed by
+your suspicion."
+
+As she spoke her thanks her voice shook a little, and her eyes were
+bright. Trent perceived nothing of this. His head was still bent. He did
+not seem to hear. She put the envelop into his hand as it lay open, palm
+upwards, on his knee. There was a touch of gentleness about the act
+which made him look up.
+
+"Can you--" he began slowly.
+
+She raised her hand as she stood before him. "No, Mr. Trent, let me
+finish before you say anything. It is such an unspeakable relief to me
+to have broken the ice at last, and I want to end the story while I am
+still feeling the triumph of beginning it." She sank down into the sofa
+from which she had first risen. "I am telling you a thing that nobody
+else knows. Everybody knew, I suppose, that something had come between
+us, though I did everything in my power to hide it. But I don't think
+any one in the world ever guessed what my husband's notion was. People
+who know me don't think that sort of thing about me, I believe. And his
+fancy was so ridiculously opposed to the facts. I will tell you what the
+situation was. Mr. Marlowe and I had been friendly enough since he came
+to us. For all his cleverness--my husband said he had a keener brain
+than any man he knew--I looked upon him as practically a boy. You know I
+am a little older than he is, and he had a sort of amiable lack of
+ambition that made me feel it the more. One day my husband asked me what
+I thought was the best thing about Marlowe, and not thinking much about
+it I said, 'His manners.' He surprised me very much by looking black at
+that, and after a silence he said, 'Yes, Marlowe is a gentleman, that's
+so'--not looking at me.
+
+"Nothing was ever said about that again until about a year ago, when I
+found that Mr. Marlowe had done what I always expected and hoped he
+would do--fallen desperately in love with an American girl. But to my
+disgust he had picked out the most worthless girl, I do believe, of all
+those whom we used to meet. She was the daughter of wealthy parents, and
+she did as she liked with them; very beautiful, well-educated, very good
+at games--what they call a woman-athlete--and caring for nothing on
+earth but her own amusement. She was one of the most unprincipled flirts
+I ever knew, and quite the cleverest. Everyone knew it, and Mr. Marlowe
+must have heard it; but she made a complete fool of him, brain and
+all.... I don't know how she managed it, but I can imagine.... She liked
+him, of course; but it was quite plain to me that she was playing with
+him. The whole affair was so idiotic, I became perfectly furious. One
+day I asked him to row me in a boat on the lake--all this happened at
+our house by Lake George. We had never been alone together for any
+length of time before. In the boat I talked to him. I was very kind
+about it, I think, and he took it admirably, but he didn't believe me a
+bit. He had the impudence to tell me that I misunderstood Alice's
+nature. When I hinted at his prospects--I knew he had scarcely anything
+of his own--he said that if she loved him he could make himself a
+position in the world. I dare say that was true, with his abilities and
+his friends; he is rather well-connected, you know, as well as popular.
+But his enlightenment came very soon after that.
+
+"My husband helped me out of the boat when we came back. He joked with
+Mr. Marlowe about something, I remember; for through all that followed
+he never once changed in his manner to him, and that was one reason why
+I took so long to realize what he thought about him and myself. But to
+me he was reserved and silent that evening--not angry. He was always
+perfectly cold and expressionless to me after he took this idea into his
+head. After dinner he only spoke to me once. Mr. Marlowe was telling him
+about some horse he had bought for the farm in Kentucky, and my husband
+looked at me and said, 'Marlowe may be a gentleman, but he seldom quits
+loser in a horse trade.' I was surprised at that, but at that time--and
+even on the next occasion when he found us together--I didn't understand
+what was in his mind. That next time was the morning when Mr. Marlowe
+received a sweet little note from the girl asking for his
+congratulations on her engagement. It was in our New York house. He
+looked so wretched at breakfast that I thought he was ill, and
+afterwards I went to the room where he worked, and asked what was the
+matter. He didn't say anything, but just handed me the note, and turned
+away to the window. I was very glad that was all over, but terribly
+sorry for him too, of course. I don't remember what I said, but I
+remember putting my hand on his arm as he stood there staring out on the
+garden; and just then my husband appeared at the open door with some
+papers. He just glanced at us, and then turned and walked quietly back
+to his study. I thought he might have heard what I was saying to comfort
+Mr. Marlowe, and that it was rather nice of him to slip away. Mr.
+Marlowe neither saw nor heard him. My husband left the house that
+morning for the West while I was out. Even then I did not understand. He
+used often to go off suddenly like that, if some business project called
+him.
+
+"It was not until he returned a week later that I grasped the situation.
+He was looking white and strange, and as soon as he saw me he asked me
+where Mr. Marlowe was. Somehow the tone of his question told me
+everything in a flash.
+
+"I almost gasped. I was wild with indignation. You know, Mr. Trent, I
+don't think I should have minded at all if any one had thought me
+capable of openly breaking with my husband and leaving him for somebody
+else. I dare say I might have done that. But that coarse suspicion ... a
+man whom he trusted ... and the notion of concealment. It made me see
+scarlet. Every shred of pride in me was strung up till I quivered, and I
+swore to myself on the spot that I would never show by any word or sign
+that I was conscious of his having such a thought about me. I would
+behave exactly as I always had behaved, I determined--and that I did, up
+to the very last. Though I knew that a wall had been made between us now
+that could never be broken down--even if he asked my pardon and obtained
+it--I never once closed the door between our rooms at night.
+
+"And so it went on. I never could go through such a time again. My
+husband showed silent and cold politeness to me always when we were
+alone--and that was only when it was unavoidable. He never once alluded
+to what was in his mind; but I felt it, and he knew that I felt it. Both
+of us were stubborn in our different attitudes. To Mr. Marlowe he was
+more friendly, if anything, than before--heaven only knows why. I
+fancied he was planning some sort of revenge; but that was only a fancy.
+Certainly Mr. Marlowe never knew what was suspected of him. He and I
+remained good friends, though we never spoke of anything intimate after
+that disappointment of his; but I made a point of seeing no less of him
+than I had always done. Then we came over to England and to White
+Gables, and after that followed--my husband's dreadful end."
+
+She threw out her right hand in a gesture of finality. "You know about
+the rest--so much more than any other man," she added; and glanced up at
+him with a quaint expression.
+
+Trent wondered at that look. But the wonder was only a passing shadow on
+his thought. Inwardly his whole being was possessed by thankfulness. All
+the vivacity had returned to his face. Long before Mrs. Manderson ended
+her story he had recognized the certainty of its truth, as from the
+first days of their renewed acquaintance he had doubted the story that
+his imagination had built up at White Gables, upon foundations that
+seemed so good to him.
+
+He said: "I don't know how to begin the apologies I have to make. There
+are no words to tell you how ashamed and disgraced I feel when I realize
+what a crude, cock-sure blundering at a conclusion my suspicion was.
+Yes, I suspected--you! I had almost forgotten that I was ever such a
+fool. Almost; not quite. Sometimes when I have been alone I have
+remembered that folly, and poured contempt on it. I have tried to
+imagine what the facts were. I have tried to excuse myself."
+
+She interrupted him quickly. "What nonsense. Do be sensible, Mr. Trent.
+You had only seen me on two occasions in your life before you came to me
+with your solution of the mystery." Again the quaint expression came and
+was gone. "If you talk of folly, it really is folly for a man like you
+to pretend to a woman like me that I had innocence written all over me
+in large letters--so large that you couldn't believe very strong
+evidence against me after seeing me twice." Mrs. Manderson laughed, and
+her laugh carried him away with it. He knew well by this time that
+sudden rush of cascading notes of mirth, the perfect expression of
+enjoyment; he had many times tried to amuse her merely for his delight
+in the sound of it. "And now it's all over, and you know--and we'll
+never speak of it any more."
+
+"I hope not," Trent said in sincere relief. "If you're resolved to be so
+kind as this about it, I am not high-principled enough to insist on your
+blasting me with your lightnings. And now, Mrs. Manderson, I had better
+go. Changing the subject after this would be like playing
+puss-in-the-corner after an earthquake." He rose to his feet.
+
+"You are right," she said. "But no! Wait. There is another thing--part
+of the same subject; and we ought to pick up all the pieces now while we
+are about it. Please sit down." She took the envelop containing Trent's
+manuscript despatch from the table where he had laid it. "I want to
+speak about this."
+
+His brows bent, and he looked at her questioningly. "So do I, if you
+do," he said slowly. "I want very much to know one thing."
+
+"Tell me."
+
+"Since my reason for suppressing that information was all a fantasy, why
+did you never make any use of it? When I began to realize that I had
+been wrong about you, I explained your silence to myself by saying that
+you could not bring yourself to do a thing that would put a rope round a
+man's neck, whatever he might have done. I can quite understand that
+feeling. Was that what it was? Another possibility I thought of was that
+you knew of something that was by way of justifying or excusing
+Marlowe's act. Or I thought you might have a simple horror, quite apart
+from humanitarian scruples, of appearing publicly in connection with a
+murder trial. Many important witnesses in such cases have to be
+practically forced into giving their evidence. They feel there is
+defilement even in the shadow of the scaffold."
+
+Mrs. Manderson tapped her lips with the envelop without quite concealing
+a smile. "You didn't think of another possibility, I suppose, Mr.
+Trent," she said.
+
+"No." He looked puzzled.
+
+"I mean the possibility of your having been wrong about Mr. Marlowe as
+well as about me. No, no; you needn't tell me that the chain of evidence
+is complete. I know it is. But evidence of what? Of Mr. Marlowe having
+impersonated my husband that night, and having escaped by way of my
+window, and built up an alibi. I have read your despatch again and
+again, Mr. Trent, and I don't see that those things can be doubted."
+
+Trent gazed at her with narrowed eyes. He said nothing to fill the brief
+pause that followed. Mrs. Manderson smoothed her skirt with a
+preoccupied air, as one collecting her ideas.
+
+"I did not make any use of the facts found out by you," she slowly said
+at last, "because it seemed to me very likely that they would be fatal
+to Mr. Marlowe."
+
+"I agree with you," Trent remarked in a colorless tone.
+
+"And," pursued Mrs. Manderson, looking up at him with a mild
+reasonableness in her eyes, "as I knew that he was innocent I was not
+going to expose him to that risk."
+
+There was another little pause. Trent rubbed his chin, with an
+affectation of turning over the idea. Inwardly he was telling himself,
+somewhat feebly, that this was very right and proper; that it was quite
+feminine, and that he liked her to be feminine. It was permitted to
+her--more than permitted--to set her loyal belief in the character of a
+friend above the clearest demonstrations of the intellect. Nevertheless,
+it chafed him. He would have had her declaration of faith a little less
+positive in form. It was too irrational to say she "knew." In fact (he
+put it to himself bluntly) it was quite unlike her. If to be
+unreasonable when reason led to the unpleasant was a specially feminine
+trait, and if Mrs. Manderson had it, she was accustomed to wrap it up
+better than any woman he had known.
+
+"You suggest," he said at length, "that Marlowe constructed an alibi for
+himself, by means which only a desperate man would have attempted, to
+clear himself of a crime he did not commit. Did he tell you he was
+innocent?"
+
+She uttered a little laugh of impatience. "So you think he has been
+talking me round! No, that is not so. I am merely sure he did not do it.
+Ah! I see you think that absurd. But see how unreasonable you are, Mr.
+Trent! Just now you were explaining to me quite sincerely that it was
+foolishness in you to have had a certain suspicion of me." Trent started
+in his chair. She glanced at him, and went on: "Now I know a great deal
+more about Mr. Marlowe than you know about me even now. I saw him
+constantly for several years. I don't pretend to know all about him; but
+I do know that he is incapable of a crime of bloodshed. The idea of his
+planning a murder is as unthinkable to me as the idea of your picking a
+poor woman's pocket, Mr. Trent. I can imagine you killing a man, you
+know ... if the man deserved it and had an equal chance of killing you.
+I could kill a person myself in some circumstances. But Mr. Marlowe was
+incapable of doing it. I don't care what the provocation might be. He
+had a temper that nothing could shake, and he looked upon human nature
+with a sort of cold magnanimity that would find excuses for absolutely
+anything. It wasn't a pose; you could see it was a part of him. He never
+put it forward, but it was there always. It was quite irritating at
+times.... He really loathed and hated physical violence. He was a very
+strange man in some ways, Mr. Trent. He gave one a feeling that he might
+do unexpected things--do you know that feeling one has about some
+people?... What part he really played in the events of that night I have
+never been able to guess. But nobody who knew anything about him could
+possibly believe in his deliberately taking a man's life." Again the
+movement of her head expressed finality, and she leaned back in the
+sofa, calmly regarding him.
+
+"Then," said Trent, who had followed this with earnest attention, "we
+are forced back on two other possibilities, which I had not thought
+worth much consideration until this moment. Accepting what you say, he
+might still conceivably have killed in self-defense; or he might have
+done so by accident."
+
+The lady nodded. "Of course I thought of those two explanations when I
+read your manuscript."
+
+"And I suppose you felt, as I did myself, that in either of those cases
+the natural thing, and obviously the safest thing, for him to do was to
+make a public statement of the truth, instead of setting up a series of
+deceptions which would certainly stamp him as guilty in the eyes of the
+law, if anything went wrong with them."
+
+"Yes," she said wearily, "I thought over all that until my head ached.
+And I thought somebody else might have done it, and that he was somehow
+screening the guilty person. But that seemed wild. I could see no light
+in the mystery, and after a while I simply let it alone. All I was clear
+about was that Mr. Marlowe was not a murderer, and that if I told what
+you had found out, the judge and jury would probably think he was. I
+promised myself that I would speak to you about it if we should meet
+again; and now I've kept my promise."
+
+Trent, his chin resting on his hand, was staring at the carpet. The
+excitement of the hunt for the truth was steadily rising in him. He had
+not in his own mind accepted Mrs. Manderson's account of Marlowe's
+character as unquestionable. But she had spoken forcibly; he could by no
+means set it aside, and his theory was much shaken.
+
+"There is only one thing for it," he said, looking up. "I must see
+Marlowe. It worries me too much to have the thing left like this. I will
+get at the truth. Can you tell me," he broke off, "how he behaved after
+the day I left White Gables?"
+
+"I never saw him after that," said Mrs. Manderson simply. "For some days
+after you went away I was ill, and didn't go out of my room. When I was
+about again he had left and was in London, settling things with the
+lawyers. He did not come down to the funeral. Immediately after that I
+went abroad. After some weeks a letter from him reached me, saying he
+had concluded his business and given the solicitors all the assistance
+in his power. He thanked me very nicely for what he called all my
+kindness, and said good-by. There was nothing in it about his plans for
+the future, and I thought it particularly strange that he said not a
+word about my husband's death. I didn't answer. Knowing what I knew, I
+couldn't. In those days I shuddered whenever I thought of that
+masquerade in the night. Rather than face him, I was ready to go on in
+ignorance of what had really happened. I never wanted to see or hear of
+him again."
+
+"Then you don't know what has become of him?"
+
+"No: but I dare say Uncle Burton--Mr. Cupples, you know--could tell you.
+Some time ago he told me that he had met Mr. Marlowe in London, and had
+some talk with him. I changed the conversation." She paused and smiled
+with a trace of mischief. "I rather wonder what you supposed had
+happened to Mr. Marlowe, after you withdrew from the scene of the drama
+that you had put together so much to your satisfaction."
+
+Trent flushed. "Do you really want to know?" he said.
+
+"I ask you," she retorted quietly.
+
+"You ask me to humiliate myself again, Mrs. Manderson. Very well. I will
+tell you what I thought I should most likely find when I returned to
+London this year: that you had married Marlowe and gone to live abroad."
+
+She heard him with unmoved composure. "We certainly couldn't have lived
+very comfortably in England on his money and mine," she observed
+thoughtfully. "He had practically nothing then."
+
+He stared at her--"gaped," she told him some time afterwards. At the
+moment she laughed with a little embarrassment. "Dear me, Mr. Trent!
+Have I said anything dreadful? You surely must know ... I thought
+everybody understood by now ... I'm sure I've had to explain it often
+enough ... if I marry again I lose everything that my husband left me."
+
+The effect of this speech upon Trent was curious. For an instant his
+face was flooded with the emotion of surprise. As this passed away he
+gradually drew himself together as he sat into a tense attitude. He
+looked, she thought as she saw his knuckles grow white on the arms of
+the chair, like a man prepared for pain under the hand of the surgeon.
+But all he said, in a voice lower than his usual tone, was: "I had no
+idea of it."
+
+"It is so," she said calmly, trifling with a ring on her finger.
+"Really, Mr. Trent, it is not such a very unusual thing.... I think I am
+glad of it. For one thing, it has secured me--at least since it became
+generally known--from a good many attentions of a kind that a woman in
+my position has to put up with as a rule."
+
+"No doubt," he said gravely. "And ... the other kind?"
+
+She looked at him questioningly. "Ah!" she laughed. "The other kind
+trouble me even less. I have not yet met a man silly enough to want to
+marry a widow with a selfish disposition, and luxurious habits and
+tastes, and nothing but the little my father left me."
+
+She shook her head slowly, and something in the gesture shattered the
+last remnants of Trent's self-possession. "Haven't you, by God!" he
+exclaimed, rising with a violent movement and advancing a step towards
+her. "Then I am going to show you that human passion is not always
+stifled by the smell of money. I am going to end the business--my
+business. I am going to tell you what I dare say scores of better men
+have wanted to tell you, but couldn't summon up what I have summoned
+up--the infernal cheek to do it. They were afraid of making fools of
+themselves. I am not. You have accustomed me to the feeling this
+afternoon." He laughed aloud in his rush of words, and spread out his
+hands. "Look at me! It is the sight of the century! It is the one who
+says he loves you, and would ask you to give up very great wealth to
+stand at his side."
+
+She was hiding her face in her hands. He heard her say brokenly:
+"Please ... don't speak in that way."
+
+He answered: "It will make a great difference to me if you will allow me
+to say all I have to say before I leave you. Perhaps it is in bad taste,
+but I will risk that--I want to relieve my soul, it needs open
+confession. This is the truth. You have troubled me ever since the first
+time I saw you--and you did not know it--as you sat under the edge of
+the cliff at Marlstone and held out your arms to the sea. It was only
+your beauty that filled my mind then. As I passed by you it seemed as if
+all the life in the place were crying out a song about you in the wind
+and the sunshine. And the song stayed in my ears; but even your beauty
+would be no more than an empty memory to me by now if that had been all.
+It was when I led you from the hotel there to your house, with your hand
+on my arm, that--what was it that happened? I only knew that your
+stronger magic had struck home, and that I never should forget that day,
+whatever the love of my life should be. Till that day I had admired as I
+should admire the loveliness of a still lake; but that day I felt the
+spell of the divinity of the lake. And next morning the waters were
+troubled, and she rose--the morning when I came to you with my
+questions, tired out with doubts that were as bitter as pain, and when I
+saw you without your pale, sweet mask of composure--when I saw you moved
+and glowing, with your eyes and your hands alive, and when you made me
+understand that for such a creature as you there had been emptiness and
+the mere waste of yourself for so long. Madness rose in me then, and my
+spirit was clamoring to say what I say at last now--that life would
+never seem a full thing again because you could not love me, that I was
+taken forever in the nets of your black hair and by the incantation of
+your voice--"
+
+"Oh, stop!" she cried, suddenly throwing back her head, her face flaming
+and her hands clutching the cushions beside her. She spoke fast and
+disjointedly, her breath coming quick. "You shall not talk me into
+forgetting common sense. What does all this mean? Oh! I do not recognize
+you at all--you seem another man. We are not children--have you
+forgotten that? You speak like a boy in love for the first time. It is
+foolish, unreal--I know that if you do not. I will not hear it. What has
+happened to you?" She was half sobbing. "How can these sentimentalities
+come from a man like you? Where is your self-restraint?"
+
+"Gone!" exclaimed Trent with an abrupt laugh. "It has got right away! I
+am going after it in a minute." He looked gravely down into her eyes. "I
+don't care so much now. I never could declare myself to you under the
+cloud of your great fortune. It was too great. There's nothing
+creditable in that feeling, as I look at it; as a matter of simple fact,
+it was a form of cowardice--fear of what you would think, and very
+likely say--fear of the world's comment too, I suppose. But the cloud
+being rolled away I have spoken, and I don't care so much. I can face
+things with a quiet mind now that I have told you the truth in its own
+terms. You may call it sentimentality or any other nickname you like. It
+is quite true that it was not intended for a scientific statement. Since
+it annoys you, let it be extinguished. But please believe that it was
+serious to me if it was comedy to you. I have said that I love you and
+honor you and would hold you dearest of all the world. Now give me leave
+to go."
+
+But she held out her hands to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+WRITING A LETTER
+
+
+"If you insist," Trent said, "I suppose you will have your way. But I
+had much rather write it when I am not with you. However, if I must,
+bring me a tablet whiter than a star, or hand of hymning angel. Don't
+underestimate the sacrifice I am making. I never felt less like
+correspondence in my life."
+
+She rewarded him.
+
+"What shall I say?" he inquired, his pen hovering over the paper. "Shall
+I compare him to a summer's day? What _shall_ I say?"
+
+"Say what you want to say," she suggested helpfully.
+
+He shook his head. "What I want to say--what I have been wanting for the
+past twenty-four hours to say to every man, woman, and child I met--is
+'Mabel and I are betrothed, and joy is borne on burning wheels.' But
+that wouldn't be a very good opening for a letter of strictly formal,
+not to say sinister character. I have got as far as 'Dear Mr. Marlowe.'
+What comes next?"
+
+"I am sending you a manuscript which I thought you might like to see,"
+she prompted as she came to his chair before the escritoire. "Something
+of that kind. Please try. I want to see what you write, and I want it to
+go to him at once. You see, I would be contented enough to leave things
+as they are; but you say you must get at the truth, and if you must, I
+want it to be as soon as possible. Do it now--you know you can if you
+will--and I'll send it off the moment it is ready. Don't you ever feel
+that?--the longing to get the worrying letter into the post and off your
+hands, so that you can't recall it if you would, and it's no use fussing
+any more about it."
+
+"I will do as you wish," he said, and turned to the paper, which he
+dated as from his hotel. Mrs. Manderson looked down at his bent head
+with a gentle light in her eyes, and made as if to place a smoothing
+hand upon his rather untidy crop of hair. But she did not touch it.
+Going in silence to the piano, she began to play very softly. It was ten
+minutes before Trent spoke.
+
+"At last I am his faithfully. Do you want to see it?"
+
+She ran across the twilight room, and turned on a reading lamp beside
+the escritoire. Then, leaning on his shoulder, she read what follows:
+
+     Dear Mr. Marlowe:
+
+     You will perhaps remember that we met, under unhappy circumstances,
+     in June of last year at Marlstone.
+
+     On that occasion it was my duty, as representing a newspaper, to
+     make an independent investigation of the circumstances of the death
+     of the late Sigsbee Manderson. I did so, and I arrived at certain
+     conclusions. You may learn from the enclosed manuscript, which was
+     originally written as a despatch for my newspaper, what those
+     conclusions were. For reasons which it is not necessary to state I
+     decided at the last moment not to make them public, or to
+     communicate them to you, and they are known to only two persons
+     beside myself.
+
+At this point Mrs. Manderson raised her eyes quickly from the letter.
+Her dark brows were drawn together. "Two persons?" she said with a note
+of inquiry.
+
+"Your uncle is the other. I sought him out last night and told him the
+whole story. Have you anything against it? I always felt uneasy at
+keeping it from him as I did, because I had led him to expect I should
+tell him all I discovered, and my silence looked like mystery-making.
+Now that it is to be cleared up finally, and there is no question of
+shielding you, I wanted him to know everything. He is a very shrewd
+adviser, too, in a way of his own; and I should like to have him with me
+when I see Marlowe. I have a feeling that two heads will be better than
+one on my side of the interview."
+
+She sighed. "Yes, of course, uncle ought to know the truth. I hope there
+is nobody else at all." She pressed his hand. "I so much want all that
+horror buried--buried deep. I am very happy now, dear, but I shall be
+happier still when you have satisfied that curious mind of yours and
+found out everything, and stamped down the earth upon it all." She
+continued her reading.
+
+     Quite recently, however, (the letter went on) facts have come to my
+     knowledge which have led me to change my decision. I do not mean
+     that I shall publish what I discovered, but that I have determined
+     to approach you and ask you for a private statement. If you have
+     anything to say which would place the matter in another light, I
+     can imagine no reason why you should withhold it.
+
+     I expect, then, to hear from you when and where I may call upon
+     you; unless you would prefer the interview to take place at my
+     hotel. In either case I desire that Mr. Cupples, whom you will
+     remember, and who has read the enclosed document, should be present
+     also.
+
+     Faithfully yours,
+
+     PHILIP TRENT.
+
+"What a very stiff letter!" she said. "Now I am sure you couldn't have
+made it any stiffer in your own rooms."
+
+Trent slipped the letter and enclosure into a long envelop. "This thing
+mustn't run any risk of going wrong. It would be best to send a special
+messenger with orders to deliver it into his own hands. If he's away it
+oughtn't to be left."
+
+She nodded. "I can arrange that. Wait here for a little."
+
+When Mrs. Manderson returned, he was hunting through the music-cabinet.
+She sank on the carpet beside him in a wave of dark brown skirts. "Tell
+me something, Philip," she said.
+
+"If it is among the few things that I know."
+
+"When you saw uncle last night, did you tell him about--about us?"
+
+"I did not," he answered. "I remembered you had said nothing about
+telling any one. It is for you--isn't it?--to decide whether we take the
+world into our confidence at once or later on."
+
+"Then will you tell him?" She looked down at her clasped hands. "I wish
+_you_ to tell him. Perhaps if you think you will guess why. There! that
+is settled." She lifted her eyes again to his, and for a time there was
+silence between them.
+
+He leaned back at length in the deep chair. "What a world!" he said.
+"Mabel, will you play something on the piano that expresses mere joy,
+the genuine article, nothing feverish or like thorns under a pot, but
+joy that has decided in favor of the universe. It's a mood that can't
+last altogether, so we had better get all we can out of it."
+
+She went to the instrument and struck a few chords while she thought.
+Then she began to work with all her soul at the theme in the last
+movement of the Ninth Symphony which is like the sound of the opening of
+the gates of Paradise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+DOUBLE CUNNING
+
+
+An old oaken desk with a deep body stood by the window in a room that
+overlooked St. James's Park from a height. The room was large, furnished
+and decorated in the mode by someone who had brought taste to the work;
+but the hand of the bachelor lay heavy upon it. John Marlowe unlocked
+the desk and drew a long, stout envelop from the back of the well.
+
+"I understand," he said to Mr. Cupples, "that you have read this."
+
+"I read it for the first time two days ago," replied Mr. Cupples, who,
+seated on a sofa, was peering about the room with a benignant face. "We
+have discussed it fully."
+
+Marlowe turned to Trent. "There is your manuscript," he said, laying the
+envelop on the table. "I have gone over it three times. I do not believe
+there is another man who could have got at as much of the truth as you
+have set down there."
+
+Trent ignored the compliment. He sat by the table gazing stonily at the
+fire, his long legs twisted beneath his chair. "You mean, of course," he
+said, drawing the envelop towards him, "that there is more of the truth
+to be disclosed now. We are ready to hear you as soon as you like. I
+expect it will be a long story, and the longer the better, so far as I
+am concerned; I want to understand thoroughly. What we should both like,
+I think, is some preliminary account of Manderson and your relations
+with him. It seemed to me from the first that the character of the dead
+man must be somehow an element in the business."
+
+"You were right," Marlowe answered grimly. He crossed the room and
+seated himself on a corner of the tall cushion-topped fender. "I will
+begin as you suggest."
+
+"I ought to tell you beforehand," said Trent, looking him in the eyes,
+"that although I am here to listen to you, I have not as yet any reason
+to doubt the conclusions I have stated here." He tapped the envelop. "It
+is a defense that you will be putting forward--you understand that?"
+
+"Perfectly." Marlowe was cool and in complete possession of himself, a
+man different indeed from the worn-out, nervous being Trent remembered
+at Marlstone a year and a half ago. His tall, lithe figure was held with
+the perfection of muscular tone. His brow was candid, his blue eyes were
+clear, though they still had, as he paused collecting his ideas, the
+look that had troubled Trent at their first meeting. Only the lines of
+his mouth showed that he knew himself in a position of difficulty, and
+meant to face it.
+
+"Sigsbee Manderson was not a man of normal mind," Marlowe began in his
+quiet voice. "Most of the very rich men I met with in America had become
+so by virtue of abnormal greed, or abnormal industry, or abnormal
+personal force, or abnormal luck. None of them had remarkable
+intellects. Manderson delighted too in heaping up wealth; he worked
+incessantly at it; he was a man of dominant will; he had quite his share
+of luck; but what made him singular was his brain-power. In his own
+country they would perhaps tell you that it was his ruthlessness in
+pursuit of his aims that was his most striking characteristic; but there
+are hundreds of them who would have carried out his plans with just as
+little consideration for others if they could have formed the plans.
+
+"I used to think that his strain of Indian blood, remote as it was,
+might have something to do with the cunning and pitilessness of the man.
+Strangely enough, the existence of that strain was unknown to anyone but
+himself and me. It was when he asked me to apply my taste for
+genealogical work to his own obscure family history that I made the
+discovery that he had in him a share of the blood of the Iroquois chief
+Montour and his French wife, a terrible woman who ruled the savage
+politics of the tribes of the Wilderness two hundred years ago. The
+Mandersons were active in the fur trade on the Pennsylvania border in
+those days, and more than one of them married Indian women. Other Indian
+blood than Montour's may have descended to Manderson, for all I can say,
+through previous and subsequent unions; some of the wives' antecedents
+were quite untraceable, and there were so many generations of pioneering
+before the whole country was brought under civilization. Manderson was
+thunderstruck at what I told him, and was anxious to conceal it from
+every soul. Of course I never gave it away while he lived, and I don't
+think he supposed I would; but I have thought since that his mind took a
+turn against me from that time onward. It happened about a year before
+his death."
+
+"Had Manderson," asked Mr. Cupples, so unexpectedly that the other
+started, "any definable religious attitude?"
+
+Marlowe considered a moment. "None that I ever heard of," he said.
+"Worship and prayer were quite unknown to him, so far as I could see,
+and I never heard him mention religion. I should doubt if he had any
+real sense of God at all, or if he was capable of knowing God through
+the emotions. But I understood that as a child he had had a religious
+up-bringing with a strong moral side to it. His private life was, in the
+usual limited sense, blameless. He was almost ascetic in his habits,
+except as to smoking. I lived with him five years without ever knowing
+him to tell a direct verbal falsehood, constantly as he used to practise
+deceit in other forms. Can you understand the soul of a man who never
+hesitated to take steps that would have the effect of hoodwinking
+people, who would use every trick of the markets to mislead, and who was
+at the same time scrupulous never to utter a direct lie on the most
+insignificant matter? Manderson was like that, and he was not the only
+one. I suppose you might compare the state of mind to that of a soldier
+who is personally a truthful man, but who will stick at nothing to
+deceive the enemy. The rules of the game allow it; and the same may be
+said of business as many business men regard it. Only with them it is
+always war-time."
+
+"It is a sad world," observed Mr. Cupples.
+
+"As you say," Marlowe agreed. "Now I was saying that one could always
+take Manderson's word if he gave it in a definite form. The first time I
+ever heard him utter a downright lie was on the night he died; and
+hearing it, I believe, saved me from being hanged as his murderer."
+
+Marlowe stared at the light above his head, and Trent moved impatiently
+in his chair. "Before we come to that," he said, "will you tell us
+exactly on what footing you were with Manderson during the years you
+were with him."
+
+"We were on very good terms from beginning to end," answered Marlowe.
+"Nothing like friendship--he was not a man for making friends--but the
+best of terms as between a trusted employee and his chief. I went to him
+as private secretary just after getting my degree at Oxford. For a long
+time I liked the position greatly. When one is attached to an active
+American plutocrat in the prime of life one need not have many dull
+moments. Besides, it made me independent. My father had some serious
+business reverses about that time, and I was glad to be able to do
+without an allowance from him. At the end of the first year Manderson
+doubled my salary. 'It's big money,' he said, 'but I guess I don't
+lose.'
+
+"You see, by that time I was doing a great deal more than accompany him
+on horseback in the morning and play chess in the evening, which was
+mainly what he had required. I was attending to his houses, his farm in
+Ohio, his shooting in Maine, his horses, his cars and his yacht. I had
+become a walking railway-guide and an expert cigar-buyer. I was always
+learning something.
+
+"Well, now you understand what my position was in regard to Manderson
+during the last few years of my connection with him. It was a happy life
+for me on the whole. I was busy, my work was varied and interesting. I
+had time to amuse myself, too, and money to spend. At one time I made a
+fool of myself about a girl, and that was not a happy time; but it
+taught me to understand the great goodness of Mrs. Manderson." Marlowe
+inclined his head to Mr. Cupples as he said this. "She may choose to
+tell you about it. As for her husband, he had never varied in his
+attitude towards me, in spite of the change that came over him in the
+last months of his life, as you know. He treated me well and generously
+in his unsympathetic way, and I never had a feeling that he was less
+than satisfied with his bargain--that was the sort of footing we lived
+upon. And it was that continuance of his attitude right up to the end
+that made the revelation so shocking when I was suddenly shown, on the
+night on which he met his end, the depth of crazy hatred of myself that
+was in Manderson's soul."
+
+The eyes of Trent and Mr. Cupples met for an instant.
+
+"You never suspected that he hated you before that time?" asked Trent,
+and Mr. Cupples asked at the same moment: "To what did you attribute
+it?"
+
+"I never guessed until that night," answered Marlowe, "that he had the
+smallest ill-feeling toward me. How long it had existed I do not know. I
+cannot imagine why it was there. I was forced to think, when I
+considered the thing in those awful days after his death, that it was a
+case of a madman's delusion, that he believed me to be plotting against
+him, as they so often do. Some such insane conviction must have been at
+the root of it. But who can sound the abysses of a lunatic's fancy? Can
+you imagine the state of mind in which a man dooms himself to death with
+the object of delivering someone he hates to the hangman?"
+
+Mr. Cupples moved sharply in his chair. "You say Manderson was
+responsible for his own death?" he asked. Trent glanced at him with an
+eye of impatience, and resumed his intent watch upon the face of
+Marlowe. In the relief of speech it was now less pale and drawn.
+
+"I do say so," Marlowe answered concisely, and looked his questioner in
+the face. Mr. Cupples nodded.
+
+"Before we proceed to the elucidation of your statement," observed the
+old gentleman, in the tone of one discussing a point of abstract
+science, "it may be remarked that the state of mind which you attribute
+to Manderson--"
+
+"Suppose we have the story first," Trent interrupted, gently laying a
+hand on Mr. Cupples' arm. "You were telling us," he went on, turning to
+Marlowe, "how things stood between you and Manderson. Now will you tell
+us the facts of what happened that night?"
+
+Marlowe flushed at the barely perceptible emphasis which Trent laid upon
+the word "facts." He drew himself up.
+
+"Bunner and myself dined with Mr. and Mrs. Manderson that Sunday
+evening," he began, speaking carefully. "It was just like other dinners
+at which the four of us had been together. Manderson was taciturn and
+gloomy, as we had latterly been accustomed to see him. We others kept a
+conversation going. We rose from the table, I suppose, about nine. Mrs.
+Manderson went to the drawing-room, and Bunner went up to the hotel to
+see an acquaintance. Manderson asked me to come into the orchard behind
+the house, saying he wished to have a talk. We paced up and down the
+pathway there, out of earshot from the house, and Manderson, as he
+smoked his cigar, spoke to me in his cool, deliberate way. He had never
+seemed more sane, or more well-disposed to me.
+
+"He said he wanted me to do him an important service. There was a big
+thing on. It was a secret affair. Bunner knew nothing of it, and the
+less I knew the better. He wanted me to do exactly as he directed, and
+not bother my head about reasons.
+
+"This, I may say, was quite characteristic of Manderson's method of
+going to work. If at times he required a man to be a mere tool in his
+hand, he would tell him so. He had used me in the same kind of way a
+dozen times. I assured him he could rely on me, and said I was ready.
+'Right now?' he asked. I said, of course I was.
+
+"He nodded, and said--I tell you his words as well as I can recollect
+them--'Well, attend to this. There is a man in England now who is in
+this thing with me. He was to have left to-morrow for Paris by the noon
+boat from Southampton to Havre. His name is George Harris--at least
+that's the name he is going by. Do you remember that name?' 'Yes,' I
+said, 'when I went up to London a week ago you asked me to book a cabin
+in that name on the boat that goes to-morrow. I gave you the ticket.'
+'Here it is,' he said, producing it from his pocket.
+
+"'Now,' Manderson said to me, poking his cigar-butt at me with each
+sentence in a way he used to have, 'George Harris cannot leave England
+to-morrow. I find I shall want him where he is. And I want Bunner where
+_he_ is. But somebody has got to go by that boat and take certain papers
+to Paris. Or else my plan is going to fall to pieces. Will you go?' I
+said, 'Certainly. I am here to obey orders.'
+
+"He bit his cigar, and said: 'That's all right: but these are not just
+ordinary orders;--not the kind of thing one can ask of a man in the
+ordinary way of his duty to an employer. The point is this. The deal I
+am busy with is one in which neither myself nor any one known to be
+connected with me must appear as yet. That is vital. But these people I
+am up against know your face as well as they know mine. If my secretary
+is known in certain quarters to have crossed to Paris at this time and
+to have interviewed certain people--and that would be known as soon as
+it happened--then the game is up.' He threw away his cigar-end and
+looked at me questioningly.
+
+"I didn't like it much, but I liked failing Manderson at a pinch still
+less. I spoke lightly. I said I supposed I should have to conceal my
+identity, and I would do my best. I told him I used to be pretty good at
+make-up.
+
+"He nodded in approval. He said: 'That's good. I judged you would not
+let me down.' Then he gave me my instructions--'You take the car right
+now and start for Southampton--there's no train that will fit in. You'll
+be driving all night. Barring accidents, you ought to get there by six
+in the morning. But whenever you arrive, drive straight to the Grand
+Hotel and ask for George Harris. If he's there, tell him you are to go
+over instead of him, and ask him to telephone me here. It is very
+important he should know that at the earliest moment possible. But if he
+isn't there, that means he has got the instructions I wired to-day, and
+hasn't gone to Southampton. In that case you don't want to trouble about
+him any more, but just wait for the boat. You can leave the car at a
+garage under a fancy name--mine must not be given. See about changing
+your appearance--I don't care how, so you do it well. Travel by the boat
+as George Harris. Let on to be anything you like, but be careful, and
+don't talk much to anybody. When you arrive, take a room at the Hotel
+St. Petersburg. You will receive a note or message there, addressed to
+George Harris, telling you where to take the wallet I shall give you.
+The wallet is locked, and you want to take good care of it. Have you got
+all that clear?'
+
+"I repeated the instructions. I asked if I should return from Paris
+after handing over the wallet. 'As soon as you like,' he said. 'And mind
+this--whatever happens, don't communicate with me at any stage of the
+journey. If you don't get the message in Paris at once, just wait until
+you do--days, if necessary. But not a line of any sort to me.
+Understand? Now get ready as quick as you can. I'll go with you in the
+car a little way. Hurry!'
+
+"That is, so far as I can remember, the exact substance of what
+Manderson said to me that night. I went to my room, changed into day
+clothes, and hastily threw a few necessaries into a kit-bag. My mind was
+in a whirl, not so much at the nature of the business as at the
+suddenness of it. I think I remember telling you the last time we
+met"--he turned to Trent--"that Manderson had rather a fondness for
+doing things in a story-book style. Other things being equal, he
+delighted in a bit of mystification and melodrama, and I told myself
+that this was Manderson all over. I hurried downstairs with my bag and
+rejoined him in the library. He handed me a stout leather letter-case,
+about eight inches by six, fastened with a strap with a lock on it. I
+could just squeeze it into my side-pocket. Then I went to get out the
+car from the garage behind the house.
+
+"As I was bringing it round to the front a disconcerting thought struck
+me. I remembered that I had only a few shillings in my pocket.
+
+"For some time past I had been keeping myself very short of cash, and
+for this reason--which I tell you because it is a vital point, as you
+will see in a minute. I was living temporarily on borrowed money. I had
+always been careless about money while I was with Manderson, and being a
+gregarious animal I had made many friends, most of them belonging to a
+New York set that had little to do but get rid of the large incomes
+given them by their parents. Still, I was very well paid, and I was too
+busy even to attempt to go very far with them in that amusing
+occupation. I was still well on the right side of the ledger until I
+began, merely out of curiosity, to play at speculation. It's a very old
+story--particularly in Wall Street. I thought it was easy; I was lucky
+at first; I would always be prudent--and so on. Then came the day when I
+went out of my depth. In one week I was separated from my roll, as
+Bunner expressed it when I told him; and I owed money, too. I had had my
+lesson. Now in this pass I went to Manderson and told him what I had
+done and how I stood. He heard me with a very grim smile, and then, with
+the nearest approach to sympathy I had ever found in him, he advanced me
+a sum on account of my salary that would clear me. 'Don't play the
+markets any more,' was all he said.
+
+"Now on that Sunday night Manderson knew that I was practically without
+any money in the world. He knew that Bunner knew it, too. He may have
+known that I had even borrowed a little more from Bunner for
+pocket-money until my next check was due, which, owing to my
+anticipation of my salary, would not have been a large one. Bear this
+knowledge of Manderson's in mind.
+
+"As soon as I had brought the car round I went into the library and
+stated the difficulty to Manderson.
+
+"What followed gave me, slight as it was, my first impression of
+something odd being afoot. As soon as I mentioned the word 'expenses'
+his hand went mechanically to his left hip-pocket, where he always kept
+a little case containing notes to the value of about a hundred pounds in
+our money. This was such a rooted habit in him that I was astonished to
+see him check the movement suddenly. Then, to my greater amazement, he
+swore viciously under his breath. I had never heard him do this before;
+but Bunner had told me that of late he had often shown irritation in
+this way when they were alone. 'Has he mislaid his note-case?' was the
+question that flashed through my mind. But it seemed to me that it could
+not affect his plan at all, and I will tell you why. The week before,
+when I had gone up to London to carry out various commissions, including
+the booking of a berth for Mr. George Harris, I had drawn a thousand
+pounds for Manderson from his bankers; and all, at his request, in notes
+of small amounts. I did not know what this unusually large sum in cash
+was for; but I did know that the packets of notes were in his locked
+desk in the library, or had been earlier in the day, when I had seen him
+fingering them as he sat at the desk.
+
+"But instead of turning to the desk, Manderson stood looking at me.
+There was fury in his face, and it was a strange sight to see him
+gradually master it until his eyes grew cold again. 'Wait in the car,'
+he said slowly. 'I will get some money.' We both went out, and as I was
+getting into my overcoat in the hall I saw him enter the drawing-room,
+which, you remember, was on the other side of the entrance hall.
+
+"I stepped out onto the lawn before the house and smoked a cigarette,
+pacing up and down. I was asking myself again and again where that
+thousand pounds was; whether it was in the drawing-room; and if so, why.
+Presently, as I passed one of the drawing-room windows, I noticed Mrs.
+Manderson's shadow on the thin silk curtain. She was standing at her
+escritoire. The window was open, and as I passed I heard her say: 'I
+have not quite thirty pounds here. Will that be enough?' I did not hear
+the answer, but next moment Manderson's shadow was mingled with hers,
+and I heard the chink of money. Then, as he stood by the window, and as
+I was moving away, these words of his came to my ears--and these at
+least I can repeat exactly, for astonishment stamped them on my
+memory--'I'm going out now. Marlowe has persuaded me to go for a
+moonlight run in the car. He is very urgent about it. He says it will
+help me to sleep, and I guess he is right.'
+
+"I have told you that in the course of four years I had never once heard
+Manderson utter a direct lie about anything great or small. I believed
+that I understood the man's queer skin-deep morality, and I could have
+sworn that if he was firmly pressed with a question that could not be
+evaded he would either refuse to answer or tell the truth. But what had
+I just heard? No answer to any question. A voluntary statement, precise
+in terms, that was utterly false. The unimaginable had happened. It was
+almost as if one's dearest friend, in a moment of closest sympathy, had
+suddenly struck one in the face. The blood rushed to my head, and I
+stood still on the grass. I stood there until I heard his step at the
+front-door, and then I pulled myself together and stepped quickly to the
+car. He handed me a banker's paper bag with gold and notes in it.
+'There's more than you'll want there,' he said, and I pocketed it
+mechanically.
+
+"For a minute or so I stood discussing with Manderson--it was by one of
+those _tours de force_ of which one's mind is capable under great
+excitement--certain points about the route of the long drive before me.
+I had made the run several times by day, and I believe I spoke quite
+calmly and naturally about it. But while I spoke my mind was seething in
+a flood of suddenly-born suspicion and fear. I did not know what I
+feared. I simply felt fear, somehow--I did not know how--connected with
+Manderson. My soul once opened to it, fear rushed in like an assaulting
+army. I felt--I knew--that something was altogether wrong and sinister,
+and I felt myself to be the object of it. Yet Manderson was surely no
+enemy of mine. Then my thoughts reached out wildly for an answer to the
+question why he had told that lie. And all the time the blood hammered
+in my ears: 'Where is that money?' Reason struggled hard to set up the
+suggestion that the two things were not necessarily connected. The
+instinct of a man in danger would not listen to it. As we started, and
+the car took the curve into the road, it was merely the unconscious part
+of me that steered and controlled it, and that made occasional empty
+remarks as we slid along in the moonlight. Within me was a confusion and
+vague alarm that was far worse than any definite terror I ever felt.
+
+"About a mile from the house, you remember, one passed on one's left a
+gate on the other side of which was the golf-course. There Manderson
+said he would get down, and I stopped the car. 'You've got it all
+clear?' he asked. With a sort of wrench I forced myself to remember and
+repeat the directions given me. 'That's O. K.,' he said. 'Good-by, then.
+Stay with that wallet.' Those were the last words I heard him speak as
+the car moved gently away from him."
+
+Marlowe rose from his chair and pressed his hands to his eyes. He was
+flushed with the excitement of his own narrative, and there was in his
+look a horror of recollection that held both the listeners silent. He
+shook himself with a movement like a dog's, and then, his hands behind
+him, stood erect before the fire as he continued his tale.
+
+"I expect you both know what the back-reflector of a motor-car is."
+
+Trent nodded quickly, his face alive with anticipation; but Mr. Cupples,
+who cherished a mild but obstinate prejudice against motor-cars, readily
+confessed to ignorance.
+
+"It is a small round or more often rectangular mirror," Marlowe
+explained, "rigged out from the right side of the screen in front of the
+driver, and adjusted in such a way that he can see, without turning
+round, if anything is coming up behind to pass him. It is quite an
+ordinary appliance, and there was one on this car. As the car moved on,
+and Manderson ceased speaking behind me, I saw in that mirror a thing
+that I wish I could forget."
+
+Marlowe was silent for a moment, staring at the wall before him.
+
+"Manderson's face," he said in a low tone. "He was standing in the road,
+looking after me, only a few yards behind, and the moonlight was full on
+his face. The mirror happened to catch it for an instant.
+
+"Physical habit is a wonderful thing. I did not shift hand or foot on
+the controlling mechanism of the car. Indeed, I dare say it steadied me
+against the shock to have myself braced to the business of driving. You
+have read in books, I dare say, of hell looking out of a man's eyes, but
+perhaps you don't know what a good metaphor that is. If I had not known
+Manderson was there, I should not have recognized the face. It was that
+of a madman, distorted, hideous in the imbecility of hate, the teeth
+bared in a simian grin of ferocity and triumph, the eyes--! In the
+little mirror I had this glimpse of the face alone; I saw nothing of
+whatever gesture there may have been as that writhing white mask glared
+after me. And I saw it only for a flash. The car went on, gathering
+speed, and as it went, my brain, suddenly purged of the vapors of doubt
+and perplexity, was as busy as the throbbing engine before my feet. I
+knew.
+
+"You say something in that manuscript of yours, Mr. Trent, about the
+swift, automatic way in which one's ideas arrange themselves about some
+new, illuminating thought. It is quite true. The awful intensity of
+ill-will that had flamed after me from those straining eyeballs had
+poured over my mind like a search-light. I was thinking quite clearly
+now, and almost coldly, for I knew what--at least I knew whom--I had to
+fear, and instinct warned me that it was not a time to give room to the
+emotions that were fighting to possess me. The man hated me insanely.
+That incredible fact I suddenly knew. But the face had told me--it would
+have told anybody--more than that. It was a face of hatred gratified, it
+proclaimed some damnable triumph. It had gloated over me driving away to
+my fate. This too was plain to me. And to what fate?
+
+"I stopped the car. It had gone about two hundred and fifty yards, and a
+sharp bend of the road hid the spot where I had set Manderson down. I
+lay back in the seat and thought it out. Something was to happen to me.
+In Paris? Probably--why else should I be sent there, with money and a
+ticket? But why Paris? That puzzled me, for I had no melodramatic ideas
+about Paris. I put the point aside for a moment. I turned to the other
+things that had roused my attention that evening. The lie about my
+'persuading him to go for a moonlight run.' What was the intention of
+that? Manderson, I said to myself, will be returning without me while I
+am on my way to Southampton. What will he tell them about me? How
+account for his returning alone and without the car? As I asked myself
+that sinister question there rushed into my mind the last of my
+difficulties: 'Where are the thousand pounds?' And in the same instant
+came the answer: 'The thousand pounds are in my pocket.'
+
+"I got up and stepped from the car. My knees trembled and I felt very
+sick. I saw the plot now--as I thought. The whole of the story about the
+papers and the necessity of their being taken to Paris was a blind. With
+Manderson's money about me, of which he would declare I had robbed him,
+I was to all appearance attempting to escape from England, with every
+precaution that guilt could suggest. He would communicate with the
+police at once, and would know how to put them on my track. I should be
+arrested in Paris--if I got so far--living under a false name, after
+having left the car under a false name, disguised myself, and traveled
+in a cabin which I had booked in advance, also under a false name. It
+would be plainly the crime of a man without money, and for some reason
+desperately in want of it. As for my account of the affair, it would be
+too preposterous.
+
+"As this ghastly array of incriminating circumstances rose up before me,
+I dragged the stout letter-case from my pocket. In the intensity of the
+moment I never entertained the faintest doubt that I was right, and that
+the money was there. It would easily hold the packets of notes. But as I
+felt it and weighed it in my hands it seemed to me there must be more
+than this. It was too bulky. What more was to be laid to my charge?
+After all, a thousand pounds was not much to tempt a man like myself to
+run the risk of penal servitude. In this new agitation, scarcely knowing
+what I did, I caught the surrounding strap in my fingers just above the
+fastening and tore the staple out of the lock. These locks, you know,
+are pretty flimsy as a rule."
+
+Here Marlowe paused and walked to the oaken desk before the window.
+Opening a drawer full of miscellaneous objects, he took out a box of odd
+keys, and selected a small one distinguished by a piece of pink tape.
+
+He handed it to Trent. "I keep that by me as a sort of morbid memento.
+It is the key to the lock I smashed. I might have saved myself the
+trouble if I had known that this key was at that moment in the left-hand
+side-pocket of my overcoat. Manderson must have slipped it in, either
+while the coat was hanging in the hall or while he sat at my side in the
+car. I might not have found the tiny thing there for weeks--as a matter
+of fact I did find it two days after Manderson was dead--but a police
+search would have found it in five minutes. And then I--I with the case
+and its contents in my pocket, my false name and my sham spectacles and
+the rest of it--I should have had no explanation to offer but the highly
+convincing one that I didn't know the key was there."
+
+Trent dangled the key by its tape idly. Then--"How do you know this is
+the key of that case?" he asked quickly.
+
+"I tried it. As soon as I found it I went up and fitted it to the lock.
+I knew where I had left the thing. So do you, I think, Mr. Trent. Don't
+you?" There was a faint shade of mockery in Marlowe's voice.
+
+"Touché!" Trent said, with a dry smile. "I found a large empty
+letter-case with a burst lock lying with other odds and ends on the
+dressing-table in Manderson's room. Your statement is that you put it
+there. I could make nothing of it." He closed his lips.
+
+"There was no reason for hiding it," said Marlowe. "But to get back to
+my story. I burst the lock of the strap. I opened the case before one of
+the lamps of the car. The first thing I found in it I ought to have
+expected, of course; but I hadn't." He paused and glanced at Trent.
+
+"It was--" began Trent mechanically; and then stopped himself. "Try not
+to bring me in any more, if you don't mind," he said, meeting the
+other's eye. "I have complimented you already in that document on your
+cleverness. You need not prove it by making the judge help you out with
+your evidence."
+
+"All right," agreed Marlowe. "I couldn't resist just that much. If _you_
+had been in my place you would have known before I did that Manderson's
+little pocket case was there. As soon as I saw it, of course, I
+remembered his not having had it about him when I asked for money, and
+his surprising anger. He had made a false step. He had already fastened
+his note-case up with the rest of what was to figure as my plunder, and
+placed it in my hands. I opened it. It contained a few notes as usual--I
+didn't count them.
+
+"Tucked into the flaps of the big case in packets were the other notes,
+just as I had brought them from London. And with them were two small
+wash-leather bags, the look of which I knew well. My heart jumped
+sickeningly again, for this too was utterly unexpected. In those bags
+Manderson kept the diamonds in which he had been investing for some time
+past. I didn't open them; I could feel the tiny stones shifting under
+the pressure of my fingers. How many thousands of pounds' worth there
+were there I have no idea. We had regarded Manderson's diamond-buying as
+merely a speculative fad. I believe now that it was the earliest
+movement in the scheme for my ruin. For any one like myself to be
+represented as having robbed him there ought to be a strong inducement
+shown. That had been provided with a vengeance.
+
+"Now, I thought, I have the whole thing plain, and I must act. I saw
+instantly what I must do. I had left Manderson about a mile from the
+house. It would take him twenty minutes, fifteen if he walked fast, to
+get back to the house, where he would of course immediately tell his
+story of robbery, and probably telephone at once to the police in
+Bishopsbridge. I had left him only five or six minutes ago--for all that
+I have just told you was as quick thinking as I ever did. It would be
+easy to overtake him in the car before he neared the house. There would
+be an awkward interview--I set my teeth as I thought of it, and all my
+fears vanished as I began to savor the gratification of telling him my
+opinion of him. There are probably few people who ever positively looked
+forward to an awkward interview with Manderson; but I was mad with rage.
+My honor and my liberty had been plotted against with detestable
+treachery. I did not consider what would follow the interview. That
+would arrange itself.
+
+"I had started and turned the car--I was already going fast--when I
+heard the sound of a shot in front of me, to the right.
+
+"Instantly I stopped the car. My first wild thought was that Manderson
+was shooting at me. Then I realized that the noise had not been close at
+hand. I could see nobody on the road, though the moonlight flooded it. I
+had left Manderson at a spot just round a corner that was now some fifty
+yards ahead of me. I started again, and turned the corner at a slow
+pace. Then I stopped again with a jar, and for a moment I sat perfectly
+still.
+
+"Manderson lay dead a few steps from me on the turf within the gate,
+clearly visible to me in the moonlight."
+
+Marlowe made another pause, and Trent, with a puckered brow, inquired:
+"On the golf-course?"
+
+"Obviously," remarked Mr. Cupples. "The eighth green is just there." He
+had grown more and more interested as Marlowe went on, and was now
+playing feverishly with his thin beard.
+
+"On the green, quite close to the flag," said Marlowe. "He lay on his
+back, his arms were stretched abroad, his jacket and heavy overcoat were
+open; the light shone hideously on his white face and his shirt-front;
+it glistened on his bared teeth and one of the eyes. The other ... you
+saw it. The man was certainly dead. As I sat there stunned, unable for
+the moment to think at all, I could even see a thin dark line of blood
+running down from the shattered socket to the ear. Close by lay his soft
+black hat, and at his feet a pistol.
+
+"I suppose it was only a few seconds that I sat helplessly staring at
+the body. Then I rose and moved to it with dragging feet; for now the
+truth had come to me at last, and I realized the fullness of my
+appalling danger. It was not only my liberty or my honor that the maniac
+had undermined. It was death that he had planned for me; death with the
+degradation of the scaffold. To strike me down with certainty he had not
+hesitated to end his life--a life which was, no doubt, already
+threatened by a melancholic impulse to self-destruction; and the last
+agony of the suicide had been turned, perhaps, to a devilish joy by the
+thought that he dragged down my life with his. For, so far as I could
+see at the moment, my situation was utterly hopeless. If it had been
+desperate on the assumption that Manderson meant to denounce me as a
+thief, what was it now that his corpse denounced me as a murderer?
+
+"I picked up the revolver and saw, almost without emotion, that it was
+my own--Manderson had taken it from my room, I suppose, while I was
+getting out the car. At the same moment I remembered that it was by
+Manderson's suggestion that I had had it engraved with my initials, to
+distinguish it from a precisely similar weapon which he had of his own.
+
+"I bent over the body and satisfied myself that there was no life left
+in it. I must tell you here that I did not notice, then or afterwards,
+the scratches and marks on the wrists which were taken as evidence of a
+struggle with an assailant. But I have no doubt that Manderson
+deliberately injured himself in this way before firing the shot; it was
+a part of his plan.
+
+"Though I never perceived that detail, however, it was evident enough as
+I looked at the body that Manderson had not forgotten, in his last act
+on earth, to tie me tighter by putting out of court the question of
+suicide. He had clearly been at pains to hold the pistol at arm's
+length, and there was not a trace of smoke or of burning on the face.
+The wound was absolutely clean, and was already ceasing to bleed
+outwardly. I rose and paced the green, reckoning up the points in the
+crushing case against me.
+
+"I was the last to be seen with Manderson. I had persuaded him--so he
+had lied to his wife and, as I afterwards knew, to the butler--to go
+with me for the drive from which he never returned. My pistol had killed
+him. It was true that by discovering his plot I had saved myself from
+heaping up further incriminating facts--flight, concealment, the
+possession of the treasure. But what need of them, after all? As I
+stood, what hope was there? What could I do?"
+
+Marlowe came to the table and leaned forward with his hands upon it. "I
+want," he said very earnestly, "to try to make you understand what was
+in my mind when I decided to do what I did. I hope you won't be bored,
+because I must do it. You may both have thought I acted like a fool. But
+after all the police never suspected me. I walked that green for a
+quarter of an hour, I suppose, thinking the thing out like a game of
+chess. I had to think ahead and think coolly; for my safety depended on
+upsetting the plans of one of the longest-headed men who ever lived. And
+remember that, for all I knew, there were details of the scheme still
+hidden from me, waiting to crush me.
+
+"Two plain courses presented themselves at once. Either of them, I
+thought, would certainly prove fatal. I could, in the first place, do
+the completely straightforward thing: take back the dead man, tell my
+story, hand over the notes and diamonds, and trust to the saving power
+of truth and innocence. I could have laughed as I thought of it. I saw
+myself bringing home the corpse and giving an account of myself,
+boggling with sheer shame over the absurdity of my wholly unsupported
+tale as I brought a charge of mad hatred and fiendish treachery against
+a man who had never, so far as I knew, had a word to say against me. At
+every turn the cunning of Manderson had forestalled me. His careful
+concealment of such a hatred was a characteristic feature of the
+stratagem; only a man of his iron self-restraint could have done it. You
+can see for yourselves how every fact in my statement would appear, in
+the shadow of Manderson's death, a clumsy lie. I tried to imagine myself
+telling such a story to the counsel for my defense. I could see the face
+with which he would listen to it; I could read in the lines of it his
+thought, that to put forward such an impudent farrago would mean merely
+the disappearance of any chance there might be of a commutation of the
+capital sentence.
+
+"True, I had not fled; I had brought back the body; I had handed over
+the property. But how did that help me? It would only suggest that I had
+yielded to a sudden funk after killing my man, and had no nerve left to
+clutch at the fruits of the crime; it would suggest, perhaps, that I had
+not set out to kill but only to threaten, and that, when I found that I
+had done murder, the heart went out of me. Turn it which way I would, I
+could see no hope of escape by this plan of action.
+
+"The second of the obvious things that I might do was to take the hint
+offered by the situation, and to fly at once. That too must prove fatal.
+There was the body. I had no time to hide it in such a way that it would
+not be found at the first systematic search. But whatever I should do
+with the body, Manderson's not returning to the house would cause
+uneasiness in two or three hours at most. Martin would suspect an
+accident to the car, and would telephone to the police. At daybreak the
+roads would be scoured and inquiries telegraphed in every direction. The
+police would act on the possibility of there being foul play. They would
+spread their nets with energy in such a big business as the
+disappearance of Manderson. Ports and railway termini would be watched.
+Within twenty-four hours the body would be found, and the whole country
+would be on the alert for me--all Europe scarcely less; I did not
+believe there was a spot in Christendom where the man accused of
+Manderson's murder could pass unchallenged, with every newspaper crying
+the fact of his death into the ears of all the world. Every stranger
+would be suspected; every man, woman and child would be a detective. The
+car, wherever I should abandon it, would put people on my track. If I
+had to choose between two utterly hopeless courses, I decided, I would
+take that of telling the preposterous truth.
+
+"But now I cast about desperately for some tale that would seem more
+plausible than the truth. Could I save my neck by a lie? One after
+another came into my mind; I need not trouble to remember them now. Each
+had its own futilities and perils; but every one split upon the fact--or
+what would be taken for fact--that I had induced Manderson to go out
+with me, and the fact that he had never returned alive. Notion after
+notion I swiftly rejected as I paced there by the dead man, and doom
+seemed to settle down upon me more heavily as the moments passed. Then a
+strange thought came to me.
+
+"Several times I had repeated to myself half-consciously, as a sort of
+refrain, the words in which I had heard Manderson tell his wife that I
+had induced him to go out. 'Marlowe has persuaded me to go for a
+moonlight run in the car. He is very urgent about it.' All at once it
+struck me that, without meaning to do so, I was saying this in
+Manderson's voice.
+
+"As you found out for yourself, Mr. Trent, I have a natural gift of
+mimicry. I had imitated Manderson's voice many times so successfully as
+to deceive even Bunner, who had been much more in his company than his
+own wife. It was, you remember,"--Marlowe turned to Mr. Cupples--"a
+strong, metallic voice, of great carrying power, so unusual as to make
+it a very fascinating voice to imitate, and at the same time very easy.
+I said the words carefully to myself again, like this--" he uttered
+them, and Mr. Cupples opened his eyes in amazement--"and then I struck
+my hand upon the low wall beside me. 'Manderson never returned alive?' I
+said aloud. 'But Manderson _shall_ return alive!'
+
+"In thirty seconds the bare outline of the plan was complete in my mind.
+I did not wait to think over details. Every instant was precious now; I
+lifted the body and laid it on the floor of the car, covered with a rug.
+I took the hat and the revolver. Not one trace remained on the green, I
+believe, of that night's work. As I drove back to White Gables my design
+took shape before me with a rapidity and ease that filled me with a wild
+excitement. I should escape yet! It was all so easy if I kept my pluck.
+Putting aside the unusual and unlikely, I should not fail. I wanted to
+shout, to scream! Nearing the house I slackened speed, and carefully
+reconnoitered the road. Nothing was moving. I turned the car into the
+open field on the other side of the road, about twenty paces short of
+the little door at the extreme corner of the grounds. I brought it to
+rest behind a stack. When, with Manderson's hat on my head and the
+pistol in my pocket, I had staggered with the body across the moonlit
+road and through that door, I left much of my apprehension behind me.
+With swift action and an unbroken nerve, I thought I ought to succeed."
+
+With a long sigh Marlowe threw himself into one of the deep chairs at
+the fireside, and passed his handkerchief over his damp forehead. Each
+of his hearers, too, drew a deep breath, but not audibly.
+
+"Everything else you know," he said. He took a cigarette from a box
+beside him and lighted it. Trent watched the very slight quiver of the
+hand that held the match, and privately noted that his own at the moment
+was not so steady.
+
+"The shoes that betrayed me to you," pursued Marlowe after a short
+silence, "were painful all the time I wore them, but I never dreamed
+that they had given anywhere. I knew that no footstep of mine must
+appear by any accident in the soft ground about the hut where I laid the
+body, or between the hut and the house, so I took the shoes off and
+crammed my feet into them as soon as I was inside the little door. I
+left my own shoes, with my own jacket and overcoat, near the body, ready
+to be resumed later. I made a clear footmark on the soft gravel outside
+the French window, and several on the drugget round the carpet. The
+stripping off of the outer clothing of the body and the dressing of it
+afterwards in the brown suit and shoes, and putting the things into the
+pockets, was a horrible business; and getting the teeth out of the mouth
+was worse. The head ... but you don't want to hear about it. I didn't
+feel it much at the time. I was wriggling my own head out of a noose,
+you see. I wish I had thought of pulling down the cuffs, and had tied
+the shoes more neatly. And putting the watch in the wrong pocket was a
+bad mistake. It had all to be done so hurriedly.
+
+"You were wrong, by the way, about the whisky. After one stiffish drink
+I had no more; but I filled up a flask that was in the cupboard, and
+pocketed it. I had a night of peculiar anxiety and effort in front of
+me, and I didn't know how I should stand it. I had to take some once or
+twice during the drive. Speaking of that, you give rather a generous
+allowance of time in your document for doing that run by night. You say
+that to get to Southampton by half-past six in that car under the
+conditions, a man must, even if he drove like a demon, have left
+Marlstone by twelve at latest. I had not got the body dressed in
+the other suit, with tie and watch-chain and so forth, until nearly
+ten minutes past; and then I had to get to the car and start it
+going.... But then I don't suppose any demon would have taken the risks
+I did in that car at night, without a head-light. It turns me cold to
+think of it now.
+
+"There's nothing much to say about what I did in the house. I spent the
+time after Martin had left me in carefully thinking over the remaining
+steps in my plan, while I unloaded and thoroughly cleaned the revolver,
+using my handkerchief and a penholder from the desk. I also placed the
+packets of notes, the note-case and the diamonds in the roll-top desk,
+which I opened and re-locked with Manderson's key. When I went upstairs
+it was a trying moment, for though I was safe from the eyes of Martin as
+he sat in his pantry, there was a faint possibility of somebody being
+about on the bedroom floor. I had sometimes found the French maid
+wandering about there when the other servants were in bed. Bunner, I
+knew, was a deep sleeper. Mrs. Manderson, I had gathered from things I
+had heard her say, was usually asleep by eleven; I had thought it
+possible that her gift of sleep had helped her to retain all her beauty
+and vitality in spite of a marriage which we all knew was an unhappy
+one. Still, it was uneasy work mounting the stairs and holding myself
+ready to retreat to the library again at the least sound from above. But
+nothing happened.
+
+"The first thing I did on reaching the corridor was to enter my room and
+put the revolver and cartridges back in the case. Then I turned off the
+light and went quietly into Manderson's room.
+
+"What I had to do there you know. I had to take off the shoes and put
+them outside the door, leave Manderson's jacket, waistcoat, trousers and
+black tie, after taking everything out of the pockets, select a suit and
+tie and shoes for the body, and place the dental plate in the bowl,
+which I moved from the washing-stand to the bedside, leaving those
+ruinous finger-marks as I did so. The marks on the drawer must have been
+made when I shut it after taking out the tie. Then I had to lie down in
+the bed and tumble it. You know all about it--all except my state of
+mind, which you couldn't imagine, and I couldn't describe.
+
+"The worst came when I had hardly begun my operations; the moment when
+Mrs. Manderson spoke from the room where I supposed her asleep. I was
+prepared for it happening; it was a possibility; but I nearly lost my
+nerve all the same. However....
+
+"By the way, I may tell you this: in the extremely unlikely contingency
+of Mrs. Manderson remaining awake and so putting out of the question my
+escape by way of her window, I had planned simply to remain where I was
+a few hours, and then, not speaking to her, to leave the house quickly
+and quietly by the ordinary way. Martin would have been in bed by that
+time. I might have been heard to leave, but not seen. I should have done
+just as I had planned with the body, and then made the best time I could
+in the car to Southampton. The difference would have been that I
+couldn't have furnished an unquestionable alibi by turning up at the
+hotel at six-thirty. I should have made the best of it by driving
+straight to the docks and making my ostentatious inquiries there. I
+could in any case have got there long before the boat left at noon. I
+couldn't see that anybody could suspect me of the supposed murder in any
+case; but if any one had, and if I hadn't arrived until ten o'clock,
+say, I shouldn't have been able to answer: 'It is impossible for me to
+have got to Southampton so soon after shooting him.' I should simply
+have had to say I was delayed by a break-down after leaving Manderson at
+half-past ten, and challenged any one to produce any fact connecting me
+with the crime. They couldn't have done it. The pistol, left openly in
+my room, might have been used by anybody, even if it could be proved
+that that particular pistol was used. Nobody could reasonably connect me
+with the shooting so long as it was believed that it was Manderson who
+had returned to the house. The suspicion could not, I was confident,
+enter any one's mind. All the same, I wanted to introduce the element of
+absolute physical impossibility; I knew I should feel ten times as safe
+with that.
+
+"So when I knew from the sound of her breathing that Mrs. Manderson was
+asleep again I walked quickly across her room in my stocking feet and
+was on the grass with my bundle in ten seconds. I don't think I made the
+least noise. The curtain before the window was of soft, thick stuff and
+didn't rustle, and when I pushed the glass doors further open there was
+not a sound."
+
+"Tell me," said Trent as the other stopped to light a new cigarette,
+"why you took the risk of going through Mrs. Manderson's room to escape
+from the house? I could see when I looked into the thing on the spot why
+it had to be on that side of the house; there was a danger of being seen
+by Martin or by some servant at a bedroom window if you got out by a
+window on one of the other sides. But there were three unoccupied rooms
+on that side: two spare bedrooms and Mrs. Manderson's sitting-room. I
+should have thought it would have been safer, after you had done what
+was necessary to your plan in Manderson's room, to leave it quietly and
+escape through one of those three rooms.... The fact that you went
+through her window, you know," he added coldly, "might have suggested,
+if it became known, a certain suspicion in regard to the lady herself. I
+think you understand me."
+
+Marlowe turned upon him with a glowing face. "And I think you will
+understand me, Mr. Trent," he said in a voice that shook a little, "when
+I say that if such a possibility had occurred to me then, I would have
+taken any risk rather than make my escape by that way.... Oh, well!" he
+went on more coolly, "I suppose that to any one who didn't know her the
+idea of her being privy to her husband's murder might not seem so
+indescribably fatuous. Forgive the expression." He looked attentively at
+the burning end of his cigarette, studiously unconscious of the red flag
+that flew in Trent's eyes for an instant at his words and the tone of
+them.
+
+That emotion, however, was conquered at once. "Your remark is perfectly
+just," Trent said with answering coolness. "I can quite believe, too,
+that at the time you didn't think of the possibility I mentioned. But
+surely, apart from that, it would have been safer to do as I said: go by
+the window of an unoccupied room."
+
+"Do you think so?" said Marlowe. "All I can say is I hadn't the nerve to
+do it. I tell you, when I entered Manderson's room I shut the door of it
+on more than half my terrors. I had the problem confined before me in a
+closed space, with only one danger in it, and that a _known_ danger: the
+danger of Mrs. Manderson. The thing was almost done: I had only to wait
+until she was certainly asleep after her few moments of waking up, for
+which, as I told you, I was prepared as a possibility. Barring
+accidents, the way was clear. But now suppose that I, carrying
+Manderson's clothes and shoes, had opened that door again and gone in my
+shirt-sleeves and socks to enter one of the empty rooms. The moonlight
+was flooding the corridor through the end-window. Even if my face were
+concealed, nobody could mistake my standing figure for Manderson's.
+Martin might be going about the house in his silent way. Bunner might
+come out of his bedroom. One of the servants who were supposed to be in
+bed might come round the corner from the other passage--I had found
+Célestine prowling about quite as late as it was then. None of these
+things was very likely; but they were all too likely for me. They were
+uncertainties. Shut off from the household in Manderson's room I knew
+exactly what I had to face. As I lay in my clothes in Manderson's bed
+and listened for the almost inaudible breathing through the open door I
+felt far more ease of mind, terrible as my anxiety was, than I had felt
+since I saw the dead body on the turf. I even congratulated myself that
+I had had the chance, through Mrs. Manderson's speaking to me, of
+tightening one of the screws in my scheme by repeating the statement
+about my having been sent to Southampton."
+
+Marlowe looked at Trent, who nodded as who should say that his point was
+met.
+
+"As for Southampton," pursued Marlowe, "you know what I did when I got
+there, I have no doubt. I had decided to take Manderson's story about
+the mysterious Harris and act it out on my own lines. It was a carefully
+prepared lie, better than anything I could improvise. I even went so far
+as to get through a trunk call to the hotel at Southampton from the
+library before starting, and ask if Harris was there. As I expected, he
+wasn't."
+
+"Was that why you telephoned?" Trent inquired quickly.
+
+"The reason for telephoning was to get myself into an attitude in which
+Martin couldn't see my face or anything but the jacket and hat, yet
+which was a natural and familiar attitude. But while I was about it, it
+was obviously better to make a genuine call. If I had simply pretended
+to be telephoning, the people at the exchange could have told you at
+once that there hadn't been a call from White Gables that night."
+
+"One of the first things I did was to make that inquiry," said Trent.
+"That telephone call, and the wire you sent from Southampton to the dead
+man, to say Harris hadn't turned up and you were returning--both those
+appealed to me."
+
+A constrained smile lighted Marlowe's face for a moment. "I don't know
+that there's anything more to tell. I returned to Marlstone, and faced
+your friend the detective with such nerve as I had left. The worst was
+when I heard you had been put on the case--no, that wasn't the worst.
+The worst was when I saw you walk out of the shrubbery the next day,
+coming away from the shed where I had laid the body. For one ghastly
+moment I thought you were going to give me in charge on the spot. Now
+I've told you everything, you don't look so terrible."
+
+He closed his eyes, and there was a short silence. Then Trent got
+suddenly to his feet.
+
+"Cross-examination?" inquired Marlowe, looking at him gravely.
+
+"Not at all," said Trent, stretching his long limbs. "Only stiffness of
+the legs. I don't want to ask any questions. I believe what you have
+told us. I don't believe it simply because I always liked your face, or
+because it saves awkwardness, which are the most usual reasons for
+believing a person, but because my vanity will have it that no man could
+lie to me steadily for an hour without my perceiving it. Your story is
+an extraordinary one; but Manderson was an extraordinary man, and so are
+you. You acted like a lunatic in doing what you did; but I quite agree
+with you that if you had acted like a sane man you wouldn't have had the
+hundredth part of a dog's chance with a judge and jury. One thing is
+beyond dispute on any reading of the affair: you are a man of courage."
+
+The color rushed into Marlowe's face, and he hesitated for words. Before
+he could speak Mr. Cupples arose with a dry cough.
+
+"For my part," he said, "I never supposed you guilty for a moment."
+Marlowe turned to him in grateful amazement, Trent with an incredulous
+stare. "But," pursued Mr. Cupples, holding up his hand, "there is one
+question which I should like to put."
+
+Marlowe bowed, saying nothing.
+
+"Suppose," said Mr. Cupples, "that someone else had been suspected of
+the crime and put upon trial. What would you have done?"
+
+"I think my duty was clear. I should have gone with my story to the
+lawyers for the defense, and put myself in their hands."
+
+Trent laughed aloud. Now that the thing was over his spirits were
+rapidly becoming ungovernable. "I can see their faces!" he said. "As a
+matter of fact, though, nobody else was ever in danger. There wasn't a
+shred of evidence against any one. I looked up Murch at the Yard this
+morning, and he told me he had come round to Bunner's view, that it was
+a case of revenge on the part of some American black-hand gang. So
+there's the end of the Manderson case. Holy, suffering Moses! _What_ an
+ass a man can make of himself when he thinks he's being preternaturally
+clever!" He seized the bulky envelop from the table, and stuffed it into
+the heart of the fire. "There's for you, old friend! For want of you the
+world's course will not fail. But look here! It's getting late--nearly
+seven, and Cupples and I have an appointment at half-past. We must go.
+Mr. Marlowe, good-by." He looked into the other's eyes. "I am a man who
+has worked hard to put a rope round your neck. Considering the
+circumstances I don't know whether you will blame me. Will you shake
+hands?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE LAST STRAW
+
+
+"What was that you said about our having an appointment at half-past
+seven?" asked Mr. Cupples as the two came out of the great gateway of
+the pile of flats. "Have we such an appointment?"
+
+"Certainly we have," replied Trent. "You are dining with me. Only one
+thing can properly celebrate this occasion, and that is a dinner for
+which I pay. No, no! I asked you first. I have got right down to the
+bottom of a case that must be unique, a case that has troubled even my
+mind for over a year, and if that isn't a good reason for standing a
+dinner, I don't know what is. Cupples, we will not go to my club. This
+is to be a festival, and to be seen in a London club in a state of
+pleasurable emotion is more than enough to shatter any man's career.
+Besides that, the dinner there is always the same, or at least they
+always make it taste the same, I know not how. The eternal dinner at my
+club hath bored millions of members like me, and shall bore; but
+to-night let the feast be spread in vain, so far as we are concerned. We
+will not go where the satraps throng the hall. We will go to
+Sheppard's."
+
+"Who is Sheppard?" asked Mr. Cupples mildly, as they proceeded up
+Victoria Street. His companion went with an unnatural lightness, and a
+policeman observing his face, smiled indulgently at a look of happiness
+which he could only attribute to alcohol.
+
+"Who is Sheppard?" echoed Trent with bitter emphasis. "That question, if
+you will pardon me for saying so, Cupples, is thoroughly characteristic
+of the spirit of aimless inquiry prevailing in this restless day. I
+suggest our dining at Sheppard's and instantly you fold your arms and
+demand, in a frenzy of intellectual pride, to know who Sheppard is
+before you will cross the threshold of Sheppard's. I am not going to
+pander to the vices of the modern mind. Sheppard's is a place where one
+can dine. I do not know Sheppard. It never occurred to me that Sheppard
+existed. Probably he is a myth of totemistic origin. All I know is that
+you can get a bit of saddle of mutton at Sheppard's that has made many
+an American visitor curse the day that Christopher Columbus was
+born.... Taxi!"
+
+A cab rolled smoothly to the curb, and the driver received his
+instruction with a majestic nod.
+
+"Another reason I have for suggesting Sheppard's," continued Trent,
+feverishly lighting a cigarette, "is that I am going to be married to
+the most wonderful woman in the world. I trust the connection of ideas
+is clear."
+
+"You are going to marry Mabel!" cried Mr. Cupples. "My dear friend, what
+good news this is! Shake hands, Trent; this is glorious! I congratulate
+you both from the bottom of my heart. And may I say--I don't want to
+interrupt your flow of high spirits, which is very natural indeed, and I
+remember being just the same in similar circumstances long ago--but may
+I say how earnestly I have hoped for this? Mabel has seen so much
+unhappiness, yet she is surely a woman formed in the great purpose of
+humanity to be the best influence in the life of a good man. But I did
+not know her mind as regarded yourself. _Your_ mind I have known for
+some time," Mr. Cupples went on, with a twinkle in his eye that would
+have done credit to the worldliest of creatures. "I saw it at once when
+you were both dining at my house, and you sat listening to Professor
+Peppmüller and looking at her. Some of us older fellows have our wits
+about us still, my dear boy."
+
+"Mabel says she knew it before that," replied Trent with a slightly
+crestfallen air. "And I thought I was acting the part of a person who
+was not mad about her to the life. Well, I never was any good at
+dissembling. I shouldn't wonder if even old Peppmüller noticed something
+through his double convex lenses. But however crazy I may have been as
+an undeclared suitor, I am going to be much worse now. Here's the
+place," he broke off, as the cab rushed down a side-street and swung
+round a corner into a broad and populous thoroughfare. "We're there
+already." The cab drew up.
+
+"Here we are," said Trent as he paid the man and led Mr. Cupples into a
+long paneled room set with many tables and filled with a hum of talk.
+"This is the house of fulfilment of craving, this is the bower with the
+roses around it. I see there are three bookmakers eating pork at my
+favorite table. We will have that one in the opposite corner."
+
+He conferred earnestly with a waiter, while Mr. Cupples, in a pleasant
+meditation, warmed himself before the great fire. "The wine here," Trent
+resumed, as they seated themselves, "is almost certainly made out of
+grapes. What shall we drink?"
+
+Mr. Cupples came out of his reverie. "I think," he said, "I will have
+milk and soda-water."
+
+"Speak lower!" urged Trent. "The head-waiter has a weak heart, and he
+might hear you. Milk and soda-water! Cupples, you may think you have a
+strong constitution, and I don't say you have not, but I warn you that
+this habit of mixing drinks has been the death of many a robuster man
+than you. Be wise in time. Fill high the bowl with Samian wine; leave
+soda to the Turkish hordes. Here comes our food." He gave another order
+to the waiter, who ranged the dishes before them and darted away. Trent
+was, it seemed, a respected customer. "I have sent," he said, "for wine
+that I know, and I hope you will try it. If you have taken a vow, then
+in the name of all the teetotal saints drink water, which stands at your
+elbow, but don't seek a cheap notoriety by demanding milk and soda."
+
+"I have never taken any pledge," said Mr. Cupples, examining his mutton
+with a favorable eye. "I simply don't care about wine. I bought a bottle
+once and drank it to see what it was like, and it made me ill. But very
+likely it was bad wine. I will taste some of yours, as it is your
+dinner, and I do assure you, my dear Trent, I should like to do
+something unusual to show how strongly I feel on the present occasion. I
+have not been so delighted for many years. To think," he reflected aloud
+as the waiter filled his glass, "of the Manderson mystery disposed of,
+the innocent exculpated, and your own and Mabel's happiness crowned--all
+coming upon me together! I drink to you, my dear friend." And Mr.
+Cupples took a very small sip of the wine.
+
+"You have a great nature," said Trent, much moved. "Your outward
+semblance doth belie your soul's immensity. I should have expected as
+soon to see an elephant conducting at the opera as you drinking my
+health. Dear Cupples! May his beak retain ever that delicate
+rose-stain!--No, curse it all!" he broke out, surprising a shade of
+discomfort that fitted over his companion's face as he tasted the wine
+again. "I have no business to meddle with your tastes. I apologize. You
+shall have what you want, even if it causes the head-waiter to perish in
+his pride."
+
+When Mr. Cupples had been supplied with his monastic drink, and the
+waiter had retired, Trent looked across the table with significance. "In
+this babble of many conversations," he said, "we can speak as freely as
+if we were on a bare hill-side. The waiter is whispering soft nothings
+into the ear of the young woman at the pay-desk. We are alone. What do
+you think of that interview of this afternoon?" He began to dine with an
+appetite.
+
+Without pausing in the task of cutting his mutton into very small pieces
+Mr. Cupples replied: "The most curious feature of it, in my judgment,
+was the irony of the situation. We both held the clue to that mad hatred
+of Manderson's which Marlowe found so mysterious. We knew of his jealous
+obsession; which knowledge we withheld, as was very proper, if only in
+consideration of Mabel's feelings. Marlowe will never know of what he
+was suspected by that person. Strange! Nearly all of us, I venture to
+think, move unconsciously among a network of opinions, often quite
+erroneous, which other people entertain about us. With regard to
+Marlowe's story, it appeared to me entirely straightforward, and not, in
+its essential features, especially remarkable, once we have admitted, as
+we surely must, that in the case of Manderson we have to deal with a
+more or less disordered mind. It was Mr. Bunner, I think you said, who
+told you of his rooted and apparently hereditary temper of suspicious
+jealousy. When the pressure of his business labors brought on mental
+derangement, that abnormality increased until it dominated him
+entirely."
+
+Trent laughed loudly. "Not especially remarkable!" he said. "I confess
+that the affair struck me as a little unusual."
+
+"Only in the development of the details," argued Mr. Cupples. "What is
+there abnormal in the essential facts? A madman conceives a crazy
+suspicion; he hatches a cunning plot against his fancied injurer; it
+involves his own destruction. Put thus, what is there that any man with
+the least knowledge of the ways of lunatics would call remarkable? Turn
+now to Marlowe's proceedings. He finds himself in a perilous position
+from which, though he is innocent, telling the truth will not save him.
+Is that an unheard-of situation? He escapes by means of a bold and
+ingenious piece of deception. That seems to me a thing that might happen
+every day and probably does so." He attacked his now unrecognizable
+mutton.
+
+"I should like to know," said Trent after an alimentary pause in the
+conversation, "whether there is anything that ever happened on the face
+of the earth that you could not represent as quite ordinary and
+commonplace, by such a line of argument as that. You may say what you
+like, but the idea of impersonating Manderson in those circumstances was
+an extraordinarily ingenious idea."
+
+"Ingenious--certainly!" replied Mr. Cupples. "Extraordinarily so--no! In
+those circumstances (your own words) it was really not strange that it
+should occur to a clever man. It lay almost on the surface of the
+situation. Marlowe was famous for his imitation of Manderson's voice; he
+had a talent for acting; he knew the ways of the establishment
+intimately. I grant you that the idea was brilliantly carried out; but
+everything favored it. As for the essential idea, I do not place it, as
+regards ingenuity, in the same class with, for example, the idea of
+utilizing the force of recoil in a discharged firearm to actuate the
+mechanism of ejecting and reloading. I do, however, admit, as I did at
+the outset, that in respect of details the case had unusual features. It
+developed a high degree of complexity."
+
+"Did it really strike you in that way?" inquired Trent with desperate
+sarcasm.
+
+"The affair became complicated," proceeded Mr. Cupples quite unmoved,
+"because after Marlowe's suspicions were awakened a second subtle mind
+came in to interfere with the plans of the first. That sort of duel
+often happens in business and politics, but less frequently, I imagine,
+in the world of crime. One disturbing reflection was left on my mind by
+what we learned to-day. If Marlowe had suspected nothing and walked into
+the trap, he would almost certainly have been hanged. Now how often may
+not a plan to throw the guilt of murder on an innocent person have been
+practised successfully? There are, I imagine, numbers of cases in which
+the accused, being found guilty on circumstantial evidence, have died
+protesting their innocence. I shall never approve again of a
+death-sentence imposed in a case decided upon such evidence."
+
+"I never have done so, for my part," said Trent. "To hang in such cases
+seems to me flying in the face of the perfectly obvious and sound
+principle expressed in the saying that 'you never can tell.' I agree
+with the American jurist who lays it down that we should not hang a
+yellow dog for stealing jam on circumstantial evidence, not even if he
+has jam all over his nose. As for attempts being made by malevolent
+persons to fix crimes upon innocent men, of course it is constantly
+happening."
+
+Mr. Cupples mused a few moments. "We know," he said, "from the things
+Mabel and Mr. Bunner told you what may be termed the spiritual truth
+underlying this matter: the insane depth of jealous hatred which
+Manderson concealed. We can understand that he was capable of such a
+scheme. But as a rule it is in the task of penetrating to the spiritual
+truth that the administration of justice breaks down. Sometimes that
+truth is deliberately concealed, as in Manderson's case. Sometimes, I
+think, it is concealed because simple people are actually unable to
+express it, and nobody else divines it."
+
+"The law certainly does not shine when it comes to a case requiring much
+delicacy of perception," said Trent. "It goes wrong easily enough over
+the commonplace criminal. As for the people with temperaments who get
+mixed up in legal proceedings, they must feel as if they were in a
+forest of apes, whether they win or lose. Well, I dare say it's good for
+them and their sort to have their noses rubbed in reality now and again.
+But what would twelve red-faced realities in a jury-box have done to
+Marlowe? His story would, as he says, have been a great deal worse than
+no defense at all. It's not as if there were a single piece of evidence
+in support of his tale. Can't you imagine how the prosecution would tear
+it to rags? Can't you see the judge simply taking it in his stride when
+it came to the summing up? And the jury--you've served on juries, I
+expect--in their room, snorting with indignation over the feebleness of
+the lie, telling each other it was the clearest case they ever heard of,
+and that they'd have thought better of him if he hadn't lost his nerve
+at the crisis, and had cleared off with the swag as he intended. Imagine
+yourself on that jury, not knowing Marlowe, and trembling with
+indignation at the record unrolled before you--cupidity, murder,
+robbery, sudden cowardice, shameless, impenitent, desperate lying! Why,
+you and I believed him to be guilty until--"
+
+"I beg your pardon! I beg your pardon!" interjected Mr. Cupples, laying
+down his knife and fork. "I was most careful, when we talked it all over
+the other night, to say nothing indicating such a belief. _I_ was always
+certain that he was innocent."
+
+"You said something of the sort at Marlowe's just now. I wondered what
+on earth you could mean. Certain that he was innocent! How can you be
+certain? You are generally more careful about terms than that, Cupples."
+
+"I said 'certain,'" Mr. Cupples repeated firmly.
+
+Trent shrugged his shoulders. "If you really were, after reading my
+manuscript and discussing the whole thing as we did," he rejoined, "then
+I can only say that you must have totally renounced all trust in the
+operations of the human reason; an attitude which, while it is bad
+Christianity and also infernal nonsense, is oddly enough bad Positivism
+too, unless I misunderstand that system. Why, man--"
+
+"Let me say a word," Mr. Cupples interposed again, folding his hands
+above his plate. "I assure you I am far from abandoning reason. I am
+certain he is innocent, and I always was certain of it, because of
+something that I know, and knew from the very beginning. You asked me
+just now to imagine myself on the jury at Marlowe's trial. That would be
+an unprofitable exercise of the mental powers, because I know that I
+should be present in another capacity. I should be in the witness box,
+giving evidence for the defense. You said just now, 'If there were a
+single piece of evidence in support of his tale.' There is, and it is my
+evidence. And," he added quietly, "it is conclusive." He took up his
+knife and fork and went contentedly on with his dinner.
+
+The pallor of excitement had turned Trent to marble while Mr. Cupples
+led laboriously up to this statement. At the last word the blood rushed
+to his face again and he struck the table with an unnatural laugh. "It
+can't be!" he exploded. "It's something you fancied, something you
+dreamed after one of those debauches of soda-and-milk. You can't really
+mean that all the time I was working on the case down there you knew
+Marlowe was innocent."
+
+Mr. Cupples, busy with his last mouthful, nodded brightly. He made an
+end of eating, wiped his sparse mustache, and then leaned forward over
+the table. "It's very simple," he said. "I shot Manderson myself."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I am afraid I startled you," Trent heard the voice of Mr. Cupples say.
+He forced himself out of his stupefaction like a diver striking upward
+for the surface, and with a rigid movement raised his glass. But half of
+the wine splashed upon the cloth, and he put it carefully down again
+untasted. He drew a deep breath, which was exhaled in a laugh wholly
+without merriment. "Go on," he said.
+
+"It was not murder," began Mr. Cupples, slowly measuring off inches with
+a fork on the edge of the table. "I will tell you the whole story. On
+that Sunday night I was taking my before-bedtime constitutional, having
+set out from the hotel about a quarter past ten. I went along the
+field-path that runs behind White Gables, cutting off the great curve of
+the road, and came out on the road nearly opposite that gate that is
+just by the eighth hole on the golf-course. Then I turned in there,
+meaning to walk along the turf to the edge of the cliff, and go back
+that way. I had only gone a few steps when I heard the car coming, and
+then I heard it stop near the gate. I saw Manderson at once. Do you
+remember my telling you I had seen him once alive after our quarrel in
+front of the hotel? Well, this was the time. You asked me if I had, and
+I did not care to tell a falsehood."
+
+A slight groan came from Trent. He drank a little wine, and said
+stonily: "Go on, please."
+
+"It was, as you know," pursued Mr. Cupples, "a moonlight night; but I
+was in shadow under the trees by the stone wall, and anyhow they could
+not suppose there was any one near them. I heard all that passed just as
+Marlowe has narrated it to us, and I saw the car go off towards
+Bishopsbridge. I did not see Manderson's face as it went, because his
+back was to me, but he shook his left hand at the car with extraordinary
+violence, greatly to my amazement. Then I waited for him to go back to
+White Gables, as I did not want to meet him again. But he did not go. He
+opened the gate through which I had just passed, and he stood there on
+the turf of the green, quite still. His head was bent, his arms hung at
+his sides, and he looked somehow ... rigid. For a few moments he
+remained in this tense attitude; then all of a sudden his right arm
+moved swiftly, and his hand was at the pocket of his overcoat. I saw his
+face raised in the moonlight, the teeth bared and the eyes glittering,
+and all at once I knew that the man was mad. Almost as quickly as that
+flashed across my mind, something else flashed in the moonlight. He held
+the pistol before him, pointing at his breast.
+
+"Now I may say here I shall always be doubtful whether Manderson
+intended to kill himself then. Marlowe naturally thinks so, knowing
+nothing of my intervention. But I think it quite likely he only meant to
+wound himself, and to charge Marlowe with attempted murder and robbery.
+
+"At that moment, however, I assumed it was suicide. Before I knew what I
+was doing I had leapt out of the shadows and seized his arm. He shook me
+off with a furious snarling noise, giving me a terrific blow in the
+chest, and presented the revolver at my head. But I seized his wrists
+before he could fire, and clung with all my strength--you remember how
+bruised and scratched they were. I knew I was fighting for my own life
+now, for murder was in his eyes. We struggled like two beasts, without
+an articulate word, I holding his pistol-hand down and keeping a grip on
+the other. I never dreamed that I had the strength for such an
+encounter. Then, with a perfectly instinctive movement--I never knew I
+meant to do it--I flung away his free hand and clutched like lightning
+at the weapon, tearing it from his fingers. By a miracle it did not go
+off. I darted back a few steps, he sprang at my throat like a wild cat,
+and I fired blindly in his face. He would have been about a yard away, I
+suppose. His knees gave way instantly, and he fell in a heap on the
+turf.
+
+"I flung the pistol down, and bent over him. The heart's motion ceased
+under my hand. I knelt there staring, struck motionless; and I don't
+know how long it was before I heard the noise of the car returning.
+
+"Trent, all the time that Marlowe paced that green, with the moonlight
+on his white and working face, I was within a few yards of him,
+crouching in the shadow of the furze by the ninth tee. I dared not show
+myself. I was thinking. My public quarrel with Manderson the same
+morning was, I suspected, the talk of the hotel. I assure you that every
+horrible possibility of the situation for me had rushed across my mind
+the moment I saw Manderson fall. I became cunning. I knew what I must
+do. I must get back to the hotel as fast as I could, get in somehow
+unperceived, and play a part to save myself. I must never tell a word to
+any one. Of course I was assuming that Marlowe would tell everyone how
+he had found the body. I knew he would suppose it was suicide; I thought
+everyone would suppose so.
+
+"When Marlowe began at last to lift the body, I stole away down the wall
+and got out into the road by the club-house, where he could not see me.
+I felt perfectly cool and collected. I crossed the road, climbed the
+fence, and ran across the meadow to pick up the field-path I had come
+by, that runs to the hotel behind White Gables. I got back to the hotel
+very much out of breath."
+
+"Out of breath," repeated Trent mechanically, still staring at his
+companion as if hypnotized.
+
+"I had had a sharp run," said Mr. Cupples. "Well, approaching the hotel
+from the back I could see into the writing-room through the open window.
+There was nobody in there, so I climbed over the sill, walked to the
+bell and rang it, and then sat down to write a letter I had meant to
+write the next day. I saw by the clock that it was a little past eleven.
+When the waiter answered the bell I asked for a glass of milk and a
+postage-stamp. Soon afterwards I went up to bed. But I could not sleep."
+
+Mr. Cupples, having nothing more to say, ceased speaking. He looked in
+mild surprise at Trent, who now sat silent, supporting his bent head in
+his hands.
+
+"He could not sleep!" murmured Trent at last in a hollow tone. "A
+frequent result of over-exertion during the day. Nothing to be alarmed
+about." He was silent again, then looked up with a pale face. "Cupples,
+I am cured. I will never touch a crime-mystery again. The Manderson
+affair shall be Philip Trent's last case. His high-blown pride at length
+breaks under him." Trent's smile suddenly returned. "I could have borne
+everything but that last revelation of the impotence of human reason.
+Cupples, I have absolutely nothing left to say, except this: you have
+beaten me. I drink your health in a spirit of self-abasement. And _you_
+shall pay for the dinner."
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Woman in Black, by Edmund Clerihew Bentley
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Woman in Black, by Edmund Clerihew Bentley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
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+Title: The Woman in Black
+
+Author: Edmund Clerihew Bentley
+
+Release Date: June 18, 2007 [EBook #21854]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMAN IN BLACK ***
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+
+Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Mary Meehan and the
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+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>THE WOMAN IN BLACK</h1>
+
+<h2>BY EDMUND CLERIHEW BENTLEY</h2>
+
+<h3>Copyright, 1913, by<br />
+<span class="smcap">The Century Co.</span><br />
+NEW YORK<br />
+<i>Published, March, 1913</i></h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"... So shall you hear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of deaths put on by cunning, and forc'd cause,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, in this upshot, purposes mistook<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fall'n on the inventors' heads ..."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&mdash;<i>Hamlet</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="TO_GILBERT_KEITH_CHESTERTON" id="TO_GILBERT_KEITH_CHESTERTON"></a>TO GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>My dear Gilbert</i>:</p>
+
+<p>I dedicate this story to you. First: because the only really noble
+motive I had in writing it was the hope that you would enjoy it. Second:
+because I owe you a book in return for "The Man Who Was Thursday."
+Third: because I said I would when I unfolded the plan of it to you,
+surrounded by Frenchmen, two years ago. Fourth: because I remember the
+past.</p>
+
+<p>I have been thinking again to-day of those astonishing times when
+neither of us ever looked at a newspaper; when we were purely happy in
+the boundless consumption of paper, pencils, tea and our elders'
+patience; when we embraced the most severe literature, and ourselves
+produced such light reading as was necessary; when (in the words of
+Canada's poet) we studied the works of nature, also those little frogs;
+when, in short, we were extremely young.</p>
+
+<p>For the sake of that age I offer you this book.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Yours always,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><span class="smcap">E. C. Bentley</span>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<p>
+<a href="#PROLOGUE">PROLOGUE</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I <span class="smcap">Knocking the Town Endways</span></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II  <span class="smcap">Breakfast</span></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III  <span class="smcap">Handcuffs in the Air</span></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV  <span class="smcap">Poking About</span></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V <span class="smcap">Mr. Brunner on the Case</span></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI <span class="smcap">The Lady in Black</span></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII <span class="smcap">The Inquest</span></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII <span class="smcap">A Hot Scent</span></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX <span class="smcap">The Wife of Dives</span></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X <span class="smcap">Hitherto Unpublished</span></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI <span class="smcap">Evil Days</span></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII <span class="smcap">Eruption</span></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII <span class="smcap">Writing a Letter</span></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV <span class="smcap">Double Cunning</span></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV <span class="smcap">The Last Straw</span></a><br />
+</p>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE WOMAN IN BLACK</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PROLOGUE" id="PROLOGUE"></a>PROLOGUE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we
+know judge wisely?</p>
+
+<p>When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered
+by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single
+tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of
+such wealth as this dead man had piled up&mdash;without making one loyal
+friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to
+the least honor. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to those
+living in the great vortices of business as if the earth, too, shuddered
+under a blow.</p>
+
+<p>In all the lurid commercial history of his country there had been no
+figure that had so imposed itself upon the mind of the trading world. He
+had a niche apart in its temples. Financial giants, strong to direct and
+augment the forces of capital, and taking an approved toll in millions
+for so doing, had existed before; but in the case of Manderson there had
+been this singularity, that a pale halo of piratical romance, a thing
+especially dear to the hearts of his countrymen, had remained
+incongruously about his head through the years when he stood in every
+eye as the unquestioned guardian of stability, the stamper-out of
+manipulated crises, the foe of the raiding chieftains that infest the
+borders of Wall Street.</p>
+
+<p>The fortune left by his grandfather, who had been one of those
+chieftains, on the smaller scale of his day, had descended to him with
+accretion through his father, who during a long life had quietly
+continued to lend money and never had margined a stock. Manderson, who
+had at no time known what it was to be without large sums to his hand,
+should have been altogether of that newer American plutocracy which is
+steadied by the tradition and habit of great wealth. But it was not so.
+While his nurture and education had taught him European ideas of a rich
+man's proper external circumstance; while they had rooted in him an
+instinct for quiet magnificence, the larger costliness which does not
+shriek of itself with a thousand tongues; there had been handed on to
+him, nevertheless, much of the Forty-Niner and financial buccaneer, his
+forbear. During that first period of his business career which had been
+called his early bad manner he had been little more than a gambler of
+genius, his hand against every man's, an infant prodigy who brought to
+the enthralling pursuit of speculation a brain better endowed than any
+opposed to it. At St. Helena it was laid down that war is <i>une belle
+occupation</i>, and so the young Manderson had found the multitudinous and
+complicated dog-fight of the Stock Exchange of New York.</p>
+
+<p>Then came his change. At his father's death, when Manderson was thirty
+years old, some new revelation of the power and the glory of the god he
+served seemed to have come upon him. With the sudden, elastic
+adaptability of his nation he turned to steady labor in his father's
+banking business, closing his ears to the sound of the battles of the
+Street. In a few years he came to control all the activity of the great
+firm whose unimpeached conservatism, safety and financial weight lifted
+it like a cliff above the angry sea of the markets. All mistrust founded
+on the performances of his youth had vanished. He was quite plainly a
+different man. How the change came about none could with authority say,
+but there was a story of certain last words spoken by his father, whom
+alone he had respected and perhaps loved.</p>
+
+<p>He began to tower above the financial situation. Soon his name was
+current in the bourses of the world. One who spoke the name of Manderson
+called up a vision of all that was broad-based and firm in the vast
+wealth of the United States. He planned great combinations of capital,
+drew together and centralized industries of continental scope, financed
+with unerring judgment the large designs of state or of private
+enterprise. Many a time when he "took hold" to smash a strike, or to
+federate the ownership of some great field of labor, he sent ruin upon a
+multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or steel-workers or cattlemen
+defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and ruthless
+than they. But this was done in the pursuit of legitimate business ends.
+Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but the financier
+and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a hand to protect
+or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of the country.
+Forcible, cold and unerring, in all he did he ministered to the national
+lust for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him the Colossus.</p>
+
+<p>But there was an aspect of Manderson in this later period that lay long
+unknown and unsuspected save by a few, his secretaries and lieutenants
+and certain of the associates of his bygone hurling time. This little
+circle knew that Manderson, the pillar of sound business and stability
+in the markets, had his hours of nostalgia for the lively times when the
+Street had trembled at his name. It was, said one of them, as if
+Blackbeard had settled down as a decent merchant in Bristol on the
+spoils of the Main. Now and then the pirate would glare suddenly out,
+the knife in his teeth and the sulphur matches sputtering in his
+hat-band. During such spasms of reversion to type a score of tempestuous
+raids upon the market had been planned on paper in the inner room of the
+offices of Manderson, Colefax and Company. But they were never carried
+out. Blackbeard would quell the mutiny of his old self within him and go
+soberly down to his counting-house&mdash;humming a stave or two of "Spanish
+Ladies," perhaps, under his breath. Manderson would allow himself the
+harmless satisfaction, as soon as the time for action had gone by, of
+pointing out to some Rupert of the markets how a coup worth a million to
+the depredator might have been made. "Seems to me," he would say almost
+wistfully, "the Street is getting to be a mighty dull place since I
+quit." By slow degrees this amiable weakness of the Colossus became
+known to the business world, which exulted greatly in the knowledge.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>At the news of his death, panic went through the markets like a
+hurricane; for it came at a luckless time. Prices tottered and crashed
+like towers in an earthquake. For two days Wall Street was a clamorous
+inferno of pale despair. All over the United States, wherever
+speculation had its devotees, went a waft of ruin, a plague of suicide.
+In Europe also not a few took with their own hands lives that had become
+pitiably linked to the destiny of a financier whom most of them had
+never seen. In Paris a well-known banker walked quietly out of the
+Bourse and fell dead upon the broad steps among the raving crowd of
+Jews, a phial crushed in his hand. In Frankfort one leaped from the
+Cathedral top, leaving a redder stain where he struck the red tower. Men
+stabbed and shot and strangled themselves, drank death or breathed it as
+the air, because in a lonely corner of England the life had departed
+from one cold heart vowed to the service of greed.</p>
+
+<p>The blow could not have fallen at a more disastrous moment. It came when
+Wall Street was in a condition of suppressed "scare." Suppressed:
+because for a week past the great interests known to act with or to be
+actually controlled by the Colossus had been desperately combating the
+effects of the sudden arrest of Lucas Hahn, and the exposure of his
+plundering of the Hahn banks. This bombshell, in its turn, had fallen at
+a time when the market had been "boosted" beyond its real strength. In
+the language of the place, a slump was due. Reports from the corn-lands
+had not been good, and there had been two or three railway statements
+which had been expected to be much better than they were. But at
+whatever point in the vast area of speculation the shudder of the
+threatened break had been felt, "the Manderson crowd" had stepped in and
+held the market up. All through the week the speculator's mind, as
+shallow as it is quick-witted, as sentimental as greedy, had seen in
+this the hand of the giant stretched out in protection from afar.
+Manderson, said the newspapers in chorus, was in hourly communication
+with his lieutenants in the Street. One journal was able to give, in
+round figures, the sum spent on cabling between New York and Marlstone
+in the past twenty-four hours; it told how a small staff of expert
+operators had been sent down by the Post Office authorities to Marlstone
+to deal with the flood of messages. Another revealed that Manderson, on
+the first news of the Hahn crash, had arranged to abandon his holiday
+and return home by the <i>Lusitania</i>; but that he soon had the situation
+so well in hand that he had determined to remain where he was.</p>
+
+<p>All this was falsehood, more or less consciously elaborated by the
+"finance editors," consciously initiated and encouraged by the shrewd
+business men of the Manderson group, who knew that nothing could better
+help their plans than this illusion of hero-worship&mdash;knew also that no
+word had come from Manderson in answer to their messages, and that
+Howard B. Jeffrey, of Steel and Iron fame, was the true organizer of
+victory. So they fought down apprehension through four feverish days,
+and minds grew calmer. On Saturday, though the ground beneath the feet
+of Mr. Jeffrey yet rumbled now and then with &AElig;tna-mutterings of
+disquiet, he deemed his task almost done. The market was firm and slowly
+advancing. Wall Street turned to its sleep of Sunday, worn out but
+thankfully at peace.</p>
+
+<p>In the first trading hour of Monday a hideous rumor flew round the sixty
+acres of the financial district. It came into being as the lightning
+comes, a blink that seems to begin nowhere; though it is to be suspected
+that it was first whispered over the telephone&mdash;together with an urgent
+selling order&mdash;by some employee in the cable service. In five minutes
+the dull noise of the curbstone market in Broad Street had leaped to a
+high note of frantic interrogation. From within the hive of the Exchange
+itself could be heard a droning hubbub of fear and men rushed hatless in
+and out. Was it true? asked every man; and every man replied, with
+trembling lips, that it was a lie put out by some unscrupulous "short"
+interest seeking to cover itself. In another quarter of an hour news
+came of a sudden and ruinous collapse of "Yankees" in London at the
+close of the Stock Exchange day. It was enough. New York had still four
+hours' trading in front of her. The strategy of pointing to Manderson as
+the savior and warden of the market had recoiled upon its authors with
+annihilating force, and Jeffrey, his ear at his private telephone,
+listened to the tale of disaster with a set jaw. The new Napoleon had
+lost his Marengo. He saw the whole financial landscape sliding and
+falling into chaos before him. In half an hour the news of the finding
+of Manderson's body, with the inevitable rumor that it was suicide, was
+printing in a dozen newspaper offices; but before a copy reached Wall
+Street the tornado of the panic was in full fury, and Howard B. Jeffrey
+and his collaborators were whirled away like leaves before its breath.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>All this sprang out of nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing in the texture of the general life had changed. The corn had not
+ceased to ripen in the sun. The rivers bore their barges and gave power
+to a myriad engines. The flocks fattened on the pastures, the herds were
+unnumbered. Men labored everywhere in the various servitudes to which
+they were born, and chafed not more than usual in their bonds. Bellona
+tossed and murmured as ever, yet still slept her uneasy sleep. To all
+mankind save a million or two of half-crazed gamblers, blind to all
+reality, the death of Manderson meant nothing; the life and work of the
+world went on. Weeks before he died strong hands had been in control of
+every wire in the huge network of commerce and industry that he had
+supervised. Before his corpse was buried his countrymen had made a
+strange discovery: that the existence of the potent engine of monopoly
+that went by the name of Sigsbee Manderson had not been a condition of
+even material prosperity. The panic blew itself out in two days, the
+pieces were picked up, the bankrupts withdrew out of sight; the market
+"recovered a normal tone."</p>
+
+<p>While the brief delirium was yet subsiding there broke out a domestic
+scandal in England that suddenly fixed the attention of two continents.
+Next morning the Chicago Limited was wrecked, and the same day a notable
+politician was shot down in cold blood by his wife's brother in the
+streets of New Orleans. Within a week of its arising "the Manderson
+story," to the trained sense of editors throughout the Union, was
+"cold." The tide of American visitors pouring through Europe made eddies
+round the memorial or statue of many a man who had died in poverty; and
+never thought of their most famous plutocrat. Like the poet who died in
+Rome, so young and poor, a hundred years ago, he was buried far away
+from his own land; but for all the men and women of Manderson's people
+who flock round the tomb of Keats in the cemetery under the Monte
+Testaccio, there is not one, nor ever will be, to stand in reverence by
+the rich man's grave beside the little church of Marlstone.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>KNOCKING THE TOWN ENDWAYS</h3>
+
+
+<p>In the only comfortably furnished room in the offices of the <i>Record</i>,
+the telephone on Sir James Molloy's table buzzed. Sir James made a
+motion with his pen, and Mr. Silver, his secretary, left his work and
+came over to the instrument.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is that?" he said. "Who?... I can't hear you ... Oh, it's Mr.
+Bunner, is it? Yes, but ... I know, but he's fearfully busy this
+afternoon. Can't you ... Oh, really? Well, in that case&mdash;just hold on,
+will you?"</p>
+
+<p>He placed the receiver before Sir James. "It's Calvin Bunner, Sigsbee
+Manderson's right hand man," he said concisely. "He insists on speaking
+to you personally. Says it is the gravest piece of news. He is talking
+from the house down by Bishopsbridge, so it will be necessary to speak
+clearly."</p>
+
+<p>Sir James looked at the telephone, not affectionately, and took up the
+receiver. "Well?" he said in his strong voice; and listened. "Yes," he
+said. The next moment Mr. Silver, eagerly watching him, saw a look of
+amazement and horror. "Good God," murmured Sir James. Clutching the
+instrument, he slowly rose to his feet, still bending ear intently. At
+intervals he repeated, "Yes." Presently, as he listened, he glanced at
+the clock, and spoke quickly to Mr. Silver over the top of the
+transmitter. "Go and hunt up Figgis and young Williams. Hurry!" Mr.
+Silver darted from the room.</p>
+
+<p>The great journalist was a tall, strong, clever Irishman of fifty, swart
+and black-mustached, a man of untiring business energy, well known in
+the world, which he understood very thoroughly, and played upon with the
+half-cynical competence of his race. Yet was he without a touch of the
+charlatan: he made no mysteries, and no pretenses of knowledge, and he
+saw instantly through these in others. In his handsome, well-bred,
+well-dressed appearance there was something a little sinister when anger
+or intense occupation put its imprint about his eyes and brow; but when
+his generous nature was under no restraint he was the most cordial of
+men. He was managing director of the company which owned that most
+powerful morning paper, the <i>Record</i>, and also that most indispensable
+evening paper, the <i>Sun</i>, which had its offices on the other side of the
+street. He was moreover editor-in-chief of the <i>Record</i>, to which he had
+in the course of years attached the most variously capable personnel in
+the country. It was a maxim of his that where you could not get gifts,
+you must do the best you could with solid merit; and he employed a great
+deal of both. He was respected by his staff as few are respected in a
+profession not favorable to the growth of the sentiment of reverence.</p>
+
+<p>"You're sure that's all?" asked Sir James, after a few minutes of
+earnest listening and questioning. "And how long has this been
+known?... Yes, of course, the police are; but the servants? Surely
+it's all over the place down there by now.... Well, we'll have a
+try.... Look here, Bunner, I'm infinitely obliged to you about this.
+I owe you a good turn. You know I mean what I say. Come and see me the
+first day you get to town.... All right, that's understood. Now I must
+act on your news. Good-by."</p>
+
+<p>Sir James hung up the receiver, and seized a railway time-table from the
+rack before him. After a rapid consultation of this oracle, he flung it
+down with a forcible word as Mr. Silver hurried into the room, followed
+by a hard-featured man with spectacles, and a youth with an alert eye.</p>
+
+<p>"I want you to jot down some facts, Figgis," said Sir James, banishing
+all signs of agitation and speaking with a rapid calmness. "When you
+have them, put them into shape just as quick you can for a special
+edition of the <i>Sun</i>." The hard-featured man nodded and glanced at the
+clock, which pointed to a few minutes past three; he pulled out a
+notebook and drew a chair up to the big writing-table. "Silver," Sir
+James went on, "go and tell Jones to wire our local correspondent very
+urgently, to drop everything and get down to Marlstone at once. He is
+not to say why in the telegram. There must not be an unnecessary word
+about this news until the <i>Sun</i> is on the streets with it&mdash;you all
+understand. Williams, cut across the way and tell Mr. Anthony to hold
+himself ready for a two-column opening that will knock the town endways.
+Just tell him that he must take all measures and precautions for a
+scoop. Say that Figgis will be over in five minutes with the facts, and
+that he had better let him write up the story in his private room. As
+you go, ask Miss Morgan to see me here at once and tell the telephone
+people to see if they can get Mr. Trent on the wire for me. After seeing
+Mr. Anthony, return here and stand by." The alert-eyed young man
+vanished like a spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Sir James turned instantly to Mr. Figgis, whose pencil was poised over
+the paper. "Sigsbee Manderson has been murdered," he began quickly and
+clearly, pacing the floor with his hands behind him. Mr. Figgis
+scratched down a line of shorthand with as much emotion as if he had
+been told that the day was fine&mdash;the pose of his craft. "He and his wife
+and two secretaries have been for the past fortnight at the house called
+White Gables, at Marlstone, near Bishopsbridge. He bought it four years
+ago. He and Mrs. Manderson have since spent a part of each summer there.
+Last night he went to bed about half-past eleven, just as usual. No one
+knows when he got up and left the house. He was not missed until this
+morning. About ten o'clock his body was found by a gardener. It was
+lying by a shed in the grounds. He was shot in the head, through the
+left eye. Death must have been instantaneous. The body was not robbed,
+but there were marks on the wrists which pointed to a struggle having
+taken place. Dr. Stock, of Marlstone, was at once sent for, and will
+conduct the post-mortem examination. The police from Bishopsbridge, who
+were soon on the spot, are reticent, but it is believed that they are
+quite without a clue to the identity of the murderer. There you are,
+Figgis. Mr. Anthony is expecting you. Now I must telephone him and
+arrange things."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Figgis looked up. "One of the ablest detectives at Scotland Yard,"
+he suggested, "has been put in charge of the case. It's a safe
+statement."</p>
+
+<p>"If you like," said Sir James.</p>
+
+<p>"And Mrs. Manderson? Was she there?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. What about her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Prostrated by the shock," hinted the reporter, "and sees nobody. Human
+interest."</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't put that in, Mr. Figgis," said a quiet voice. It belonged to
+Miss Morgan, a pale, graceful woman, who had silently made her
+appearance while the dictation was going on. "I have seen Mrs.
+Manderson," she proceeded, turning to Sir James. "She looks quite
+healthy and intelligent. Has her husband been murdered? I don't think
+the shock would prostrate her. She is more likely to be doing all she
+can to help the police."</p>
+
+<p>"Something in your own style, then, Miss Morgan," he said with a
+momentary smile. Her imperturbable efficiency was an office proverb.
+"Cut it out, Figgis. Off you go! Now, madam, I expect you know what I
+want."</p>
+
+<p>"Our Manderson biography happens to be well up-to-date," replied Miss
+Morgan, drooping her dark eye-lashes as she considered the position. "I
+was looking over it only a few months ago. It is practically ready for
+to-morrow's paper. I should think the <i>Sun</i> had better use the sketch of
+his life they had about two years ago, when he went to Berlin and
+settled the potash difficulty. I remember it was a very good sketch, and
+they won't be able to carry much more than that. As for our paper, of
+course we have a great quantity of cuttings, mostly rubbish. The
+sub-editors shall have them as soon as they come in. Then we have two
+very good portraits that are our own property; the best is a drawing Mr.
+Trent made when they were both on the same ship somewhere. It is better
+than any of the photographs; but you say the public prefers a bad
+photograph to a good drawing. I will send them down to you at once, and
+you can choose. As far as I can see, the <i>Record</i> is well ahead of the
+situation, except that you will not be able to get a special man down
+there in time to be of any use for to-morrow's paper."</p>
+
+<p>Sir James sighed deeply. "What are we good for, anyhow?" he inquired
+dejectedly of Mr. Silver, who had returned to his desk. "She even knows
+Bradshaw by heart."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Morgan adjusted her cuffs with an air of patience. "Is there
+anything else?" she asked, as the telephone bell rang.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, one thing," replied Sir James as he took up the receiver. "I want
+you to make a bad mistake some time, Miss Morgan; an everlasting
+bloomer&mdash;just to put us in countenance." She permitted herself the
+fraction of what would have been a charming smile as she went out.</p>
+
+<p>"Anthony?" asked Sir James; and was at once deep in consultation with
+the editor on the other side of the road. He seldom entered the <i>Sun</i>
+building in person: the atmosphere of an evening paper, he would say,
+was all very well if you liked that kind of thing. Mr. Anthony, the
+Murat of Fleet Street, who delighted in riding the whirlwind and
+fighting a tumultuous battle against time, would say the same of a
+morning paper.</p>
+
+<p>It was some five minutes later that a uniformed boy came in to say that
+Mr. Trent was on the wire. Sir James abruptly closed his talk with Mr.
+Anthony. "They can put him through at once," he said to the boy.</p>
+
+<p>"Hullo!" he cried into the telephone after a few moments. A voice in the
+instrument replied: "Hullo be blowed! What do you want?"</p>
+
+<p>"This is Molloy," said Sir James.</p>
+
+<p>"I know it is," the voice said. "This is Trent. He is in the middle of
+painting a picture, and he has been interrupted at a critical moment.
+Well, I hope it's something important, that's all!"</p>
+
+<p>"Trent," said Sir James impressively, "it is important. I want you to do
+some work for us."</p>
+
+<p>"Some play, you mean," replied the voice. "Believe me, I don't want a
+holiday. The working fit is very strong. I am doing some really decent
+things. Why can't you leave a man alone?"</p>
+
+<p>"Something very serious has happened."</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sigsbee Manderson has been murdered&mdash;shot through the brain&mdash;and they
+don't know who has done it. They found the body this morning. It
+happened at his place near Bishopsbridge." Sir James proceeded to tell
+his hearer, briefly and clearly, the facts that he had communicated to
+Mr. Figgis. "What do you think of it?" he ended.</p>
+
+<p>A considering grunt was the only answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Come now!" urged Sir James.</p>
+
+<p>"Tempter!"</p>
+
+<p>"You will go down?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a brief pause. "Are you there?" said Sir James.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Molloy," the voice broke out querulously, "the thing may be
+a case for me, or it may not. We can't possibly tell. It may be a
+mystery: it may be as simple as bread and cheese. The body not being
+robbed looks interesting, but he may have been outed by some wretched
+tramp whom he found sleeping in the grounds and tried to kick out. It's
+the sort of thing he would do. Such a murderer might easily have sense
+enough to know that to leave the money and valuables was the safest
+thing. I tell you frankly, I wouldn't have a hand in hanging a poor
+devil who had let daylight into a man like Sig Manderson as a measure of
+social protest."</p>
+
+<p>Sir James smiled at the telephone: a smile of success. "Come, my boy,
+you're getting feeble. Admit you want to go and have a look at the case.
+You know you do. If it's anything you don't want to handle, you're free
+to drop it. By the bye, where are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am blown along a wandering wind," replied the voice irresolutely,
+"and hollow, hollow, hollow all delight."</p>
+
+<p>"Can you get here within an hour?" persisted Sir James.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I can," the voice grumbled. "How much time have I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good man! Well, there's time enough&mdash;that's just the worst of it. I've
+got to depend on our local correspondent for to-night. The only good
+train of the day went half an hour ago. The next is a slow one, leaving
+Paddington at midnight. You could have the Buster, if you like"&mdash;Sir
+James referred to a very fast motor-car of his&mdash;"but you wouldn't get
+down in time to do anything to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"And I'd miss my sleep. No, thanks. The train for me. I am quite fond of
+railway-traveling, you know; I have a gift for it. I am the stoker and
+the stoked, I am the song the porter sings."</p>
+
+<p>"What's that you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"It doesn't matter," said the voice sadly. "I say," it continued, "will
+your people look out a hotel near the scene of action, and telegraph for
+a room?"</p>
+
+<p>"At once," said Sir James. "Come here as soon as you can!" He replaced
+the receiver. As he turned to his papers again a shrill outcry burst
+forth in the street below. He walked to the open window. A band of
+excited boys was rushing down the steps of the Sun building and up the
+narrow thoroughfare toward Fleet Street. Each carried a bundle of
+newspapers and a large broadsheet with the simple legend:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>MURDER OF SIGSBEE MANDERSON</p></div>
+
+<p>Sir James smiled and rattled the money in his pockets cheerfully.</p>
+
+<p>"It makes a good bill," he observed to Mr. Silver, who stood at his
+elbow.</p>
+
+<p>Such was Manderson's epitaph.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>BREAKFAST</h3>
+
+
+<p>At about eight o'clock in the morning of the following day Mr. Nathaniel
+Burton Cupples stood on the veranda of the hotel at Marlstone. He was
+thinking about breakfast. In his case the colloquialism must be taken
+literally; he really was thinking about breakfast, as he thought about
+every conscious act of his life when time allowed deliberation. He
+reflected that on the preceding day the excitement and activity
+following upon the discovery of the corpse had disorganized his appetite
+and led to his taking considerably less nourishment than usual. This
+morning he was very hungry, having already been up and about for an
+hour; and he decided to allow himself a third piece of toast and an
+additional egg; the rest as usual. The remaining deficit must be made up
+at luncheon; but that could be gone into later.</p>
+
+<p>So much being determined, Mr. Cupples applied himself to the enjoyment
+of the view for a few minutes before ordering his meal. With a
+connoisseur's eye he explored the beauty of the rugged coast, where a
+great pierced rock rose from a glassy sea, and the ordered loveliness of
+the vast tilted levels of pasture and tillage and woodland that sloped
+gently up from the cliffs toward the distant moor. Mr. Cupples delighted
+in landscape.</p>
+
+<p>He was a man of middle height and spare figure, nearly sixty years old,
+by constitution rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his
+age. A sparse and straggling beard and mustache did not conceal a thin
+but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and
+narrow jaw gave him very much the air of a priest, and this impression
+was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. He was a
+man of unusually conscientious, industrious and orderly mind, with
+little imagination. His father's household had been used to recruit its
+domestic establishment by means of advertisements in which it was
+truthfully described as a serious family. From that fortress of gloom he
+had escaped with two saintly gifts somehow unspoiled: an inexhaustible
+kindness of heart and a capacity for innocent gaiety which owed nothing
+to humor. In an earlier day and with a clerical training he might have
+risen to the scarlet hat. He was, in fact, a highly regarded member of
+the London Positivist Society, a retired banker, a widower without
+children. His austere but not unhappy life was spent largely among books
+and in museums; his profound and patiently accumulated knowledge of a
+number of curiously disconnected subjects which had stirred his interest
+at different times had given him a place in the quiet, half-lit world of
+professors and curators and devotees of research; at their amiable,
+unconvivial dinner-parties he was most himself. His favorite author was
+Montaigne.</p>
+
+<p>Just as Mr. Cupples was finishing his meal at a little table on the
+veranda, a big motor-car turned into the drive before the hotel. "Who is
+this?" he inquired of the waiter. "Id is der manager," said the young
+man listlessly. "He have been to meed a gendleman by der train."</p>
+
+<p>The car drew up and the porter hurried from the entrance. Mr. Cupples
+uttered an exclamation of pleasure as a long, loosely-built man, much
+younger than himself, stepped from the car and mounted the veranda,
+flinging his hat on a chair. His high-boned Quixotic face wore a
+pleasant smile, his rough tweed clothes, his hair and short mustache
+were tolerably untidy.</p>
+
+<p>"Cupples, by all that's miraculous!" cried the man, pouncing upon Mr.
+Cupples before he could rise, and seizing his outstretched hand in a
+hard grip. "My luck is serving me to-day," the newcomer went on
+spasmodically. "This is the second slice within an hour. How are you, my
+best of friends? And why are you here? Why sit'st thou by that ruined
+breakfast? Dost thou its former pride recall, or ponder how it passed
+away? I <i>am</i> glad to see you!"</p>
+
+<p>"I was half expecting you, Trent," Mr. Cupples replied, his face
+wreathed in smiles. "You are looking splendid, my dear fellow. I will
+tell you all about it. But you cannot have had your own breakfast yet.
+Will you have it at my table here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Rather!" said the man. "An enormous great breakfast, too&mdash;with refined
+conversation and tears of recognition never dry. Will you get young
+Siegfried to lay a place for me while I go and wash? I sha'n't be three
+minutes." He disappeared into the hotel, and Mr. Cupples, after a
+moment's thought, went to the telephone in the porter's office.</p>
+
+<p>He returned to find his friend already seated, pouring out tea, and
+showing an unaffected interest in the choice of food. "I expect this to
+be a hard day for me," he said, with the curious jerky utterance which
+seemed to be his habit. "I sha'n't eat again till the evening, very
+likely. You guess why I'm here, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Undoubtedly," said Mr. Cupples. "You have come down to write about the
+murder."</p>
+
+<p>"That is rather a colorless way of stating it," Trent replied, as he
+dissected a sole. "I should prefer to put it that I have come down in
+the character of avenger of blood, to hunt down the guilty and vindicate
+the honor of society. That is my line of business. Families waited on at
+their private residences. I say, Cupples, I have made a good beginning
+already. Wait a bit, and I'll tell you." There was a silence, during
+which the newcomer ate swiftly and abstractedly, while Mr. Cupples
+looked on happily.</p>
+
+<p>"Your manager here," said the tall man at last, "is a fellow of
+remarkable judgment. He is an admirer of mine. He knows more about my
+best cases than I do myself. The <i>Record</i> wired last night to say I was
+coming, and when I got out of the train at seven o'clock this morning,
+there he was waiting for me with a motor-car the size of a haystack. He
+is beside himself with joy at having me here. It is fame." He drank a
+cup of tea and continued: "Almost his first words were to ask me if I
+would like to see the body of the murdered man&mdash;if so, he thought he
+could manage it for me. He is as keen as a razor. The body lies in Dr.
+Stock's surgery, you know, down in the village, exactly as it was when
+found. It's to be post-mortem'd this morning, by the way, so I was only
+just in time. Well, he ran me down here to the doctor's, giving me full
+particulars about the case all the way. I was pretty well <i>au fait</i> by
+the time we arrived. I suppose the manager of a place like this has some
+sort of a pull with the doctor. Anyhow, he made no difficulties, nor did
+the constable on duty, though he was careful to insist on my not giving
+him away in the paper."</p>
+
+<p>"I saw the body before it was removed," remarked Mr. Cupples. "I should
+not have said there was anything remarkable about it, except that the
+shot in the eye had scarcely disfigured the face at all, and caused
+scarcely any effusion of blood, apparently. The wrists were scratched
+and bruised. I expect that, with your trained faculties, you were able
+to remark other details of a suggestive nature."</p>
+
+<p>"Other details, certainly; but I don't know that they suggest anything.
+They are merely odd. Take the wrists, for instance. How is it you could
+see bruises and scratches on them? I dare say you saw something of
+Manderson down here before the murder?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," Mr. Cupples said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, did you ever see his wrists?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples reflected. "No. Now you raise the point, I am reminded that
+when I interviewed Manderson here he was wearing stiff cuffs, coming
+well down over his hands."</p>
+
+<p>"He always did," said Trent. "My friend the manager says so. I pointed
+out to him the fact you didn't observe, that there were no cuffs
+visible, and that they had indeed been dragged up inside the
+coat-sleeves, as yours would be if you hurried into a coat without
+pulling your cuffs down. That was why you saw his wrists."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I call that suggestive," observed Mr. Cupples mildly. "You might
+infer, perhaps, that when he got up he hurried over his dressing."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but did he? The manager said just what you say. 'He was always a
+bit of a swell in his dress,' he told me, and he drew the inference that
+when Manderson got up in that mysterious way, before the house was
+stirring, and went out into the grounds, he was in a great hurry. 'Look
+at his shoes,' he said to me: 'Mr. Manderson was always specially neat
+about his foot-wear. But those shoe-laces were tied in a hurry.' I
+agreed. 'And he left his false teeth in his room,' said the manager.
+'Doesn't <i>that</i> prove he was flustered and hurried?' I allowed that it
+looked like it. But I said, 'Look here: if he was so very much pressed,
+why did he part his hair so carefully? That parting is a work of art.
+Why did he put on so much?&mdash;for he had on a complete out-fit of
+underclothing, studs in his shirt, sock-suspenders, a watch and chain,
+money and keys and things in his pockets.' That's what I said to the
+manager. He couldn't find an explanation. Can you?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples considered. "Those facts might suggest that he was hurried
+only at the end of his dressing. Coat and shoes would come last."</p>
+
+<p>"But not false teeth. You ask anybody who wears them. And besides, I'm
+told he hadn't washed at all on getting up, which in a neat man looks
+like his being in a violent hurry from the beginning. And here's another
+thing. One of his waistcoat pockets was lined with wash-leather for the
+reception of his gold watch. But he had put his watch into the pocket on
+the other side. Anybody who has settled habits can see how odd that is.
+The fact is, there are signs of great agitation and haste, and there are
+signs of exactly the opposite. For the present I am not guessing. I must
+reconnoiter the ground first, if I can manage to get the right side of
+the people of the house." Trent applied himself again to his breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples smiled at him benevolently. "That is precisely the point,"
+he said, "on which I can be of some assistance to you." Trent glanced up
+in surprise. "I told you I half expected you. I will explain the
+situation. Mrs. Manderson, who is my niece&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What!" Trent laid down his knife and fork. "Cupples, you are jesting
+with me."</p>
+
+<p>"I am perfectly serious, Trent, really," returned Mr. Cupples earnestly.
+"Her father, John Peter Domecq, was my wife's brother. I never mentioned
+my niece or her marriage to you before, I suppose. To tell the truth, it
+has always been a painful subject to me, and I have avoided discussing
+it with anybody. To return to what I was about to say: last night, when
+I was over at the house&mdash;by the way, you can see it from here. You
+passed it in the car." He indicated a red roof among poplars some three
+hundred yards away, the only building in sight that stood separate from
+the tiny village in the gap below them.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly I did," said Trent. "The manager told me all about it, among
+other things, as he drove me in from Bishopsbridge."</p>
+
+<p>"Other people here have heard of you and your performances," Mr. Cupples
+went on. "As I was saying, when I was over there last night, Mr. Bunner,
+who is one of Manderson's two secretaries, expressed a hope that the
+<i>Record</i> would send you down to deal with the case, as the police seemed
+quite at a loss. He mentioned one or two of your past successes, and
+Mabel&mdash;my niece&mdash;was interested when I told her afterwards. She is
+bearing up wonderfully well, Trent; she has remarkable fortitude of
+character. She said she remembered reading your articles about the
+Abinger case. She has a great horror of the newspaper side of this sad
+business, and she had entreated me to do anything I could to keep
+journalists away from the place&mdash;I'm sure you can understand her
+feeling, Trent; it isn't really any reflection on that profession. But
+she said you appeared to have great powers as a detective, and she would
+not stand in the way of anything that might clear up the crime. Then I
+told her you were a personal friend of mine, and gave you a good
+character for tact and consideration of others' feelings; and it ended
+in her saying that if you should come, she would like you to be helped
+in every way."</p>
+
+<p>Trent leaned across the table and shook Mr. Cupples by the hand in
+silence. Mr. Cupples, much delighted with the way things were turning
+out, resumed:</p>
+
+<p>"I spoke to my niece on the telephone only just now, and she is glad you
+are here. She asks me to say that you may make any inquiries you like,
+and she puts the house and grounds at your disposal. She had rather not
+see you herself; she is keeping to her own sitting-room. She has already
+been interviewed by a detective officer who is there, and feels unequal
+to any more. She adds that she does not believe she could say anything
+that would be of the smallest use. The two secretaries and Martin, the
+butler (who is a most intelligent man) could tell you all you want to
+know, she thinks."</p>
+
+<p>Trent finished his breakfast with a thoughtful brow. He filled a pipe
+slowly, and seated himself on the rail of the veranda. "Cupples," he
+said quietly, "is there anything about this business that you know and
+would rather not tell me?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples gave a slight start, and turned an astonished gaze on the
+questioner. "What do you mean?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean about the Mandersons. Look here! shall I tell you a thing that
+strikes me about this affair at the very beginning? Here's a man
+suddenly and violently killed; and nobody's heart seems to be broken
+about it, to say the least. The manager of this hotel spoke to me about
+him as coolly as if he'd never set eyes on him, though I understand
+they've been neighbors every summer for some years. Then you talk about
+the thing in the coldest of blood. And Mrs. Manderson&mdash;well, you won't
+mind my saying that I have heard of women being more cut up about their
+husbands being murdered than she seems to be. Is there something in
+this, Cupples, or is it my fancy? Was there something queer about
+Manderson? I traveled on the same boat with him once, but never spoke to
+him. I only know his public character, which was repulsive enough. You
+see, this may have a bearing on the case; that's the only reason why I
+ask."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples took time for thought. He fingered his sparse beard and
+looked out over the sea. At last he turned to Trent. "I see no reason,"
+he said, "why I shouldn't tell you as between ourselves, my dear fellow.
+I need not say that this must not be referred to, however distantly. The
+truth is that nobody really liked Manderson; and I think those who were
+nearest to him liked him least."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" the other interjected.</p>
+
+<p>"Most people found a difficulty in explaining why. In trying to account
+to myself for my own sensations, I could only put it that one felt in
+the man a complete absence of the sympathetic faculty. There was nothing
+outwardly repellent about him. He was not ill-mannered, or vicious, or
+dull&mdash;indeed, he could be remarkably interesting. But I received the
+impression that there could be no human creature whom he would not
+sacrifice in the pursuit of his schemes, in his task of imposing himself
+and his will upon the world. Perhaps that was fanciful, but I think not
+altogether so. However, the point is that Mabel, I am sorry to say, was
+very unhappy. I am nearly twice your age, my dear boy, though you always
+so kindly try to make me feel as if we were contemporaries&mdash;I am getting
+to be an old man, and a great many people have been good enough to
+confide their matrimonial troubles to me; but I never knew another case
+like my niece's and her husband's. I have known her since she was a
+baby, Trent, and I know&mdash;you understand, I think, that I do not employ
+that word lightly&mdash;I <i>know</i> that she is as amiable and honorable a
+woman, to say nothing of her other good gifts, as any man could wish.
+But Manderson, for some time past, had made her miserable."</p>
+
+<p>"What did he do?" asked Trent, as Mr. Cupples paused.</p>
+
+<p>"When I put that question to Mabel, her words were that he seemed to
+nurse a perpetual grievance. He maintained a distance between them, and
+he would say nothing. I don't know how it began or what was behind it;
+and all she would tell me on that point was that he had no cause in the
+world for his attitude. I think she knew what was in his mind, whatever
+it was; but she is full of pride. This seems to have gone on for months.
+At last, a week ago, she wrote to me. I am the only near relative she
+has. Her mother died when she was a child; and after John Peter died, I
+was something like a father to her until she married&mdash;that was five
+years ago. She asked me to come and help her, and I came at once. That
+is why I am here now."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples paused and drank some tea. Trent smoked and stared out at
+the hot June landscape.</p>
+
+<p>"I would not go to White Gables," Mr. Cupples resumed. "You know my
+views, I think, upon the economic constitution of society, and the
+proper relationship of the capitalist to the employee, and you know, no
+doubt, what use that person made of his vast economic power upon several
+very notorious occasions. I refer especially to the trouble in the
+Pennsylvania coal fields, three years ago. I regarded him, apart from
+all personal dislike, in the light of a criminal and a disgrace to
+society. I came to this hotel, and I saw my niece here. She told me what
+I have more briefly told you. She said that the worry and the
+humiliation of it, and the strain of trying to keep up appearances
+before the world, were telling upon her, and she asked for my advice. I
+said I thought she should face him and demand an explanation of his way
+of treating her. But she would not do that. She had always taken the
+line of affecting not to notice the change in his demeanor, and nothing,
+I knew, would persuade her to admit to him that she was injured, once
+pride had led her into that course. Life is quite full, my dear Trent,"
+said Mr. Cupples with a sigh, "of these obstinate silences and
+cultivated misunderstandings."</p>
+
+<p>"Did she love him?" Trent inquired abruptly. Mr. Cupples did not reply
+at once. "Had she any love left for him?" Trent amended.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples played with his teaspoon. "I am bound to say," he answered
+slowly, "that I think not. But you must not misunderstand the woman,
+Trent. No power on earth would have persuaded her to admit that to any
+one&mdash;even to herself, perhaps&mdash;so long as she considered herself bound
+to him. And I gather that, apart from this mysterious sulking of late,
+he had always been considerate and generous."</p>
+
+<p>"You were saying that she refused to have it out with him."</p>
+
+<p>"She did," replied Mr. Cupples. "And I knew by experience that it was
+quite useless to attempt to move a Domecq where the sense of dignity was
+involved. So I thought it over carefully, and next day I watched my
+opportunity and met Manderson as he passed by this hotel. I asked him to
+favor me with a few minutes' conversation, and he stepped inside the
+gate down there. We had held no communication of any kind since my
+niece's marriage, but he remembered me, of course. I put the matter to
+him at once and quite definitely. I told him what Mabel had confided to
+me. I said that I would neither approve nor condemn her action in
+bringing me into the business, but that she was suffering, and I
+considered it my right to ask how he could justify himself in placing
+her in such a position."</p>
+
+<p>"And how did he take that?" said Trent, smiling secretly at the
+landscape. The picture of this mildest of men calling the formidable
+Manderson to account pleased him.</p>
+
+<p>"Not very well," Mr. Cupples replied sadly. "In fact, far from well. I
+can tell you almost exactly what he said&mdash;it wasn't much. He said, 'See
+here, Cupples, you don't want to butt in. My wife can look after
+herself. I've found that out, along with other things.' He was perfectly
+quiet&mdash;you know he was said never to lose control of himself&mdash;though
+there was a light in his eyes that would have frightened a man who was
+in the wrong, I dare say. But I had been thoroughly roused by his last
+remark, and the tone of it, which I cannot reproduce. You see," said Mr.
+Cupples simply, "I love my niece. She is the only child that there has
+been in our&mdash;in my house. Moreover, my wife brought her up as a girl,
+and any reflection on Mabel I could not help feeling, in the heat of the
+moment, as an indirect reflection upon one who is gone."</p>
+
+<p>"You turned upon him," suggested Trent in a low tone. "You asked him to
+explain his words."</p>
+
+<p>"That is precisely what I did," said Mr. Cupples. "For a moment he only
+stared at me, and I could see a vein on his forehead swelling&mdash;an
+unpleasant sight. Then he said quite quietly: 'This thing has gone far
+enough, I guess,' and turned to go."</p>
+
+<p>"Did he mean your interview?" Trent asked thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"From the words alone you would think so," Mr. Cupples answered. "But
+the way in which he uttered them gave me a strange and very apprehensive
+feeling. I received the impression that the man had formed some sinister
+resolve. But I regret to say I had lost the power of dispassionate
+thought. I fell into a great rage"&mdash;Mr. Cupples' tone was mildly
+apologetic&mdash;"and said a number of foolish things. I reminded him that
+the law allowed a measure of freedom to wives who received intolerable
+treatment. I made some utterly irrelevant references to his public
+record, and expressed the view that such men as he were unfit to live. I
+said these things, and others as ill-considered, under the eyes, and
+very possibly within earshot, of half a dozen persons sitting on this
+veranda. I noticed them, in spite of my agitation, looking at me as I
+walked up to the hotel again after relieving my mind&mdash;for it undoubtedly
+did relieve it," sighed Mr. Cupples, lying back in his chair.</p>
+
+<p>"And Manderson? Did he say no more?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not a word. He listened to me with his eyes on my face, as quiet as
+before. When I stopped he smiled very slightly, and at once turned away
+and strolled through the gate, making for White Gables."</p>
+
+<p>"And this happened&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"On the Sunday morning."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I suppose you never saw him alive again?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Mr. Cupples. "Or rather, yes&mdash;once. It was later in the day,
+on the golf-course. But I did not speak to him. And next morning he was
+found dead."</p>
+
+<p>The two regarded each other in silence for a few moments. A party of
+guests who had been bathing came up the steps and seated themselves,
+with much chattering, at a table near them. The waiter approached. Mr.
+Cupples rose, and taking Trent's arm led him to a long tennis-lawn at
+the side of the hotel.</p>
+
+<p>"I have a reason for telling you all this," began Mr. Cupples as they
+paced slowly up and down.</p>
+
+<p>"Trust you for that," rejoined Trent, carefully filling his pipe again.
+He lit it, smoked a little and then said: "I'll try and guess what your
+reason is, if you like."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples' face of solemnity relaxed into a slight smile. He said
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"You thought it possible," said Trent meditatively, "may I say you
+thought it practically certain?&mdash;that I should find out for myself that
+there had been something deeper than a mere conjugal tiff between the
+Mandersons. You thought that my unwholesome imagination would begin at
+once to play with the idea of Mrs. Manderson having something to do with
+the crime. Rather than that I should lose myself in barren speculations
+about this, you decided to tell me exactly how matters stood, and
+incidentally to impress upon me, who know how excellent your judgment
+is, your opinion of your niece. Is that about right?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is perfectly right. Listen to me, my dear fellow," said Mr. Cupples
+earnestly, laying his hand on the other's arm. "I am going to be very
+frank. I am extremely glad that Manderson is dead. I believe him to have
+done nothing but harm in the world as an economic factor. I know that he
+was making a desert of the life of one who was like my own child to me.
+But I am under an intolerable dread of Mabel being involved in suspicion
+with regard to the murder. It is horrible to me to think of her delicacy
+and goodness being in contact, if only for a time, with the brutalities
+of the law. She is not fitted for it. It would mark her deeply. Many
+young women of twenty-five in these days could face such an ordeal, I
+suppose. I have observed a sort of imitative hardness about the products
+of the higher education of women to-day which would carry them through
+anything, perhaps. I am not prepared to say it is a bad thing in the
+conditions of feminine life prevailing at present. Mabel, however, is
+not like that. She is as unlike that as she is unlike the simpering
+misses that used to surround me as a child. She has plenty of brains;
+she is full of character; her mind and her tastes are cultivated; but it
+is all mixed up"&mdash;Mr. Cupples waved his hands in a vague gesture&mdash;"with
+ideals of refinement and reservation and womanly mystery. I fear she is
+not a child of the age. You never knew my wife, Trent. Mabel is my
+wife's child."</p>
+
+<p>The younger man bowed his head. They paced the length of the lawn before
+he asked gently: "Why did she marry him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," said Mr. Cupples briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"Admired him, I suppose," suggested Trent.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples shrugged his shoulders. "I have been told that a woman will
+usually be more or less attracted by the most successful man in her
+circle. Of course we cannot realize how a wilful, dominating personality
+like his would influence a girl whose affections were not bestowed
+elsewhere; especially if he laid himself out to win her. It is probably
+an overwhelming thing to be courted by a man whose name is known all
+over the world. She had heard of him, of course, as a financial great
+power, and she had no idea&mdash;she had lived mostly among people of
+artistic or literary propensities&mdash;how much soulless inhumanity that
+might involve. For all I know, she has no adequate idea of it to this
+day. When I first heard of the affair the mischief was done, and I knew
+better than to interpose my unsought opinions. She was of age, and there
+was absolutely nothing against him from the conventional point of view.
+Then I dare say his immense wealth would cast a spell over almost any
+woman. Mabel had some hundreds a year of her own; just enough, perhaps,
+to let her realize what millions really meant. But all this is
+conjecture. She certainly had not wanted to marry some scores of young
+fellows who, to my knowledge, had asked her; and though I don't believe,
+and never did believe, that she really loved this man of forty-five, she
+certainly did want to marry him. But if you ask me why, I can only say I
+don't know."</p>
+
+<p>Trent nodded, and after a few more paces looked at his watch. "You've
+interested me so much," he said, "that I had quite forgotten my main
+business. I mustn't waste my morning. I am going down the road to White
+Gables at once, and I dare say I shall be poking about there until
+mid-day. If you can meet me then, Cupples, I should like to talk over
+anything I find out with you, unless something detains me."</p>
+
+<p>"I am going for a walk this morning," Mr. Cupples replied. "I meant to
+have luncheon at a little inn near the golf-course, the Three Tuns. You
+had better join me there. It's further along the road, about a quarter
+of a mile beyond White Gables. You can just see the roof between those
+two trees. The food they give one there is very plain, but good."</p>
+
+<p>"So long as they have a cask of beer," said Trent, "they are all right.
+We will have bread and cheese, and oh, may Heaven our simple lives
+prevent from luxury's contagion, weak and vile! Till then, good-by." He
+strode off to recover his hat from the veranda, waved it to Mr. Cupples,
+and was gone.</p>
+
+<p>The old gentleman, seating himself in a deck-chair on the lawn, clasped
+his hands behind his head and gazed up into the speckless blue sky. "He
+is a dear fellow," he murmured. "The best of fellows. And a terribly
+acute fellow. Dear me! How curious it all is!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>HANDCUFFS IN THE AIR</h3>
+
+
+<p>A painter and the son of a painter, Philip Trent had, while yet in his
+twenties, achieved some reputation within the world of English art.
+Moreover, his pictures sold. An original, forcible talent and a habit of
+leisurely but continuous working, broken by fits of strong creative
+enthusiasm, were at the bottom of it. His father's name had helped; a
+patrimony large enough to relieve him of the perilous imputation of
+being a struggling man had certainly not hindered. But his best aid to
+success had been an unconscious power of getting himself liked. Good
+spirits and a lively, humorous fancy will always be popular. Trent
+joined to these a genuine interest in others that gained him something
+deeper than popularity. His judgment of persons was penetrating, but its
+process was internal; no one felt on good behavior with a man who seemed
+always to be enjoying himself. Whether he was in a mood for floods of
+nonsense or applying himself vigorously to a task, his face seldom lost
+its expression of contained vivacity. Apart from a sound knowledge of
+his art and its history, his culture was large and loose, dominated by a
+love of poetry. At thirty-two he had not yet passed the age of laughter
+and adventure.</p>
+
+<p>His rise to a celebrity a hundred times greater than his proper work had
+won for him came of a momentary impulse. One day he had taken up a
+newspaper to find it chiefly concerned with a crime of a sort curiously
+rare in our country: a murder done in a railway train. The circumstances
+were puzzling; two persons were under arrest upon suspicion. Trent, to
+whom an interest in such affairs was a new sensation, heard the thing
+discussed among his friends, and set himself in a purposeless mood to
+read up the accounts given in several journals. He became intrigued; his
+imagination began to work, in a manner strange to him, upon facts; an
+excitement took hold of him such as he had only known before in his
+bursts of art-inspiration or of personal adventure. At the end of the
+day he wrote and despatched a long letter to the editor of the <i>Record</i>,
+which he chose only because it had contained the fullest and most
+intelligent version of the facts.</p>
+
+<p>In this letter he did very much what Poe had done in the case of the
+murder of Mary Rogers. With nothing but the newspapers to guide him, he
+drew attention to the significance of certain apparently negligible
+facts, and ranged the evidence in such a manner as to throw grave
+suspicion upon a man who had presented himself as a witness. Sir James
+Molloy had printed this letter in leaded type. The same evening he was
+able to announce in the <i>Sun</i> the arrest and full confession of the
+incriminated man.</p>
+
+<p>Sir James, who knew all the worlds of London, had lost no time in making
+Trent's acquaintance. The two men got on well; for Trent possessed some
+secret of native tact which had the effect of almost abolishing
+differences of age between himself and others. The great rotary presses
+in the basement of the <i>Record</i> building had filled him with a new
+enthusiasm: he had painted there, and Sir James had bought at sight,
+what he called a machinery-scape in the manner of Heinrich Kley.</p>
+
+<p>Then a few months later came the affair known as the Ilkley mystery. Sir
+James had invited Trent to an emollient dinner, and thereafter offered
+him what seemed to the young man a fantastically large sum for his
+temporary services as special representative of the <i>Record</i> at Ilkley.
+"You could do it," the editor had urged. "You can write good stuff, and
+you know how to talk to people, and I can teach you all the
+technicalities of a reporter's job in half an hour. And you have a head
+for a mystery; you have imagination and cool judgment along with it.
+Think how it would feel if you pulled it off!" Trent had admitted that
+it would be rather a lark; he had smoked, frowned, and at last convinced
+himself that the only thing that held him back was fear of an unfamiliar
+task. To react against fear had become a fixed moral habit with him, and
+he had accepted Sir James's offer.</p>
+
+<p>He had pulled it off. For the second time he had given the authorities a
+start and a beating, and his name was on all tongues. He withdrew and
+painted pictures. He felt no leaning towards journalism, and Sir James,
+who knew a good deal about art, honorably refrained&mdash;as other editors
+did not&mdash;from tempting him with a good salary. But in the course of a
+few years he had applied to him perhaps thirty times for his services in
+the unraveling of similar problems at home and abroad. Sometimes Trent,
+busy with work that held him, had refused; sometimes he had been
+forestalled in the discovery of the truth. But the result of his
+irregular connection with the <i>Record</i> had been to make his name one of
+the best-known in England. It was characteristic of him that his name
+was almost the only detail of his personality known to the public. He
+had imposed absolute silence about himself upon the Molloy papers; and
+the others were not going to advertise one of Sir James's men.</p>
+
+<p>The Manderson case, he told himself as he walked rapidly up the sloping
+road to White Gables, might turn out to be terribly simple. Cupples was
+a wise old boy, but it was probably impossible for him to have an
+impartial opinion about his niece. Yet it was true that the manager of
+the hotel, who had spoken of her beauty in terms that aroused his
+attention, had spoken even more emphatically of her goodness. Not an
+artist in words, the manager had yet conveyed a very definite idea to
+Trent's mind. "There isn't a child about here that don't brighten up at
+the sound of her voice," he had said, "nor yet a grown-up, for the
+matter of that. Everybody used to look forward to her coming over in the
+summer. I don't mean that she's one of those women that are all kind
+heart and nothing else. There's backbone with it, if you know what I
+mean&mdash;pluck&mdash;any amount of go. There's nobody in Marlstone that isn't
+sorry for the lady in her trouble&mdash;not but what some of us may think
+she's lucky at the last of it." Trent wanted very much to meet Mrs.
+Manderson.</p>
+
+<p>He could see now, beyond a spacious lawn and shrubbery, the front of the
+two-storied house of dull red brick, with the pair of great gables from
+which it had its name. He had had but a glimpse of it from the car that
+morning. A modern house, he saw; perhaps ten years old. The place was
+beautifully kept, with that air of opulent peace that clothes even the
+smallest houses of the well-to-do in an English country-side. Before it,
+beyond the road, the rich meadow-land ran down to the edge of the
+cliffs; behind it a woody landscape stretched away across a broad vale
+to the moors. That such a place could be the scene of a crime of
+violence seemed fantastic; it lay so quiet and well-ordered, so eloquent
+of disciplined service and gentle living. Yet there beyond the house,
+and near the hedge that rose between the garden and the hot, white road,
+stood the gardener's tool-shed, by which the body had been found, lying
+tumbled against the wooden wall.</p>
+
+<p>Trent walked past the gate of the drive and along the road until he was
+opposite this shed. Some forty yards further along, the road turned
+sharply away from the house, to run between thick plantations; and just
+before this turn the grounds of the house ended, with a small white gate
+at the angle of the boundary hedge. He approached this gate, which was
+plainly for the use of gardeners and the service of the establishment;
+it swung easily on its hinges, and he passed slowly up a path that led
+towards the back of the house between the outer hedge and a tall wall of
+rhododendrons. Through a gap in this wall a track led him to the little
+neatly-built erection of wood, which stood among trees that faced a
+corner of the front. The body had lain on the side away from the house;
+a servant, he thought, looking out of the nearer windows in the earlier
+hours of the day before, might have glanced unseeing at the hut, as she
+wondered what it could be like to be as rich as Manderson.</p>
+
+<p>He examined the place carefully, and ransacked the hut within, but he
+could note no more than the trodden appearance of the uncut grass where
+the body had lain. Crouching low, with keen eyes and feeling fingers, he
+searched the ground minutely over a wide area; but the search was
+fruitless.</p>
+
+<p>It was interrupted by the sound&mdash;the first he had heard from the
+house&mdash;of the closing of the front door. Trent unbent his long legs and
+stepped to the edge of the drive. A man was walking quickly away from
+the house in the direction of the great gate.</p>
+
+<p>At the noise of a footstep on the gravel, the man wheeled with nervous
+swiftness and looked earnestly at Trent. The sudden sight of his face
+was almost terrible, so white and worn it was. Yet it was a young man's
+face. There was not a wrinkle about the haggard blue eyes, for all their
+tale of strain and desperate fatigue. As the two approached each other,
+Trent noted with admiration the man's breadth of shoulder and lithe,
+strong figure. In his carriage, inelastic as weariness had made it, in
+his handsome, regular features, in his short, smooth yellow hair and in
+his voice as he addressed Trent, the influence of a special sort of
+training was confessed. "Oxford was your playground, I think, my young
+friend," said Trent to himself.</p>
+
+<p>"If you are Mr. Trent," said the young man pleasantly, "you are
+expected. Mr. Cupples 'phoned from the hotel. My name is Marlowe."</p>
+
+<p>"You were secretary to Mr. Manderson, I believe," said Trent. He was
+much inclined to like young Mr. Marlowe. Though he seemed so near a
+physical break-down, he gave out none the less that air of clean living
+and inward health that is the peculiar glory of his social type at his
+years. But there was something in the tired eyes that was a challenge to
+Trent's penetration; an habitual expression, as he took it to be, of
+meditating and weighing things not present to their sight. It was a look
+too intelligent, too steady and purposeful, to be called dreamy. Trent
+thought he had seen such a look before somewhere. He went on to say: "It
+is a terrible business for all of you. I fear it has upset you
+completely, Mr. Marlowe."</p>
+
+<p>"A little limp, that's all," replied the young man wearily. "I was
+driving the car all Sunday night and most of yesterday, and I didn't
+sleep last night, after hearing the news&mdash;who would? But I have an
+appointment now, Mr. Trent, down at the doctor's&mdash;arranging about the
+inquest. I expect it'll be to-morrow. If you will go up to the house and
+ask for Mr. Bunner, you'll find him expecting you; he will tell you all
+about things and show you round. He's the other secretary; an American,
+and the best of fellows; he'll look after you. There's a detective here,
+by the way; Inspector Murch, from Scotland Yard. He came yesterday."</p>
+
+<p>"Murch!" Trent exclaimed. "But he and I are old friends. How under the
+sun did he get here so soon?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have no idea," Mr. Marlowe answered. "But he was here last evening,
+before I got back from Southampton, interviewing everybody, and he's
+been about here since eight this morning. He's in the library
+now&mdash;that's where the open French window is that you see at the end of
+the house there. Perhaps you would like to step down there and talk
+about things."</p>
+
+<p>"I think I will," said Trent. Mr. Marlowe nodded and went on his way.
+The thick turf of the lawn round which the drive took its circular sweep
+made Trent's footsteps as noiseless as a cat's. In a few moments he was
+looking in through the open leaves of the window at the southward end of
+the house, considering with a smile a very broad back and a bent head
+covered with short grizzled hair. The man within was stooping over a
+number of papers laid out on the table.</p>
+
+<p>"'Twas ever thus," said Trent in a melancholy tone, at the first sound
+of which the man within turned round with startling swiftness. "From
+childhood's hour I've seen my fondest hopes decay. I did think I was
+ahead of Scotland Yard this time, and now here is the largest officer in
+the entire Metropolitan force already occupying the position."</p>
+
+<p>The detective smiled grimly and came to the window. "I was expecting
+you, Mr. Trent," he said. "This is the sort of case that you like."</p>
+
+<p>"Since my tastes were being considered," Trent replied, stepping into
+the room, "I wish they had followed up the idea by keeping my hated
+rival out of the business. You have got a long start, too&mdash;I know all
+about it." His eyes began to wander round the room. "How did you manage
+it? You are a quick mover, I know; the dun deer's hide on fleeter foot
+was never tied; but I don't see how you got here in time to be at work
+yesterday evening. Has Scotland Yard secretly started an aviation corps?
+Or is it in league with the infernal powers? In either case the Home
+Secretary should be called upon to make a statement."</p>
+
+<p>"It's simpler than that," said Mr. Murch with professional stolidity. "I
+happened to be on leave with the Missus at Halvey, which is only twelve
+mile or so along the coast. As soon as our people there heard of the
+murder they told me. I wired to the Chief, and was put in charge of the
+case at once. I bicycled over yesterday evening, and have been at it
+since then."</p>
+
+<p>"Arising out of that reply," said Trent inattentively, "how is Mrs.
+Inspector Murch?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never better, thank you," answered the inspector, "and frequently
+speaks of you and the games you used to have with our kids. But you'll
+excuse me saying, Mr. Trent, that you needn't trouble to talk your
+nonsense to me while you're using your eyes. I know your ways by now. I
+understand you've fallen on your feet as usual, and have the lady's
+permission to go over the place and make inquiries."</p>
+
+<p>"Such is the fact," said Trent. "I am going to cut you out again,
+Inspector. I owe you one for beating me over the Abinger case, you old
+fox. But if you really mean that you're not inclined for the social
+amenities just now, let us leave compliments and talk business." He
+stepped to the table, glanced through the papers arranged there in
+order, and then turned to the open roll-top desk. He looked into the
+drawers swiftly. "I see this has been cleared out. Well now, inspector,
+I suppose we play the game as before."</p>
+
+<p>Trent had found himself on several occasions in the past thrown into the
+company of Inspector Murch, who stood high in the councils of the
+Criminal Investigation Department. He was a quiet, tactful and very
+shrewd officer, a man of great courage, with a vivid history in
+connection with the more dangerous class of criminals. His humanity was
+as broad as his frame, which was large even for a policeman. Trent and
+he, through some obscure working of sympathy, had appreciated one
+another from the beginning, and had formed one of those curious
+friendships with which it was the younger man's delight to adorn his
+experience. The inspector would talk more freely to him than to any one,
+under the rose, and they would discuss details and possibilities of
+every case, to their mutual enlightenment. There were necessarily rules
+and limits. It was understood between them that Trent made no
+journalistic use of any point that could only have come to him from an
+official source. Each of them, moreover, for the honor and prestige of
+the institution he represented, openly reserved the right to withhold
+from the other any discovery or inspiration that might come to him which
+he considered vital to the solution of the difficulty. Trent had
+insisted on carefully formulating these principles of what he called
+detective sportsmanship. Mr. Murch, who loved a contest, and who only
+stood to gain by his association with the keen intelligence of the
+other, entered very heartily into "the game." In these strivings for the
+credit of the press and of the police, victory sometimes attended the
+experience and method of the officer, sometimes the quicker brain and
+livelier imagination of Trent, his gift of instinctively recognizing the
+significant through all disguises.</p>
+
+<p>The inspector, then, replied to Trent's last words with cordial
+agreement. Leaning on either side of the French window, with the deep
+peace and hazy splendor of the summer landscape before them, they
+reviewed the case.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Trent had taken out a thin notebook, and as they talked he began to
+make, with light, sure touches, a rough sketch plan of the room. It was
+a thing he did habitually on such occasions, and often quite idly, but
+now and then the habit had served him to good purpose.</p>
+
+<p>This was a large, light apartment at the corner of the house, with
+generous window-space in two walls. A broad table stood in the middle.
+As one entered by the window the roll-top desk stood just to the left of
+it against the wall. The inner door was in the wall to the left, at the
+farther end of the room; and was faced by a broad window divided into
+openings of the casement type. A beautifully carved old corner-cupboard
+rose high against the wall beyond the door, and another cupboard filled
+a recess beside the fireplace. Some colored prints of Harunobu, with
+which Trent promised himself a better acquaintance, hung on what little
+wall-space was unoccupied by books. These had a very uninspiring
+appearance of having been bought by the yard and never taken from their
+shelves. Bound with a sober luxury, the great English novelists,
+essayists, historians and poets stood ranged like an army struck dead in
+its ranks. There were a few chairs made, like the cupboard and table, of
+old carved oak; a modern arm-chair and a swivel office-chair before the
+desk. The room looked costly but very bare. Almost the only portable
+objects were a great porcelain bowl of a wonderful blue on the table, a
+clock and some cigar boxes on the mantel-shelf, and a movable telephone
+standard on the top of the desk.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"Seen the body?" inquired the inspector.</p>
+
+<p>Trent nodded. "And the place where it lay," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"First impressions of this case rather puzzle me," said the inspector.
+"From what I heard at Halvey I guessed it might be common robbery and
+murder by some tramp, though such a thing is very far from common in
+these parts. But as soon as I began my inquiries I came on some curious
+points, which by this time I dare say you've noted for yourself. The man
+is shot in his own grounds, quite near the house, to begin with. Yet
+there's not the slightest trace of any attempt at burglary. And the body
+wasn't robbed. In fact, it would be as plain a case of suicide as you
+could wish to see, if it wasn't for certain facts. Here's another thing:
+for a month or so past, they tell me, Manderson had been in a queer
+state of mind. I expect you know already that he and his wife had some
+trouble between them. The servants had noticed a change in his manner to
+her for a long time, and for the past week he had scarcely spoken to
+her. They say he was a changed man, moody and silent&mdash;whether on account
+of that or something else. The lady's maid says he looked as if
+something was going to arrive. It's always easy to remember that people
+looked like that, after something has happened to them. Still, that's
+what they say. There you are again, then: suicide! Now, why wasn't it
+suicide, Mr. Trent?"</p>
+
+<p>"The facts, so far as I know them, are really all against it," Trent
+replied, sitting on the threshold of the window and clasping his knees.
+"First, of course, no weapon is to be found. I've searched, and you've
+searched, and there's no trace of any firearm anywhere within a stone's
+throw of where the body lay. Second, the marks on the wrists, flesh
+scratches and bruises, which we can only assume to have been done in a
+struggle with somebody. Third, who ever heard of anybody shooting
+himself in the eye? Then I heard from the manager of the hotel here
+another fact, which strikes me as the most curious detail in this
+affair. Manderson had dressed himself fully before going out there, but
+he forgot his false teeth. Now how could a suicide who dressed himself
+to make a decent appearance as a corpse forget his teeth?"</p>
+
+<p>"That last argument hadn't struck me," admitted Mr. Murch. "There's
+something in it. But on the strength of the other points, which had
+occurred to me, I am not considering suicide. I have been looking about
+for ideas in this house, this morning. I expect you were thinking of
+doing the same."</p>
+
+<p>"That is so. It is a case for ideas, it seems to me. Come, Murch, let us
+make an effort; let us bend our spirits to a temper of general
+suspicion. Let us suspect everybody in the house, to begin with. Listen:
+I will tell you whom I suspect. I suspect Mrs. Manderson, of course. I
+also suspect both the secretaries&mdash;I hear there are two, and I hardly
+know which of them I regard as more thoroughly open to suspicion. I
+suspect the butler and the lady's maid. I suspect the other domestics,
+and especially do I suspect the boot-boy. By the way, what domestics are
+there? I have more than enough suspicion to go round, whatever the size
+of the establishment; but as a matter of curiosity I should like to
+know."</p>
+
+<p>"All very well to laugh," replied the inspector, "but at the first stage
+of affairs it's the only safe principle, and you know that as well as I
+do, Mr. Trent. However, I've seen enough of the people here, last night
+and to-day, to put a few of them out of my mind for the present at
+least. You will form your own conclusions. As for the establishment,
+there's the butler and lady's maid, cook and three other maids, one a
+young girl. One chauffeur, who's away with a broken wrist. No boy."</p>
+
+<p>"What about the gardener? You say nothing about that shadowy and
+sinister figure, the gardener. You are keeping him in the background,
+Murch. Out with him!"</p>
+
+<p>"The garden is attended to by a man in the village, who comes twice a
+week. I've talked to him. He was here last on Friday."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I suspect him all the more," said Trent. "And now as to the house
+itself. What I propose to do, to begin with, is to sniff about a little
+in this room, where I am told Manderson spent a great deal of his time,
+and in his bedroom; especially the bedroom. But since we're in this
+room, let's start here. You seem to be at the same stage of the inquiry.
+Perhaps you've done the bedroom already?"</p>
+
+<p>The inspector nodded. "I've been through Manderson's and his wife's.
+Nothing to be got there, I think. Very simple and bare, no signs of any
+sort&mdash;that <i>I</i> could see. Seems to have insisted on the simple life,
+does Manderson. Never employed a valet. The room's almost like a cell,
+except for the clothes and shoes. You'll find it all exactly as I found
+it; and they tell me that's exactly as Manderson left it at we don't
+know what o'clock yesterday morning. Opens into Mrs. Manderson's
+bedroom&mdash;not much of the cell about that, I can tell you. I should say
+the lady was as fond of pretty things as most. But she cleared out of it
+on the morning of the discovery&mdash;told the maid she could never sleep in
+a room opening into her murdered husband's room. Very natural feeling in
+a woman, Mr. Trent. She's camping out, so to say, in one of the spare
+bedrooms now."</p>
+
+<p>"Come, my friend," Trent was saying to himself, as he made a few notes
+in his little book. "Have you got your eye on Mrs. Manderson? Or haven't
+you? I know that colorless tone of the inspectorial voice. I wish I had
+seen her. Either you've got something against her and you don't want me
+to get hold of it; or else you've made up your mind she's innocent, but
+have no objection to my wasting my time over her. Well, it's all in the
+game; which begins to look extremely interesting as we go on." To Mr.
+Murch he said aloud: "Well, I'll draw the bedroom later on. What about
+this?"</p>
+
+<p>"They call it the library," said the inspector. "Manderson used to do
+his writing and that in here; passed most of the time he spent indoors
+here. Since he and his wife ceased to hit it off together, he had taken
+to spending his evenings alone, and when at this house he always spent
+'em in here. He was last seen alive, as far as the servants are
+concerned, in this room."</p>
+
+<p>Trent rose and glanced again through the papers set out on the table.
+"Business letters and documents, mostly," said Mr. Murch. "Reports,
+prospectuses, and that. A few letters on private matters, nothing in
+them that I can see. The American secretary&mdash;Bunner his name is, and a
+queerer card I never saw turned&mdash;he's been through this desk with me
+this morning. He had got it into his head that Manderson had been
+receiving threatening letters, and that the murder was the outcome of
+that. But there's no trace of any such thing; and we looked at every
+blessed paper. The only unusual things we found were some packets of
+bank-notes to a very considerable amount, and a couple of little bags of
+unset diamonds. I asked Mr. Bunner to put them in a safer place. It
+appears that Manderson had begun buying diamonds lately as a
+speculation&mdash;it was a new game to him, the secretary said, and it seemed
+to amuse him."</p>
+
+<p>"What about these secretaries?" Trent inquired. "I met one called
+Marlowe just now outside; a nice-looking chap with singular eyes,
+unquestionably English. The other, it seems, is an American. What did
+Manderson want with an English secretary?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Marlowe explained to me how that was. The American was his
+right-hand business man, one of his office staff, who never left him.
+Mr. Marlowe had nothing to do with Manderson's business as a financier,
+knew nothing of it. His job was to look after Manderson's horses and
+motors and yacht and sporting arrangements and that&mdash;make himself
+generally useful, as you might say. He had the spending of a lot of
+money, I should think. The other was confined entirely to the office
+affairs, and I dare say he had his hands full. As for his being English,
+it was just a fad of Manderson's to have an English secretary. He'd had
+several before Mr. Marlowe."</p>
+
+<p>"He showed his taste," observed Trent. "It might be more than
+interesting, don't you think, to be minister to the pleasures of a
+modern plutocrat with a large P? Only they say that Manderson's were
+exclusively of an innocent kind. Certainly Marlowe gives me the
+impression that he would be weak in the part of Petronius. But to return
+to the matter in hand." He looked at his notes. "You said just now that
+he was last seen alive here, 'so far as the servants were concerned.'
+That meant&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"He had a conversation with his wife on going to bed. But for that, the
+man-servant, Martin by name, last saw him in this room. I had his story
+last night, and very glad he was to tell it. An affair like this is meat
+and drink to the servants of the house."</p>
+
+<p>Trent considered for some moments, gazing through the open window over
+the sun-flooded slopes. "Would it bore you to hear what he has to say
+again?" he asked at length. For reply, Mr. Murch rang the bell. A spare,
+clean-shaven, middle-aged man, having the servant's manner in its most
+distinguished form, answered it.</p>
+
+<p>"This is Mr. Trent, who is authorized by Mrs. Manderson to go over the
+house and make inquiries," explained the detective. "He would like to
+hear your story." Martin bowed distantly. He recognized Trent for a
+gentleman. Time would show whether he was what Martin called a gentleman
+in every sense of the word.</p>
+
+<p>"I observed you approaching the house, sir," said Martin with impassive
+courtesy. He spoke with a slow and measured utterance. "My instructions
+are to assist you in every possible way. Should you wish me to recall
+the circumstances of Sunday night?"</p>
+
+<p>"Please," said Trent with ponderous gravity. Martin's style was making
+clamorous appeal to his sense of comedy. He banished with an effort all
+vivacity of expression from his face.</p>
+
+<p>"I last saw Mr. Manderson&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, not that yet," Trent checked him quietly. "Tell me all you saw of
+him that evening&mdash;after dinner, say. Try to recollect every little
+detail."</p>
+
+<p>"After dinner, sir?&mdash;yes. I remember that after dinner Mr. Manderson and
+Mr. Marlowe walked up and down the path through the orchard, talking. If
+you ask me for details, it struck me they were talking about something
+important, because I heard Mr. Manderson say something when they came in
+through the back entrance. He said, as near as I can remember: 'If
+Harris is there, every minute is of importance. You want to start right
+away. And not a word to a soul.' Mr. Marlowe answered: 'Very well. I
+will just change out of these clothes and then I'm ready'&mdash;or words to
+that effect. I heard this plainly as they passed the window of my
+pantry. Then Mr. Marlowe went up to his bedroom and Mr. Manderson
+entered the library and rang for me. He handed me some letters for the
+postman in the morning and directed me to sit up, as Mr. Marlowe had
+persuaded him to go for a drive in the car by moonlight."</p>
+
+<p>"That was curious," remarked Trent.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought so, sir. But I recollected what I had heard about 'not a word
+to a soul,' and I concluded that this about a moonlight drive was
+intended to mislead."</p>
+
+<p>"What time was this?"</p>
+
+<p>"It would be about ten, sir, I should say. After speaking to me, Mr.
+Manderson waited until Mr. Marlowe had come down and brought round the
+car. He then went into the drawing-room, where Mrs. Manderson was."</p>
+
+<p>"Did that strike you as curious?"</p>
+
+<p>Martin looked down his nose. "If you ask me the question, sir," he said
+with reserve, "I had not known him enter that room since we came here
+this year. He preferred to sit in the library in the evenings. That
+evening he only remained with Mrs. Manderson for a few minutes. Then he
+and Mr. Marlowe started immediately."</p>
+
+<p>"You saw them start?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir. They took the direction of Bishopsbridge."</p>
+
+<p>"And you saw Mr. Manderson again later?"</p>
+
+<p>"After an hour or thereabouts, sir, in the library. That would have been
+about a quarter past eleven, I should say; I had noticed eleven striking
+from the church. I may say I am peculiarly quick of hearing, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Manderson had rung the bell for you, I suppose. Yes? And what
+passed when you answered it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Manderson had put out the decanter of whisky and a syphon and
+glass, sir, from the cupboard where he kept them&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Trent held up his hand. "While we are on that point, Martin, I want to
+ask you plainly, did Mr. Manderson drink very much? You understand this
+is not impertinent curiosity on my part. I want you to tell me because
+it may possibly help in the clearing up of this case."</p>
+
+<p>"Perfectly, sir," replied Martin gravely. "I have no hesitation in
+telling you what I have already told the inspector. Mr. Manderson was,
+considering his position in life, a remarkably abstemious man. In my
+four years of service with him I never knew anything of an alcoholic
+nature pass his lips except a glass or two of wine at dinner, very
+rarely a little at luncheon, and from time to time a whisky-and-soda
+before going to bed. He never seemed to form a habit of it. Often I used
+to find his glass in the morning with only a little soda water in it;
+sometimes he would have been having whisky with it, but never much. He
+never was particular about his drinks; ordinary soda was what he
+preferred, though I had ventured to suggest some of the natural
+minerals, having personally acquired a taste for them in my previous
+service. He used to keep them in the cupboard here because he had a
+great dislike of being waited on more than was necessary. It was an
+understood thing that I never came near him after dinner unless sent
+for. And when he sent for anything, he liked it brought quick, and to be
+left alone again at once. He hated to be asked if he required anything
+more. Amazingly simple in his tastes, sir, Mr. Manderson was."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well; and he rang for you that night about a quarter past eleven.
+Now can you remember exactly what he said?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think I can tell you with some approach to accuracy, sir. It was not
+much. First he asked me if Mr. Bunner had gone to bed, and I replied
+that he had been gone up some time. He then said that he wanted someone
+to sit up until twelve-thirty, in case an important message should come
+by telephone, and that Mr. Marlowe having gone to Southampton for him in
+the motor, he wished me to do this, and that I was to take down the
+message if it came, and not disturb him. He also ordered a fresh syphon
+of soda-water. I believe that was all, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"You noticed nothing unusual about him, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir, nothing unusual. When I answered the ring, he was seated at
+the desk listening at the telephone, waiting for a number, as I
+supposed. He gave his orders and went on listening at the same time.
+When I returned with the syphon he was engaged in conversation over the
+wire."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you remember anything of what he was saying?"</p>
+
+<p>"Very little, sir; it was something about somebody being at some
+hotel&mdash;of no interest to me. I was only in the room just time enough to
+place the syphon on the table and withdraw. As I closed the door he was
+saying: 'You're sure he isn't in the hotel?' or words to that effect."</p>
+
+<p>"And that was the last you saw and heard of him alive?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir. A little later, at half-past eleven, when I had settled down
+in my pantry with the door ajar, and a book to pass the time, I heard
+Mr. Manderson go upstairs to bed. I immediately went to close the
+library window, and slipped the lock of the front door. I did not hear
+anything more."</p>
+
+<p>Trent considered. "I suppose you didn't doze at all," he said
+tentatively, "while you were sitting up waiting for the telephone
+message."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, sir! I am always very wakeful about that time. I'm a bad
+sleeper, especially in the neighborhood of the sea, and I generally read
+in bed until somewhere about midnight."</p>
+
+<p>"And did any message come?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"No. And I suppose you sleep with your window open, these warm nights."</p>
+
+<p>"It is never closed at night, sir."</p>
+
+<p>Trent added a last note; then he looked thoughtfully through those he
+had taken. He rose and paced up and down the room for some moments with
+a downcast eye. At length he paused opposite Martin. "It all seems
+perfectly ordinary and simple," he said. "I just want to get a few
+details clear. You went to shut the windows in the library before going
+to bed. Which windows?"</p>
+
+<p>"The French window, sir. It had been open all day. The windows opposite
+the door were seldom opened."</p>
+
+<p>"And what about the curtains? I am wondering whether anyone outside the
+house could have seen into the room."</p>
+
+<p>"Easily, sir, I should say, if he had got into the grounds on that side.
+The curtains were never drawn in the hot weather. Mr. Manderson would
+often sit right in the doorway at nights, smoking and looking out into
+the darkness. But nobody could have seen him who had any business to be
+there."</p>
+
+<p>"I see. And now tell me this. Your hearing is very acute, you say, and
+you heard Mr. Manderson enter the house when he came in after dinner
+from the garden. Did you hear him re-enter it after returning from the
+motor-drive?"</p>
+
+<p>Martin paused. "Now you mention it, sir, I remember that I did not. His
+ringing the bell in this room was the first I knew of his being back. I
+should have heard him come in, if he had come in by the front. I should
+have heard the door go. But he must have come in by the window." The man
+reflected for a moment, then added: "As a general rule, Mr. Manderson
+would come in by the front, hang up his hat and coat in the hall, and
+pass down the hall into the study. It seems likely to me that he was in
+a great hurry to use the telephone, and so went straight across the lawn
+to the window&mdash;he was like that, sir, when there was anything important
+to be done. He had on his hat, now I remember, and had thrown his
+great-coat over the end of the table. He gave his order very sharp, too,
+as he always did when busy. A very precipitate man indeed, was Mr.
+Manderson; a hustler, as they say."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! He appeared to be busy. But didn't you say just now that you
+noticed nothing unusual about him?"</p>
+
+<p>A melancholy smile flitted momentarily over Martin's face. "That
+observation shows that you did not know Mr. Manderson, sir, if you will
+pardon my saying so. His being like that was nothing unusual; quite the
+contrary. It took me long enough to get used to it. Either he would be
+sitting quite still and smoking a cigar, thinking or reading, or else he
+would be writing, dictating, and sending off wires all at the same time,
+till it almost made one dizzy to see it, sometimes for an hour or more
+at a stretch. As for being in a hurry over a telephone message, I may
+say it wasn't in him to be anything else."</p>
+
+<p>Trent turned to the inspector, who met his eye with a look of answering
+intelligence. Not sorry to show his understanding of the line of inquiry
+opened by Trent, Mr. Murch for the first time put a question:</p>
+
+<p>"Then you left him telephoning by the open window, with the lights on,
+and the drinks on the table; is that it?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is so, Mr. Murch." The delicacy of the change in Martin's manner
+when called upon to answer the detective momentarily distracted Trent's
+appreciative mind. But the big man's next question brought it back to
+the problem at once.</p>
+
+<p>"About those drinks. You say Mr. Manderson often took no whisky before
+going to bed. Did he have any that night?"</p>
+
+<p>"I could not say. The room was put to rights in the morning by one of
+the maids, and the glass washed, I presume, as usual. I know that the
+decanter was nearly full that evening; I had refilled it a few days
+before, and I glanced at it when I brought the fresh syphon, just out of
+habit, to make sure there was a decent-looking amount."</p>
+
+<p>The inspector went to the tall corner-cupboard and opened it. He took
+out a decanter of cut glass, and set it on the table before Martin. "Was
+it fuller than that?" he asked quietly. "That's how I found it this
+morning." The decanter was more than half empty.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time Martin's self-possession wavered. He took up the
+decanter quickly, tilted it before his eyes, and then stared amazedly at
+the others. He said slowly: "There's not much short of half a bottle
+gone out of this since I last set eyes on it&mdash;and that was Sunday
+night."</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody in the house, I suppose&mdash;" suggested Trent discreetly.</p>
+
+<p>"Out of the question," replied Martin briefly. Then he added: "I beg
+pardon, sir, but this is a most extraordinary thing to me. Such a thing
+never happened in all my experience of Mr. Manderson. As for the
+women-servants, they never touch anything. I can answer for it; and as
+for me, when I want a drink I can help myself without going to the
+decanters." He took up the decanter again, and aimlessly renewed his
+observation of the contents, while the inspector eyed him with a look of
+serene satisfaction, as a master contemplates his handiwork.</p>
+
+<p>Trent turned to a fresh page of his notebook, and tapped it thoughtfully
+with his pencil. Then he looked up and said: "I suppose Mr. Manderson
+had dressed for dinner that night."</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly, sir. He had on a suit with a dress-jacket, what he used to
+refer to as a Tuxedo, which he usually wore when dining at home or
+informally."</p>
+
+<p>"And he was dressed like that when you saw him last?"</p>
+
+<p>"All but the jacket, sir. When he spent the evening in the library, as
+usually happened, he would change it for an old shooting-jacket after
+dinner, a light-colored tweed, a little too loud in pattern for English
+tastes, perhaps. He had it on when I saw him last. It used to hang in
+this cupboard here"&mdash;Martin opened the door of it as he spoke&mdash;"along
+with Mr. Manderson's fishing-rods and such things, so that he could slip
+it on after dinner without going upstairs."</p>
+
+<p>"Leaving the dinner-jacket in the cupboard?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir. The housemaid used to take it upstairs in the morning."</p>
+
+<p>"In the morning," Trent repeated slowly. "And now that we are speaking
+of the morning, will you tell me exactly what you know about that. I
+understand that Mr. Manderson was not missed until the body was found
+about ten o'clock."</p>
+
+<p>"That is so, sir. Mr. Manderson would never be called, or have anything
+brought to him in the morning. He occupied a separate bedroom. Usually
+he would get up about eight and go round to the bathroom, and he would
+come down some time before nine. But often he would sleep till nine or
+ten o'clock. Mrs. Manderson was always called at seven. The maid would
+take in tea to her. Yesterday morning Mrs. Manderson took breakfast
+about eight in her sitting-room as usual, and everyone supposed that Mr.
+Manderson was still in bed and asleep when Evans came rushing up to the
+house with the shocking intelligence."</p>
+
+<p>"I see," said Trent. "And now another thing. You say you slipped the
+lock of the front door before going to bed. Was that all the locking-up
+you did?"</p>
+
+<p>"To the front-door, sir, yes; I slipped the lock. No more is considered
+necessary in these parts. But I had locked both the doors at the back,
+and seen to the fastenings of all the windows on the ground-floor. In
+the morning everything was as I had left it."</p>
+
+<p>"As you had left it. Now here is another point&mdash;the last, I think. Were
+the clothes in which the body was found the clothes that Mr. Manderson
+would naturally have worn that day?"</p>
+
+<p>Martin rubbed his chin. "You remind me how surprised I was when I first
+set eyes on the body, sir. At first I couldn't make out what was unusual
+about the clothes, and then I saw what it was. The collar was a shape of
+collar Mr. Manderson never wore except with evening dress. Then I found
+that he had put on all the same things that he had worn the night
+before&mdash;large-fronted shirt and all&mdash;except just the coat and waistcoat
+and trousers, and the brown shoes and blue tie. As for the suit, it was
+one of half a dozen he might have worn. But for him to have simply put
+on all the rest just because they were there, instead of getting out the
+kind of shirt and things he always wore by day&mdash;well, sir, it was
+unprecedented. It shows, like some other things, what a hurry he must
+have been in when getting up."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," said Trent. "Well, I think that's all I wanted to know. You
+have put everything with admirable clearness, Martin. If we want to ask
+any more questions later on, I suppose you will be somewhere about."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall be at your disposal, sir." Martin bowed and went out quietly.</p>
+
+<p>Trent flung himself into the arm-chair and exhaled a long breath.
+"Martin is a great creature," he said. "He is far, far better than a
+play. There is none like him, none&mdash;nor will be when our summers have
+deceased. Straight, too: not an atom of harm in dear old Martin. Do you
+know, Murch, you are wrong in suspecting that man."</p>
+
+<p>"I never said a word about suspecting him." The inspector was taken
+aback. "<i>You</i> know, Mr. Trent, he would never have told his story like
+that if he thought I suspected him."</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say he doesn't think so. He is a wonderful creature, a great
+artist; but in spite of that he is not at all a sensitive type. It has
+never occurred to his mind that you, Murch, could suspect him, Martin,
+the complete, the accomplished. But I know it. You must understand,
+inspector, that I have made a special study of the psychology of
+officers of the law. It is a grossly neglected branch of knowledge. They
+are far more interesting than criminals, and not nearly so easy. All the
+time I was questioning him I saw handcuffs in your eye. Your lips were
+mutely framing the syllables of those tremendous words: 'It is my duty
+to tell you that anything you now say will be taken down and used in
+evidence against you.' Your manner would have deceived most men, but it
+could not deceive me."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Murch laughed heartily. Trent's nonsense never made any sort of
+impression on his mind, but he took it as a mark of esteem, which indeed
+it was; so it never failed to please him. "Well, Mr. Trent," he said,
+"you're perfectly right. There's no point in denying it. I have got my
+eye on him. Not that there's anything definite; but you know, as well as
+I do, how often servants are mixed up in affairs of this kind, and this
+man is such a very quiet customer. You remember the case of Lord William
+Russell's valet, who went in as usual in the morning to draw up the
+blinds in his master's bedroom, as quiet and starchy as you please, a
+few hours after he had murdered him in his bed. I've talked to all the
+women of the house, and I don't believe there's a morsel of harm in one
+of them. But Martin's not so easy set aside. I don't like his manner; I
+believe he's hiding something. If so, I shall find it out."</p>
+
+<p>"Cease!" said Trent. "Drain not to its dregs the urn of bitter prophecy.
+Let us get back to facts. Have you, as a matter of evidence, anything at
+all to bring against Martin's story as he has told it to us?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing whatever at present. As for his suggestion that Manderson came
+in by way of the window after leaving Marlowe and the car, that's right
+enough, I should say. I questioned the servant who swept the room next
+morning, and she tells me there were gravelly marks near the window, on
+this plain drugget that goes round the carpet. And there's a footprint
+in this soft new gravel just outside." The inspector took a folding rule
+from his pocket and with it pointed out the traces. "One of the patent
+shoes Manderson was wearing that night exactly fits that print&mdash;you'll
+find them," he added, "on the top shelf in the bedroom, near the
+window-end, the only patents in the row. The girl who polished them in
+the morning picked them out for me."</p>
+
+<p>Trent bent down and studied the faint marks keenly. "Good!" he said.
+"You have covered a lot of ground, Murch, I must say. That was excellent
+about the whisky&mdash;you made your point finely. I felt inclined to shout
+'Encore!' It's a thing that I shall have to think over."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you might have fitted it in already," said Mr. Murch. "Come,
+Mr. Trent, we're only at the beginning of our inquiries, but what do you
+say to this for a preliminary theory? There's a plan of burglary&mdash;say a
+couple of men in it and Martin squared. They know where the plate is,
+and all about the handy little bits of stuff in the drawing-room and
+elsewhere. They watch the house; see Manderson off to bed; Martin comes
+to shut the window, and leaves it ajar&mdash;accidentally on purpose. They
+wait till Martin goes to bed at twelve-thirty; then they just walk into
+the library, and begin to sample the whisky first thing. Now suppose
+Manderson isn't asleep, and suppose they make a noise opening the
+window, or however it might be. He hears it; thinks of burglars; gets up
+very quietly to see if anything's wrong; creeps down on them, perhaps,
+just as they're getting ready for work. They cut and run; he chases them
+down to the shed, and collars one; there's a fight; one of them loses
+his temper and his head, and makes a swinging job of it. Now, Mr. Trent,
+pick that to pieces."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well," said Trent. "Just to oblige you, Murch&mdash;especially as I
+know you don't believe a word of it. First: no traces of any kind left
+by your burglar or burglars, and the window found fastened in the
+morning&mdash;according to Martin. Not much force in that, I allow. Next:
+nobody in the house hears anything of this stampede through the library,
+nor hears any shout from Manderson either inside the house or outside.
+Next: Manderson goes down without a word to anybody, though Bunner and
+Martin are both at hand. Next: did you ever hear in your long experience
+of a householder getting up in the night to pounce on burglars, who
+dressed himself fully, with underclothing, shirt, collar and tie,
+trousers, waistcoat and coat, socks and hard leather shoes; and who gave
+the finishing touches to a somewhat dandified toilet by doing his hair
+and putting on his watch and chain? Personally, I call that
+over-dressing the part. The only decorative detail he seems to have
+forgotten is his teeth."</p>
+
+<p>The inspector leaned forward thinking, his large hands clasped before
+him. "No," he said at last. "Of course there's no help in that theory. I
+rather expect we have some way to go before we find out why a man gets
+up before the servants are awake, dresses himself fully, and is murdered
+within sight of his house early enough to be cold and stiff by ten in
+the morning."</p>
+
+<p>Trent shook his head. "We can't build anything on that last
+consideration. I've gone into the subject with people who know. I
+shouldn't wonder," he added, "if the traditional notions about loss of
+temperature and rigor after death had occasionally brought an innocent
+man to the gallows, or near it. Dr. Stock has them all, I feel sure:
+most general practitioners of the older generation have. That Dr. Stock
+will make an ass of himself at the inquest is almost as certain as that
+to-morrow's sun will rise. I've seen him. He will say the body must have
+been dead about so long, because of the degree of coldness and <i>rigor
+mortis</i>. I can see him nosing it all out in some text-book that was out
+of date when he was a student. Listen, Murch, and I will tell you some
+facts which will be a great hindrance to you in your professional
+career. There are many things that may hasten or retard the cooling of
+the body. This one was lying in the long dewy grass on the shady side of
+the shed. As for rigidity, if Manderson died in a struggle, or laboring
+under sudden emotion, his corpse might stiffen practically
+instantaneously: there are dozens of cases noted, particularly in cases
+of injury to the skull, like this one. On the other hand, the stiffening
+might not have begun until eight or ten hours after death. You can't
+hang anybody on <i>rigor mortis</i> nowadays, inspector, much as you may
+resent the limitation. No; what we <i>can</i> say is this. If he had been
+shot after the hour at which the world begins to get up and go about its
+business, it would have been heard and very likely seen, too. In fact,
+we must reason&mdash;to begin with, at any rate&mdash;on the assumption that he
+wasn't shot at a time when people might be awake&mdash;it isn't done in these
+parts. Put that time at six-thirty <span class="smcap">a. m.</span> Manderson went up to
+bed at eleven <span class="smcap">p. m.</span> and Martin sat up till twelve-thirty. Assuming that he went to sleep at once on turning in, that leaves us
+something like six hours for the crime to be committed in; and that is a
+long time. But whenever it took place, I wish you would suggest a reason
+why Manderson, who was a fairly late riser, was up and dressed at or
+before six-thirty; and why neither Martin, who sleeps lightly, nor
+Bunner, nor his wife heard him moving about, or letting himself out of
+the house. He must have been careful. He must have crept about like a
+cat.... Do you feel as I do, Murch, about all this: that it is very, very
+strange and baffling?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's how it looks," agreed the inspector.</p>
+
+<p>"And now," said Trent, rising to his feet, "I'll leave you to your
+meditations, and take a look at the bedrooms. Perhaps the explanation of
+all this will suddenly burst upon you while I am poking about up there.
+But," concluded Trent in a voice of sudden exasperation, turning round
+in the doorway, "if you can tell me at any time how under the sun a man
+who put on all those clothes could forget to put in his teeth, you may
+kick me from here to the nearest lunatic asylum, and hand me over as an
+incipient dement."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>POKING ABOUT</h3>
+
+
+<p>There are moments in life, as one might think, when that which is within
+us, busy about its secret affair, lets escape into consciousness some
+hint of a fortunate thing ordained. Who does not know what it is to feel
+at times a wave of unaccountable persuasion that it is about to go well
+with him?&mdash;not the feverish confidence of men in danger of a blow from
+fate, not the persistent illusion of the optimist, but an unsought
+conviction, springing up like a bird from the heather, that success is
+at hand in some great or little thing. The general suddenly knows at
+dawn that the day will bring him victory; the man on the green suddenly
+knows that he will put down the long putt. As Trent mounted the stairway
+outside the library door he seemed to rise into certainty of
+achievement.</p>
+
+<p>A host of guesses and inferences swarmed apparently unsorted through his
+mind; a few secret observations that he had made, and which he felt must
+have significance, still stood unrelated to any plausible theory of the
+crime; yet as he went up he seemed to know indubitably that light was
+going to appear.</p>
+
+<p>The bedrooms lay on either side of a broad carpeted passage, lighted by
+a tall end-window. It went the length of the house until it ran at right
+angles into a narrower passage, out of which the servants' rooms opened.
+Martin's room was the exception: it opened out of a small landing
+halfway to the upper floor. As Trent passed it, he glanced within. A
+little square room, clean and commonplace. In going up the rest of the
+stairway he stepped with elaborate precaution against noise, hugging the
+wall closely and placing each foot with care; but a series of very
+audible creaks marked his passage.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that Manderson's room was the first on the right hand when the
+bedroom floor was reached, and he went to it at once. He tried the latch
+and the lock, which worked normally, and examined the wards of the key.
+Then he turned to the room.</p>
+
+<p>It was a small apartment, strangely bare. The plutocrat's toilet
+appointments were of the simplest. All remained just as it had been on
+the morning of the ghastly discovery in the grounds. The sheets and
+blankets of the unmade bed lay tumbled over a narrow wooden bedstead,
+and the sun shone brightly through the window upon them. It gleamed,
+too, upon the gold parts of the delicate work of dentistry that lay in
+water in a shallow bowl of glass placed on a small, plain table by the
+bedside. On this also stood a wrought-iron candlestick. Some clothing
+lay untidily over one of the two rush-bottomed chairs. Various objects
+on the top of a chest of drawers, which had been used as a dressing
+table, lay in such disorder as a hurried man might make&mdash;toilet
+articles, a book of flies, an empty pocket-book with a burst strap, a
+pocket compass and other trifles. Trent looked them over with a
+questioning eye. He noted also that the occupant of the room had neither
+washed nor shaved. With his finger he turned over the dental plate in
+the bowl, and frowned again at its incomprehensible presence.</p>
+
+<p>The emptiness and disarray of the little room, flooded by the sunbeams,
+were producing in Trent a sense of gruesomeness. His fancy called up a
+picture of a haggard man dressing himself in careful silence by the
+first light of dawn, glancing constantly at the inner door behind which
+his wife slept, his eyes full of some terror.</p>
+
+<p>Trent shivered, and to fix his mind again on actualities opened two tall
+cupboards in the wall on either side of the bed. They contained
+clothing, a large choice of which had evidently been one of the very few
+conditions of comfort for the man who had slept there.</p>
+
+<p>In the matter of shoes, also, Manderson had allowed himself the
+advantage of wealth. An extraordinary number of these, treed and
+carefully kept, was ranged on two long low shelves against the wall.
+Trent, himself an amateur of good shoe-leather, now turned to them, and
+glanced over the collection with an appreciative eye. It was to be seen
+that Manderson had been inclined to pride himself on a rather small and
+well-formed foot. The shoes were of a distinctive shape, narrow and
+round-toed, beautifully made; all were evidently from the same last.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly his eyes narrowed themselves over a pair of patent-leather
+shoes on the upper shelf.</p>
+
+<p>These were the shoes of which the inspector had already described the
+position to him; the shoes worn by Manderson the night before his death.
+They were a well-worn pair, he saw at once; he saw, too, that they had
+been very recently polished. Something about the uppers of these shoes
+had seized his attention. He bent lower and frowned over them, comparing
+what he saw with the appearance of the neighboring shoes. Then he took
+them up and examined the line of juncture of the uppers with the soles.</p>
+
+<p>As he did this, Trent began unconsciously to whistle faintly, and with
+great precision, an air which Inspector Murch, if he had been present,
+would have recognized.</p>
+
+<p>Most men who have the habit of self-control have also some involuntary
+trick which tells those who know them that they are suppressing
+excitement. The inspector had noted that, when Trent had picked up a
+strong scent, he whistled faintly a certain melodious passage; though
+the inspector could not have told you that it was, in fact, the opening
+movement of Mendelssohn's <i>Lied ohne W&ouml;rter</i> in A major.</p>
+
+<p>He turned the shoes over, made some measurements with a marked tape, and
+looked minutely at the bottoms. On each, in the angle between the heel
+and the instep, he detected a faint trace of red gravel.</p>
+
+<p>Trent placed the shoes on the floor, and walked with his hands behind
+him to the window, out of which, still faintly whistling, he gazed with
+eyes that saw nothing. Once his lips opened to emit mechanically the
+Englishman's expletive of sudden enlightenment. At length he turned to
+the shelves again, and swiftly but carefully examined every one of the
+shoes there.</p>
+
+<p>This done, he took up the garments from the chair, looked them over
+closely and replaced them. He turned to the wardrobe cupboards again,
+and hunted through them carefully. The litter on the dressing table now
+engaged his attention for the second time. Then he sat down on the empty
+chair, took his head in his hands, and remained in that attitude,
+staring at the carpet, for some minutes. He rose at last and opened the
+inner door leading to Mrs. Manderson's room.</p>
+
+<p>It was evident at a glance that the big room had been hurriedly put down
+from its place as the lady's bower. All the array of objects that belong
+to a woman's dressing table had been removed; on bed and chairs and
+smaller tables there were no garments or hats, bags or boxes; no trace
+remained of the obstinate conspiracy of gloves and veils, handkerchiefs
+and ribbons, to break the captivity of the drawer. The room was like an
+unoccupied guest-chamber. Yet in every detail of furniture and
+decoration it spoke of an unconventional but exacting taste. Trent, as
+his expert eye noted the various perfection of color and form amid which
+the ill-mated lady dreamed her dreams and thought her loneliest
+thoughts, knew that she had at least the resources of an artistic
+nature. His interest in this unknown personality grew stronger; and his
+brows came down heavily as he thought of the burdens laid upon it, and
+of the deed of which the history was now shaping itself with more and
+more of substance before his busy mind.</p>
+
+<p>He went first to the tall French window in the middle of the wall that
+faced the door, and opening it, stepped out upon a small balcony with an
+iron railing. He looked down on a broad stretch of lawn that began
+immediately beneath him, separated from the house-wall only by a narrow
+flower-bed, and stretched away with an abrupt dip at the farther end,
+toward the orchard. The other window opened with a sash above the
+garden-entrance to the library. In the further inside corner of the room
+was a second door giving upon the passage; the door by which the maid
+was wont to come in, and her mistress to go out, in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>Trent, seated on the bed, quickly sketched in his notebook a plan of the
+room and its neighbor. The bed stood in the angle between the
+communicating-door and the sash-window, its head against the wall
+dividing the room from Manderson's. Trent stared at the pillows; then he
+lay down with deliberation on the bed and looked through the open door
+into the adjoining room.</p>
+
+<p>This observation taken, he rose again and proceeded to note on his plan
+that on either side of the bed was a small table with a cover. Upon that
+farthest from the door was a graceful electric-lamp standard of copper
+connected by a free wire with the wall. Trent looked at it thoughtfully,
+then at the switches connected with the other lights in the room. They
+were, as usual, on the wall just within the door, and some way out of
+his reach as he sat on the bed. He rose, and satisfied himself that the
+lights were all in order. Then he turned on his heel, walked quickly
+into Manderson's room, and rang the bell.</p>
+
+<p>"I want your help again, Martin," he said, as the butler presented
+himself, upright and impassive, in the doorway. "I want you to prevail
+upon Mrs. Manderson's maid to grant me an interview."</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly, sir," said Martin.</p>
+
+<p>"What sort of a woman is she? Has she her wits about her?"</p>
+
+<p>"She's French, sir," replied Martin succinctly; adding after a pause:
+"She has not been with us long, sir, but I have formed the impression
+that the young woman knows as much of the world as is good for
+her&mdash;since you ask me."</p>
+
+<p>"You think butter might possibly melt in her mouth, do you?" said Trent.
+"Well, I am not afraid. I want to put some questions to her."</p>
+
+<p>"I will send her up immediately, sir." The butler withdrew, and Trent
+wandered round the little room with his hands at his back. Sooner than
+he had expected, a small, neat figure in black appeared quietly before
+him.</p>
+
+<p>The lady's maid, with her large brown eyes, had taken favorable notice
+of Trent from a window when he had crossed the lawn, and had been hoping
+desperately that the resolver of mysteries (whose reputation was as
+great below-stairs as elsewhere) would send for her. For one thing, she
+felt the need to make a scene; her nerves were overwrought. But her
+scenes were at a discount with the other domestics, and as for Mr.
+Murch, he had chilled her into self-control with his official manner.
+Trent, her glimpse of him had told her, had not the air of a policeman,
+and at a distance he had appeared <i>sympathetique</i>.</p>
+
+<p>As she entered the room, however, instinct decided for her that any
+approach to coquetry would be a mistake, if she sought to make a good
+impression at the beginning. It was with an air of amiable candor, then,
+that she said, "Monsieur desire to speak with me?" She added helpfully,
+"I am called C&eacute;lestine."</p>
+
+<p>"Naturally," said Trent with businesslike calm. "Now what I want you to
+tell me, C&eacute;lestine, is this: when you took tea to your mistress
+yesterday morning at seven o'clock, was the door between the two
+bedrooms&mdash;this door here&mdash;open?"</p>
+
+<p>C&eacute;lestine became intensely animated in an instant. "Oh, yes," she said,
+using her favorite English idiom. "The door was open as always,
+monsieur, and I shut it as always. But it is necessary to explain.
+Listen! When I enter the room of madame from the other door in
+there&mdash;ah! but if monsieur will give himself the pain to enter the other
+room, all explains itself." She tripped across to the door, and urged
+Trent before her into the larger bedroom with a hand on his arm. "See! I
+enter the room with the tea like this. I approach the bed. Before I come
+quite near the bed, here is the door to my right hand&mdash;open, always&mdash;so!
+But monsieur can perceive that I see nothing in the room of Monsieur
+Manderson. The door opens to the bed, not to me who approach from down
+there. I shut it without seeing in. It is the order. Yesterday it was as
+ordinary. I see nothing of the next room. Madame sleep like an
+angel&mdash;she see nothing. I shut the door. I place the plateau&mdash;I open the
+curtains&mdash;I prepare the toilette&mdash;I retire&mdash;voil&agrave;!" C&eacute;lestine paused for
+breath, and spread her hands abroad.</p>
+
+<p>Trent, who had followed her movements and gesticulations with deepening
+gravity, nodded his head. "I see exactly how it was now," he said.
+"Thank you, C&eacute;lestine. So Mr. Manderson was supposed to be still in his
+room while your mistress was getting up, and dressing, and having
+breakfast in her boudoir."</p>
+
+<p>"Oui, monsieur."</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody missed him, in fact," remarked Trent. "Well, C&eacute;lestine, I am
+very much obliged to you." He re-opened the door to the outer bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>"It is nothing, monsieur," said C&eacute;lestine, as she crossed the small
+room. "I hope that monsieur will catch the assassin of Monsieur
+Manderson.... But I not regret him too much," she added with sudden and
+amazing violence, turning round with her hand on the knob of the outer
+door. She set her teeth with an audible sound, and the color rose in her
+small, dark face. English departed from her. "Je ne le regrette pas du
+tout, du tout!" she cried with a flood of words. "Madame&mdash;ah! je me
+jetterais au feu pour madame&mdash;une femme si charmante, si adorable. Mais
+un homme comme, monsieur&mdash;maussade, boudeur, impassible! Ah, non!&mdash;de ma
+vie! J'en avais pardessus la t&ecirc;te, de monsieur! Ah! vrai! Est-ce
+insupportable, tout de m&ecirc;me, qu'il existe des types comme &ccedil;a? Je vous
+jure que&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Finissez ce chahut, C&eacute;lestine!" Trent broke in sharply. C&eacute;lestine's
+tirade had brought back the memory of his student days in Paris with a
+rush. "En voil&agrave; une sc&egrave;ne! C'est rasant, vous savez. Faut rentrer &ccedil;a,
+mademoiselle. Du reste, c'est bien imprudent, croyez-moi. Hang it! have
+some common sense! If the inspector downstairs heard you saying that
+kind of thing, you would get into trouble. And don't wave your fists
+about so much; you might hit something. You seem," he went on more
+pleasantly, as C&eacute;lestine grew calmer under his authoritative eye, "to be
+even more glad than other people that Mr. Manderson is out of the way. I
+could almost suspect, C&eacute;lestine, that Mr. Manderson did not take as much
+notice of you, as you thought necessary and right."</p>
+
+<p>"A peine s'il m'avait regard&eacute;!" C&eacute;lestine answered simply.</p>
+
+<p>"Ca, c'est un comble!" observed Trent. "You are a nice young woman for a
+small tea-party, I don't think. A star upon your birthday burned, whose
+fierce, serene, red, pulseless planet never yearned in heaven,
+C&eacute;lestine. Mademoiselle, I am busy. Bon jour. You certainly are a
+beauty!"</p>
+
+<p>C&eacute;lestine took this as a scarcely-expected compliment. The surprise
+restored her balance. With a sudden flash of her eyes and teeth at Trent
+over her shoulder, the lady's maid opened the door and swiftly
+disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Trent, left alone in the little bedroom, relieved his mind with two
+forcible descriptive terms in C&eacute;lestine's language, and turned to his
+problem.</p>
+
+<p>He took the pair of shoes which he had already examined, and placed them
+on one of the two chairs in the room, then seated himself on the other
+opposite to this. With his hands in his pockets he sat with eyes fixed
+upon those two dumb witnesses. Now and then he whistled, almost
+inaudibly, a few bars. It was very still in the room. A subdued
+twittering came from the trees through the open window. From time to
+time a breeze rustled in the leaves of the thick creeper about the sill.
+But the man in the room, his face grown hard and somber now with his
+thoughts, never moved.</p>
+
+<p>So he sat for the space of half an hour. Then he rose quickly to his
+feet. He replaced the shoes on their shelf with care, and stepped out
+upon the landing.</p>
+
+<p>Two bedroom doors faced him on the other side of the passage. He opened
+that which was immediately opposite, and entered a bedroom by no means
+austerely tidy. Some sticks and fishing-rods stood confusedly in one
+corner, a pile of books in another. The housemaid's hand had failed to
+give a look of order to the jumble of heterogeneous objects left on the
+dressing-table and the mantel-shelf&mdash;pipes, pen-knives, pencils, keys,
+golf-balls, old letters, photographs, small boxes, tins and bottles. Two
+fine etchings and some water-color sketches hung on the walls; leaning
+against the end of the wardrobe, unhung, were a few framed engravings. A
+row of shoes and boots was ranged beneath the window. Trent crossed the
+room and studied them intently; then he measured some of them with his
+tape, whistling very softly. This done, he sat on the side of the bed,
+and his eyes roamed gloomily about the room.</p>
+
+<p>The photographs on the mantel-shelf attracted him presently. He rose and
+examined one representing Marlowe and Manderson on horseback. Two others
+were views of famous peaks in the Alps. There was a faded print of three
+youths&mdash;one of them unmistakably his acquaintance of the haggard blue
+eyes&mdash;clothed in tatterdemalion soldier's gear of the sixteenth century.
+Another was a portrait of a majestic old lady, slightly resembling
+Marlowe. Trent, mechanically taking a cigarette from an open box on the
+mantel-shelf, lit it and stared at the photographs. Next he turned his
+attention to a flat leathern case that lay by the cigarette-box.</p>
+
+<p>It opened easily. A small and light revolver of beautiful workmanship
+was disclosed, with a score or so of loose cartridges. On the stock were
+engraved the initials "J. M."</p>
+
+<p>A step was heard on the stairs, and as Trent opened the breech and
+peered into the barrel of the weapon, Inspector Murch appeared at the
+open door of the room. "I was wondering"&mdash;he began; then stopped as he
+saw what the other was about. His intelligent eyes opened slightly.
+"Whose is the revolver, Mr. Trent?" he asked in a conversational tone.</p>
+
+<p>"Evidently it belongs to the occupant of the room, Mr. Marlowe," replied
+Trent with similar lightness, pointing to the initials. "I found this
+lying about on the mantel-piece. It seems a handy little pistol to me,
+and it has been very carefully cleaned, I should say, since the last
+time it was used. But I know little about firearms."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I know a good deal," rejoined the inspector quietly, taking the
+revolver from Trent's outstretched hand. "It's a bit of a specialty with
+me, is firearms, as I think you know, Mr. Trent. But it don't require an
+expert to tell one thing." He replaced the revolver in its case on the
+mantel-shelf, took out one of the cartridges, and laid it on the
+spacious palm of one hand; then, taking a small object from his
+waistcoat pocket, he laid it beside the cartridge. It was a little
+leaden bullet, slightly battered about the nose, and having upon it some
+bright new scratches.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that <i>the</i> one?" Trent murmured as he bent over the inspector's
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>"That's him," replied Mr. Murch. "Lodged in the bone at the back of the
+skull. Dr. Stock got it out within the last hour, and handed it to the
+local officer, who has just sent it on to me. These bright scratches you
+see, were made by the doctor's instruments. These other marks were made
+by the rifling of the barrel&mdash;a barrel like this one." He tapped the
+revolver. "Same make, same caliber."</p>
+
+<p>With the pistol in its case between them, Trent and the inspector looked
+into each other's eyes for some moments. Trent was the first to speak.
+"This mystery is all wrong," he observed. "It is insanity. The symptoms
+of mania are very marked. Let us see how we stand. We were not in any
+doubt, I believe, about Manderson having despatched Marlowe in the car
+to Southampton, or about Marlowe having gone, returning late last night,
+many hours after the murder was committed."</p>
+
+<p>"There <i>is</i> no doubt whatever about all that," said Mr. Murch, with a
+slight emphasis on the verb.</p>
+
+<p>"And now," pursued Trent, "we are invited by this polished and
+insinuating firearm to believe the following line of propositions: that
+Marlowe never went to Southampton; that he returned to the house in the
+night; that he somehow, without waking Mrs. Manderson or anybody else,
+got Manderson to get up, dress himself, and go out into the grounds;
+that he then and there shot the said Manderson with his incriminating
+pistol; that he carefully cleaned the said pistol, returned to the house
+and, again without disturbing any one, replaced it in its case in a
+favorable position to be found by the officers of the law; that he then
+withdrew and spent the rest of the day in hiding&mdash;<i>with</i> a large
+motor-car; and that he turned up, feigning ignorance of the whole
+affair, at&mdash;what time was it?"</p>
+
+<p>"A little after nine <span class="smcap">p. m.</span>" The inspector still stared moodily
+at Trent. "As you say, Mr. Trent, that is the first theory suggested by
+this find, and it seems wild enough&mdash;at least it would do, if it didn't
+fall to pieces at the very start. When the murder was done Marlowe must
+have been fifty to a hundred miles away. He <i>did</i> go to Southampton."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know?"</p>
+
+<p>"I questioned him last night, and took down his story. He arrived in
+Southampton about six-thirty on the Monday morning."</p>
+
+<p>"Come off!" exclaimed Trent bitterly. "What do I care about his story?
+What do you care about his story? I want to know how you <i>know</i> he went
+to Southampton."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Murch chuckled. "I thought I should take a rise out of you, Mr.
+Trent," he said. "Well, there's no harm in telling you. After I arrived
+yesterday evening, as soon as I had got the outlines of the story from
+Mrs. Manderson and the servants, the first thing I did was to go to the
+telegraph office and wire to our people in Southampton. Manderson had
+told his wife when he went to bed that he had changed his mind, and sent
+Marlowe to Southampton to get some important information from someone
+who was crossing by the next day's boat. It seemed right enough; but you
+see, Marlowe was the only one of the household who wasn't under my hand,
+so to speak; he didn't return in the car until later in the evening; so
+before thinking the matter out any further, I wired to Southampton
+making certain inquiries. Early this morning I got this reply." He
+handed a series of telegraph slips to Trent, who read:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Person answering description in motor answering description arrived
+Bedford Hotel here 6:30 this morning gave name Marlowe left car
+hotel garage told attendant car belonged Manderson had bath and
+breakfast went out heard of later at docks inquiring for passenger
+name Harris on Havre boat inquired repeatedly until boat left at
+noon next heard of at hotel where he lunched about 1:15, left soon
+afterwards in car company's agents inform berth was booked name
+Harris last week but Harris did not travel by boat. Burke
+Inspector.</p></div>
+
+<p>"Simple and satisfactory," observed Mr. Murch as Trent, after twice
+reading the message, returned it to him. "His own story corroborated in
+every particular. He told me he hung about the dock for half an hour or
+so on the chance of Harris turning up late, then strolled back, lunched
+and decided to return at once. He sent a wire to Manderson: 'Harris not
+turned up missed boat returning Marlowe,' which was duly delivered here
+in the afternoon, and placed among the dead man's letters. He motored
+back at a good rate, and arrived dog-tired. When he heard of Manderson's
+death from Martin, he nearly fainted. What with that and the being
+without sleep for so long, he was rather a wreck when I came to
+interview him last night; but he was perfectly coherent."</p>
+
+<p>Trent picked up the revolver and twirled the cylinder idly for a few
+moments. "It was unlucky for Manderson that Marlowe left his pistol and
+cartridges about so carelessly," he remarked at length, as he put it
+back in the case. "It was throwing temptation in somebody's way, don't
+you think?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Murch shook his head. "There isn't really much to lay hold of about
+the revolver, when you come to think. That particular make of revolver
+is common enough in England. It was introduced from the States. Half the
+people who buy a revolver to-day for self-defense or mischief provide
+themselves with that make, of that caliber. It is very reliable, and
+easily carried in the hip-pocket. There must be thousands of them in the
+possession of crooks and honest men. For instance," continued the
+inspector with an air of unconcern, "Manderson himself had one, the
+double of this. I found it in one of the top drawers of the desk
+downstairs, and it's in my overcoat pocket now."</p>
+
+<p>"Aha! so you were going to keep that little detail to yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"I was," said the inspector, "but as you've found one revolver, you may
+as well know about the other. As I say, neither of them may do us any
+good. The people in the house&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Both men started, and the inspector checked his speech abruptly, as the
+half-closed door of the bedroom was slowly pushed open, and a man stood
+in the doorway. His eyes turned from the pistol in its open case to the
+faces of Trent and the inspector. They, who had not heard a sound to
+herald this entrance, simultaneously looked at his long, narrow feet. He
+wore rubber-soled tennis shoes.</p>
+
+<p>"You must be Mr. Bunner," said Trent.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>MR. BUNNER ON THE CASE</h3>
+
+
+<p>"Calvin C. Bunner, at your service," amended the newcomer, with a touch
+of punctilio, as he removed an unlighted cigar from his mouth. He was
+used to finding Englishmen slow and ceremonious with strangers, and
+Trent's quick remark plainly disconcerted him a little. "You are Mr.
+Trent, I expect," he went on. "Mrs. Manderson was telling me a while
+ago. Captain, good-morning." Mr. Murch acknowledged the greeting with a
+nod. "I was coming up to my room, and I heard a strange voice in here,
+so I thought I would take a look in." Mr. Bunner laughed easily. "You
+thought I might have been eavesdropping, perhaps," he said. "No, sir; I
+heard a word or two about a pistol&mdash;this one, I guess&mdash;and that's all."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bunner was a thin, rather short young man with a shaven, pale, bony,
+almost girlish face and large, dark, intelligent eyes. His waving dark
+hair was parted in the middle. His lips, usually occupied with a cigar,
+in its absence were always half open with a curious expression as of
+permanent eagerness. By smoking or chewing a cigar this expression was
+banished, and Mr. Bunner then looked the consummately cool and sagacious
+Yankee that he was.</p>
+
+<p>Born in Connecticut, he had gone into a broker's office on leaving
+college, and had attracted the notice of Manderson, whose business with
+his firm he had often handled. The Colossus had watched him for some
+time, and at length offered him the post of private secretary. Mr.
+Bunner was a pattern business man, trustworthy, long-headed, methodical
+and accurate. Manderson could have found many men with those virtues:
+but he engaged Mr. Bunner because he was also swift and secret, and had
+besides a singular natural instinct in regard to the movements of the
+stock market.</p>
+
+<p>Trent and the American measured one another coolly with their eyes. Both
+appeared satisfied with what they saw. "I was having it explained to
+me," said Trent pleasantly, "that my discovery of a pistol that might
+have shot Manderson does not amount to very much. I am told it is a
+favorite weapon among your people, and has become quite popular over
+here."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bunner stretched out a bony hand and took the pistol from its case.
+"Yes, sir," he said, handling it with an air of familiarity, "the
+captain is right. This is what we call out home a Little Arthur, and I
+dare say there are duplicates of it in a hundred thousand hip-pockets
+this minute. I consider it too light in the hand myself," Mr. Bunner
+went on, mechanically feeling under the tail of his jacket, and
+producing an ugly-looking weapon. "Feel of that, now, Mr. Trent&mdash;it's
+loaded, by the way. Now this Little Arthur&mdash;Marlowe bought it just
+before we came over this year, to please the old man. Manderson said it
+was ridiculous for a man to be without a pistol in the twentieth
+century. So he went out and bought what they offered him, I guess&mdash;never
+consulted me. Not but what it's a good gun," Mr. Bunner conceded,
+squinting along the sights. "Marlowe was poor with it at first, but I've
+coached him some in the last month or so, and he's practised until he is
+pretty good. But he never could get the habit of carrying it around.
+Why, it's as natural to me as wearing my pants. I have carried one for
+some years now, because there was always likely to be somebody laying
+for Manderson. And now," Mr. Bunner concluded sadly, "they got him when
+I wasn't around. Well, gentlemen, you must excuse me. I am going in to
+Bishopsbridge. There is a lot to do these days, and I have to send off a
+bunch of cables big enough to choke a cow."</p>
+
+<p>"I must be off, too," said Trent. "I have an appointment at the Three
+Tuns inn."</p>
+
+<p>"Let me give you a lift in the automobile," said Mr. Bunner cordially.
+"I go right by that joint. Say, Cap, are you coming my way, too? No?
+Then come along, Mr. Trent, and help me get out the car. The chauffeur
+is out of action, and we have to do 'most everything ourselves except
+clean the dirt off her."</p>
+
+<p>Still tirelessly talking in his measured drawl, Mr. Bunner led Trent
+downstairs and through the house to the garage at the back. It stood at
+a little distance from the house, and made a cool retreat from the blaze
+of the mid-day sun.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bunner seemed to be in no hurry to get out the car. He offered Trent
+a cigar, which was accepted, and for the first time lit his own. Then he
+seated himself on the foot-board of the car, his thin hands clasped
+between his knees, and looked keenly at the other.</p>
+
+<p>"See here, Mr. Trent," he said after a few moments. "There are some
+things I can tell you that may be useful to you. I know your record. You
+are a smart man, and I like dealing with smart men. I don't know if I
+have that detective sized up right, but he strikes me as a mutt. I would
+answer any questions he had the gumption to ask me&mdash;I have done so, in
+fact&mdash;but I don't feel encouraged to give him any notions of mine
+without his asking. See?"</p>
+
+<p>Trent nodded. "That is a feeling many people have in the presence of our
+police," he said. "It's the official manner, I suppose. But let me tell
+you Murch is anything but what you think. He is one of the shrewdest
+officers in Europe. He is not very quick with his mind, but he is very
+sure. And his experience is immense. My forte is imagination, but I
+assure you in police work experience outweighs it by a great deal."</p>
+
+<p>"Outweighs nothing!" replied Mr. Bunner crisply. "This is no ordinary
+case, Mr. Trent. I will tell you one reason why. I believe the old man
+knew there was something coming to him. Another thing. I believe it was
+something he thought he couldn't dodge."</p>
+
+<p>Trent pulled a crate opposite to Mr. Bunner's place on the foot-board
+and seated himself. "This sounds like business," he said. "Tell me your
+ideas."</p>
+
+<p>"I say what I do because of the change in the old man's manner this last
+few weeks. I dare say you have heard, Mr. Trent, that he was a man who
+always kept himself well in hand. That was so. I have always considered
+him the coolest and hardest head in business. That man's calm was just
+deadly&mdash;I never saw anything to beat it. And I knew Manderson as nobody
+else did. I was with him in the work he really lived for. I guess I knew
+him a heap better than his wife did, poor woman. I knew him better than
+Marlowe could&mdash;he never saw Manderson in his office when there was a big
+thing on. I knew him better than any of his friends."</p>
+
+<p>"Had he any friends?" interjected Trent.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bunner glanced at him sharply. "Somebody has been putting you next,
+I see that," he remarked. "No: properly speaking, I should say not. He
+had many acquaintances among the big men, people he saw 'most every day;
+they would even go yachting or hunting together. But I don't believe
+there ever was a man that Manderson opened a corner of his heart to. But
+what I was going to say was this: some months ago the old man began to
+get like I never knew him before&mdash;gloomy and sullen, just as if he was
+everlastingly brooding over something bad, something that he couldn't
+fix. This went on without any break; it was the same down town as it was
+up home, he acted just as if there was something lying heavy on his
+mind. But it wasn't until a few weeks back that his self-restraint began
+to go; and let me tell you this, Mr. Trent"&mdash;the American laid his bony
+claw on the other's knee&mdash;"I'm the only man that knows it. With everyone
+else he would be just morose and dull; but when he was alone with me in
+his office, or anywhere where we would be working together, if the least
+little thing went wrong, by George! he would fly off the handle to beat
+the Dutch. In this library here I have seen him open a letter with
+something that didn't just suit him in it, and he would rip around and
+carry on like an Indian, saying he wished he had the man that wrote it
+here, he wouldn't do a thing to him, and so on, till it was just
+pitiful. I never saw such a change. And here's another thing. For a week
+before he died Manderson neglected his work, for the first time in my
+experience. He wouldn't answer a letter or a cable, though things looked
+like going all to pieces over there. I supposed that this anxiety of
+his, whatever it was, had got onto his nerves till they were worn out.
+Once I advised him to see a doctor, and he told me to go to hell. But
+nobody saw this side of him but me. If he was having one of these rages
+in the library here, for example, and Mrs. Manderson would come into the
+room, he would be all calm and cold again in an instant."</p>
+
+<p>"And you put this down to some secret anxiety, a fear that somebody had
+designs on his life?" asked Trent.</p>
+
+<p>The American nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose," Trent resumed, "you had considered the idea of there being
+something wrong with his mind&mdash;a break-down from overstrain, say. That
+is the first thought that your account suggests to me. Besides, it is
+what is always happening to your big business men in America, isn't it?
+That is the impression one gets from the newspapers."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't let them slip you any of that bunk," said Mr. Bunner earnestly.
+"It's only the ones who have got rich too quick, and can't make good,
+who go crazy. Think of all our really big men&mdash;the men anywhere near
+Manderson's size: did you ever hear of any one of them losing his
+senses? They don't do it&mdash;believe <i>me</i>. I know they say every man has
+his loco point," Mr. Bunner added reflectively, "but that doesn't mean
+genuine, sure-enough craziness; it just means some personal eccentricity
+in a man ... like hating cats ... or my own weakness of not being able
+to touch any kind of fish-food."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what was Manderson's?"</p>
+
+<p>"He was full of them&mdash;the old man. There was his objection to all the
+unnecessary fuss and luxury that wealthy people don't kick at much, as a
+general rule. He didn't have any use for expensive trifles and
+ornaments. He wouldn't have anybody do little things for him; he hated
+to have servants tag around after him unless he wanted them. And
+although Manderson was as careful about his clothes as any man I ever
+knew, and his shoes&mdash;well, sir, the amount of money he spent on shoes
+was sinful&mdash;in spite of that, I tell you, he never had a valet. He never
+liked to have anybody touch him. All his life nobody ever shaved him."</p>
+
+<p>"I've heard something of that," Trent remarked. "Why was it, do you
+think?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Mr. Bunner answered slowly, "it was the Manderson habit of mind,
+I guess; a sort of temper of general suspicion and jealousy. They say
+his father and grandfather were just the same.... Like a dog with a
+bone, you know, acting as if all the rest of creation was laying for a
+chance to steal it. He didn't really <i>think</i> the barber would start in
+to saw his head off; he just felt there was a possibility that he
+<i>might</i>, and he was taking no risks. Then again in business he was
+always convinced that somebody else was after his bone&mdash;which was true
+enough a good deal of the time; but not all the time. The consequence of
+that was that the old man was the most cautious and secret worker in the
+world of finance; and that had a lot to do with his success, too.... But
+that doesn't amount to being a lunatic, Mr. Trent; not by a long way.
+You ask me if Manderson was losing his mind before he died. I say I
+believe he was just worn out with worrying over something, and was
+losing his nerve."</p>
+
+<p>Trent smoked thoughtfully. He wondered how much Mr. Bunner knew of the
+domestic difficulty in his chief's household, and decided to put out a
+feeler. "I understood that he had trouble with his wife."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure," replied Mr. Bunner. "But do you suppose a thing like that was
+going to upset Sig Manderson that way? No, sir! He was a sight too big a
+man to be all broken up by any worry of that kind."</p>
+
+<p>Trent looked half-incredulously into the eyes of the young man. But
+behind all their shrewdness and intensity he saw a massive innocence.
+Mr. Bunner really believed a serious breach between husband and wife to
+be a minor source of trouble for a big man.</p>
+
+<p>"What <i>was</i> the trouble between them?" Trent inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"You can search me," Mr. Bunner replied briefly. He puffed at his cigar.
+"Marlowe and I have often talked about it, and we could never make out a
+solution. I had a notion at first," said Mr. Bunner in a lower voice,
+leaning forward, "that the old man was disappointed and vexed because he
+had expected a child; but Marlowe told me that the disappointment on
+that score was the other way around, likely as not. His idea was all
+right, I guess; he gathered it from something said by Mrs. Manderson's
+French maid."</p>
+
+<p>Trent looked up at him quickly. "C&eacute;lestine!" he said; and his thought
+was: "So that was what she was getting at!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bunner misunderstood his glance. "Don't you think I'm giving a man
+away, Mr. Trent," he said. "Marlowe isn't that kind. C&eacute;lestine just took
+a fancy to him because he talks French like a native, and she would
+always be holding him up for a gossip. French servants are quite unlike
+English that way. And servant or no servant," added Mr. Bunner with
+emphasis, "I don't see how a woman could mention such a subject to a
+man. But the French beat me." He shook his head slowly.</p>
+
+<p>"But to come back to what you were telling me just now," Trent said.
+"You believe that Manderson was going in terror of his life for some
+time. Who should threaten it? I am quite in the dark."</p>
+
+<p>"Terror&mdash;I don't know," replied Mr. Bunner meditatively. "Anxiety, if
+you like ... or suspense&mdash;that's rather my idea of it. The old man was
+hard to terrify, anyway; and more than that, he wasn't taking any
+precautions&mdash;he was actually avoiding them. It looked more like he was
+asking for a quick finish&mdash;supposing there's any truth in my idea. Why,
+he would sit in that library window, nights, looking out into the dark,
+with his white shirt just a target for anybody's gun. As for who should
+threaten his life&mdash;well, sir," said Mr. Bunner with a faint smile, "it's
+certain you have not lived in the States. To take the Pennsylvania coal
+hold-up alone, there were thirty thousand men, with women and children
+to keep, who would have jumped at the chance of drilling a hole through
+the man who fixed it so that they must starve or give in to his terms.
+Thirty thousand of the toughest aliens in the country, Mr. Trent.
+There's a type of desperado you find in that kind of push who has been
+known to lay for a man for years, and kill him when he had forgotten
+what he did. They have been known to dynamite a man in Idaho who had
+done them dirt in New Jersey ten years before. Do you suppose the
+Atlantic is going to stop them?... It takes some sand, I tell you, to be
+a big business man in our country. No, sir: the old man knew&mdash;had always
+known&mdash;that there was a whole crowd of dangerous men scattered up and
+down the States who had it in for him. My belief is that he had somehow
+got to know that some of them were definitely after him at last. What
+licks me altogether is why he should have just laid himself open to them
+the way he did&mdash;why he never tried to dodge, but walked right down into
+the garden yesterday morning to be shot at."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bunner ceased to speak, and for a little while both men sat with
+wrinkled brows, faint blue vapors rising from their cigars. Then Trent
+rose. "Your theory is quite fresh to me," he said. "It's perfectly
+rational, and it's only a question of whether it fits all the facts. I
+mustn't give away what I'm doing for my newspaper, Mr. Bunner, but I
+will say this: I have already satisfied myself that this was a
+premeditated crime, and an extraordinarily cunning one at that. I'm
+deeply obliged to you. We must talk it over again." He looked at his
+watch. "I have been expected for some time by my friend. Shall we make a
+move?"</p>
+
+<p>"Two o'clock," said Mr. Bunner, consulting his own as he got up from the
+foot-board. "Ten <span class="smcap">a. m.</span> in little old New York. You don't know Wall
+Street, Mr. Trent. Let's you and I hope we never see anything nearer
+hell than what's loose in the Street this minute."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE LADY IN BLACK</h3>
+
+
+<p>The sea broke raging upon the foot of the cliff under a good breeze; the
+sun flooded the land with life from a dappled blue sky. In this
+perfection of English weather, Trent, who had slept ill, went down
+before eight o'clock to a pool among the rocks, the direction of which
+had been given him, and dived deep into clear water. Between vast gray
+boulders he swam out to the tossing open, forced himself some little way
+against a coast-wise current, and then returned to his refuge battered
+and refreshed. Ten minutes later he was scaling the cliff again, and his
+mind, cleared for the moment of a heavy disgust for the affair he had in
+hand, was turning over his plans for the morning.</p>
+
+<p>It was the day of the inquest, the day after his arrival in the place.
+He had carried matters not much farther after parting with the American
+on the road to Bishopsbridge. In the afternoon he had walked from the
+inn into the town, accompanied by Mr. Cupples, and had there made
+certain purchases at a chemist's shop, conferred privately for some time
+with a photographer, sent off a reply-paid telegram, and made an inquiry
+at the telephone-exchange. He had said but little about the case to Mr.
+Cupples, who seemed incurious on his side, and nothing at all about the
+results of his investigation or the steps he was about to take. After
+their return from Bishopsbridge, Trent had written a long dispatch for
+the <i>Record</i>, and sent it to be telegraphed by the proud hands of the
+paper's local representative.</p>
+
+<p>This morning as he scaled the cliff he told himself that he had never
+taken up a case he liked so little, or which absorbed him so much. The
+more he contemplated it in the golden sunshine of this new day, the more
+evil and the more challenging it appeared. All that he suspected and all
+that he almost knew had occupied his questing brain for hours to the
+exclusion of sleep; and in this glorious light and air, though washed in
+body and spirit by the fierce purity of the sea, he only saw the more
+clearly the darkness of the guilt in which he believed, and was more
+bitterly repelled by the motive at which he guessed. But now at least
+his zeal was awake again, and the sense of the hunt quickened. He would
+neither slacken nor spare; here need be no compunction. In the course of
+the day, he hoped, his net would be complete. He had work to do in the
+morning; and with very vivid expectancy, though not much serious hope,
+he awaited the answer to the telegram which he had shot into the sky, as
+it were, the day before.</p>
+
+<p>The path back to the hotel wound for some way along the top of the
+cliff, and on nearing a spot he had marked from the sea-level, where the
+face had fallen away long ago, he approached the edge and looked down,
+hoping to follow with his eyes the most delicately beautiful of all the
+movements of water, the wash of a light sea over broken rock. But no
+rock was there. A few feet below him a broad ledge stood out, a rough
+platform as large as a great room, thickly grown with wiry grass and
+walled in steeply on three sides. There, close to the verge where the
+cliff at last dropped sheer, a woman was sitting, her arms about her
+drawn-up knees, her eyes fixed on the trailing smoke of a distant liner,
+her face full of some dream.</p>
+
+<p>This woman seemed to Trent, whose training had taught him to live in his
+eyes, to make the most beautiful picture he had ever seen. Her face of
+Southern pallor, touched by the kiss of the wind with color on the
+cheek, presented to him a profile of delicate regularity in which there
+was nothing hard; nevertheless the black brows bending down toward the
+point where they almost met gave her in repose a look of something like
+severity, strangely redeemed by the open curves of the mouth. Trent said
+to himself that the absurdity or otherwise of a lover writing sonnets to
+his mistress's eyebrow depended after all on the quality of the eyebrow.
+Her nose was of the straight and fine sort, exquisitely escaping the
+perdition of too much length. Her hat lay pinned to the grass beside
+her, and the lively breeze played with her thick dark hair, blowing
+backward the two broad bandeaux that should have covered much of her
+forehead, and agitating a hundred tiny curls from the mass gathered at
+the nape.</p>
+
+<p>Everything about this lady was black, from her shoes of su&egrave;de to the hat
+that she had discarded; lusterless black covered her to her bare throat.
+All she wore was fine and well put on. Dreamy and delicate of spirit as
+her looks declared her, it was very plain that she was long-practised as
+only a woman grown can be in dressing well, the oldest of the arts, and
+had her touch of primal joy in the excellence of the body that was so
+admirably curved now in the attitude of embraced knees. With the
+suggestion of French taste in her clothes, she made a very modern figure
+seated there, until one looked at her face and saw the glow and triumph
+of all vigorous beings that ever faced sun and wind and sea together in
+the prime of the year. One saw, too, a womanhood unmixed and vigorous,
+unconsciously sure of itself.</p>
+
+<p>Trent, who had halted only for a moment in the surprise of seeing the
+woman in black, had passed by on the cliff above her, perceiving and
+feeling as he went the things set down. At all times his keen vision and
+active brain took in and tasted details with an easy swiftness that was
+marvelous to men of slower chemistry; the need to stare, he held, was
+evidence of blindness. Now the feeling of beauty was awakened and
+exultant, and doubled the power of his sense. In these instants a
+picture was printed on his memory that would never pass away.</p>
+
+<p>As he went by unheard on the turf the woman, still alone with her
+thoughts, suddenly moved. She unclasped her long hands from about her
+knees, stretched her limbs and body with feline grace, then slowly
+raised her head and extended her arms with open, curving fingers, as if
+to gather to her all the glory and overwhelming sanity of the morning.
+This was a gesture not to be mistaken: it was a gesture of freedom, the
+movement of a soul's resolution to be, to possess, to go forward,
+perhaps to enjoy.</p>
+
+<p>So he saw her for an instant as he passed, and he did not turn. He knew
+suddenly who the woman must be, and it was as if a curtain of gloom were
+drawn between him and the splendor of the day.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"You were planning to go to White Gables before the inquest, I think,"
+remarked Trent to Mr. Cupples as they finished their breakfast. "You
+ought to be off, if you are to get back to the court in time. I have
+something to attend to there myself, so we might walk up together. I
+will just go and get my camera."</p>
+
+<p>"By all means," Mr. Cupples answered; and they set off at once in the
+ever-growing warmth of the morning. The roof of White Gables, a surly
+patch of dull red against the dark trees, seemed to harmonize with
+Trent's mood; he felt heavy, sinister and troubled. If a blow must fall
+that might strike down that creature radiant of beauty and life whom he
+had seen that morning, he did not wish it to come from his hand. An
+exaggerated chivalry had lived in him since the first teachings of his
+mother; but at this moment the horror of bruising anything so lovely was
+almost as much the artist's revulsion as the gentleman's. On the other
+hand, was the hunt to end in nothing? The quality of the affair was such
+that the thought of forbearance was an agony. There never was such a
+case; and he alone, he was confident, held the truth of it under his
+hand. At least, he determined, that day should show whether what he
+believed was a delusion. He would trample his compunction underfoot
+until he was quite sure that there was any call for it. That same
+morning he would know.</p>
+
+<p>As they entered at the gate of the drive they saw Marlowe and the
+American standing in talk before the front door. In the shadow of the
+porch was the lady in black.</p>
+
+<p>She saw them, and came gravely forward over the lawn, moving as Trent
+had known that she would move, erect and balanced, stepping lightly.
+When she welcomed him on Mr. Cupples' presentation, her eyes of
+golden-flecked brown observed him kindly. In her pale composure, worn as
+the mask of distress, there was no trace of the emotion that had seemed
+a halo about her head on the ledge of the cliff. She spoke the
+appropriate commonplace in a low and even voice. After a few words to
+Mr. Cupples she turned her eyes on Trent again.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope you will succeed," she said earnestly. "Do you think you will
+succeed?"</p>
+
+<p>He made his mind up as the words left her lips. He said: "I believe I
+shall do so, Mrs. Manderson. When I have the case sufficiently complete
+I shall ask you to let me see you and tell you about it. It may be
+necessary to consult you before the facts are published."</p>
+
+<p>She looked puzzled, and distress showed for an instant in her eyes. "If
+it is necessary, of course you shall do so," she said.</p>
+
+<p>On the brink of his next speech Trent hesitated. He remembered that the
+lady had not wished to repeat to him the story already given to the
+inspector-or to be questioned at all. He was not unconscious that he
+desired to hear her voice and watch her face a little longer, if it
+might be; but the matter he had to mention really troubled his mind, it
+was a queer thing that fitted nowhere into the pattern within whose
+corners he had by this time brought the other queer things in the case.
+It was very possible that she could explain it away in a breath: it was
+unlikely that any one else could. He summoned his resolution.</p>
+
+<p>"You have been so kind," he said, "in allowing me access to the house
+and every opportunity of studying the case, that I am going to ask leave
+to put a question or two to yourself&mdash;nothing that you would rather not
+answer, I think. May I?"</p>
+
+<p>She glanced at him wearily. "It would be stupid of me to refuse. Ask
+your questions, Mr. Trent."</p>
+
+<p>"It's only this," said Trent hurriedly. "We know that your husband
+lately drew an unusually large sum of ready money from his London
+bankers, and was keeping it here. It is here now, in fact. Have you any
+idea why he should have done that?"</p>
+
+<p>She opened her eyes in astonishment. "I cannot imagine," she said. "I
+did not know he had done so. I am very much surprised to hear it."</p>
+
+<p>"Why is it surprising?"</p>
+
+<p>"I thought my husband had very little money in the house. On Sunday
+night, just before he went out in the motor, he came into the
+drawing-room where I was sitting. He seemed to be irritated about
+something, and asked me at once if I had any notes or gold I could let
+him have until next day. I was surprised at that, because he was never
+without money; he made it a rule to carry a hundred pounds or so about
+him always in a note-case. I unlocked my escritoire, and gave him all I
+had by me. It was nearly thirty pounds."</p>
+
+<p>"And he did not tell you why he wanted it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. He put it in his pocket, and then said that Mr. Marlowe had
+persuaded him to go for a run in the motor by moonlight, and he thought
+it might help him to sleep. He had been sleeping badly, as perhaps you
+know. Then he went off with Mr. Marlowe. I thought it odd he should need
+money on Sunday night, but I soon forgot about it. I never remembered it
+again until now."</p>
+
+<p>"It was curious, certainly," said Trent, staring into the distance. Mr.
+Cupples began to speak to his niece of the arrangements for the inquest,
+and Trent moved away to where Marlowe was pacing slowly upon the lawn.
+The young man seemed relieved to talk about the coming business of the
+day. Though he still seemed tired out and nervous, he showed himself not
+without a quiet humor in describing the pomposities of the local police
+and the portentous airs of Dr. Stock. Trent turned the conversation
+gradually toward the problem of the crime, and all Marlowe's gravity
+returned.</p>
+
+<p>"Bunner has told me what he thinks," he said when Trent referred to the
+American's theory. "I don't find myself convinced by it, because it
+doesn't really explain some of the oddest facts. But I have lived long
+enough in the United States to know that such a stroke of revenge, done
+in a secret, melodramatic way, is not an unlikely thing. It is quite a
+characteristic feature of certain sections of the labor movement there.
+Americans have a taste and a talent for that sort of business. Do you
+know 'Huckleberry Finn?'"</p>
+
+<p>"Do I know my own name?" exclaimed Trent.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I think the most American thing in that great American epic is
+Tom Sawyer's elaboration of an extremely difficult and romantic scheme,
+taking days to carry out, for securing the escape of the nigger Jim,
+which could have been managed quite easily in twenty minutes. You know
+how fond they are of lodges and brotherhoods. Every college club has its
+secret signs and handgrips. You've heard of the Know-Nothing movement in
+politics, I dare say, and the Ku Klux Klan. Then look at Brigham Young's
+penny-dreadful tyranny in Utah, with real blood. The founders of the
+Mormon state were of the purest Yankee stock in America; and you know
+what they did. It's all part of the same mental tendency. Americans make
+fun of it among themselves. For my part, I take it very seriously."</p>
+
+<p>"It can have a very hideous side to it, certainly," said Trent, "when
+you get it in connection with crime. Or with vice. Or even mere luxury.
+But I have a sort of sneaking respect for the determination to make life
+interesting and lively in spite of civilization. To return to the matter
+in hand, however: has it struck you as a possibility that Manderson's
+mind was affected to some extent by this menace that Bunner believes in?
+For instance, it was rather an extraordinary thing to send you posting
+off like that in the middle of the night."</p>
+
+<p>"About ten o'clock, to be exact," replied Marlowe. "Though mind you, if
+he'd actually roused me out of my bed at midnight I shouldn't have been
+very much surprised. It all chimes in with what we've just been saying.
+Manderson wasn't mad in the least, but he had a strong streak of the
+national taste for dramatic proceedings; he was rather fond of his
+well-earned reputation for unexpected strokes and for going for his
+object with ruthless directness through every opposing consideration. He
+had decided suddenly that he wanted to have word from this man Harris&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Who is Harris?" interjected Trent.</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody knows. Even Bunner never heard of him, and can't imagine what
+the business in hand was. All I know is that when I went up to London
+last week to attend to various things I booked a deck-cabin, at
+Manderson's request, for a Mr. George Harris on the boat that sailed on
+Monday. It seems that Manderson suddenly found he wanted news from
+Harris which presumably was of a character too secret for the telegraph;
+and there was no train that served; so I was sent off as you know."</p>
+
+<p>Trent looked round to make sure that they were not overheard, then faced
+the other gravely. "There is one thing I may tell you," he said quietly,
+"that I don't think you know. Martin the butler caught a few words at
+the end of your conversation with Manderson in the orchard before you
+started with him in the car. He heard him say: 'If Harris is there every
+moment is of importance.' Now, Mr. Marlowe, you know my business here. I
+am sent to make inquiries, and you mustn't take offense. I want to ask
+you if, in the face of that sentence, you will repeat that you know
+nothing of what the business was."</p>
+
+<p>Marlowe shook his head. "I know nothing, indeed. I'm not easily
+offended, and your question is quite fair. What passed during that
+conversation I have already told the detective. Manderson plainly said
+to me that he could not tell me what it was all about. He simply wanted
+me to find Harris, tell him that he desired to know how matters stood,
+and bring back a letter or message from him. Harris, I was further told,
+might not turn up. If he did, 'every moment was of importance.' And now
+you know as much as I do."</p>
+
+<p>"That talk took place <i>before</i> he told his wife that you were taking him
+for a moonlight run. Why did he conceal your errand in that way, I
+wonder."</p>
+
+<p>The young man made a gesture of helplessness. "Why? I can guess no
+better than you."</p>
+
+<p>"Why," muttered Trent as if to himself, gazing on the ground, "did he
+conceal it&mdash;from Mrs. Manderson?" He looked up at Marlowe.</p>
+
+<p>"And from Martin," the other amended coolly. "He was told the same
+thing."</p>
+
+<p>With a sudden movement of his head Trent seemed to dismiss the subject.
+He drew from his breast-pocket a letter-case, and thence extracted two
+small leaves of clean, fresh paper.</p>
+
+<p>"Just look at these two slips, Mr. Marlowe," he said. "Did you ever see
+them before? Have you any idea where they come from?" he added, as
+Marlowe took one in each hand and examined them curiously.</p>
+
+<p>"They seem to have been cut with a knife or scissors from a small diary
+for this year&mdash;from the October pages," Marlowe observed, looking them
+over on both sides. "I see no writing of any kind on them. Nobody here
+has any such diary so far as I know. What about them?"</p>
+
+<p>"There may be nothing in it," Trent said dubiously. "Any one in the
+house, of course, might have such a diary without your having seen it.
+But I didn't much expect you would be able to identify the leaves&mdash;in
+fact, I should have been surprised if you had."</p>
+
+<p>He stopped speaking as Mrs. Manderson came towards them. "My uncle
+thinks we should be going now," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"I think I will walk on with Mr. Bunner," Mr. Cupples said as he joined
+them. "There are certain business matters that must be disposed of as
+soon as possible. Will you come on with these two gentlemen, Mabel? We
+will wait for you before we reach the place."</p>
+
+<p>Trent turned to her. "Mrs. Manderson will excuse me, I hope," he said.
+"I really came up this morning in order to look about me here for some
+indications I thought I might possibly find. I had not thought of
+attending the&mdash;the court just yet."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with eyes of perfect candor. "Of course, Mr. Trent.
+Please do exactly as you wish. We are all relying upon you. If you will
+wait a few moments, Mr. Marlowe, I shall be ready."</p>
+
+<p>She entered the house. Her uncle and the American had already strolled
+towards the gate.</p>
+
+<p>Trent looked into the eyes of his companion. "That is a wonderful
+woman," he said in a lowered voice.</p>
+
+<p>"You say so without knowing her," replied Marlowe in a similar tone.
+"She is more than that."</p>
+
+<p>Trent said nothing to this. He stared out over the fields towards the
+sea. In the silence a noise of hobnailed haste rose on the still air. A
+little distance down the road a boy appeared trotting towards them from
+the direction of the hotel. In his hand was the orange envelope,
+unmistakable afar off, of a telegram. Trent watched him with a carefully
+indifferent eye as he met and passed the two others. Then he turned to
+Marlowe. "Apropos of nothing in particular," he said, "were you at
+Oxford?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said the young man. "Why do you ask?"</p>
+
+<p>"I just wondered if I was right in my guess. It's one of the things you
+can very often tell about a man, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so," Marlowe admitted. "Well, each of us is marked in one way
+or another, perhaps. I should have said you were an artist, if I hadn't
+known it."</p>
+
+<p>"Why? Does my hair want cutting?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no! It's only that you look at things and people as I've seen
+artists do, with an eye that moves steadily from detail to
+detail&mdash;rather looking them over than looking at them."</p>
+
+<p>The boy came up panting. "Telegram for you, sir," he said to Trent.
+"Just come, sir."</p>
+
+<p>Trent tore open the envelop with an apology, and his eyes lighted up so
+visibly as he read the slip that Marlowe's tired face softened in a
+smile.</p>
+
+<p>"It must be good news," he murmured half to himself.</p>
+
+<p>Trent turned on him a glance in which nothing could be read. "Not
+exactly news," he said. "It only tells me that another little guess of
+mine was a good one."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE INQUEST</h3>
+
+
+<p>The coroner, who fully realized that for that one day of his life as a
+provincial solicitor he was living in the gaze of the world, had
+resolved to be worthy of the fleeting eminence. He was a large man of
+jovial temper, with a strong interest in the dramatic aspects of his
+work, and the news of Manderson's mysterious death within his
+jurisdiction had made him the happiest coroner in England. A respectable
+capacity for marshaling facts was fortified in him by a copiousness of
+impressive language that made juries as clay in his hands and sometimes
+disguised a doubtful interpretation of the rules of evidence.</p>
+
+<p>The court was held in a long unfurnished room lately built onto the
+hotel, and intended to serve as a ball-room or concert-hall. A regiment
+of reporters was entrenched in the front seats, and those who were to be
+called on to give evidence occupied chairs to one side of the table
+behind which the coroner sat, while the jury, in double row, with
+plastered hair and a spurious ease of manner, flanked him on the other
+side. An undistinguished public filled the rest of the space, and
+listened, in an awed silence, to the opening solemnities. The newspaper
+men, well used to these, muttered among themselves. Those of them who
+knew Trent by sight, assured the rest that he was not in the court.</p>
+
+<p>The identity of the dead man was proved by his wife, the first witness
+called, from whom the coroner, after some inquiry into the health and
+circumstances of the deceased, proceeded to draw an account of the last
+occasion on which she had seen her husband alive. Mrs. Manderson was
+taken through her evidence by the coroner with the sympathy which every
+man felt for that dark figure of grief. She lifted her thick veil before
+beginning to speak, and the extreme paleness and unbroken composure of
+the lady produced a singular impression. This was not an impression of
+hardness. Interesting femininity was the first thing to be felt in her
+presence. She was not even enigmatic. It was only clear that the force
+of a powerful character was at work to master the emotions of her
+situation. Once or twice as she spoke she touched her eyes with her
+handkerchief, but her voice was low and clear to the end.</p>
+
+<p>Her husband, she said, had come up to his bedroom about his usual hour
+for retiring on the Sunday night. His room was really a dressing-room
+attached to her own bedroom, communicating with it by a door which was
+usually kept open during the night. Both dressing-room and bedroom were
+entered by other doors giving on the passage. Her husband had always had
+a preference for the greatest simplicity in his bedroom arrangements,
+and liked to sleep in a small room. She had not been awake when he came
+up, but had been half-aroused, as usually happened, when the light was
+switched on in her husband's room. She had spoken to him. She had no
+clear recollection of what she had said, as she had been very drowsy at
+the time; but she had remembered that he had been out for a moonlight
+run in the car, and she believed she had asked whether he had had a good
+run, and what time it was. She had asked what the time was because she
+felt as if she had only been a very short time asleep, and she had
+expected her husband to be out very late. In answer to her question he
+had told her it was half-past eleven, and had gone on to say that he had
+changed his mind about going for a run.</p>
+
+<p>"Did he say why?" the coroner asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," replied the lady, "he did explain why. I remember very well what
+he said, because&mdash;" she stopped with a little appearance of confusion.</p>
+
+<p>"Because&mdash;" the coroner insisted gently.</p>
+
+<p>"Because my husband was not as a rule communicative about his business
+affairs," answered the witness, raising her chin with a faint touch of
+defiance. "He did not&mdash;did not think they would interest me, and as a
+rule referred to them as little as possible. That is why I was rather
+surprised when he told me that he had sent Mr. Marlowe to Southampton to
+bring back some important information from a man who was leaving for
+Paris by the next day's boat. He said that Mr. Marlowe could do it quite
+easily if he had no accident. He said that he had started in the car,
+and then walked back home a mile or so, and felt all the better for it."</p>
+
+<p>"Did he say any more?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing, as well as I remember," the witness said. "I was very sleepy,
+and I dropped off again in a few moments. I just remember my husband
+turning his light out, and that is all. I never saw him again alive."</p>
+
+<p>"And you heard nothing in the night?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I never woke until my maid brought my tea in the morning at seven
+o'clock. She closed the door leading to my husband's room, as she always
+did, and I supposed him to be still there. He always needed a great deal
+of sleep. He sometimes slept until quite late in the morning. I had
+breakfast in my sitting-room. It was about ten when I heard that my
+husband's body had been found." The witness dropped her head and
+silently waited for her dismissal.</p>
+
+<p>But it was not to be yet.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Manderson." The coroner's voice was sympathetic, but it had a hint
+of firmness in it now. "The question I am going to put to you must, in
+these sad circumstances, be a painful one; but it is my duty to ask it.
+Is it the fact that your relations with your late husband had not been,
+for some time past, relations of mutual affection and confidence? Is it
+the fact that there was an estrangement between you?"</p>
+
+<p>The lady drew herself up again and faced her questioner, the color
+rising in her cheeks. "If that question is necessary," she said with
+cold distinctness, "I will answer it so that there shall be no
+misunderstanding. During the last few months of my husband's life his
+attitude towards me had given me great anxiety and sorrow. He had
+changed towards me; he had become very reserved and seemed mistrustful.
+I saw much less of him than before; he seemed to prefer to be alone. I
+can give no explanation at all of the change. I tried to work against
+it; I did all I could with justice to my own dignity, as I thought.
+Something was between us, I did not know what, and he never told me. My
+own obstinate pride prevented me from asking what it was in so many
+words; I only made a point of being to him exactly as I had always been,
+so far as he would allow me. I suppose I shall never know now what it
+was." The witness, whose voice had trembled in spite of her
+self-control, over the last few sentences, drew down her veil when she
+had said this, and stood erect and quiet.</p>
+
+<p>One of the jury asked a question, not without obvious hesitation. "Then
+was there never anything of the nature of what they call Words between
+you and your husband, ma'am?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never." The word was colorlessly spoken; but everyone felt that a crass
+misunderstanding of the possibilities of conduct in the case of a person
+like Mrs. Manderson had been visited with some severity.</p>
+
+<p>Did she know, the coroner asked, of any other matter which might have
+been preying upon her husband's mind recently?</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Manderson knew of none whatever. The coroner intimated that her
+ordeal was at an end, and the veiled lady made her way to the door. The
+general attention, which followed her for a few moments, was now eagerly
+directed upon Martin, whom the coroner had proceeded to call.</p>
+
+<p>It was at this moment that Trent appeared at the doorway, and edged his
+way into the great room. But he did not look at Martin. He was observing
+the well-balanced figure that came quickly toward him along an opening
+path in the crowd, and his eye was gloomy. He started, as he stood aside
+from the door with a slight bow, to hear Mrs. Manderson address him by
+name in a low voice. He followed her a pace or two into the hall.</p>
+
+<p>"I wanted to ask you," she said in a voice now weak and oddly broken,
+"if you would give me your arm a part of the way to the house. I could
+not see my uncle near the door, and I suddenly felt rather faint.... I
+shall be better in the air.... No, no! I cannot stay here&mdash;please, Mr.
+Trent!" she said, as he began to make an obvious suggestion. "I must go
+to the house." Her hand tightened momentarily on his arm as if, for all
+her weakness, she could drag him from the place; then again she leaned
+heavily upon it, and with that support, and with bent head, she walked
+slowly from the hotel and along the oak-shaded path toward White Gables.</p>
+
+<p>Trent went in silence, his thoughts whirling, dancing insanely to a
+chorus of "Fool! fool!" All that he alone knew, all that he guessed and
+suspected of this affair rushed through his brain in a rout; but the
+touch of her unnerved hand upon his arm never for an instant left his
+consciousness, filling him with an exaltation that enraged and
+bewildered him. He was still cursing himself furiously behind the mask
+of conventional solicitude that he turned to the lady when he had
+attended her to the house, and seen her sink upon a couch in the morning
+room. Raising her veil, she thanked him gravely and frankly, with a look
+of sincere gratitude in her eyes. She was much better now, she said, and
+a cup of tea would work a miracle upon her. She hoped she had not taken
+him away from anything important. She was ashamed of herself; she
+thought she could go through with it, but she had not expected those
+last questions. "I am glad you did not hear me," she said when he
+explained. "But of course you will read it all in the reports. It shook
+me so to have to speak of that," she added simply, "and to keep from
+making an exhibition of myself took it out of me. And all those staring
+men by the door! Thank you again for helping me when I asked you.... I
+thought I might," she ended queerly, with a little tired smile; and
+Trent took himself away, his hand still quivering from the cool touch of
+her fingers.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>A HOT SCENT</h3>
+
+
+<p>"Come in," called Trent.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples entered his sitting-room at the hotel. It was the early
+evening of the day on which the coroner's jury, without leaving the box,
+had pronounced the expected denunciation of a person or persons unknown.
+Trent, with a hasty glance upward, continued his intent study of what
+lay in a photographic dish of enameled metal, which he moved slowly
+about in the light of the window. He looked very pale and his movements
+were nervous.</p>
+
+<p>"Sit on the sofa," he advised. "The chairs are a job lot bought at the
+sale after the suppression of the Holy Inquisition in Spain. This is a
+pretty good negative," he went on, holding it up to the light with his
+head at the angle of discriminating judgment. "Washed enough now, I
+think. Let us leave it to dry, and get rid of all this mess."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples, as the other busily cleared the table of a confusion of
+basins, dishes, racks, boxes and bottles, picked up first one and then
+another of the objects and studied them with innocent curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>"That is called hypo-eliminator," said Trent as Mr. Cupples uncorked and
+smelled at one of the bottles. "Very useful when you're in a hurry with
+a negative. I shouldn't drink it, though, all the same. It eliminates
+sodium hypophosphite, but I shouldn't wonder if it would eliminate human
+beings too." He found a place for the last of the litter on the crowded
+mantel-shelf, and came to sit before Mr. Cupples on the table. "The
+great thing about a hotel sitting-room is that its beauty does not
+distract the mind from work. It is no place for the May-fly pleasures of
+a mind at ease. Have you ever been in this room before, Cupples? I have,
+hundreds of times. It has pursued me all over England for years. I
+should feel lost without it if, in some fantastic, far-off hotel, they
+were to give me some other sitting-room. Look at this table-cover; there
+is the ink I spilled on it when I had this room in Halifax. I burnt that
+hole in the carpet when I had it in Ipswich. But I see they have mended
+the glass over the picture of 'Silent Sympathy,' which I threw a boot at
+in Banbury. I do all my best work here. This afternoon, for instance,
+since the inquest, I have finished several excellent negatives. There is
+a very good dark-room downstairs."</p>
+
+<p>"The inquest&mdash;that reminds me," said Mr. Cupples, who knew that this
+sort of talk in Trent meant the excitement of action, and was wondering
+what he could be about. "I came in to thank you, my dear fellow, for
+looking after Mabel this morning. I had no idea she was going to feel
+ill after leaving the box; she seemed quite unmoved, and really she is a
+woman of such extraordinary self-command, I thought I could leave her to
+her own devices and hear out the evidence, which I thought it important
+I should do. It was a very fortunate thing she found a friend to assist
+her, and she is most grateful. She is quite herself again now."</p>
+
+<p>Trent, with his hands in his pockets and a slight frown on his brow,
+made no reply to this. "I tell you what," he said after a short pause,
+"I was just getting to the really interesting part of the job when you
+came in. Come: would you like to see a little bit of high-class police
+work? It's the very same kind of work that old Murch ought to be doing
+at this moment. Perhaps he is; but I hope to glory he isn't." He sprang
+off the table and disappeared into his bedroom. Presently he came out
+with a large drawing-board on which a number of heterogeneous objects
+was ranged.</p>
+
+<p>"First I must introduce you to these little things," he said, setting
+them out on the table. "Here is a big ivory paper-knife; here are two
+leaves cut out of a diary&mdash;my own diary; here is a bottle containing
+dentifrice; here is a little case of polished walnut. Some of these
+things have to be put back where they belong in somebody's bedroom at
+White Gables before night. That's the sort of man I am&mdash;nothing stops
+me. I borrowed them this very morning when everyone was down at the
+inquest, and I dare say some people would think it rather an odd
+proceeding if they knew. Now there remains one object on the board. Can
+you tell me, without touching it, what it is?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly I can," said Mr. Cupples, peering at it with great interest.
+"It is an ordinary glass bowl. It looks like a finger-bowl. I see
+nothing odd about it," he added after some moments of close scrutiny.</p>
+
+<p>"That," replied Trent, "is exactly where the fun comes in. Now take this
+little fat bottle, Cupples, and pull out the cork. Do you recognize that
+powder inside it? You have swallowed pounds of it in your time, I
+expect. They give it to babies. Gray powder is its ordinary
+name&mdash;mercury and chalk. It is great stuff. Now while I hold the basin
+side-ways over this sheet of paper, I want you to pour a little powder
+out of the bottle over this part of the bowl&mdash;just here.... Perfect! Sir
+Edward Henry himself could not have handled the powder better. You have
+done this before, Cupples, I can see. You are an old hand."</p>
+
+<p>"I really am not," said Mr. Cupples seriously, as Trent returned the
+fallen powder to the bottle. "I assure you it is all a complete mystery
+to me. What did I do then?"</p>
+
+<p>"I brush the powdered part of the bowl lightly with this camel-hair
+brush. Now look at it again. You saw nothing odd about it before. Do you
+see anything now?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples peered again. "How curious," he said. "Yes, there are two
+large gray finger-marks on the bowl. They were not there before."</p>
+
+<p>"I am Hawkshaw the detective," observed Trent. "Would it interest you to
+hear a short lecture on the subject of glass finger-bowls? When you take
+one up with your hand you leave traces upon it, usually practically
+invisible, which may remain for days or months. You leave the marks of
+your fingers. The human hand, even when quite clean, is never quite dry,
+and sometimes&mdash;in moments of great anxiety, for instance, Cupples&mdash;it is
+very moist. It leaves a mark on any cold smooth surface it may touch.
+That bowl was moved by somebody with a rather moist hand quite lately."
+He sprinkled the powder again. "Here on the other side, you see, is the
+thumb-mark&mdash;very good impressions all of them." He spoke without raising
+his voice, but Mr. Cupples could perceive that he was ablaze with
+excitement as he stared at the faint gray marks. "This one should be the
+index finger. I need not tell a man of your knowledge of the world that
+the pattern of it is a single-spiral whorl, with deltas symmetrically
+disposed. This, the print of the second finger, is a simple loop, with a
+staple core and fifteen counts. I know there are fifteen, because I have
+just the same two prints on this negative, which I have examined in
+detail. Look&mdash;!" he held one of the negatives up to the light of the
+declining sun and demonstrated with a pencil point. "You can see they're
+the same. You see the bifurcation of that ridge. There it is in the
+other. You see that little scar near the center. There it is in the
+other. There are a score of ridge-characteristics on which an expert
+would swear in the witness-box that the marks on that bowl and the marks
+I have photographed on this negative were made by the same hand."</p>
+
+<p>"And where did you photograph them? What does it all mean?" asked Mr.
+Cupples, wide-eyed.</p>
+
+<p>"I found them on the inside of the left-hand leaf of the front-window in
+Mrs. Manderson's bedroom. As I could not bring the window with me, I
+photographed them, sticking a bit of black paper on the other side of
+the glass for the purpose. The bowl comes from Manderson's room. It is
+the bowl in which his false teeth were placed at night. I could bring
+that away, so I did."</p>
+
+<p>"But those cannot be Mabel's finger-marks."</p>
+
+<p>"I should think not!" said Trent with decision. "They are twice the size
+of any print Mrs. Manderson could make."</p>
+
+<p>"Then they must be her husband's."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps they are. Now shall we see if we can match them once more? I
+believe we can." Whistling faintly, and very white in the face, Trent
+opened another small squat bottle containing a dense black powder.
+"Lamp-black," he explained. "Hold a bit of paper in your hand for a
+second or two, and this little chap will show you the pattern of your
+fingers." He carefully took up with a pair of tweezers one of the leaves
+cut from his diary, and held it out for the other to examine. No marks
+appeared on the leaf. He tilted some of the powder out upon one surface
+of the paper, then, turning it over, upon the other; then shook the leaf
+gently to rid it of the loose powder. He held it out to Mr. Cupples in
+silence. On one side of the paper appeared unmistakably, clearly printed
+in black, the same two finger-prints that he had already seen on the
+bowl and on the photographic plate. He took up the bowl and compared
+them. Trent turned the paper over, and on the other side was a bold
+black replica of the thumb-mark that was printed in gray on the glass in
+his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Same man, you see," Trent said with a short laugh. "I felt that it must
+be so, and now I know." He walked to the window and looked out. "Now I
+know," he repeated in a low voice, as if to himself. His tone was
+bitter. Mr. Cupples, understanding nothing, stared at his motionless
+back for a few moments.</p>
+
+<p>"I am still completely in the dark," he ventured presently. "I have
+often heard of this finger-print business, and wondered how the police
+went to work about it. It is of extraordinary interest to me, but upon
+my life I cannot see how in this case Manderson's finger-prints are
+going&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I am very sorry, Cupples," Trent broke in upon his meditative speech
+with a swift return to the table. "When I began this investigation I
+meant to take you with me every step of the way. You mustn't think I
+have any doubts about your discretion if I say now that I must hold my
+tongue about the whole thing, at least for a time. I will tell you this:
+I have come upon a fact that looks too much like having terrible
+consequences if it is discovered by any one else." He looked at the
+other with a hard and darkened face, and struck the table with his hand.
+"It is terrible for me here and now. Up to this moment I was hoping
+against hope that I was wrong about the fact. I may still be wrong in
+the surmise that I base upon that fact. There is only one way of finding
+out that is open to me, and I must nerve myself to take it." He smiled
+suddenly at Mr. Cupples' face of consternation. "All right&mdash;I'm not
+going to be tragic any more, and I'll tell you all about it when I can.
+Look here, I'm not half through my game with the powder-bottles yet."</p>
+
+<p>He drew one of the defamed chairs to the table and sat down to test the
+broad ivory blade of the paper knife. Mr. Cupples, swallowing his
+amazement, bent forward in an attitude of deep interest and handed Trent
+the bottle of lamp-black.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE WIFE OF DIVES</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mrs. Manderson stood at the window of her sitting-room at White Gables
+gazing out upon a wavering landscape of fine rain and mist. The weather
+had broken as it seldom does in that part in June. White wreathings
+drifted up the fields from the sullen sea; the sky was an unbroken gray
+deadness shedding pin-point moisture that was now and then blown against
+the panes with a crepitation of despair. The lady looked out on the dim
+and chilling prospect with a woeful face. It was a bad day for a woman
+bereaved, alone and without a purpose in life.</p>
+
+<p>There was a knock, and she called, "Come in!" drawing herself up with an
+unconscious gesture that always came when she realized that the
+weariness of the world had been gaining upon her spirit. Mr. Trent had
+called, the maid said; he apologized for coming at such an early hour,
+but hoped that Mrs. Manderson would see him on a matter of urgent
+importance. Mrs. Manderson would see Mr. Trent. She walked to a mirror,
+looked into the olive face she saw reflected there, shook her head at
+herself with the flicker of a grimace, and turned to the door as Trent
+was shown in.</p>
+
+<p>His appearance, she noted, was changed. He had the jaded look of the
+sleepless, and a new and reserved expression, in which her quick
+sensibilities felt something not propitious, took the place of his
+half-smile of fixed good-humor.</p>
+
+<p>"May I come to the point at once?" he said when she had given him her
+hand. "There is a train I ought to catch at Bishopsbridge at twelve
+o'clock, but I cannot go until I have settled this thing, which concerns
+you only, Mrs. Manderson. I have been working half the night, and
+thinking the rest; and I know now what I ought to do."</p>
+
+<p>"You look wretchedly tired," she said kindly. "Won't you sit down?&mdash;this
+is a very restful chair. Of course it is about this terrible business
+and your work as correspondent. Please ask me anything you think I can
+properly tell you, Mr. Trent. I know that you won't make it worse for me
+than you can help in doing your duty here. If you say you must see me
+about something, I know it must be because, as you say, you ought to do
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Manderson," said Trent, slowly measuring his words, "I won't make
+it worse for you than I can help. But I am bound to make it bad for
+you&mdash;only between ourselves, I hope. As to whether you can properly tell
+me what I shall ask you, you will decide that; but I tell you this on my
+word of honor: I shall ask you only as much as will decide me whether to
+publish or to withhold certain grave things that I have found out about
+your husband's death, things not suspected by any one else, nor, I
+think, likely to be so. What I have discovered&mdash;what I believe that I
+have practically proved&mdash;will be a great shock to you in any case. But
+it may be worse for you than that; and if you give me reason to think it
+would be so, then I shall destroy this manuscript"&mdash;he laid a long
+envelop on the small table beside him&mdash;"and nothing of what it has to
+tell shall ever be printed. It consists, I may tell you, of a short
+private note to my editor, followed by a long despatch for publication
+in the <i>Record</i>. Now you may refuse to say anything to me. If you do
+refuse, my duty to my employers, as I see it, is to take this up to
+London with me to-day and leave it with my editor to be dealt with at
+his discretion. My view is, you understand, that I am not entitled to
+suppress it on the strength of a mere possibility that presents itself
+to my imagination. But if I gather from you&mdash;and I can gather it from no
+other person&mdash;that there is substance in that imaginary possibility I
+speak of, then I have only one thing to do as a gentleman and as one
+who"&mdash;he hesitated for a phrase&mdash;"wishes you well. I shall suppress that
+despatch of mine. In some directions I decline to assist the police.
+Have you followed me so far?" he asked with a touch of anxiety in his
+careful coldness; for her face, but for its pallor, gave no sign as she
+regarded him, her hands clasped before her and her shoulders drawn back
+in a pose of rigid calm. She looked precisely as she had looked at the
+inquest.</p>
+
+<p>"I understand quite well," said Mrs. Manderson in a low voice. She drew
+a deep breath, and went on: "I don't know what dreadful thing you have
+found out, or what the possibility that has occurred to you can be, but
+it was good&mdash;it was honorable of you to come to me about it. Now will
+you please tell me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot do that," Trent replied. "The secret is my newspaper's, if it
+is not yours. If I find it is yours, you shall have my manuscript to
+read and destroy. Believe me," he broke out with something of his old
+warmth, "I detest such mystery-making from the bottom of my soul, but it
+is not I who have made this mystery. This is the most painful hour of my
+life, and you make it worse by not treating me like a hound. The first
+thing I ask you to tell me"&mdash;he reverted with an effort to his colorless
+tone&mdash;"is this: is it true, as you stated at the inquest, that you had
+no idea at all of the reason why your late husband had changed his
+attitude toward you, and become mistrustful and reserved, during the
+last few months of his life?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Manderson's dark brows lifted and her eyes flamed; she quickly rose
+from her chair. Trent got up at the same moment, and took his envelop
+from the table; his manner said that he perceived the interview to be at
+an end. But she held up a hand, and there was color in her cheeks and
+quick breathing in her voice as she said: "Do you know what you ask, Mr.
+Trent? You ask me if I perjured myself."</p>
+
+<p>"I do," he answered unmoved; and he added after a pause: "You knew
+already that I had not come here to preserve the polite fictions, Mrs.
+Manderson. The theory that no reputable person, being on oath, could
+withhold a part of the truth under any circumstances is a polite
+fiction." He still stood as awaiting dismissal; but she was silent. She
+walked to the window, and he stood miserably watching the slight
+movement of her shoulders until it subsided. Then with face averted,
+looking out on the dismal weather, she spoke at last clearly.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Trent," she said, "you inspire confidence in people, and I feel
+that things which I don't want known or talked about are safe with you.
+And I know you must have a very serious reason for doing what you are
+doing, though I don't know what it is. I suppose it would be assisting
+justice in some way if I told you the truth about what you asked me just
+now. To understand that truth you ought to know about what went before;
+I mean about my marriage. After all, a good many people could tell you
+as well as I can that it was not ... a very successful union. I was only
+twenty. I admired his force and courage and certainty; he was the only
+strong man I had ever known. But it did not take me long to find out
+that he cared for his business more than for me, and I think I found out
+even sooner that I had been deceiving myself and blinding myself,
+promising myself impossible things and wilfully misunderstanding my own
+feelings, because I was dazzled by the idea of having more money to
+spend than an English girl ever dreams of. I have been despising myself
+for that for five years. My husband's feeling for me ... well, I cannot
+speak of that ... what I want to say is that along with it there had
+always been a belief of his that I was the sort of woman to take a great
+place in society, and that I should throw myself into it with enjoyment
+and become a sort of personage and do him great credit&mdash;that was his
+idea; and the idea remained with him after other delusions had
+gone. I was a part of his ambition. That was his really bitter
+disappointment&mdash;that I failed him as a social success. I think he was
+too shrewd not to have known in his heart that such a man as he was,
+twenty years older than I, with great business responsibilities that
+filled every hour of his life, and caring for nothing else&mdash;he must have
+felt that there was a risk of great unhappiness in marrying the sort of
+girl I was, brought up to music and books and unpractical ideas, always
+enjoying myself in my own way. But he had really reckoned on me as a
+wife who would do the honors of his position in the world; and I found I
+couldn't."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Manderson had talked herself into a more emotional mood than she
+had yet shown to Trent. Her words flowed freely, and her voice had begun
+to ring and give play to a natural expressiveness that must hitherto
+have been dulled, he thought, by the shock and self-restraint of the
+past few days. Now she turned swiftly from the window and faced him as
+she went on, her beautiful face flushed and animated, her eyes gleaming,
+her hands moving in slight emphatic gestures, as she surrendered herself
+to the impulse of giving speech to things long pent up.</p>
+
+<p>"The people!" she said. "Oh, those people! Can you imagine what it must
+be for any one who has lived in a world where there was always creative
+work in the background, work with some dignity about it, men and women
+with professions or arts to follow, with ideals and things to believe in
+and quarrel about, some of them wealthy, some of them quite poor,&mdash;can
+you think what it means to step out of that into another world where you
+<i>have</i> to be very rich, shamefully rich, to exist at all&mdash;where money is
+the only thing that counts and the first thing in everybody's
+thoughts&mdash;where the men who make the millions are so jaded by the work
+that sport is the only thing they can occupy themselves with when they
+have any leisure, and the men who don't have to work are even duller
+than the men who do, and vicious as well; and the women live for display
+and silly amusements and silly immoralities&mdash;do you know how awful that
+life is?... Of course I know there are clever people and people of taste
+in that set, but they're swamped and spoiled, and it's the same thing in
+the end&mdash;empty, empty! Oh! I suppose I'm exaggerating, and I did make
+friends and have some happy times; but that's how I feel after it all.
+The seasons in New York and London! How I hated them! And our
+house-parties and cruises in the yacht and the rest&mdash;the same people,
+the same emptiness!</p>
+
+<p>"And you see, don't you, that my husband couldn't have an idea of all
+this? <i>His</i> life was never empty. He did not live it in society, and
+when he was in society he had always his business plans and difficulties
+to occupy his mind. He hadn't a suspicion of what I felt, and I never
+let him know&mdash;I couldn't; it wouldn't have been fair. I felt I must do
+<i>something</i> to justify myself as his wife, sharing his position and
+fortune; and the only thing I could do was to try, and try, to live up
+to his idea about my social qualities.... I did try. I acted my best.
+And it became harder year by year.... I never was what they call a
+popular hostess&mdash;how could I be? I was a failure; but I went on
+trying.... I used to steal holidays now and then. I used to feel as if I
+was not doing my part of a bargain&mdash;it sounds horrid to put it like
+that, I know, but it <i>was</i> so&mdash;when I took one of my old school-friends,
+who couldn't afford to travel, away to Italy for a month or two, and we
+went about cheaply all by ourselves and were quite happy; or when I went
+and made a long stay in London with some quiet people who had known me
+all my life, and we all lived just as in the old days, when we had to
+think twice about seats at the theater, and told each other about cheap
+dress-makers. Those and a few other expeditions of the same sort were my
+best times after I was married, and they helped me to go through with it
+the rest of the time. But I felt my husband would have hated to know how
+much I enjoyed every hour of those returns to the old life.</p>
+
+<p>"And in the end, in spite of everything I could do, he came to
+know.... He could see through anything, I think, once his attention was
+turned to it. He had always been able to see that I was not fulfilling
+his idea of me as a figure in the social world, and I suppose he thought
+it was my misfortune rather than my fault. But the moment he began to
+see, in spite of my pretending, that I wasn't playing my part with any
+spirit, he knew the whole story; he divined how I loathed and was weary
+of the luxury and the brilliancy and the masses of money just because
+of the people who lived among them&mdash;who were made so by them, I
+suppose.... It happened last year. I don't know just how or when. It may
+have been suggested to him by some woman&mdash;for <i>they</i> all understood, of
+course. He said nothing to me, and I think he tried not to change in his
+manner to me at first; but such things hurt&mdash;and it was working in both
+of us. I knew that he knew. After a time we were just being polite and
+considerate to each other. Before he found me out we had been on a
+footing of&mdash;how can I express it to you?&mdash;of intelligent companionship,
+I might say. We talked without restraint of many things of the kind we
+could agree or disagree about without its going very deep ... if you
+understand. And then that came to an end. I felt that the only possible
+basis of our living in each other's company was going under my feet. And
+at last it was gone.</p>
+
+<p>"It had been like that," she ended simply, "for months before he died."
+She sank into the corner of a sofa by the window, as though relaxing her
+body after an effort. For a few moments both were silent. Trent was
+hastily sorting out a tangle of impressions. He was amazed at the
+frankness of Mrs. Manderson's story. He was amazed at the vigorous
+expressiveness in her telling of it. In this vivid being, carried away
+by an impulse to speak, talking with her whole personality, he had seen
+the real woman in a temper of activity, as he had already seen the real
+woman by chance in a temper of reverie and unguarded emotion. In both
+she was very unlike the pale, self-disciplined creature of majesty that
+she had been to the world. With that amazement of his went something
+like terror of her dark beauty, which excitement kindled into an
+appearance scarcely mortal in his eyes. Incongruously there rushed into
+his mind, occupied as it was with the affair of the moment, a little
+knot of ideas ... she was unique not because of her beauty but because
+of its being united with intensity of nature; in England all the very
+beautiful women were placid, all the fiery women seemed to have burnt up
+the best of their beauty; that was why no beautiful woman had ever cast
+this sort of spell on him before; when it was a question of wit in women
+he had preferred the brighter flame to the duller, without much
+regarding the lamp. "All this is very disputable," said his reason; and
+instinct answered, "Yes&mdash;except that I am under a spell"; and a deeper
+instinct cried out, "Away with it!" He forced his mind back to her
+story, and found growing swiftly in him an irrepressible conviction. It
+was all very fine; but it would not do.</p>
+
+<p>"I feel as if I had led you into saying more than you meant to say, or
+than I wanted to learn," he said slowly. "But there is one brutal
+question which is the whole point of my inquiry." He braced his frame
+like one preparing for a plunge into cold waters. "Mrs. Manderson, will
+you assure me that your husband's change toward you had nothing to do
+with John Marlowe?"</p>
+
+<p>And what he had dreaded came. "Oh!" she cried with a sound of anguish,
+her face thrown up and open hands stretched out as if for pity; and then
+the hands covered the burning face, and she flung herself aside among
+the cushions at her elbow, so that he saw nothing but her heavy crown of
+black hair and her body moving with sobs that stabbed his heart, and a
+foot turned inward gracefully in an abandonment of misery. Like a tall
+tower suddenly breaking apart she had fallen in ruins, helplessly
+weeping.</p>
+
+<p>Trent stood up, his face white and calm. With a senseless particularity
+he placed his envelop exactly in the center of the little polished
+table. He walked to the door, closed it noiselessly as he went out, and
+in a few minutes was tramping through the rain out of sight of White
+Gables, going nowhere, seeing nothing, his soul shaken in the fierce
+effort to kill and trample the raving impulse that had seized him in the
+presence of her shame, that clamored to him to drag himself before her
+feet, to pray for pardon, to pour out words&mdash;he knew not what words, but
+he knew that they had been straining at his lips&mdash;to wreck his
+self-respect forever, and hopelessly defeat even the crazy purpose that
+had almost possessed him, by drowning her wretchedness in disgust, by
+babbling with the tongue of infatuation to a woman with a husband not
+yet buried, to a woman who loved another man.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the magic of her tears, quickening in a moment the thing which,
+as his heart had known, he must not let come to life. For Philip Trent
+was a young man, younger in nature even than his years, and a way of
+life that kept his edge keen and his spirit volcanic had prepared him
+very ill for the meeting that comes once in the early manhood of most of
+us, usually&mdash;as in his case, he told himself harshly&mdash;to no purpose but
+the testing of virtue and the power of the will.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3>"HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED"</h3>
+
+
+<p>(<i>Being the report which was not sent to the Record.</i>)</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Marlstone, June 16th.</i></p>
+
+<p>My Dear Molloy: This is in case I don't find you at your office. I
+have found out who killed Manderson, as this despatch will show.
+That was my problem; yours is to decide what use to make of it. It
+definitely charges an unsuspected person with having a hand in the
+crime, and practically accuses him of being the murderer, so I
+don't suppose you will publish it before his arrest, and I believe
+it is illegal to do so afterwards until he has been tried and found
+guilty. You may decide to publish it then; and you may find it
+possible to make some use or other before then of the facts I have
+given. That is your affair. Meanwhile, will you communicate with
+Scotland Yard, and let them see what I have written? I have done
+with the Manderson mystery, and I wish to God I had never touched
+it. Here follows my despatch.</p>
+
+<p>P. T.</p></div>
+
+<p>I begin this, my third and probably my final despatch to the <i>Record</i>
+upon the Manderson murder, with conflicting feelings. I have a strong
+sense of relief, because in my two previous despatches I was obliged, in
+the interests of justice, to withhold facts ascertained by me which
+would, if published then, have put a certain person upon his guard and
+possibly have led to his escape; for he is a man of no common boldness
+and resource. Those facts I shall now set forth. But I have, I confess,
+no liking for the story of treachery and perverted cleverness which I
+have to tell. It leaves an evil taste in the mouth, a savor of something
+revolting in the deeper puzzle of motive underlying the puzzle of the
+crime itself, which I believe I have solved.</p>
+
+<p>It will be remembered that in my first despatch I described the
+situation as I found it on reaching this place early on Tuesday morning.
+I told how the body was found, and in what state; dwelt upon the
+complete mystery surrounding the crime and mentioned one or two local
+theories about it; gave some account of the dead man's domestic
+surroundings; and furnished a somewhat detailed description of his
+movements on the evening before his death. I gave, too, a little fact
+which may or may not have seemed irrelevant: that a quantity of whisky
+much larger than Manderson habitually drank at night had disappeared
+from his private decanter since the last time he was seen alive. On the
+following day, the day of the inquest, I wired little more than an
+abstract of the proceedings in the coroner's court, of which a verbatim
+report was made at my request by other representatives of the <i>Record</i>;
+and it will be remembered that the police evidence showed that two
+revolvers, with either of which the crime might have been committed, had
+been found&mdash;one in Manderson's bureau and the other in the room of the
+secretary, Marlowe; but that no importance could be attached to this, as
+the weapons were of an extremely popular make. I write these lines in
+the last hours of the same day; and I have now completed an
+investigation which has led me directly to the man who must be called
+upon to clear himself of the guilt of the death of Manderson.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from the central mystery of Manderson's having arisen long before
+his usual hour to go out and meet his death, there were two minor points
+of oddity about this affair which, I suppose, must have occurred to
+thousands of those who have read the accounts in the newspapers; points
+apparent from the very beginning. The first of these was that, whereas
+the body was found at a spot not thirty yards from the house, all the
+people of the house declared that they had heard no cry or other noise
+in the night. Manderson had not been gagged; the marks on his wrists
+pointed to a struggle with his assailant; and there had been at least
+one pistol-shot. (I say at least one, because it is the fact that in
+murders with firearms, especially if there has been a struggle, the
+criminal commonly misses his victim at least once.) This odd fact seemed
+all the more odd to me when I learned that Martin, the butler, was a bad
+sleeper, very keen of hearing, and that his bedroom, with the window
+open, faced almost directly toward the shed by which the body was found.</p>
+
+<p>The second odd little fact that was apparent from the outset was
+Manderson's leaving his dental plate by the bedside. It appeared that he
+had risen and dressed himself fully, down to his necktie and watch and
+chain, and had gone out-of-doors without remembering to put in this
+plate, which he had carried in his mouth every day for years, and which
+contained all the visible teeth of the upper jaw. It had evidently not
+been a case of frantic hurry; and even if it had been, he would have
+been more likely to forget almost anything than this denture. Any one
+who wears such a removable plate will agree that the putting it in on
+rising is a matter of second nature. Speaking as well as eating, to say
+nothing of appearances, depend upon it.</p>
+
+<p>Neither of these queer details, however, seemed to lead to anything at
+the moment. They only awakened in me a suspicion of something lurking in
+the shadows, something that lent more mystery to the already mysterious
+question how and why and through whom Manderson met his end.</p>
+
+<p>With this much of preamble I come at once to the discovery which, in the
+first few hours of my investigation, set me upon the path which so much
+ingenuity had been directed to concealing.</p>
+
+<p>I have already described Manderson's bedroom, the rigorous simplicity of
+its furnishings, contrasted so strangely with the multitude of clothes
+and shoes, and the manner of its communication with Mrs. Manderson's
+room. On the upper of the two long shelves on which the shoes were
+ranged I found, where I had been told I should find them, the pair of
+patent leather shoes which Manderson had worn on the evening before his
+death. I had glanced over the row, not with any idea of their giving me
+a clue, but merely because it happens that I am a judge of shoes, and
+all these shoes were of the very best workmanship.</p>
+
+<p>But my attention was at once caught by a little peculiarity in this
+particular pair. They were the lightest kind of lace-up dress shoes,
+very thin in the sole, without toe-caps, and beautifully made, like all
+the rest. These shoes were old and well-worn; but being carefully
+polished and fitted, as all the shoes were, upon their trees, they
+looked neat enough. What caught my eye was a slight splitting of the
+leather in that part of the upper known as the vamp, a splitting at the
+point where the two laced parts of the shoe rise from the upper. It is
+at this point that the strain comes when a tight shoe of this sort is
+forced upon the foot, and it is usually guarded with a strong stitching
+across the bottom of the opening. In both the shoes I was examining this
+stitching had parted, and the leather below had given way. The splitting
+was a tiny affair in each case, not an eighth of an inch long, and the
+torn edges having come together again on the removal of the strain,
+there was nothing that a person who was not something of a connoisseur
+of shoe-leather would have noticed. Even less noticeable, and indeed not
+to be seen at all unless one were looking for it, was a slight straining
+of the stitches uniting the upper to the sole. At the toe and on the
+outer side of each shoe this stitching had been dragged until it was
+visible on a close inspection of the joining.</p>
+
+<p>These indications, of course, could mean only one thing. The shoes had
+been worn by someone for whom they were too small.</p>
+
+<p>Now it was clear at a glance that Manderson was always thoroughly well
+shod and careful, perhaps a little vain, of his small and narrow feet.
+Not one of the other shoes in the collection, as I soon ascertained,
+bore similar marks; they had not belonged to a man who squeezed himself
+into tight shoe-leather. Someone who was not Manderson had worn these
+shoes, and worn them recently; the edges of the tears were quite fresh.</p>
+
+<p>The possibility of someone having worn them since Manderson's death was
+not worth considering; the body had only been found about twenty-six
+hours when I was examining the shoes; besides, why should any one wear
+them? The possibility of someone having borrowed Manderson's shoes and
+spoiled them for him, while he was alive, seemed about as negligible.
+With others to choose from he would not have worn these. Besides, the
+only men in the place were the butler and the two secretaries. But I do
+not say that I gave those possibilities even as much consideration as
+they deserved; for my thoughts were running away with me; and I have
+always found it good policy, in cases of this sort, to let them have
+their heads. Ever since I had got out of the train at Marlstone early
+that morning I had been steeped in details of the Manderson affair; the
+thing had not once been out of my head. Suddenly the moment had come
+when the d&aelig;mon wakes and begins to range.</p>
+
+<p>Let me put it less fancifully. After all, it is a detail of psychology
+familiar enough to all whose business or inclination brings them in
+contact with difficult affairs of any sort. Swiftly and spontaneously,
+when chance or effort puts one in possession of the key-fact in any
+system of baffling circumstances, one's ideas seem to rush to group
+themselves anew in relation to that fact, so that they are suddenly
+rearranged almost before one has consciously grasped the significance of
+the key-fact itself. In the present instance, my brain had scarcely
+formulated within itself the thought, 'Somebody who was not Manderson
+has been wearing those shoes,' when there flew into my mind a flock of
+ideas, all of the same character and all bearing upon this new notion.
+It was unheard-of for Manderson to drink much whisky at night. It was
+very unlike him to be untidily dressed, as the body was when found&mdash;the
+cuffs dragged up inside the sleeves, the shoes unevenly laced; very
+unlike him not to wash, when he rose, and to put on last night's evening
+shirt and collar and underclothing; very unlike him to have his watch in
+the waistcoat pocket that was not lined with leather for its reception.
+(In my first despatch I mentioned all these points, but neither I nor
+any one else saw anything significant in them, when examining the body.)
+It was very strange, in the existing domestic situation, that Manderson
+should be communicative to his wife about his doings, especially at the
+time of his going to bed, when he seldom spoke to her at all. It was
+extraordinary that Manderson should leave his bedroom without his false
+teeth.</p>
+
+<p>All these thoughts, as I say, came flocking into my mind together, drawn
+from various parts of my memory of the morning's inquiries and
+observations. They had all presented themselves, in far less time than
+it takes to read them as set down here, as I was turning over the shoes,
+confirming my own certainty on the main point. And yet when I confronted
+the definite idea that had sprung up suddenly and unsupported before
+me,&mdash;<i>It was not Manderson who was in the house that night</i>&mdash;it seemed a
+stark absurdity at the first formulating. It was certainly Manderson who
+had dined at the house and gone out with Marlowe in the car. People had
+seen him at close quarters. But was it he who returned at ten? That
+question too seemed absurd enough. But I could not set it aside. It
+seemed to me as if a faint light was beginning to creep over the whole
+expanse of my mind, as it does over land at dawn, and that presently the
+sun would be rising. I set myself to think over, one by one, the points
+that had just occurred to me, so as to make out, if possible, why any
+man masquerading as Manderson should have done these things that
+Manderson would not have done.</p>
+
+<p>I had not to cast about very long for the motive a man might have in
+forcing his feet into Manderson's narrow shoes. The examination of
+footmarks is very well understood by the police. But not only was the
+man concerned to leave no footmarks of his own. He was concerned to
+leave Manderson's, if any; his whole plan, if my guess was right, must
+have been directed to producing the belief that Manderson was in the
+place that night. Moreover, his plan did not turn upon leaving
+footmarks. He meant to leave the shoes themselves, and he did so. The
+maidservant had found them outside the bedroom door, as Manderson always
+left his shoes, and had polished them, replacing them on the
+shoe-shelves later in the morning, after the body had been found.</p>
+
+<p>When I came to consider in this new light the leaving of the false
+teeth, an explanation of what had seemed the maddest part of the affair
+broke upon me at once. A dental plate is not inseparable from its owner.
+If my guess was right, the unknown had brought the denture to the house
+with him, and left it in the bedroom, with the same object as he had in
+leaving the shoes; to make it impossible that any one should doubt that
+Manderson had been in the house and had gone to bed there. This, of
+course, led me to the inference that <i>Manderson was dead before the
+false Manderson came to the house</i>; and other things confirmed this.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, the clothing, to which I now turned in my review of the
+position: if my guess was right, the unknown in Manderson's shoes had
+certainly had possession of Manderson's trousers, waistcoat and shooting
+jacket. They were there before my eyes in the bedroom; and Martin had
+seen the jacket&mdash;which nobody could have mistaken&mdash;upon the man who sat
+at the telephone in the library. It was now quite plain (if my guess was
+right) that this unmistakable garment was a cardinal feature of the
+unknown's plan. He knew that Martin would take him for Manderson at the
+first glance.</p>
+
+<p>And there my thinking was interrupted by the realization of a thing that
+had escaped me before. So strong had been the influence of the
+unquestioned assumption that it was Manderson who was present that
+night, that neither I nor, so far as I know, any one else had noted the
+point. <i>Martin had not seen the man's face; nor had Mrs. Manderson.</i></p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Manderson (judging by her evidence at the inquest, of which, as I
+have said, I had a full report made by the <i>Record</i> stenographers in
+court) had not seen the man at all. She hardly could have done, as I
+shall show presently. She had merely spoken with him as she lay half
+asleep, resuming a conversation which she had had with her living
+husband about an hour before. Martin, I perceived, could only have seen
+the man's back, as he sat crouching over the telephone; no doubt a
+characteristic pose was imitated there. And the man had worn his hat,
+Manderson's broad-brimmed hat! There is too much character in the back
+of a head and neck. The unknown, in fact, supposing him to have been of
+about Manderson's build, had had no need for any disguise, apart from
+the jacket and the hat and his powers of mimicry.</p>
+
+<p>I paused there to contemplate the coolness and ingenuity of the man. The
+thing, I now began to see, was so safe and easy, provided that his
+mimicry was good enough, and that his nerve held. Those two points
+assured, only some wholly unlikely accident could unmask him.</p>
+
+<p>To come back to my puzzling out of the matter as I sat in the dead man's
+bedroom with the tell-tale shoes before me:&mdash;the reason for the entrance
+by the window instead of by the front-door will already have occurred to
+any one reading this. Entering by the door, the man would almost
+certainly have been heard by the sharp-eared Martin in his pantry just
+across the hall; he might have met him face to face.</p>
+
+<p>Then there was the problem of the whisky. I had not attached much
+importance to it; whisky will sometimes vanish in very queer ways in a
+household of eight or nine persons; but it had seemed strange that it
+should go in that way on that evening. Martin had been plainly quite
+dumfounded by the fact. It seemed to me now that many a man&mdash;fresh, as
+this man in all likelihood was, from a bloody business, from the
+unclothing of a corpse, and with a desperate part still to play&mdash;would
+turn to that decanter as to a friend. No doubt he had a drink before
+sending for Martin; after making that trick with ease and success, he
+probably drank more.</p>
+
+<p>But he had known when to stop. The worst part of the enterprise was
+before him, the business&mdash;clearly of such vital importance to him, for
+whatever reason&mdash;of shutting himself in Manderson's room and preparing a
+mass of convincing evidence of its having been occupied by Manderson;
+and this with the risk&mdash;very slight, as no doubt he understood, but how
+unnerving!&mdash;of the woman on the other side of the half-open door awaking
+and somehow discovering him. True, if he kept out of her limited field
+of vision from the bed, she could only see him by getting up and going
+to the door. I found that to a person lying in her bed, which stood with
+its head to the wall a little beyond the door, nothing was visible
+through the doorway but one of the cupboards by Manderson's bed-head.
+Moreover, since this man knew the ways of the household, he would think
+it most likely that Mrs. Manderson was asleep. Another point with him, I
+guessed, might have been the estrangement between the husband and wife,
+which they had tried to cloak by keeping up, among other things, their
+usual practice of sleeping in connected rooms, but which was well known
+to all who had anything to do with them. He would hope from this that if
+Mrs. Manderson heard him, she would take no notice of the supposed
+presence of her husband.</p>
+
+<p>So, pursuing my hypothesis, I followed the unknown up to the bedroom,
+and saw him setting about his work. And it was with a catch in my own
+breath that I thought of the hideous shock with which he must have heard
+the sound of all others he was dreading most: the drowsy voice from the
+adjoining room.</p>
+
+<p>What Mrs. Manderson actually said, she was unable to recollect at the
+inquest. She thinks she asked her supposed husband whether he had had a
+good run in the car. And now what does the unknown do? Here, I think, we
+come to a supremely significant point. Not only does he&mdash;standing rigid
+there, as I picture him, before the dressing-table, listening to the
+sound of his own leaping heart&mdash;not only does he answer the lady in the
+voice of Manderson; he volunteers an explanatory statement. He tells her
+that he has, on a sudden inspiration, sent Marlowe in the car to
+Southampton; that he has sent him to bring back some important
+information from a man leaving for Paris by the steamboat that morning.
+Why these details from a man who had long been uncommunicative to his
+wife, and that upon a point scarcely likely to interest her? Why these
+details <i>about Marlowe</i>?</p>
+
+<p>Having taken my story so far, I now put forward the following definite
+propositions: that between a time somewhere about ten, when the car
+started, and a time somewhere about eleven, Manderson was shot&mdash;probably
+at a considerable distance from the house, as no shot was heard; that
+the body was brought back, left by the shed, and stripped of its outer
+clothing, while the car was left in hiding somewhere at hand; that at
+some time round about eleven o'clock a man who was not Manderson,
+wearing Manderson's shoes, hat and jacket, entered the library by the
+garden-window; that he had with him Manderson's black trousers,
+waistcoat and motor-coat, the denture taken from Manderson's mouth, and
+the weapon with which he had been murdered; that he concealed these,
+rang the bell for the butler, and sat down at the telephone with his hat
+on and his back to the door; that he was occupied with the telephone all
+the time Martin was in the room; that on going up to the bedroom-floor
+he quietly entered Marlowe's room and placed the revolver with which the
+crime had been committed&mdash;Marlowe's revolver&mdash;in the case on the
+mantel-piece from which it had been taken; and that he then went to
+Manderson's room, placed Manderson's shoes outside the door, threw
+Manderson's garments on a chair, placed the denture in the bowl by the
+bedside, and selected a suit of clothes, a pair of shoes and a tie from
+those in the bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>Here I will pause in my statement of this man's proceedings to go into a
+question for which the way is now sufficiently prepared.</p>
+
+<p><i>Who was the false Manderson?</i></p>
+
+<p>Reviewing what was known to me, or might almost with certainty be
+surmised, about that person, I set down the following five conclusions:</p>
+
+<p>(1) He had been in close relations with the dead man. In his acting
+before Martin and his speaking to Mrs. Manderson he had made no mistake.</p>
+
+<p>(2) He was of a build not unlike Manderson's, especially as to height
+and breadth of shoulder, which mainly determine the character of the
+back of a seated figure when the head is concealed and the body loosely
+clothed. But his feet were larger, though not greatly larger, than
+Manderson's.</p>
+
+<p>(3) He had considerable aptitude for mimicry and acting&mdash;probably some
+experience too.</p>
+
+<p>(4) He had a minute acquaintance with the ways of the Manderson
+household.</p>
+
+<p>(5) He was under a vital necessity of creating the belief that Manderson
+was alive and in that house until some time after midnight on the Sunday
+night.</p>
+
+<p>So much I took as either certain or next door to it. It was as far as I
+could see. And it was far enough.</p>
+
+<p>I proceed to give, in an order corresponding with the numbered
+paragraphs above, such relevant facts as I was able to obtain about Mr.
+John Marlowe, from himself and other sources.</p>
+
+<p>(1) He had been Manderson's private secretary, upon a footing of great
+intimacy, for nearly three years.</p>
+
+<p>(2) The two men were nearly of the same height, about five feet, eleven
+inches; both were powerfully built and heavy in the shoulder; Marlowe,
+who was the younger by some twenty years, was slighter about the body,
+though Manderson was a man in good physical condition. Marlowe's shoes
+(of which I examined several pairs) were roughly about one shoemaker's
+size longer and broader than Manderson's.</p>
+
+<p>(3) In the afternoon of the first day of my investigation, after
+arriving at the results already detailed, I sent a telegram to a
+personal friend, a fellow of a college at Oxford, whom I knew to be
+interested in theatrical matters, in these terms:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Please wire John Marlowe's record in connection with acting at
+Oxford some time past decade very urgent and confidential.</p></div>
+
+<p>My friend replied in the following telegram, which reached me next
+morning (the morning of the inquest):</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Marlowe was member O.U.D.S. for three years and president 19&mdash;
+played Bardolph Cleon and Mercutio excelled in character acting and
+imitations in great demand at smokers was hero of some historic
+hoaxes.</p></div>
+
+<p>I had been led to send the telegram which brought this very helpful
+answer by seeing on the mantel-shelf in Marlowe's bedroom a photograph
+of himself and two others in the costume of Falstaff's three followers,
+with an inscription from <i>The Merry Wives</i>, and by noting that it bore
+the imprint of an Oxford firm of photographers.</p>
+
+<p>(4) During his connection with Manderson, Marlowe had lived as one of
+the family. No other person, apart from the servants, had his
+opportunities for knowing the domestic life of the Mandersons in detail.</p>
+
+<p>(5) I ascertained beyond doubt that Marlowe arrived at a hotel in
+Southampton on the Monday morning at six-thirty, and there proceeded to
+carry out the commission which, according to his story, and to the
+statement made to Mrs. Manderson in the bedroom by the false Manderson,
+had been entrusted to him by his employer. He had then returned in the
+car to Marlstone, where he had shown great amazement and horror at the
+news of the murder.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>These, I say, are the relevant facts about Marlowe. We must now examine
+fact number <i>five</i> (as set out above) in connection with conclusion
+number <i>five</i> about the false Manderson.</p>
+
+<p>I would first draw attention to one important fact. <i>The only person who
+professed to have heard Manderson mention Southampton at all before he
+started in the car was Marlowe.</i> His story&mdash;confirmed to some extent by
+what the butler overheard&mdash;was that the journey was all arranged in a
+private talk before they set out, and he could not say, when I put the
+question to him, why Manderson should have concealed his intentions by
+giving out that he was going with Marlowe for a moonlight drive. This
+point, however, attracted no attention. Marlowe had an absolutely
+air-tight alibi in his presence at Southampton by six-thirty; nobody
+thought of him in connection with a murder which must have been
+committed after twelve-thirty&mdash;the hour at which Martin, the butler, had
+gone to bed. But it was the Manderson who came back from the drive who
+went out of his way to mention Southampton openly to two persons. <i>He
+even went so far as to ring up a hotel at Southampton and ask questions
+which bore out Marlowe's story of his errand.</i> This was the call he was
+busy with when Martin was in the library.</p>
+
+<p>Now let us consider the alibi. If Manderson was in the house that night,
+and if he did not leave it until some time after twelve-thirty, Marlowe
+could not by any possibility have had a direct hand in the murder. It is
+a question of the distance between Marlstone and Southampton. If he had
+left Marlstone in the car at the hour when he is supposed to have done
+so&mdash;between ten and ten-thirty&mdash;with a message from Manderson, the run
+would be quite an easy one to do in the time. But it would be physically
+impossible for the car&mdash;a fifteen horse-power four-cylinder
+Northumberland, an average medium-power car&mdash;to get to Southampton by
+half-past six unless it left Marlstone by midnight at latest. Motorists
+who will examine the road-map and make the calculations required, as I
+did in Manderson's library that day, will agree that on the facts as
+they appeared there was absolutely no case against Marlowe.</p>
+
+<p>But even if they were not as they appeared; if Manderson was dead by
+eleven o'clock, and if at about that time Marlowe impersonated him at
+White Gables; if Marlowe retired to Manderson's bedroom&mdash;how can all
+this be reconciled with his appearance next morning at Southampton? <i>He
+had to get out of the house, unseen and unheard, and away in the car by
+midnight.</i> And Martin, the sharp-eared Martin, was sitting up until
+twelve-thirty in his pantry, with the door open, listening for the
+telephone bell. Practically he was standing sentry over the foot of the
+staircase, the only staircase leading down from the bedroom floor.</p>
+
+<p>With this difficulty we arrive at the last and crucial phase of my
+investigation. Having the foregoing points clearly in mind, I spent the
+rest of the day before the inquest in talking to various persons and in
+going over my story, testing it link by link. I could only find the one
+weakness which seemed to be involved in Martin's sitting up until
+twelve-thirty; and since his having been instructed to do so was
+certainly a part of the plan, meant to clinch the alibi for Marlowe, I
+knew there must be an explanation somewhere. If I could not find that
+explanation my theory was valueless. I must be able to show that at the
+time Martin went up to bed, the man who had shut himself in Manderson's
+bedroom might have been many miles away on the road to Southampton.</p>
+
+<p>I had, however, a pretty good idea already&mdash;as perhaps the reader of
+these lines has by this time, if I have made myself clear&mdash;of how the
+escape of the false Manderson before midnight had been contrived. But I
+did not want what I was now about to do to be known. If I had chanced to
+be discovered at work, there would have been no concealing the direction
+of my suspicions. I resolved not to test them on this point until the
+next day, during the opening proceedings at the inquest. This was to be
+held, I knew, at the hotel, and I reckoned upon having White Gables to
+myself so far as the principal inmates were concerned.</p>
+
+<p>So in fact it happened. By the time the proceedings at the hotel had
+begun, I was hard at work at White Gables. I had a camera with me. I
+made search, on principles well known to and commonly practised by the
+police, and often enough by myself, for certain indications. Without
+describing my search, I may say at once that I found and was able to
+photograph two fresh finger-prints, very large and distinct, on the
+polished front of the right-hand top drawer of the chest of drawers in
+Manderson's bedroom; five more (among a number of smaller and less
+recent impressions made by other hands) on the glasses of the French
+window in Mrs. Manderson's room, a window which always stood open at
+night with a curtain before it; and three more upon the glass bowl in
+which Manderson's dental plate had been found lying.</p>
+
+<p>I took the bowl with me from White Gables. I took also a few articles
+which I selected from Marlowe's bedroom, as bearing the most distinct of
+the innumerable finger-prints which are always to be found upon
+toilet-articles in daily use. I already had in my possession, made upon
+leaves cut from my pocket diary, some excellent finger-prints of
+Marlowe's, which he had made in my presence without knowing it. I had
+shown him the leaves, asking if he recognized them; and the few seconds
+during which he had held them in his fingers had sufficed to leave
+impressions which I was afterward able to bring out.</p>
+
+<p>By six o'clock in the evening, two hours after the jury had brought in
+their verdict against a person or persons unknown, I had completed my
+work, and was in a position to state that two of the five large prints
+made on the window-glasses, and the three on the bowl, were made by the
+left hand of Marlowe; that the remaining three on the window and the two
+on the drawer were made by his right hand.</p>
+
+<p>By eight o'clock I had made at the establishment of Mr. H. T. Copper,
+photographer, of Bishopsbridge, and with his assistance, a dozen
+enlarged prints of the finger-marks of Marlowe, clearly showing the
+identity of those which he unknowingly made in my presence and those
+left upon articles in his bedroom, with those found by me as I have
+described, and thus establishing the facts that Marlowe was recently in
+Manderson's bedroom, where he had in the ordinary way no business, and
+in Mrs. Manderson's room, where he had still less. I hope it may be
+possible to reproduce these prints for publication with this despatch.</p>
+
+<p>At nine o'clock I was back in my room at the hotel and sitting down to
+begin this manuscript. I had my story complete.</p>
+
+<p>I bring it to a close by advancing these further propositions: that on
+the night of the murder the impersonator of Manderson, being in
+Manderson's bedroom, told Mrs. Manderson, as he had already told Martin,
+that Marlowe was at that moment on his way to Southampton; that having
+made his dispositions in the room, he switched off the light, and lay in
+the bed in his clothes; that he waited until he was assured that Mrs.
+Manderson was asleep; that he then arose and stealthily crossed Mrs.
+Manderson's bedroom in his stocking feet, having under his arm the
+bundle of clothing and shoes for the body; that he stepped behind the
+curtain, pushing the doors of the window a little further open with his
+hands, strode over the iron railing of the balcony, and let himself down
+until only a drop of a few feet separated him from the soft turf of the
+lawn.</p>
+
+<p>All this might very well have been accomplished within half an hour of
+his entering Manderson's bedroom, which according to Martin he did at
+about half-past eleven.</p>
+
+<p>What followed your readers and the authorities may conjecture for
+themselves. The corpse was found next morning clothed&mdash;rather untidily.
+Marlowe in the car appeared at Southampton by half-past six.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I bring this manuscript to an end in my sitting-room at the hotel at
+Marlstone. It is four o'clock in the morning. I leave for London by the
+noon train from Bishopsbridge. By this evening these pages will be in
+your hands, and I ask you to communicate the substance of them to the
+Criminal Investigation Department.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Philip Trent.</span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3>EVIL DAYS</h3>
+
+
+<p>"I am returning the check you sent for what I did on the Manderson
+case," Trent wrote to Sir James Molloy from Munich, whither he had gone
+immediately after handing in at the <i>Record</i> office a brief despatch
+bringing his work on the case to an unexciting close. "What I sent you
+wasn't worth one-tenth of the amount; but I should have no scruple about
+pocketing it, if I hadn't taken a fancy&mdash;never mind why&mdash;not to touch
+any money at all for this business. I should like you, if there is no
+objection, to pay for the stuff at your ordinary space-rate, and hand
+the money to some charity which does not devote itself to bullying
+people, if you know of any such. I have come to this place to see some
+old friends and arrange my ideas, and the idea that comes out upper-most
+is that for a little while I want some employment with activity in it. I
+find I can't paint at all; I couldn't paint a fence. Will you try me as
+your Own Correspondent somewhere? If you can find me a good adventure I
+will send you good accounts. After that I could settle down and work."</p>
+
+<p>Sir James sent him instructions by telegram to proceed at once to
+Kurland and Livonia, where Citizen Browning was abroad again, and town
+and country-side blazed in revolt. It was a roving commission, and for
+two months Trent followed his luck. It served him not less well than
+usual. He was the only correspondent who saw General Dragilew killed in
+the street at Volmar by a girl of eighteen. He saw burnings, lynchings,
+fusillades, hangings; each day his soul sickened afresh at the
+imbecilities born of misrule. Many nights he lay down in danger. Many
+days he went fasting. But there was never an evening or a morning when
+he did not see the face of the woman whom he hopelessly loved.</p>
+
+<p>He discovered in himself an unhappy pride at the lasting force of this
+infatuation. It interested him as a phenomenon; it amazed and
+enlightened him. Such a thing had not visited him before; it confirmed
+so much that he had found dubious in the recorded experience of men.</p>
+
+<p>It was not that, at thirty-two, he could pretend to ignorance of this
+world of emotion. About his knowledge, let it be enough to say that what
+he had learned had come unpursued and unpurchased, and was without
+intolerable memories; broken to the realities of sex, he was still
+troubled by its inscrutable history; he went through life full of a
+strange respect for certain feminine weakness and a very simple terror
+of certain feminine strength. He had held to a rather lukewarm faith
+that something remained in him to be called forth, and that the voice
+that should call would be heard in its own time, if ever, and not
+through any seeking.</p>
+
+<p>But he had not thought of the possibility that, if this proved true some
+day, the truth might come in a sinister shape. The two things that had
+taken him utterly by surprise in the matter of his feeling towards Mabel
+Manderson were the insane suddenness of its uprising in full strength
+and its extravagant hopelessness. Before it came, he had been much
+disposed to laugh at the permanence of unrequited passion as a generous
+boyish delusion. He knew now that he had been wrong, and he was living
+bitterly in the knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Before the eye of his fancy the woman always came just as she was when
+he had first had sight of her, with the gesture which he had surprised
+as he walked past unseen on the edge of the cliff; that great gesture of
+passionate joy in her new liberty which had told him more plainly than
+speech that her widowhood was a release from torment, and had confirmed
+with terrible force the suspicion, active in his mind before, that it
+was her passport to happiness with a man whom she loved. He could not
+with certainty name to himself the moment when he had first suspected
+that it might be so. The seed of the thought must have been sown, he
+believed, at his first meeting with Marlowe; his mind would have noted
+automatically that such evident strength and grace, with the sort of
+looks and manners that the tall young man possessed, might go far with
+any woman of unfixed affections. And the connection of this with what
+Mr. Cupples had told him of the Mandersons' married life must have
+formed itself in the unconscious depths of his mind. Certainly it had
+presented itself as an already established thing when he began, after
+satisfying himself of the identity of the murderer, to cast about for
+the motive of the crime. Motive, motive! How desperately he had sought
+for another, turning his back upon that grim thought, that
+Marlowe&mdash;obsessed by passion like himself, and privy perhaps to
+maddening truths about the wife's unhappiness&mdash;had taken a leaf, the
+guiltiest, from the book of Bothwell. But in all his investigations at
+the time, in all his broodings on the matter afterwards, he had been
+able to discover nothing else that could prompt Marlowe to such a
+deed&mdash;nothing but that temptation, the whole strength of which he could
+not know, but which if it had existed must have pressed urgently upon a
+bold spirit in which scruple had been somehow paralyzed. If he could
+trust his senses at all, the young man was neither insane nor by nature
+evil. But that could not clear him. Murder for a woman's sake, he
+thought, was not a rare crime, Heaven knew! If the modern feebleness of
+impulse in the comfortable classes, and their respect for the modern
+apparatus of detection, had made it rare among them, it was yet far from
+impossible; it only needed a man of equal daring and intelligence, his
+soul drugged with the vapors of an intoxicating intrigue, to plan and
+perform such a deed.</p>
+
+<p>A thousand times, with a heart full of anguish, he had sought to reason
+away the dread that Mabel Manderson had known too much of what had been
+intended against her husband's life. That she knew all the truth after
+the thing was done, he could not doubt; her unforgettable collapse in
+his presence when the question about Marlowe was suddenly and bluntly
+put had swept away his last hope that there was no love between the
+pair, and had seemed to him, moreover, to speak of dread of discovery.
+In any case, she knew the truth after reading what he had left with her;
+and it was certain that no public suspicion had been cast upon Marlowe
+since. She had destroyed his manuscript, then, and taken him at his word
+to keep the secret that threatened her lover's life.</p>
+
+<p>But it was the monstrous thought that she might have known murder was
+brewing, and guiltily kept silence, that haunted Trent's mind. She might
+have suspected, have guessed something; was it conceivable that she was
+aware of the whole plot, that she connived? He could never forget that
+his first suspicion of Marlowe's motive in the crime had been roused by
+the fact that his escape was made through the lady's room. At that time,
+when he had not yet seen her, he had been ready enough to entertain the
+idea of her equal guilt and her co&ouml;peration. He had figured to himself
+some passionate <i>hyst&eacute;rique</i>, merciless as a tiger in her hate and her
+love, a zealous abettor, perhaps even the ruling spirit in the crime.</p>
+
+<p>Then he had seen her, had spoken with her, had helped her in her
+weakness; and such suspicions, since their first meeting, had seemed the
+vilest of infamy. He had seen her eyes and her mouth; he had breathed
+the woman's atmosphere. Trent was one of those who fancy they can scent
+true wickedness in the air. In her presence he had felt an inward
+certainty of her ultimate goodness of heart; and it was nothing against
+this, that she had abandoned herself a moment, that day on the cliff, to
+the sentiment of relief at the ending of her bondage, of her years of
+starved sympathy and unquickened motherhood. That she had turned to
+Marlowe in her destitution he believed; that she had any knowledge of
+his deadly purpose he did not believe.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, morning and evening, the sickening doubts returned, and he
+recalled again that it was almost in her very presence that Marlowe had
+made his preparations in the bedroom of the murdered man, that it was
+from the window of her own chamber that he had escaped from the house.
+Had he forgotten his cunning and taken the risk of telling her then? Or
+had he, as Trent thought more likely, still played his part with her
+then, and stolen off while she slept? He did not think she had known of
+the masquerade when she gave evidence at the inquest; it read like
+honest evidence. Or&mdash;the question would never be silenced, though he
+scorned it&mdash;had she lain expecting the footstep in the room and the
+whisper that should tell her it was done? Among the foul possibilities
+of human nature, was it possible that black ruthlessness and black
+deceit as well were hidden behind that good and straight and gentle
+seeming?</p>
+
+<p>These thoughts would scarcely leave him when he was alone.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Trent served Sir James, well earning his pay, for six months, and then
+returned to Paris, where he went to work again with a better heart. His
+powers had returned to him, and he began to live more happily than he
+had expected among a tribe of strangely-assorted friends, French,
+English and American, artists, poets, journalists, policemen,
+hotel-keepers, soldiers, lawyers, business men and others. His old
+faculty of sympathetic interest in his fellows won for him, just as in
+his student days, privileges seldom extended to the Briton. He enjoyed
+again the rare experience of being taken into the bosom of a Frenchman's
+family. He was admitted to the momentous confidence of <i>les jeunes</i>, and
+found them as sure that they had surprised the secrets of art and life
+as the departed <i>jeunes</i> of ten years before had been.</p>
+
+<p>One morning in June, as he descended the slope of the Rue des Martyrs,
+he saw approaching a figure that he remembered. He glanced quickly
+round, for the thought of meeting Mr. Bunner again was unacceptable. For
+some time he had recognized that his wound was healing under the spell
+of creative work; he thought less often of the woman he loved, and with
+less pain. He would not have the memory of those three days re-opened.</p>
+
+<p>But the straight and narrow thoroughfare offered no refuge, and the
+American saw him almost at once.</p>
+
+<p>His unforced geniality made Trent ashamed, for he had liked the man.
+They sat long over a meal, and Mr. Bunner talked. Trent listened to him,
+now that he was in for it, with genuine pleasure, now and then
+contributing a question or remark. Besides liking his companion, he
+enjoyed his conversation for its own sake.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bunner was, it appeared, resident in Paris as the chief Continental
+agent of the Manderson firm, and fully satisfied with his position and
+prospects. He discoursed on these for some twenty minutes. This subject
+at length exhausted, he went on to tell Trent, who confessed that he had
+been away from England for a year, that Marlowe had shortly after the
+death of Manderson entered his father's business, which was now again in
+a flourishing state, and had already come to be virtually in control of
+it. They had kept up their intimacy, and were even now planning a
+holiday for the summer. Mr. Bunner spoke with generous admiration of his
+friend's talent for affairs. "Jack Marlowe has a natural big head," he
+declared, "and if he had more experience, I wouldn't want to have him up
+against me. He would put a crimp in me every time."</p>
+
+<p>As the American's talk flowed on, Trent listened with growing surprise
+and anxiety. It became more and more plain that something was very wrong
+in his theory of the situation; there was no mention of its central
+figure. Presently Mr. Bunner mentioned that Marlowe was engaged to be
+married to an Irish girl, whose charms he celebrated with native
+enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>Trent clasped his hands savagely together beneath the table. What could
+have happened? His ideas were sliding and shifting. At last he forced
+himself to put a direct question.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bunner was not very fully informed. He knew that Mrs. Manderson had
+left England immediately after the settlement of her husband's affairs,
+and had lived for some time in Italy. She had returned not long ago to
+London, where she had decided not to live in the house in Mayfair, and
+had bought a smaller one in the Hampstead neighborhood; also, he
+understood, one somewhere in the country. She was said to go but little
+into society. "And all the good hard dollars just waiting for someone to
+spraddle them around!" said Mr. Bunner with a note of pathos in his
+voice. "Why, she has money to burn&mdash;money to feed to the birds&mdash;and
+nothing doing! The old man left her more than half his wad. And think of
+the figure she might make in the world! She is beautiful, and she is the
+best woman I ever met, too. But she couldn't ever seem to get the habit
+of spending money the way it ought to be spent."</p>
+
+<p>His words now became a soliloquy: Trent's thoughts were occupying all
+his attention. He pleaded business soon, and the two men parted with
+cordiality.</p>
+
+<p>Half an hour later Trent was in his studio, swiftly and mechanically
+"cleaning up." He wanted to know what had happened; somehow he must find
+out. He could never approach herself, he knew; he would never bring back
+to her the shame of that last encounter with him; it was scarcely likely
+that he would even set eyes on her. But he must know!... Cupples was in
+London, Marlowe was there.... And anyhow he was sick of Paris.</p>
+
+<p>Such thoughts came, and went; and below them all strained the fibers of
+an unseen cord that dragged mercilessly at his heart, and that he cursed
+bitterly in the moments when he could not deny to himself that it was
+there.... The folly, the useless, pitiable folly of it!</p>
+
+<p>In twenty-four hours his feeble roots in Paris had been torn out. He was
+looking over a leaden sea at the shining fortress-wall of the Dover
+cliffs.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>But though he had instinctively picked out the lines of a set purpose
+from among the welter of promptings in his mind, he found it delayed at
+the very outset.</p>
+
+<p>He had decided that he must first see Mr. Cupples, who would be in a
+position to tell him much more than the American knew. But Mr. Cupples
+was away on his travels, not expected to come back for a month; and
+Trent had no reasonable excuse for hastening his return. Marlowe he
+would not confront until he had tried at least to reconnoiter the
+position. He constrained himself not to commit the crowning folly of
+seeking out Mrs. Manderson's house in Hampstead; he could not enter it,
+and the thought of the possibility of being seen by her lurking in its
+neighborhood brought the blood to his face.</p>
+
+<p>He stayed at a hotel, took a studio, and while he awaited Mr. Cupples'
+return attempted vainly to lose himself in work.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of a week he had an idea that he acted upon with eager
+precipitancy. She had let fall some word, at their last meeting, of a
+taste for music. Trent went that evening, and thenceforward regularly,
+to the opera. He might see her; and if, in spite of his caution, she
+caught sight of him, they could be blind to each other's
+presence&mdash;anybody might happen to go to the opera.</p>
+
+<p>So he went alone each evening, passing as quickly as he might through
+the people in the vestibule; and each evening he came away knowing that
+she had not been in the house. It was a habit that yielded him a sort of
+satisfaction along with the guilty excitement of his search; for he too
+loved music, and nothing gave him so much peace while its magic endured.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>One night as he entered, hurrying through the brilliant crowd, he felt a
+touch on his arm. Flooded with an incredible certainty at the touch, he
+turned.</p>
+
+<p>It was she: so much more radiant in the absence of grief and anxiety, in
+the fact that she was smiling, and in the allurement of evening dress,
+that he could not speak. She, too, breathed a little quickly, and there
+was a light of daring in her eyes and cheeks as she greeted him.</p>
+
+<p>Her words were few. "I wouldn't miss a note of <i>Tristan</i>," she said,
+"nor must you. Come and see me in the interval." She gave him the number
+of the box.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3>ERUPTION</h3>
+
+
+<p>The following two months were a period in Trent's life that he has never
+since remembered without shuddering. He met Mrs. Manderson half a dozen
+times, and each time her cool friendliness, a nicely calculated mean
+between mere acquaintance and the first stage of intimacy, baffled and
+maddened him. At the opera he had found her, to his further amazement,
+with a certain Mrs. Wallace, a frisky matron whom he had known from
+childhood. Mrs. Manderson, it appeared, on her return from Italy, had
+somehow wandered into circles to which he belonged by nurture and
+disposition. It came, she said, of her having pitched her tent in their
+hunting-grounds; several of his friends were near neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>He had a dim but horrid recollection of having been on that occasion
+unlike himself, ill at ease, burning in the face, talking with idiot
+loquacity of his adventures in the Baltic provinces, and finding from
+time to time that he was addressing himself exclusively to Mrs. Wallace.
+The other lady, when he joined them, had completely lost the slight
+appearance of agitation with which she had stopped him in the vestibule.
+She had spoken pleasantly to him of her travels, of her settlement in
+London and of people whom they both knew.</p>
+
+<p>During the last half of the opera, which he had stayed in the box to
+hear, he had been conscious of nothing, as he sat behind them, but the
+angle of her cheek and the mass of her hair, the lines of her shoulder
+and arm, her hand upon the cushion. The black hair had seemed at last a
+forest, immeasurable, pathless and enchanted, luring him to a fatal
+adventure. At the end he had been pale and subdued, parting with them
+rather formally.</p>
+
+<p>The next time he saw her&mdash;it was at a country house where both were
+guests&mdash;and the subsequent times, he had had himself in hand. He had
+matched her manner and had acquitted himself, he thought, decently,
+considering ... considering that he lived in an agony of bewilderment
+and remorse and longing. He could make nothing, absolutely nothing, of
+her attitude. That she had read his manuscript, and understood the
+suspicion indicated in his last question to her at White Gables, was
+beyond the possibility of doubt. Then how could she treat him thus
+amiably and frankly, as she treated all the world of men who had done
+her no injury?</p>
+
+<p>For it had become clear to his intuitive sense, for all the absence of
+any shade of differentiation in her outward manner, that an injury had
+been done, and that she had felt it. Several times, on the rare and
+brief occasions when they had talked apart, he had warning from the same
+sense that she was approaching this subject; and each time he had turned
+the conversation with the ingenuity born of fear. Two resolutions he
+made. The first was that when he had completed a commissioned work which
+tied him to London he would go away, and stay away. The strain was too
+great. He no longer burned to know the truth; he wanted nothing to
+confirm his fixed internal conviction by faith, that he had blundered,
+that he had misread the situation, misinterpreted her tears, written
+himself down a slanderous fool. He speculated no more on Marlowe's
+motive in the killing of Manderson. Mr. Cupples returned to London, and
+Trent asked him nothing. He knew now that he had been right in those
+words&mdash;Trent remembered them for the emphasis with which they were
+spoken&mdash;"So long as she considered herself bound to him ... no power on
+earth could have persuaded her." He met Mrs. Manderson at dinner at her
+uncle's large and tomb-like house in Bloomsbury, and there he conversed
+most of the evening with a professor of archaeology from Berlin.</p>
+
+<p>His other resolution was that he would not be with her alone.</p>
+
+<p>But when, a few days after, she wrote asking him to come and see her on
+the following afternoon, he made no attempt to excuse himself. This was
+a formal challenge.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>While she celebrated the rites of tea, and for some little time
+thereafter, she joined with such natural ease in his slightly fevered
+conversation on matters of the day that he began to hope she had changed
+what he could not doubt had been her resolve, to corner him and speak to
+him gravely. She was to all appearances careless now, smiling so that he
+recalled, not for the first time since that night at the opera, what was
+written long ago of a Princess of Brunswick: "Her mouth has ten thousand
+charms that touch the soul." She made a tour of the beautiful room where
+she had received him, singling out this treasure or that from the spoils
+of a hundred bric-&agrave;-brac shops, laughing over her quests, discoveries
+and bargainings. And when he asked if she would delight him again with a
+favorite piece of his which he had heard her play at another house, she
+consented at once.</p>
+
+<p>She played with a perfection of execution and feeling that moved him now
+as it had moved him before. "You are a musician born," he said quietly
+when she had finished, and the last tremor of the music had passed away.
+"I knew that before I first heard you play."</p>
+
+<p>"I have played a great deal ever since I can remember. It has been a
+great comfort to me," she said simply, and half-turned to him smiling.
+"When did you first detect music in me? Oh, of course! I was at the
+opera. But that wouldn't prove much, would it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said, abstractedly, his sense still busy with the music that
+had just ended. "I think I knew it the first time I saw you." Then
+understanding of his own words came to him, and turned him rigid. For
+the first time the past had been invoked.</p>
+
+<p>There was a short silence. Mrs. Manderson looked at Trent, then hastily
+looked away. Color began to rise in her cheeks, and she pursed her lips
+as if for whistling. Then with a defiant gesture of the shoulders which
+he remembered she rose suddenly from the piano and placed herself in a
+chair opposite to him.</p>
+
+<p>"That speech of yours will do as well as anything," she began slowly,
+looking at the point of her shoe, "to bring us to what I wanted to say.
+I asked you here to-day on purpose, Mr. Trent, because I couldn't bear
+it any longer. Ever since the day you left me at White Gables I have
+been saying to myself that it didn't matter what you thought of me in
+that affair; that you were certainly not the kind of man to speak to
+others of what you believed about me, after what you had told me of your
+reasons for suppressing your manuscript. I asked myself how it could
+matter. But all the time, of course, I knew it did matter. It mattered
+horribly. Because what you thought was not true." She raised her eyes
+and met his gaze calmly. Trent, with a completely expressionless face,
+returned her look.</p>
+
+<p>"Since I began to know you," he said, "I have ceased to think it."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," said Mrs. Manderson; and blushed suddenly and deeply. Then,
+playing with a glove, she added: "But I want you to know what <i>was</i>
+true."</p>
+
+<p>"I did not know if I should ever see you again," she went on in a lower
+voice, "but I felt that if I did I must speak to you about this. I
+thought it would not be hard to do so, because you seemed to me an
+understanding person, and besides, a woman who has been married isn't
+expected to have the same sort of difficulty as a young girl in speaking
+about such things when it is necessary. And then we did meet again, and
+I discovered that it was very difficult indeed. You made it difficult."</p>
+
+<p>"How?" he asked quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," said the lady. "But yes&mdash;I do know. It was just because
+you treated me exactly as if you had never thought or imagined anything
+of that sort about me. I had always supposed that if I saw you again you
+would turn on me that hard, horrible sort of look you had when you asked
+me that last question&mdash;do you remember?&mdash;at White Gables. Instead of
+that you were just like any other acquaintance. You were just"&mdash;she
+hesitated and spread her hands&mdash;"nice. You know. After that first time
+at the opera when I spoke to you I went home positively wondering if you
+had really recognized me. I mean, I thought you might have recognized my
+face without remembering who it was."</p>
+
+<p>A short laugh broke from Trent in spite of himself, but he said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>She smiled deprecatingly. "Well, I couldn't remember if you had spoken
+my name; and I thought it might be so. But the next time, at the
+Wallaces', you did speak it, so I knew; and a dozen times during those
+few days I almost brought myself to tell you, but never quite. I began
+to feel that you wouldn't let me, that you would slip away from the
+subject if I approached it. Wasn't I right? Tell me, please." He nodded.
+"But why?" He remained silent.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she said, "I will finish what I had to say, and then you will
+tell me, I hope, why you had to make it so hard. When I began to
+understand that you wouldn't let me talk of the matter to you, it made
+me more determined than ever. I suppose you didn't realize that I would
+insist on speaking even if you were quite discouraging. I dare say I
+couldn't have done it if I had been guilty, as you thought. You walked
+into my parlor to-day, never thinking I should dare. Well, now you see."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Manderson had lost all her air of hesitancy. She had, as she was
+wont to say, talked herself enthusiastic, and in the ardor of her
+purpose to annihilate the misunderstanding that had troubled her so long
+she felt herself mistress of the situation.</p>
+
+<p>"I am going to tell you the story of the mistake you made," she
+continued, as Trent, his hands clasped between his knees, still looked
+at her enigmatically. "You will have to believe it, Mr. Trent; it is so
+utterly true to life, with its confusions and hidden things and
+cross-purposes and perfectly natural mistakes that nobody thinks twice
+about taking for facts. Please understand that I don't blame you in the
+least, and never did, for jumping to the conclusion you did. You knew
+that I had no love for my husband, and you knew what that so often
+means. You knew before I told you, I expect, that he had taken up an
+injured attitude towards me; and I was silly enough to try and explain
+it away. I gave you the explanation of it that I had given myself at
+first, before I realized the wretched truth; I told you he was
+disappointed in me because I couldn't take a brilliant lead in society.
+Well, that was true. He was so. But I could see you weren't convinced.
+You had guessed what it took me much longer to see, because I knew how
+irrational it was. Yes; my husband was jealous of John Marlowe; you had
+divined that.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I behaved like a fool when you let me see you had divined it; it
+was such a blow, you understand, when I had supposed all the humiliation
+and strain was at an end, and that his delusion had died with him. You
+practically asked me if my husband's secretary was not my lover, Mr.
+Trent&mdash;I <i>have</i> to say it, because I want you to understand why I broke
+down and made a scene. You took that for a confession; you thought I was
+guilty of that, and I think you even thought I might be a party to the
+crime, that I had consented.... That did hurt me; but perhaps you
+couldn't have thought anything else&mdash;I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>Trent, who had not hitherto taken his eyes from her face, hung his head
+at the words. He did not raise it again as she continued. "But really it
+was simple shock and distress that made me give way, and the memory of
+all the misery that mad suspicion had meant to me. And when I pulled
+myself together again you had gone."</p>
+
+<p>She rose and went to an escritoire beside the window, unlocked a drawer,
+and drew out a long, sealed envelop.</p>
+
+<p>"This is the manuscript you left with me," she said. "I have read it
+through again and again. I have always wondered, as everybody does, at
+your cleverness in things of this kind." A faintly mischievous smile
+flashed upon her face and was gone. "I thought it was splendid, Mr.
+Trent&mdash;I almost forgot that the story was my own, I was so interested.
+And I want to say now, while I have this in my hand, how much I thank
+you for your generous, chivalrous act in sacrificing this triumph of
+yours rather than put a woman's reputation in peril. If all had been as
+you supposed, the facts must have come out when the police took up the
+case you put in their hands. Believe me, I understood just what you had
+done, and I never ceased to be grateful even when I felt most crushed by
+your suspicion."</p>
+
+<p>As she spoke her thanks her voice shook a little, and her eyes were
+bright. Trent perceived nothing of this. His head was still bent. He did
+not seem to hear. She put the envelop into his hand as it lay open, palm
+upwards, on his knee. There was a touch of gentleness about the act
+which made him look up.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you&mdash;" he began slowly.</p>
+
+<p>She raised her hand as she stood before him. "No, Mr. Trent, let me
+finish before you say anything. It is such an unspeakable relief to me
+to have broken the ice at last, and I want to end the story while I am
+still feeling the triumph of beginning it." She sank down into the sofa
+from which she had first risen. "I am telling you a thing that nobody
+else knows. Everybody knew, I suppose, that something had come between
+us, though I did everything in my power to hide it. But I don't think
+any one in the world ever guessed what my husband's notion was. People
+who know me don't think that sort of thing about me, I believe. And his
+fancy was so ridiculously opposed to the facts. I will tell you what the
+situation was. Mr. Marlowe and I had been friendly enough since he came
+to us. For all his cleverness&mdash;my husband said he had a keener brain
+than any man he knew&mdash;I looked upon him as practically a boy. You know I
+am a little older than he is, and he had a sort of amiable lack of
+ambition that made me feel it the more. One day my husband asked me what
+I thought was the best thing about Marlowe, and not thinking much about
+it I said, 'His manners.' He surprised me very much by looking black at
+that, and after a silence he said, 'Yes, Marlowe is a gentleman, that's
+so'&mdash;not looking at me.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing was ever said about that again until about a year ago, when I
+found that Mr. Marlowe had done what I always expected and hoped he
+would do&mdash;fallen desperately in love with an American girl. But to my
+disgust he had picked out the most worthless girl, I do believe, of all
+those whom we used to meet. She was the daughter of wealthy parents, and
+she did as she liked with them; very beautiful, well-educated, very good
+at games&mdash;what they call a woman-athlete&mdash;and caring for nothing on
+earth but her own amusement. She was one of the most unprincipled flirts
+I ever knew, and quite the cleverest. Everyone knew it, and Mr. Marlowe
+must have heard it; but she made a complete fool of him, brain and
+all.... I don't know how she managed it, but I can imagine.... She liked
+him, of course; but it was quite plain to me that she was playing with
+him. The whole affair was so idiotic, I became perfectly furious. One
+day I asked him to row me in a boat on the lake&mdash;all this happened at
+our house by Lake George. We had never been alone together for any
+length of time before. In the boat I talked to him. I was very kind
+about it, I think, and he took it admirably, but he didn't believe me a
+bit. He had the impudence to tell me that I misunderstood Alice's
+nature. When I hinted at his prospects&mdash;I knew he had scarcely anything
+of his own&mdash;he said that if she loved him he could make himself a
+position in the world. I dare say that was true, with his abilities and
+his friends; he is rather well-connected, you know, as well as popular.
+But his enlightenment came very soon after that.</p>
+
+<p>"My husband helped me out of the boat when we came back. He joked with
+Mr. Marlowe about something, I remember; for through all that followed
+he never once changed in his manner to him, and that was one reason why
+I took so long to realize what he thought about him and myself. But to
+me he was reserved and silent that evening&mdash;not angry. He was always
+perfectly cold and expressionless to me after he took this idea into his
+head. After dinner he only spoke to me once. Mr. Marlowe was telling him
+about some horse he had bought for the farm in Kentucky, and my husband
+looked at me and said, 'Marlowe may be a gentleman, but he seldom quits
+loser in a horse trade.' I was surprised at that, but at that time&mdash;and
+even on the next occasion when he found us together&mdash;I didn't understand
+what was in his mind. That next time was the morning when Mr. Marlowe
+received a sweet little note from the girl asking for his
+congratulations on her engagement. It was in our New York house. He
+looked so wretched at breakfast that I thought he was ill, and
+afterwards I went to the room where he worked, and asked what was the
+matter. He didn't say anything, but just handed me the note, and turned
+away to the window. I was very glad that was all over, but terribly
+sorry for him too, of course. I don't remember what I said, but I
+remember putting my hand on his arm as he stood there staring out on the
+garden; and just then my husband appeared at the open door with some
+papers. He just glanced at us, and then turned and walked quietly back
+to his study. I thought he might have heard what I was saying to comfort
+Mr. Marlowe, and that it was rather nice of him to slip away. Mr.
+Marlowe neither saw nor heard him. My husband left the house that
+morning for the West while I was out. Even then I did not understand. He
+used often to go off suddenly like that, if some business project called
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"It was not until he returned a week later that I grasped the situation.
+He was looking white and strange, and as soon as he saw me he asked me
+where Mr. Marlowe was. Somehow the tone of his question told me
+everything in a flash.</p>
+
+<p>"I almost gasped. I was wild with indignation. You know, Mr. Trent, I
+don't think I should have minded at all if any one had thought me
+capable of openly breaking with my husband and leaving him for somebody
+else. I dare say I might have done that. But that coarse suspicion ... a
+man whom he trusted ... and the notion of concealment. It made me see
+scarlet. Every shred of pride in me was strung up till I quivered, and I
+swore to myself on the spot that I would never show by any word or sign
+that I was conscious of his having such a thought about me. I would
+behave exactly as I always had behaved, I determined&mdash;and that I did, up
+to the very last. Though I knew that a wall had been made between us now
+that could never be broken down&mdash;even if he asked my pardon and obtained
+it&mdash;I never once closed the door between our rooms at night.</p>
+
+<p>"And so it went on. I never could go through such a time again. My
+husband showed silent and cold politeness to me always when we were
+alone&mdash;and that was only when it was unavoidable. He never once alluded
+to what was in his mind; but I felt it, and he knew that I felt it. Both
+of us were stubborn in our different attitudes. To Mr. Marlowe he was
+more friendly, if anything, than before&mdash;heaven only knows why. I
+fancied he was planning some sort of revenge; but that was only a fancy.
+Certainly Mr. Marlowe never knew what was suspected of him. He and I
+remained good friends, though we never spoke of anything intimate after
+that disappointment of his; but I made a point of seeing no less of him
+than I had always done. Then we came over to England and to White
+Gables, and after that followed&mdash;my husband's dreadful end."</p>
+
+<p>She threw out her right hand in a gesture of finality. "You know about
+the rest&mdash;so much more than any other man," she added; and glanced up at
+him with a quaint expression.</p>
+
+<p>Trent wondered at that look. But the wonder was only a passing shadow on
+his thought. Inwardly his whole being was possessed by thankfulness. All
+the vivacity had returned to his face. Long before Mrs. Manderson ended
+her story he had recognized the certainty of its truth, as from the
+first days of their renewed acquaintance he had doubted the story that
+his imagination had built up at White Gables, upon foundations that
+seemed so good to him.</p>
+
+<p>He said: "I don't know how to begin the apologies I have to make. There
+are no words to tell you how ashamed and disgraced I feel when I realize
+what a crude, cock-sure blundering at a conclusion my suspicion was.
+Yes, I suspected&mdash;you! I had almost forgotten that I was ever such a
+fool. Almost; not quite. Sometimes when I have been alone I have
+remembered that folly, and poured contempt on it. I have tried to
+imagine what the facts were. I have tried to excuse myself."</p>
+
+<p>She interrupted him quickly. "What nonsense. Do be sensible, Mr. Trent.
+You had only seen me on two occasions in your life before you came to me
+with your solution of the mystery." Again the quaint expression came and
+was gone. "If you talk of folly, it really is folly for a man like you
+to pretend to a woman like me that I had innocence written all over me
+in large letters&mdash;so large that you couldn't believe very strong
+evidence against me after seeing me twice." Mrs. Manderson laughed, and
+her laugh carried him away with it. He knew well by this time that
+sudden rush of cascading notes of mirth, the perfect expression of
+enjoyment; he had many times tried to amuse her merely for his delight
+in the sound of it. "And now it's all over, and you know&mdash;and we'll
+never speak of it any more."</p>
+
+<p>"I hope not," Trent said in sincere relief. "If you're resolved to be so
+kind as this about it, I am not high-principled enough to insist on your
+blasting me with your lightnings. And now, Mrs. Manderson, I had better
+go. Changing the subject after this would be like playing
+puss-in-the-corner after an earthquake." He rose to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"You are right," she said. "But no! Wait. There is another thing&mdash;part
+of the same subject; and we ought to pick up all the pieces now while we
+are about it. Please sit down." She took the envelop containing Trent's
+manuscript despatch from the table where he had laid it. "I want to
+speak about this."</p>
+
+<p>His brows bent, and he looked at her questioningly. "So do I, if you
+do," he said slowly. "I want very much to know one thing."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me."</p>
+
+<p>"Since my reason for suppressing that information was all a fantasy, why
+did you never make any use of it? When I began to realize that I had
+been wrong about you, I explained your silence to myself by saying that
+you could not bring yourself to do a thing that would put a rope round a
+man's neck, whatever he might have done. I can quite understand that
+feeling. Was that what it was? Another possibility I thought of was that
+you knew of something that was by way of justifying or excusing
+Marlowe's act. Or I thought you might have a simple horror, quite apart
+from humanitarian scruples, of appearing publicly in connection with a
+murder trial. Many important witnesses in such cases have to be
+practically forced into giving their evidence. They feel there is
+defilement even in the shadow of the scaffold."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Manderson tapped her lips with the envelop without quite concealing
+a smile. "You didn't think of another possibility, I suppose, Mr.
+Trent," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"No." He looked puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean the possibility of your having been wrong about Mr. Marlowe as
+well as about me. No, no; you needn't tell me that the chain of evidence
+is complete. I know it is. But evidence of what? Of Mr. Marlowe having
+impersonated my husband that night, and having escaped by way of my
+window, and built up an alibi. I have read your despatch again and
+again, Mr. Trent, and I don't see that those things can be doubted."</p>
+
+<p>Trent gazed at her with narrowed eyes. He said nothing to fill the brief
+pause that followed. Mrs. Manderson smoothed her skirt with a
+preoccupied air, as one collecting her ideas.</p>
+
+<p>"I did not make any use of the facts found out by you," she slowly said
+at last, "because it seemed to me very likely that they would be fatal
+to Mr. Marlowe."</p>
+
+<p>"I agree with you," Trent remarked in a colorless tone.</p>
+
+<p>"And," pursued Mrs. Manderson, looking up at him with a mild
+reasonableness in her eyes, "as I knew that he was innocent I was not
+going to expose him to that risk."</p>
+
+<p>There was another little pause. Trent rubbed his chin, with an
+affectation of turning over the idea. Inwardly he was telling himself,
+somewhat feebly, that this was very right and proper; that it was quite
+feminine, and that he liked her to be feminine. It was permitted to
+her&mdash;more than permitted&mdash;to set her loyal belief in the character of a
+friend above the clearest demonstrations of the intellect. Nevertheless,
+it chafed him. He would have had her declaration of faith a little less
+positive in form. It was too irrational to say she "knew." In fact (he
+put it to himself bluntly) it was quite unlike her. If to be
+unreasonable when reason led to the unpleasant was a specially feminine
+trait, and if Mrs. Manderson had it, she was accustomed to wrap it up
+better than any woman he had known.</p>
+
+<p>"You suggest," he said at length, "that Marlowe constructed an alibi for
+himself, by means which only a desperate man would have attempted, to
+clear himself of a crime he did not commit. Did he tell you he was
+innocent?"</p>
+
+<p>She uttered a little laugh of impatience. "So you think he has been
+talking me round! No, that is not so. I am merely sure he did not do it.
+Ah! I see you think that absurd. But see how unreasonable you are, Mr.
+Trent! Just now you were explaining to me quite sincerely that it was
+foolishness in you to have had a certain suspicion of me." Trent started
+in his chair. She glanced at him, and went on: "Now I know a great deal
+more about Mr. Marlowe than you know about me even now. I saw him
+constantly for several years. I don't pretend to know all about him; but
+I do know that he is incapable of a crime of bloodshed. The idea of his
+planning a murder is as unthinkable to me as the idea of your picking a
+poor woman's pocket, Mr. Trent. I can imagine you killing a man, you
+know ... if the man deserved it and had an equal chance of killing you.
+I could kill a person myself in some circumstances. But Mr. Marlowe was
+incapable of doing it. I don't care what the provocation might be. He
+had a temper that nothing could shake, and he looked upon human nature
+with a sort of cold magnanimity that would find excuses for absolutely
+anything. It wasn't a pose; you could see it was a part of him. He never
+put it forward, but it was there always. It was quite irritating at
+times.... He really loathed and hated physical violence. He was a very
+strange man in some ways, Mr. Trent. He gave one a feeling that he might
+do unexpected things&mdash;do you know that feeling one has about some
+people?... What part he really played in the events of that night I have
+never been able to guess. But nobody who knew anything about him could
+possibly believe in his deliberately taking a man's life." Again the
+movement of her head expressed finality, and she leaned back in the
+sofa, calmly regarding him.</p>
+
+<p>"Then," said Trent, who had followed this with earnest attention, "we
+are forced back on two other possibilities, which I had not thought
+worth much consideration until this moment. Accepting what you say, he
+might still conceivably have killed in self-defense; or he might have
+done so by accident."</p>
+
+<p>The lady nodded. "Of course I thought of those two explanations when I
+read your manuscript."</p>
+
+<p>"And I suppose you felt, as I did myself, that in either of those cases
+the natural thing, and obviously the safest thing, for him to do was to
+make a public statement of the truth, instead of setting up a series of
+deceptions which would certainly stamp him as guilty in the eyes of the
+law, if anything went wrong with them."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said wearily, "I thought over all that until my head ached.
+And I thought somebody else might have done it, and that he was somehow
+screening the guilty person. But that seemed wild. I could see no light
+in the mystery, and after a while I simply let it alone. All I was clear
+about was that Mr. Marlowe was not a murderer, and that if I told what
+you had found out, the judge and jury would probably think he was. I
+promised myself that I would speak to you about it if we should meet
+again; and now I've kept my promise."</p>
+
+<p>Trent, his chin resting on his hand, was staring at the carpet. The
+excitement of the hunt for the truth was steadily rising in him. He had
+not in his own mind accepted Mrs. Manderson's account of Marlowe's
+character as unquestionable. But she had spoken forcibly; he could by no
+means set it aside, and his theory was much shaken.</p>
+
+<p>"There is only one thing for it," he said, looking up. "I must see
+Marlowe. It worries me too much to have the thing left like this. I will
+get at the truth. Can you tell me," he broke off, "how he behaved after
+the day I left White Gables?"</p>
+
+<p>"I never saw him after that," said Mrs. Manderson simply. "For some days
+after you went away I was ill, and didn't go out of my room. When I was
+about again he had left and was in London, settling things with the
+lawyers. He did not come down to the funeral. Immediately after that I
+went abroad. After some weeks a letter from him reached me, saying he
+had concluded his business and given the solicitors all the assistance
+in his power. He thanked me very nicely for what he called all my
+kindness, and said good-by. There was nothing in it about his plans for
+the future, and I thought it particularly strange that he said not a
+word about my husband's death. I didn't answer. Knowing what I knew, I
+couldn't. In those days I shuddered whenever I thought of that
+masquerade in the night. Rather than face him, I was ready to go on in
+ignorance of what had really happened. I never wanted to see or hear of
+him again."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you don't know what has become of him?"</p>
+
+<p>"No: but I dare say Uncle Burton&mdash;Mr. Cupples, you know&mdash;could tell you.
+Some time ago he told me that he had met Mr. Marlowe in London, and had
+some talk with him. I changed the conversation." She paused and smiled
+with a trace of mischief. "I rather wonder what you supposed had
+happened to Mr. Marlowe, after you withdrew from the scene of the drama
+that you had put together so much to your satisfaction."</p>
+
+<p>Trent flushed. "Do you really want to know?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"I ask you," she retorted quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"You ask me to humiliate myself again, Mrs. Manderson. Very well. I will
+tell you what I thought I should most likely find when I returned to
+London this year: that you had married Marlowe and gone to live abroad."</p>
+
+<p>She heard him with unmoved composure. "We certainly couldn't have lived
+very comfortably in England on his money and mine," she observed
+thoughtfully. "He had practically nothing then."</p>
+
+<p>He stared at her&mdash;"gaped," she told him some time afterwards. At the
+moment she laughed with a little embarrassment. "Dear me, Mr. Trent!
+Have I said anything dreadful? You surely must know ... I thought
+everybody understood by now ... I'm sure I've had to explain it often
+enough ... if I marry again I lose everything that my husband left me."</p>
+
+<p>The effect of this speech upon Trent was curious. For an instant his
+face was flooded with the emotion of surprise. As this passed away he
+gradually drew himself together as he sat into a tense attitude. He
+looked, she thought as she saw his knuckles grow white on the arms of
+the chair, like a man prepared for pain under the hand of the surgeon.
+But all he said, in a voice lower than his usual tone, was: "I had no
+idea of it."</p>
+
+<p>"It is so," she said calmly, trifling with a ring on her finger.
+"Really, Mr. Trent, it is not such a very unusual thing.... I think I am
+glad of it. For one thing, it has secured me&mdash;at least since it became
+generally known&mdash;from a good many attentions of a kind that a woman in
+my position has to put up with as a rule."</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt," he said gravely. "And ... the other kind?"</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him questioningly. "Ah!" she laughed. "The other kind
+trouble me even less. I have not yet met a man silly enough to want to
+marry a widow with a selfish disposition, and luxurious habits and
+tastes, and nothing but the little my father left me."</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head slowly, and something in the gesture shattered the
+last remnants of Trent's self-possession. "Haven't you, by God!" he
+exclaimed, rising with a violent movement and advancing a step towards
+her. "Then I am going to show you that human passion is not always
+stifled by the smell of money. I am going to end the business&mdash;my
+business. I am going to tell you what I dare say scores of better men
+have wanted to tell you, but couldn't summon up what I have summoned
+up&mdash;the infernal cheek to do it. They were afraid of making fools of
+themselves. I am not. You have accustomed me to the feeling this
+afternoon." He laughed aloud in his rush of words, and spread out his
+hands. "Look at me! It is the sight of the century! It is the one who
+says he loves you, and would ask you to give up very great wealth to
+stand at his side."</p>
+
+<p>She was hiding her face in her hands. He heard her say brokenly:
+"Please ... don't speak in that way."</p>
+
+<p>He answered: "It will make a great difference to me if you will allow me
+to say all I have to say before I leave you. Perhaps it is in bad taste,
+but I will risk that&mdash;I want to relieve my soul, it needs open
+confession. This is the truth. You have troubled me ever since the first
+time I saw you&mdash;and you did not know it&mdash;as you sat under the edge of
+the cliff at Marlstone and held out your arms to the sea. It was only
+your beauty that filled my mind then. As I passed by you it seemed as if
+all the life in the place were crying out a song about you in the wind
+and the sunshine. And the song stayed in my ears; but even your beauty
+would be no more than an empty memory to me by now if that had been all.
+It was when I led you from the hotel there to your house, with your hand
+on my arm, that&mdash;what was it that happened? I only knew that your
+stronger magic had struck home, and that I never should forget that day,
+whatever the love of my life should be. Till that day I had admired as I
+should admire the loveliness of a still lake; but that day I felt the
+spell of the divinity of the lake. And next morning the waters were
+troubled, and she rose&mdash;the morning when I came to you with my
+questions, tired out with doubts that were as bitter as pain, and when I
+saw you without your pale, sweet mask of composure&mdash;when I saw you moved
+and glowing, with your eyes and your hands alive, and when you made me
+understand that for such a creature as you there had been emptiness and
+the mere waste of yourself for so long. Madness rose in me then, and my
+spirit was clamoring to say what I say at last now&mdash;that life would
+never seem a full thing again because you could not love me, that I was
+taken forever in the nets of your black hair and by the incantation of
+your voice&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, stop!" she cried, suddenly throwing back her head, her face flaming
+and her hands clutching the cushions beside her. She spoke fast and
+disjointedly, her breath coming quick. "You shall not talk me into
+forgetting common sense. What does all this mean? Oh! I do not recognize
+you at all&mdash;you seem another man. We are not children&mdash;have you
+forgotten that? You speak like a boy in love for the first time. It is
+foolish, unreal&mdash;I know that if you do not. I will not hear it. What has
+happened to you?" She was half sobbing. "How can these sentimentalities
+come from a man like you? Where is your self-restraint?"</p>
+
+<p>"Gone!" exclaimed Trent with an abrupt laugh. "It has got right away! I
+am going after it in a minute." He looked gravely down into her eyes. "I
+don't care so much now. I never could declare myself to you under the
+cloud of your great fortune. It was too great. There's nothing
+creditable in that feeling, as I look at it; as a matter of simple fact,
+it was a form of cowardice&mdash;fear of what you would think, and very
+likely say&mdash;fear of the world's comment too, I suppose. But the cloud
+being rolled away I have spoken, and I don't care so much. I can face
+things with a quiet mind now that I have told you the truth in its own
+terms. You may call it sentimentality or any other nickname you like. It
+is quite true that it was not intended for a scientific statement. Since
+it annoys you, let it be extinguished. But please believe that it was
+serious to me if it was comedy to you. I have said that I love you and
+honor you and would hold you dearest of all the world. Now give me leave
+to go."</p>
+
+<p>But she held out her hands to him.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>WRITING A LETTER</h3>
+
+
+<p>"If you insist," Trent said, "I suppose you will have your way. But I
+had much rather write it when I am not with you. However, if I must,
+bring me a tablet whiter than a star, or hand of hymning angel. Don't
+underestimate the sacrifice I am making. I never felt less like
+correspondence in my life."</p>
+
+<p>She rewarded him.</p>
+
+<p>"What shall I say?" he inquired, his pen hovering over the paper. "Shall
+I compare him to a summer's day? What <i>shall</i> I say?"</p>
+
+<p>"Say what you want to say," she suggested helpfully.</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head. "What I want to say&mdash;what I have been wanting for the
+past twenty-four hours to say to every man, woman, and child I met&mdash;is
+'Mabel and I are betrothed, and joy is borne on burning wheels.' But
+that wouldn't be a very good opening for a letter of strictly formal,
+not to say sinister character. I have got as far as 'Dear Mr. Marlowe.'
+What comes next?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am sending you a manuscript which I thought you might like to see,"
+she prompted as she came to his chair before the escritoire. "Something
+of that kind. Please try. I want to see what you write, and I want it to
+go to him at once. You see, I would be contented enough to leave things
+as they are; but you say you must get at the truth, and if you must, I
+want it to be as soon as possible. Do it now&mdash;you know you can if you
+will&mdash;and I'll send it off the moment it is ready. Don't you ever feel
+that?&mdash;the longing to get the worrying letter into the post and off your
+hands, so that you can't recall it if you would, and it's no use fussing
+any more about it."</p>
+
+<p>"I will do as you wish," he said, and turned to the paper, which he
+dated as from his hotel. Mrs. Manderson looked down at his bent head
+with a gentle light in her eyes, and made as if to place a smoothing
+hand upon his rather untidy crop of hair. But she did not touch it.
+Going in silence to the piano, she began to play very softly. It was ten
+minutes before Trent spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"At last I am his faithfully. Do you want to see it?"</p>
+
+<p>She ran across the twilight room, and turned on a reading lamp beside
+the escritoire. Then, leaning on his shoulder, she read what follows:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Dear Mr. Marlowe:</p>
+
+<p>You will perhaps remember that we met, under unhappy circumstances,
+in June of last year at Marlstone.</p>
+
+<p>On that occasion it was my duty, as representing a newspaper, to
+make an independent investigation of the circumstances of the death
+of the late Sigsbee Manderson. I did so, and I arrived at certain
+conclusions. You may learn from the enclosed manuscript, which was
+originally written as a despatch for my newspaper, what those
+conclusions were. For reasons which it is not necessary to state I
+decided at the last moment not to make them public, or to
+communicate them to you, and they are known to only two persons
+beside myself.</p></div>
+
+<p>At this point Mrs. Manderson raised her eyes quickly from the letter.
+Her dark brows were drawn together. "Two persons?" she said with a note
+of inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>"Your uncle is the other. I sought him out last night and told him the
+whole story. Have you anything against it? I always felt uneasy at
+keeping it from him as I did, because I had led him to expect I should
+tell him all I discovered, and my silence looked like mystery-making.
+Now that it is to be cleared up finally, and there is no question of
+shielding you, I wanted him to know everything. He is a very shrewd
+adviser, too, in a way of his own; and I should like to have him with me
+when I see Marlowe. I have a feeling that two heads will be better than
+one on my side of the interview."</p>
+
+<p>She sighed. "Yes, of course, uncle ought to know the truth. I hope there
+is nobody else at all." She pressed his hand. "I so much want all that
+horror buried&mdash;buried deep. I am very happy now, dear, but I shall be
+happier still when you have satisfied that curious mind of yours and
+found out everything, and stamped down the earth upon it all." She
+continued her reading.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Quite recently, however, (the letter went on) facts have come to my
+knowledge which have led me to change my decision. I do not mean
+that I shall publish what I discovered, but that I have determined
+to approach you and ask you for a private statement. If you have
+anything to say which would place the matter in another light, I
+can imagine no reason why you should withhold it.</p>
+
+<p>I expect, then, to hear from you when and where I may call upon
+you; unless you would prefer the interview to take place at my
+hotel. In either case I desire that Mr. Cupples, whom you will
+remember, and who has read the enclosed document, should be present
+also.</p>
+
+<p>Faithfully yours,</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Philip Trent</span>.</p></div>
+
+<p>"What a very stiff letter!" she said. "Now I am sure you couldn't have
+made it any stiffer in your own rooms."</p>
+
+<p>Trent slipped the letter and enclosure into a long envelop. "This thing
+mustn't run any risk of going wrong. It would be best to send a special
+messenger with orders to deliver it into his own hands. If he's away it
+oughtn't to be left."</p>
+
+<p>She nodded. "I can arrange that. Wait here for a little."</p>
+
+<p>When Mrs. Manderson returned, he was hunting through the music-cabinet.
+She sank on the carpet beside him in a wave of dark brown skirts. "Tell
+me something, Philip," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"If it is among the few things that I know."</p>
+
+<p>"When you saw uncle last night, did you tell him about&mdash;about us?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did not," he answered. "I remembered you had said nothing about
+telling any one. It is for you&mdash;isn't it?&mdash;to decide whether we take the
+world into our confidence at once or later on."</p>
+
+<p>"Then will you tell him?" She looked down at her clasped hands. "I wish
+<i>you</i> to tell him. Perhaps if you think you will guess why. There! that
+is settled." She lifted her eyes again to his, and for a time there was
+silence between them.</p>
+
+<p>He leaned back at length in the deep chair. "What a world!" he said.
+"Mabel, will you play something on the piano that expresses mere joy,
+the genuine article, nothing feverish or like thorns under a pot, but
+joy that has decided in favor of the universe. It's a mood that can't
+last altogether, so we had better get all we can out of it."</p>
+
+<p>She went to the instrument and struck a few chords while she thought.
+Then she began to work with all her soul at the theme in the last
+movement of the Ninth Symphony which is like the sound of the opening of
+the gates of Paradise.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>DOUBLE CUNNING</h3>
+
+
+<p>An old oaken desk with a deep body stood by the window in a room that
+overlooked St. James's Park from a height. The room was large, furnished
+and decorated in the mode by someone who had brought taste to the work;
+but the hand of the bachelor lay heavy upon it. John Marlowe unlocked
+the desk and drew a long, stout envelop from the back of the well.</p>
+
+<p>"I understand," he said to Mr. Cupples, "that you have read this."</p>
+
+<p>"I read it for the first time two days ago," replied Mr. Cupples, who,
+seated on a sofa, was peering about the room with a benignant face. "We
+have discussed it fully."</p>
+
+<p>Marlowe turned to Trent. "There is your manuscript," he said, laying the
+envelop on the table. "I have gone over it three times. I do not believe
+there is another man who could have got at as much of the truth as you
+have set down there."</p>
+
+<p>Trent ignored the compliment. He sat by the table gazing stonily at the
+fire, his long legs twisted beneath his chair. "You mean, of course," he
+said, drawing the envelop towards him, "that there is more of the truth
+to be disclosed now. We are ready to hear you as soon as you like. I
+expect it will be a long story, and the longer the better, so far as I
+am concerned; I want to understand thoroughly. What we should both like,
+I think, is some preliminary account of Manderson and your relations
+with him. It seemed to me from the first that the character of the dead
+man must be somehow an element in the business."</p>
+
+<p>"You were right," Marlowe answered grimly. He crossed the room and
+seated himself on a corner of the tall cushion-topped fender. "I will
+begin as you suggest."</p>
+
+<p>"I ought to tell you beforehand," said Trent, looking him in the eyes,
+"that although I am here to listen to you, I have not as yet any reason
+to doubt the conclusions I have stated here." He tapped the envelop. "It
+is a defense that you will be putting forward&mdash;you understand that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perfectly." Marlowe was cool and in complete possession of himself, a
+man different indeed from the worn-out, nervous being Trent remembered
+at Marlstone a year and a half ago. His tall, lithe figure was held with
+the perfection of muscular tone. His brow was candid, his blue eyes were
+clear, though they still had, as he paused collecting his ideas, the
+look that had troubled Trent at their first meeting. Only the lines of
+his mouth showed that he knew himself in a position of difficulty, and
+meant to face it.</p>
+
+<p>"Sigsbee Manderson was not a man of normal mind," Marlowe began in his
+quiet voice. "Most of the very rich men I met with in America had become
+so by virtue of abnormal greed, or abnormal industry, or abnormal
+personal force, or abnormal luck. None of them had remarkable
+intellects. Manderson delighted too in heaping up wealth; he worked
+incessantly at it; he was a man of dominant will; he had quite his share
+of luck; but what made him singular was his brain-power. In his own
+country they would perhaps tell you that it was his ruthlessness in
+pursuit of his aims that was his most striking characteristic; but there
+are hundreds of them who would have carried out his plans with just as
+little consideration for others if they could have formed the plans.</p>
+
+<p>"I used to think that his strain of Indian blood, remote as it was,
+might have something to do with the cunning and pitilessness of the man.
+Strangely enough, the existence of that strain was unknown to anyone but
+himself and me. It was when he asked me to apply my taste for
+genealogical work to his own obscure family history that I made the
+discovery that he had in him a share of the blood of the Iroquois chief
+Montour and his French wife, a terrible woman who ruled the savage
+politics of the tribes of the Wilderness two hundred years ago. The
+Mandersons were active in the fur trade on the Pennsylvania border in
+those days, and more than one of them married Indian women. Other Indian
+blood than Montour's may have descended to Manderson, for all I can say,
+through previous and subsequent unions; some of the wives' antecedents
+were quite untraceable, and there were so many generations of pioneering
+before the whole country was brought under civilization. Manderson was
+thunderstruck at what I told him, and was anxious to conceal it from
+every soul. Of course I never gave it away while he lived, and I don't
+think he supposed I would; but I have thought since that his mind took a
+turn against me from that time onward. It happened about a year before
+his death."</p>
+
+<p>"Had Manderson," asked Mr. Cupples, so unexpectedly that the other
+started, "any definable religious attitude?"</p>
+
+<p>Marlowe considered a moment. "None that I ever heard of," he said.
+"Worship and prayer were quite unknown to him, so far as I could see,
+and I never heard him mention religion. I should doubt if he had any
+real sense of God at all, or if he was capable of knowing God through
+the emotions. But I understood that as a child he had had a religious
+up-bringing with a strong moral side to it. His private life was, in the
+usual limited sense, blameless. He was almost ascetic in his habits,
+except as to smoking. I lived with him five years without ever knowing
+him to tell a direct verbal falsehood, constantly as he used to practise
+deceit in other forms. Can you understand the soul of a man who never
+hesitated to take steps that would have the effect of hoodwinking
+people, who would use every trick of the markets to mislead, and who was
+at the same time scrupulous never to utter a direct lie on the most
+insignificant matter? Manderson was like that, and he was not the only
+one. I suppose you might compare the state of mind to that of a soldier
+who is personally a truthful man, but who will stick at nothing to
+deceive the enemy. The rules of the game allow it; and the same may be
+said of business as many business men regard it. Only with them it is
+always war-time."</p>
+
+<p>"It is a sad world," observed Mr. Cupples.</p>
+
+<p>"As you say," Marlowe agreed. "Now I was saying that one could always
+take Manderson's word if he gave it in a definite form. The first time I
+ever heard him utter a downright lie was on the night he died; and
+hearing it, I believe, saved me from being hanged as his murderer."</p>
+
+<p>Marlowe stared at the light above his head, and Trent moved impatiently
+in his chair. "Before we come to that," he said, "will you tell us
+exactly on what footing you were with Manderson during the years you
+were with him."</p>
+
+<p>"We were on very good terms from beginning to end," answered Marlowe.
+"Nothing like friendship&mdash;he was not a man for making friends&mdash;but the
+best of terms as between a trusted employee and his chief. I went to him
+as private secretary just after getting my degree at Oxford. For a long
+time I liked the position greatly. When one is attached to an active
+American plutocrat in the prime of life one need not have many dull
+moments. Besides, it made me independent. My father had some serious
+business reverses about that time, and I was glad to be able to do
+without an allowance from him. At the end of the first year Manderson
+doubled my salary. 'It's big money,' he said, 'but I guess I don't
+lose.'</p>
+
+<p>"You see, by that time I was doing a great deal more than accompany him
+on horseback in the morning and play chess in the evening, which was
+mainly what he had required. I was attending to his houses, his farm in
+Ohio, his shooting in Maine, his horses, his cars and his yacht. I had
+become a walking railway-guide and an expert cigar-buyer. I was always
+learning something.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now you understand what my position was in regard to Manderson
+during the last few years of my connection with him. It was a happy life
+for me on the whole. I was busy, my work was varied and interesting. I
+had time to amuse myself, too, and money to spend. At one time I made a
+fool of myself about a girl, and that was not a happy time; but it
+taught me to understand the great goodness of Mrs. Manderson." Marlowe
+inclined his head to Mr. Cupples as he said this. "She may choose to
+tell you about it. As for her husband, he had never varied in his
+attitude towards me, in spite of the change that came over him in the
+last months of his life, as you know. He treated me well and generously
+in his unsympathetic way, and I never had a feeling that he was less
+than satisfied with his bargain&mdash;that was the sort of footing we lived
+upon. And it was that continuance of his attitude right up to the end
+that made the revelation so shocking when I was suddenly shown, on the
+night on which he met his end, the depth of crazy hatred of myself that
+was in Manderson's soul."</p>
+
+<p>The eyes of Trent and Mr. Cupples met for an instant.</p>
+
+<p>"You never suspected that he hated you before that time?" asked Trent,
+and Mr. Cupples asked at the same moment: "To what did you attribute
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I never guessed until that night," answered Marlowe, "that he had the
+smallest ill-feeling toward me. How long it had existed I do not know. I
+cannot imagine why it was there. I was forced to think, when I
+considered the thing in those awful days after his death, that it was a
+case of a madman's delusion, that he believed me to be plotting against
+him, as they so often do. Some such insane conviction must have been at
+the root of it. But who can sound the abysses of a lunatic's fancy? Can
+you imagine the state of mind in which a man dooms himself to death with
+the object of delivering someone he hates to the hangman?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples moved sharply in his chair. "You say Manderson was
+responsible for his own death?" he asked. Trent glanced at him with an
+eye of impatience, and resumed his intent watch upon the face of
+Marlowe. In the relief of speech it was now less pale and drawn.</p>
+
+<p>"I do say so," Marlowe answered concisely, and looked his questioner in
+the face. Mr. Cupples nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"Before we proceed to the elucidation of your statement," observed the
+old gentleman, in the tone of one discussing a point of abstract
+science, "it may be remarked that the state of mind which you attribute
+to Manderson&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose we have the story first," Trent interrupted, gently laying a
+hand on Mr. Cupples' arm. "You were telling us," he went on, turning to
+Marlowe, "how things stood between you and Manderson. Now will you tell
+us the facts of what happened that night?"</p>
+
+<p>Marlowe flushed at the barely perceptible emphasis which Trent laid upon
+the word "facts." He drew himself up.</p>
+
+<p>"Bunner and myself dined with Mr. and Mrs. Manderson that Sunday
+evening," he began, speaking carefully. "It was just like other dinners
+at which the four of us had been together. Manderson was taciturn and
+gloomy, as we had latterly been accustomed to see him. We others kept a
+conversation going. We rose from the table, I suppose, about nine. Mrs.
+Manderson went to the drawing-room, and Bunner went up to the hotel to
+see an acquaintance. Manderson asked me to come into the orchard behind
+the house, saying he wished to have a talk. We paced up and down the
+pathway there, out of earshot from the house, and Manderson, as he
+smoked his cigar, spoke to me in his cool, deliberate way. He had never
+seemed more sane, or more well-disposed to me.</p>
+
+<p>"He said he wanted me to do him an important service. There was a big
+thing on. It was a secret affair. Bunner knew nothing of it, and the
+less I knew the better. He wanted me to do exactly as he directed, and
+not bother my head about reasons.</p>
+
+<p>"This, I may say, was quite characteristic of Manderson's method of
+going to work. If at times he required a man to be a mere tool in his
+hand, he would tell him so. He had used me in the same kind of way a
+dozen times. I assured him he could rely on me, and said I was ready.
+'Right now?' he asked. I said, of course I was.</p>
+
+<p>"He nodded, and said&mdash;I tell you his words as well as I can recollect
+them&mdash;'Well, attend to this. There is a man in England now who is in
+this thing with me. He was to have left to-morrow for Paris by the noon
+boat from Southampton to Havre. His name is George Harris&mdash;at least
+that's the name he is going by. Do you remember that name?' 'Yes,' I
+said, 'when I went up to London a week ago you asked me to book a cabin
+in that name on the boat that goes to-morrow. I gave you the ticket.'
+'Here it is,' he said, producing it from his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"'Now,' Manderson said to me, poking his cigar-butt at me with each
+sentence in a way he used to have, 'George Harris cannot leave England
+to-morrow. I find I shall want him where he is. And I want Bunner where
+<i>he</i> is. But somebody has got to go by that boat and take certain papers
+to Paris. Or else my plan is going to fall to pieces. Will you go?' I
+said, 'Certainly. I am here to obey orders.'</p>
+
+<p>"He bit his cigar, and said: 'That's all right: but these are not just
+ordinary orders;&mdash;not the kind of thing one can ask of a man in the
+ordinary way of his duty to an employer. The point is this. The deal I
+am busy with is one in which neither myself nor any one known to be
+connected with me must appear as yet. That is vital. But these people I
+am up against know your face as well as they know mine. If my secretary
+is known in certain quarters to have crossed to Paris at this time and
+to have interviewed certain people&mdash;and that would be known as soon as
+it happened&mdash;then the game is up.' He threw away his cigar-end and
+looked at me questioningly.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't like it much, but I liked failing Manderson at a pinch still
+less. I spoke lightly. I said I supposed I should have to conceal my
+identity, and I would do my best. I told him I used to be pretty good at
+make-up.</p>
+
+<p>"He nodded in approval. He said: 'That's good. I judged you would not
+let me down.' Then he gave me my instructions&mdash;'You take the car right
+now and start for Southampton&mdash;there's no train that will fit in. You'll
+be driving all night. Barring accidents, you ought to get there by six
+in the morning. But whenever you arrive, drive straight to the Grand
+Hotel and ask for George Harris. If he's there, tell him you are to go
+over instead of him, and ask him to telephone me here. It is very
+important he should know that at the earliest moment possible. But if he
+isn't there, that means he has got the instructions I wired to-day, and
+hasn't gone to Southampton. In that case you don't want to trouble about
+him any more, but just wait for the boat. You can leave the car at a
+garage under a fancy name&mdash;mine must not be given. See about changing
+your appearance&mdash;I don't care how, so you do it well. Travel by the boat
+as George Harris. Let on to be anything you like, but be careful, and
+don't talk much to anybody. When you arrive, take a room at the Hotel
+St. Petersburg. You will receive a note or message there, addressed to
+George Harris, telling you where to take the wallet I shall give you.
+The wallet is locked, and you want to take good care of it. Have you got
+all that clear?'</p>
+
+<p>"I repeated the instructions. I asked if I should return from Paris
+after handing over the wallet. 'As soon as you like,' he said. 'And mind
+this&mdash;whatever happens, don't communicate with me at any stage of the
+journey. If you don't get the message in Paris at once, just wait until
+you do&mdash;days, if necessary. But not a line of any sort to me.
+Understand? Now get ready as quick as you can. I'll go with you in the
+car a little way. Hurry!'</p>
+
+<p>"That is, so far as I can remember, the exact substance of what
+Manderson said to me that night. I went to my room, changed into day
+clothes, and hastily threw a few necessaries into a kit-bag. My mind was
+in a whirl, not so much at the nature of the business as at the
+suddenness of it. I think I remember telling you the last time we
+met"&mdash;he turned to Trent&mdash;"that Manderson had rather a fondness for
+doing things in a story-book style. Other things being equal, he
+delighted in a bit of mystification and melodrama, and I told myself
+that this was Manderson all over. I hurried downstairs with my bag and
+rejoined him in the library. He handed me a stout leather letter-case,
+about eight inches by six, fastened with a strap with a lock on it. I
+could just squeeze it into my side-pocket. Then I went to get out the
+car from the garage behind the house.</p>
+
+<p>"As I was bringing it round to the front a disconcerting thought struck
+me. I remembered that I had only a few shillings in my pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"For some time past I had been keeping myself very short of cash, and
+for this reason&mdash;which I tell you because it is a vital point, as you
+will see in a minute. I was living temporarily on borrowed money. I had
+always been careless about money while I was with Manderson, and being a
+gregarious animal I had made many friends, most of them belonging to a
+New York set that had little to do but get rid of the large incomes
+given them by their parents. Still, I was very well paid, and I was too
+busy even to attempt to go very far with them in that amusing
+occupation. I was still well on the right side of the ledger until I
+began, merely out of curiosity, to play at speculation. It's a very old
+story&mdash;particularly in Wall Street. I thought it was easy; I was lucky
+at first; I would always be prudent&mdash;and so on. Then came the day when I
+went out of my depth. In one week I was separated from my roll, as
+Bunner expressed it when I told him; and I owed money, too. I had had my
+lesson. Now in this pass I went to Manderson and told him what I had
+done and how I stood. He heard me with a very grim smile, and then, with
+the nearest approach to sympathy I had ever found in him, he advanced me
+a sum on account of my salary that would clear me. 'Don't play the
+markets any more,' was all he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Now on that Sunday night Manderson knew that I was practically without
+any money in the world. He knew that Bunner knew it, too. He may have
+known that I had even borrowed a little more from Bunner for
+pocket-money until my next check was due, which, owing to my
+anticipation of my salary, would not have been a large one. Bear this
+knowledge of Manderson's in mind.</p>
+
+<p>"As soon as I had brought the car round I went into the library and
+stated the difficulty to Manderson.</p>
+
+<p>"What followed gave me, slight as it was, my first impression of
+something odd being afoot. As soon as I mentioned the word 'expenses'
+his hand went mechanically to his left hip-pocket, where he always kept
+a little case containing notes to the value of about a hundred pounds in
+our money. This was such a rooted habit in him that I was astonished to
+see him check the movement suddenly. Then, to my greater amazement, he
+swore viciously under his breath. I had never heard him do this before;
+but Bunner had told me that of late he had often shown irritation in
+this way when they were alone. 'Has he mislaid his note-case?' was the
+question that flashed through my mind. But it seemed to me that it could
+not affect his plan at all, and I will tell you why. The week before,
+when I had gone up to London to carry out various commissions, including
+the booking of a berth for Mr. George Harris, I had drawn a thousand
+pounds for Manderson from his bankers; and all, at his request, in notes
+of small amounts. I did not know what this unusually large sum in cash
+was for; but I did know that the packets of notes were in his locked
+desk in the library, or had been earlier in the day, when I had seen him
+fingering them as he sat at the desk.</p>
+
+<p>"But instead of turning to the desk, Manderson stood looking at me.
+There was fury in his face, and it was a strange sight to see him
+gradually master it until his eyes grew cold again. 'Wait in the car,'
+he said slowly. 'I will get some money.' We both went out, and as I was
+getting into my overcoat in the hall I saw him enter the drawing-room,
+which, you remember, was on the other side of the entrance hall.</p>
+
+<p>"I stepped out onto the lawn before the house and smoked a cigarette,
+pacing up and down. I was asking myself again and again where that
+thousand pounds was; whether it was in the drawing-room; and if so, why.
+Presently, as I passed one of the drawing-room windows, I noticed Mrs.
+Manderson's shadow on the thin silk curtain. She was standing at her
+escritoire. The window was open, and as I passed I heard her say: 'I
+have not quite thirty pounds here. Will that be enough?' I did not hear
+the answer, but next moment Manderson's shadow was mingled with hers,
+and I heard the chink of money. Then, as he stood by the window, and as
+I was moving away, these words of his came to my ears&mdash;and these at
+least I can repeat exactly, for astonishment stamped them on my
+memory&mdash;'I'm going out now. Marlowe has persuaded me to go for a
+moonlight run in the car. He is very urgent about it. He says it will
+help me to sleep, and I guess he is right.'</p>
+
+<p>"I have told you that in the course of four years I had never once heard
+Manderson utter a direct lie about anything great or small. I believed
+that I understood the man's queer skin-deep morality, and I could have
+sworn that if he was firmly pressed with a question that could not be
+evaded he would either refuse to answer or tell the truth. But what had
+I just heard? No answer to any question. A voluntary statement, precise
+in terms, that was utterly false. The unimaginable had happened. It was
+almost as if one's dearest friend, in a moment of closest sympathy, had
+suddenly struck one in the face. The blood rushed to my head, and I
+stood still on the grass. I stood there until I heard his step at the
+front-door, and then I pulled myself together and stepped quickly to the
+car. He handed me a banker's paper bag with gold and notes in it.
+'There's more than you'll want there,' he said, and I pocketed it
+mechanically.</p>
+
+<p>"For a minute or so I stood discussing with Manderson&mdash;it was by one of
+those <i>tours de force</i> of which one's mind is capable under great
+excitement&mdash;certain points about the route of the long drive before me.
+I had made the run several times by day, and I believe I spoke quite
+calmly and naturally about it. But while I spoke my mind was seething in
+a flood of suddenly-born suspicion and fear. I did not know what I
+feared. I simply felt fear, somehow&mdash;I did not know how&mdash;connected with
+Manderson. My soul once opened to it, fear rushed in like an assaulting
+army. I felt&mdash;I knew&mdash;that something was altogether wrong and sinister,
+and I felt myself to be the object of it. Yet Manderson was surely no
+enemy of mine. Then my thoughts reached out wildly for an answer to the
+question why he had told that lie. And all the time the blood hammered
+in my ears: 'Where is that money?' Reason struggled hard to set up the
+suggestion that the two things were not necessarily connected. The
+instinct of a man in danger would not listen to it. As we started, and
+the car took the curve into the road, it was merely the unconscious part
+of me that steered and controlled it, and that made occasional empty
+remarks as we slid along in the moonlight. Within me was a confusion and
+vague alarm that was far worse than any definite terror I ever felt.</p>
+
+<p>"About a mile from the house, you remember, one passed on one's left a
+gate on the other side of which was the golf-course. There Manderson
+said he would get down, and I stopped the car. 'You've got it all
+clear?' he asked. With a sort of wrench I forced myself to remember and
+repeat the directions given me. 'That's O. K.,' he said. 'Good-by, then.
+Stay with that wallet.' Those were the last words I heard him speak as
+the car moved gently away from him."</p>
+
+<p>Marlowe rose from his chair and pressed his hands to his eyes. He was
+flushed with the excitement of his own narrative, and there was in his
+look a horror of recollection that held both the listeners silent. He
+shook himself with a movement like a dog's, and then, his hands behind
+him, stood erect before the fire as he continued his tale.</p>
+
+<p>"I expect you both know what the back-reflector of a motor-car is."</p>
+
+<p>Trent nodded quickly, his face alive with anticipation; but Mr. Cupples,
+who cherished a mild but obstinate prejudice against motor-cars, readily
+confessed to ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a small round or more often rectangular mirror," Marlowe
+explained, "rigged out from the right side of the screen in front of the
+driver, and adjusted in such a way that he can see, without turning
+round, if anything is coming up behind to pass him. It is quite an
+ordinary appliance, and there was one on this car. As the car moved on,
+and Manderson ceased speaking behind me, I saw in that mirror a thing
+that I wish I could forget."</p>
+
+<p>Marlowe was silent for a moment, staring at the wall before him.</p>
+
+<p>"Manderson's face," he said in a low tone. "He was standing in the road,
+looking after me, only a few yards behind, and the moonlight was full on
+his face. The mirror happened to catch it for an instant.</p>
+
+<p>"Physical habit is a wonderful thing. I did not shift hand or foot on
+the controlling mechanism of the car. Indeed, I dare say it steadied me
+against the shock to have myself braced to the business of driving. You
+have read in books, I dare say, of hell looking out of a man's eyes, but
+perhaps you don't know what a good metaphor that is. If I had not known
+Manderson was there, I should not have recognized the face. It was that
+of a madman, distorted, hideous in the imbecility of hate, the teeth
+bared in a simian grin of ferocity and triumph, the eyes&mdash;! In the
+little mirror I had this glimpse of the face alone; I saw nothing of
+whatever gesture there may have been as that writhing white mask glared
+after me. And I saw it only for a flash. The car went on, gathering
+speed, and as it went, my brain, suddenly purged of the vapors of doubt
+and perplexity, was as busy as the throbbing engine before my feet. I
+knew.</p>
+
+<p>"You say something in that manuscript of yours, Mr. Trent, about the
+swift, automatic way in which one's ideas arrange themselves about some
+new, illuminating thought. It is quite true. The awful intensity of
+ill-will that had flamed after me from those straining eyeballs had
+poured over my mind like a search-light. I was thinking quite clearly
+now, and almost coldly, for I knew what&mdash;at least I knew whom&mdash;I had to
+fear, and instinct warned me that it was not a time to give room to the
+emotions that were fighting to possess me. The man hated me insanely.
+That incredible fact I suddenly knew. But the face had told me&mdash;it would
+have told anybody&mdash;more than that. It was a face of hatred gratified, it
+proclaimed some damnable triumph. It had gloated over me driving away to
+my fate. This too was plain to me. And to what fate?</p>
+
+<p>"I stopped the car. It had gone about two hundred and fifty yards, and a
+sharp bend of the road hid the spot where I had set Manderson down. I
+lay back in the seat and thought it out. Something was to happen to me.
+In Paris? Probably&mdash;why else should I be sent there, with money and a
+ticket? But why Paris? That puzzled me, for I had no melodramatic ideas
+about Paris. I put the point aside for a moment. I turned to the other
+things that had roused my attention that evening. The lie about my
+'persuading him to go for a moonlight run.' What was the intention of
+that? Manderson, I said to myself, will be returning without me while I
+am on my way to Southampton. What will he tell them about me? How
+account for his returning alone and without the car? As I asked myself
+that sinister question there rushed into my mind the last of my
+difficulties: 'Where are the thousand pounds?' And in the same instant
+came the answer: 'The thousand pounds are in my pocket.'</p>
+
+<p>"I got up and stepped from the car. My knees trembled and I felt very
+sick. I saw the plot now&mdash;as I thought. The whole of the story about the
+papers and the necessity of their being taken to Paris was a blind. With
+Manderson's money about me, of which he would declare I had robbed him,
+I was to all appearance attempting to escape from England, with every
+precaution that guilt could suggest. He would communicate with the
+police at once, and would know how to put them on my track. I should be
+arrested in Paris&mdash;if I got so far&mdash;living under a false name, after
+having left the car under a false name, disguised myself, and traveled
+in a cabin which I had booked in advance, also under a false name. It
+would be plainly the crime of a man without money, and for some reason
+desperately in want of it. As for my account of the affair, it would be
+too preposterous.</p>
+
+<p>"As this ghastly array of incriminating circumstances rose up before me,
+I dragged the stout letter-case from my pocket. In the intensity of the
+moment I never entertained the faintest doubt that I was right, and that
+the money was there. It would easily hold the packets of notes. But as I
+felt it and weighed it in my hands it seemed to me there must be more
+than this. It was too bulky. What more was to be laid to my charge?
+After all, a thousand pounds was not much to tempt a man like myself to
+run the risk of penal servitude. In this new agitation, scarcely knowing
+what I did, I caught the surrounding strap in my fingers just above the
+fastening and tore the staple out of the lock. These locks, you know,
+are pretty flimsy as a rule."</p>
+
+<p>Here Marlowe paused and walked to the oaken desk before the window.
+Opening a drawer full of miscellaneous objects, he took out a box of odd
+keys, and selected a small one distinguished by a piece of pink tape.</p>
+
+<p>He handed it to Trent. "I keep that by me as a sort of morbid memento.
+It is the key to the lock I smashed. I might have saved myself the
+trouble if I had known that this key was at that moment in the left-hand
+side-pocket of my overcoat. Manderson must have slipped it in, either
+while the coat was hanging in the hall or while he sat at my side in the
+car. I might not have found the tiny thing there for weeks&mdash;as a matter
+of fact I did find it two days after Manderson was dead&mdash;but a police
+search would have found it in five minutes. And then I&mdash;I with the case
+and its contents in my pocket, my false name and my sham spectacles and
+the rest of it&mdash;I should have had no explanation to offer but the highly
+convincing one that I didn't know the key was there."</p>
+
+<p>Trent dangled the key by its tape idly. Then&mdash;"How do you know this is
+the key of that case?" he asked quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"I tried it. As soon as I found it I went up and fitted it to the lock.
+I knew where I had left the thing. So do you, I think, Mr. Trent. Don't
+you?" There was a faint shade of mockery in Marlowe's voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Touch&eacute;!" Trent said, with a dry smile. "I found a large empty
+letter-case with a burst lock lying with other odds and ends on the
+dressing-table in Manderson's room. Your statement is that you put it
+there. I could make nothing of it." He closed his lips.</p>
+
+<p>"There was no reason for hiding it," said Marlowe. "But to get back to
+my story. I burst the lock of the strap. I opened the case before one of
+the lamps of the car. The first thing I found in it I ought to have
+expected, of course; but I hadn't." He paused and glanced at Trent.</p>
+
+<p>"It was&mdash;" began Trent mechanically; and then stopped himself. "Try not
+to bring me in any more, if you don't mind," he said, meeting the
+other's eye. "I have complimented you already in that document on your
+cleverness. You need not prove it by making the judge help you out with
+your evidence."</p>
+
+<p>"All right," agreed Marlowe. "I couldn't resist just that much. If <i>you</i>
+had been in my place you would have known before I did that Manderson's
+little pocket case was there. As soon as I saw it, of course, I
+remembered his not having had it about him when I asked for money, and
+his surprising anger. He had made a false step. He had already fastened
+his note-case up with the rest of what was to figure as my plunder, and
+placed it in my hands. I opened it. It contained a few notes as usual&mdash;I
+didn't count them.</p>
+
+<p>"Tucked into the flaps of the big case in packets were the other notes,
+just as I had brought them from London. And with them were two small
+wash-leather bags, the look of which I knew well. My heart jumped
+sickeningly again, for this too was utterly unexpected. In those bags
+Manderson kept the diamonds in which he had been investing for some time
+past. I didn't open them; I could feel the tiny stones shifting under
+the pressure of my fingers. How many thousands of pounds' worth there
+were there I have no idea. We had regarded Manderson's diamond-buying as
+merely a speculative fad. I believe now that it was the earliest
+movement in the scheme for my ruin. For any one like myself to be
+represented as having robbed him there ought to be a strong inducement
+shown. That had been provided with a vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, I thought, I have the whole thing plain, and I must act. I saw
+instantly what I must do. I had left Manderson about a mile from the
+house. It would take him twenty minutes, fifteen if he walked fast, to
+get back to the house, where he would of course immediately tell his
+story of robbery, and probably telephone at once to the police in
+Bishopsbridge. I had left him only five or six minutes ago&mdash;for all that
+I have just told you was as quick thinking as I ever did. It would be
+easy to overtake him in the car before he neared the house. There would
+be an awkward interview&mdash;I set my teeth as I thought of it, and all my
+fears vanished as I began to savor the gratification of telling him my
+opinion of him. There are probably few people who ever positively looked
+forward to an awkward interview with Manderson; but I was mad with rage.
+My honor and my liberty had been plotted against with detestable
+treachery. I did not consider what would follow the interview. That
+would arrange itself.</p>
+
+<p>"I had started and turned the car&mdash;I was already going fast&mdash;when I
+heard the sound of a shot in front of me, to the right.</p>
+
+<p>"Instantly I stopped the car. My first wild thought was that Manderson
+was shooting at me. Then I realized that the noise had not been close at
+hand. I could see nobody on the road, though the moonlight flooded it. I
+had left Manderson at a spot just round a corner that was now some fifty
+yards ahead of me. I started again, and turned the corner at a slow
+pace. Then I stopped again with a jar, and for a moment I sat perfectly
+still.</p>
+
+<p>"Manderson lay dead a few steps from me on the turf within the gate,
+clearly visible to me in the moonlight."</p>
+
+<p>Marlowe made another pause, and Trent, with a puckered brow, inquired:
+"On the golf-course?"</p>
+
+<p>"Obviously," remarked Mr. Cupples. "The eighth green is just there." He
+had grown more and more interested as Marlowe went on, and was now
+playing feverishly with his thin beard.</p>
+
+<p>"On the green, quite close to the flag," said Marlowe. "He lay on his
+back, his arms were stretched abroad, his jacket and heavy overcoat were
+open; the light shone hideously on his white face and his shirt-front;
+it glistened on his bared teeth and one of the eyes. The other ... you
+saw it. The man was certainly dead. As I sat there stunned, unable for
+the moment to think at all, I could even see a thin dark line of blood
+running down from the shattered socket to the ear. Close by lay his soft
+black hat, and at his feet a pistol.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose it was only a few seconds that I sat helplessly staring at
+the body. Then I rose and moved to it with dragging feet; for now the
+truth had come to me at last, and I realized the fullness of my
+appalling danger. It was not only my liberty or my honor that the maniac
+had undermined. It was death that he had planned for me; death with the
+degradation of the scaffold. To strike me down with certainty he had not
+hesitated to end his life&mdash;a life which was, no doubt, already
+threatened by a melancholic impulse to self-destruction; and the last
+agony of the suicide had been turned, perhaps, to a devilish joy by the
+thought that he dragged down my life with his. For, so far as I could
+see at the moment, my situation was utterly hopeless. If it had been
+desperate on the assumption that Manderson meant to denounce me as a
+thief, what was it now that his corpse denounced me as a murderer?</p>
+
+<p>"I picked up the revolver and saw, almost without emotion, that it was
+my own&mdash;Manderson had taken it from my room, I suppose, while I was
+getting out the car. At the same moment I remembered that it was by
+Manderson's suggestion that I had had it engraved with my initials, to
+distinguish it from a precisely similar weapon which he had of his own.</p>
+
+<p>"I bent over the body and satisfied myself that there was no life left
+in it. I must tell you here that I did not notice, then or afterwards,
+the scratches and marks on the wrists which were taken as evidence of a
+struggle with an assailant. But I have no doubt that Manderson
+deliberately injured himself in this way before firing the shot; it was
+a part of his plan.</p>
+
+<p>"Though I never perceived that detail, however, it was evident enough as
+I looked at the body that Manderson had not forgotten, in his last act
+on earth, to tie me tighter by putting out of court the question of
+suicide. He had clearly been at pains to hold the pistol at arm's
+length, and there was not a trace of smoke or of burning on the face.
+The wound was absolutely clean, and was already ceasing to bleed
+outwardly. I rose and paced the green, reckoning up the points in the
+crushing case against me.</p>
+
+<p>"I was the last to be seen with Manderson. I had persuaded him&mdash;so he
+had lied to his wife and, as I afterwards knew, to the butler&mdash;to go
+with me for the drive from which he never returned. My pistol had killed
+him. It was true that by discovering his plot I had saved myself from
+heaping up further incriminating facts&mdash;flight, concealment, the
+possession of the treasure. But what need of them, after all? As I
+stood, what hope was there? What could I do?"</p>
+
+<p>Marlowe came to the table and leaned forward with his hands upon it. "I
+want," he said very earnestly, "to try to make you understand what was
+in my mind when I decided to do what I did. I hope you won't be bored,
+because I must do it. You may both have thought I acted like a fool. But
+after all the police never suspected me. I walked that green for a
+quarter of an hour, I suppose, thinking the thing out like a game of
+chess. I had to think ahead and think coolly; for my safety depended on
+upsetting the plans of one of the longest-headed men who ever lived. And
+remember that, for all I knew, there were details of the scheme still
+hidden from me, waiting to crush me.</p>
+
+<p>"Two plain courses presented themselves at once. Either of them, I
+thought, would certainly prove fatal. I could, in the first place, do
+the completely straightforward thing: take back the dead man, tell my
+story, hand over the notes and diamonds, and trust to the saving power
+of truth and innocence. I could have laughed as I thought of it. I saw
+myself bringing home the corpse and giving an account of myself,
+boggling with sheer shame over the absurdity of my wholly unsupported
+tale as I brought a charge of mad hatred and fiendish treachery against
+a man who had never, so far as I knew, had a word to say against me. At
+every turn the cunning of Manderson had forestalled me. His careful
+concealment of such a hatred was a characteristic feature of the
+stratagem; only a man of his iron self-restraint could have done it. You
+can see for yourselves how every fact in my statement would appear, in
+the shadow of Manderson's death, a clumsy lie. I tried to imagine myself
+telling such a story to the counsel for my defense. I could see the face
+with which he would listen to it; I could read in the lines of it his
+thought, that to put forward such an impudent farrago would mean merely
+the disappearance of any chance there might be of a commutation of the
+capital sentence.</p>
+
+<p>"True, I had not fled; I had brought back the body; I had handed over
+the property. But how did that help me? It would only suggest that I had
+yielded to a sudden funk after killing my man, and had no nerve left to
+clutch at the fruits of the crime; it would suggest, perhaps, that I had
+not set out to kill but only to threaten, and that, when I found that I
+had done murder, the heart went out of me. Turn it which way I would, I
+could see no hope of escape by this plan of action.</p>
+
+<p>"The second of the obvious things that I might do was to take the hint
+offered by the situation, and to fly at once. That too must prove fatal.
+There was the body. I had no time to hide it in such a way that it would
+not be found at the first systematic search. But whatever I should do
+with the body, Manderson's not returning to the house would cause
+uneasiness in two or three hours at most. Martin would suspect an
+accident to the car, and would telephone to the police. At daybreak the
+roads would be scoured and inquiries telegraphed in every direction. The
+police would act on the possibility of there being foul play. They would
+spread their nets with energy in such a big business as the
+disappearance of Manderson. Ports and railway termini would be watched.
+Within twenty-four hours the body would be found, and the whole country
+would be on the alert for me&mdash;all Europe scarcely less; I did not
+believe there was a spot in Christendom where the man accused of
+Manderson's murder could pass unchallenged, with every newspaper crying
+the fact of his death into the ears of all the world. Every stranger
+would be suspected; every man, woman and child would be a detective. The
+car, wherever I should abandon it, would put people on my track. If I
+had to choose between two utterly hopeless courses, I decided, I would
+take that of telling the preposterous truth.</p>
+
+<p>"But now I cast about desperately for some tale that would seem more
+plausible than the truth. Could I save my neck by a lie? One after
+another came into my mind; I need not trouble to remember them now. Each
+had its own futilities and perils; but every one split upon the fact&mdash;or
+what would be taken for fact&mdash;that I had induced Manderson to go out
+with me, and the fact that he had never returned alive. Notion after
+notion I swiftly rejected as I paced there by the dead man, and doom
+seemed to settle down upon me more heavily as the moments passed. Then a
+strange thought came to me.</p>
+
+<p>"Several times I had repeated to myself half-consciously, as a sort of
+refrain, the words in which I had heard Manderson tell his wife that I
+had induced him to go out. 'Marlowe has persuaded me to go for a
+moonlight run in the car. He is very urgent about it.' All at once it
+struck me that, without meaning to do so, I was saying this in
+Manderson's voice.</p>
+
+<p>"As you found out for yourself, Mr. Trent, I have a natural gift of
+mimicry. I had imitated Manderson's voice many times so successfully as
+to deceive even Bunner, who had been much more in his company than his
+own wife. It was, you remember,"&mdash;Marlowe turned to Mr. Cupples&mdash;"a
+strong, metallic voice, of great carrying power, so unusual as to make
+it a very fascinating voice to imitate, and at the same time very easy.
+I said the words carefully to myself again, like this&mdash;" he uttered
+them, and Mr. Cupples opened his eyes in amazement&mdash;"and then I struck
+my hand upon the low wall beside me. 'Manderson never returned alive?' I
+said aloud. 'But Manderson <i>shall</i> return alive!'</p>
+
+<p>"In thirty seconds the bare outline of the plan was complete in my mind.
+I did not wait to think over details. Every instant was precious now; I
+lifted the body and laid it on the floor of the car, covered with a rug.
+I took the hat and the revolver. Not one trace remained on the green, I
+believe, of that night's work. As I drove back to White Gables my design
+took shape before me with a rapidity and ease that filled me with a wild
+excitement. I should escape yet! It was all so easy if I kept my pluck.
+Putting aside the unusual and unlikely, I should not fail. I wanted to
+shout, to scream! Nearing the house I slackened speed, and carefully
+reconnoitered the road. Nothing was moving. I turned the car into the
+open field on the other side of the road, about twenty paces short of
+the little door at the extreme corner of the grounds. I brought it to
+rest behind a stack. When, with Manderson's hat on my head and the
+pistol in my pocket, I had staggered with the body across the moonlit
+road and through that door, I left much of my apprehension behind me.
+With swift action and an unbroken nerve, I thought I ought to succeed."</p>
+
+<p>With a long sigh Marlowe threw himself into one of the deep chairs at
+the fireside, and passed his handkerchief over his damp forehead. Each
+of his hearers, too, drew a deep breath, but not audibly.</p>
+
+<p>"Everything else you know," he said. He took a cigarette from a box
+beside him and lighted it. Trent watched the very slight quiver of the
+hand that held the match, and privately noted that his own at the moment
+was not so steady.</p>
+
+<p>"The shoes that betrayed me to you," pursued Marlowe after a short
+silence, "were painful all the time I wore them, but I never dreamed
+that they had given anywhere. I knew that no footstep of mine must
+appear by any accident in the soft ground about the hut where I laid the
+body, or between the hut and the house, so I took the shoes off and
+crammed my feet into them as soon as I was inside the little door. I
+left my own shoes, with my own jacket and overcoat, near the body, ready
+to be resumed later. I made a clear footmark on the soft gravel outside
+the French window, and several on the drugget round the carpet. The
+stripping off of the outer clothing of the body and the dressing of it
+afterwards in the brown suit and shoes, and putting the things into the
+pockets, was a horrible business; and getting the teeth out of the mouth
+was worse. The head ... but you don't want to hear about it. I didn't
+feel it much at the time. I was wriggling my own head out of a noose,
+you see. I wish I had thought of pulling down the cuffs, and had tied
+the shoes more neatly. And putting the watch in the wrong pocket was a
+bad mistake. It had all to be done so hurriedly.</p>
+
+<p>"You were wrong, by the way, about the whisky. After one stiffish drink
+I had no more; but I filled up a flask that was in the cupboard, and
+pocketed it. I had a night of peculiar anxiety and effort in front of
+me, and I didn't know how I should stand it. I had to take some once or
+twice during the drive. Speaking of that, you give rather a generous
+allowance of time in your document for doing that run by night. You say
+that to get to Southampton by half-past six in that car under the
+conditions, a man must, even if he drove like a demon, have left
+Marlstone by twelve at latest. I had not got the body dressed in
+the other suit, with tie and watch-chain and so forth, until nearly
+ten minutes past; and then I had to get to the car and start it
+going.... But then I don't suppose any demon would have taken the risks
+I did in that car at night, without a head-light. It turns me cold to
+think of it now.</p>
+
+<p>"There's nothing much to say about what I did in the house. I spent the
+time after Martin had left me in carefully thinking over the remaining
+steps in my plan, while I unloaded and thoroughly cleaned the revolver,
+using my handkerchief and a penholder from the desk. I also placed the
+packets of notes, the note-case and the diamonds in the roll-top desk,
+which I opened and re-locked with Manderson's key. When I went upstairs
+it was a trying moment, for though I was safe from the eyes of Martin as
+he sat in his pantry, there was a faint possibility of somebody being
+about on the bedroom floor. I had sometimes found the French maid
+wandering about there when the other servants were in bed. Bunner, I
+knew, was a deep sleeper. Mrs. Manderson, I had gathered from things I
+had heard her say, was usually asleep by eleven; I had thought it
+possible that her gift of sleep had helped her to retain all her beauty
+and vitality in spite of a marriage which we all knew was an unhappy
+one. Still, it was uneasy work mounting the stairs and holding myself
+ready to retreat to the library again at the least sound from above. But
+nothing happened.</p>
+
+<p>"The first thing I did on reaching the corridor was to enter my room and
+put the revolver and cartridges back in the case. Then I turned off the
+light and went quietly into Manderson's room.</p>
+
+<p>"What I had to do there you know. I had to take off the shoes and put
+them outside the door, leave Manderson's jacket, waistcoat, trousers and
+black tie, after taking everything out of the pockets, select a suit and
+tie and shoes for the body, and place the dental plate in the bowl,
+which I moved from the washing-stand to the bedside, leaving those
+ruinous finger-marks as I did so. The marks on the drawer must have been
+made when I shut it after taking out the tie. Then I had to lie down in
+the bed and tumble it. You know all about it&mdash;all except my state of
+mind, which you couldn't imagine, and I couldn't describe.</p>
+
+<p>"The worst came when I had hardly begun my operations; the moment when
+Mrs. Manderson spoke from the room where I supposed her asleep. I was
+prepared for it happening; it was a possibility; but I nearly lost my
+nerve all the same. However....</p>
+
+<p>"By the way, I may tell you this: in the extremely unlikely contingency
+of Mrs. Manderson remaining awake and so putting out of the question my
+escape by way of her window, I had planned simply to remain where I was
+a few hours, and then, not speaking to her, to leave the house quickly
+and quietly by the ordinary way. Martin would have been in bed by that
+time. I might have been heard to leave, but not seen. I should have done
+just as I had planned with the body, and then made the best time I could
+in the car to Southampton. The difference would have been that I
+couldn't have furnished an unquestionable alibi by turning up at the
+hotel at six-thirty. I should have made the best of it by driving
+straight to the docks and making my ostentatious inquiries there. I
+could in any case have got there long before the boat left at noon. I
+couldn't see that anybody could suspect me of the supposed murder in any
+case; but if any one had, and if I hadn't arrived until ten o'clock,
+say, I shouldn't have been able to answer: 'It is impossible for me to
+have got to Southampton so soon after shooting him.' I should simply
+have had to say I was delayed by a break-down after leaving Manderson at
+half-past ten, and challenged any one to produce any fact connecting me
+with the crime. They couldn't have done it. The pistol, left openly in
+my room, might have been used by anybody, even if it could be proved
+that that particular pistol was used. Nobody could reasonably connect me
+with the shooting so long as it was believed that it was Manderson who
+had returned to the house. The suspicion could not, I was confident,
+enter any one's mind. All the same, I wanted to introduce the element of
+absolute physical impossibility; I knew I should feel ten times as safe
+with that.</p>
+
+<p>"So when I knew from the sound of her breathing that Mrs. Manderson was
+asleep again I walked quickly across her room in my stocking feet and
+was on the grass with my bundle in ten seconds. I don't think I made the
+least noise. The curtain before the window was of soft, thick stuff and
+didn't rustle, and when I pushed the glass doors further open there was
+not a sound."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me," said Trent as the other stopped to light a new cigarette,
+"why you took the risk of going through Mrs. Manderson's room to escape
+from the house? I could see when I looked into the thing on the spot why
+it had to be on that side of the house; there was a danger of being seen
+by Martin or by some servant at a bedroom window if you got out by a
+window on one of the other sides. But there were three unoccupied rooms
+on that side: two spare bedrooms and Mrs. Manderson's sitting-room. I
+should have thought it would have been safer, after you had done what
+was necessary to your plan in Manderson's room, to leave it quietly and
+escape through one of those three rooms.... The fact that you went
+through her window, you know," he added coldly, "might have suggested,
+if it became known, a certain suspicion in regard to the lady herself. I
+think you understand me."</p>
+
+<p>Marlowe turned upon him with a glowing face. "And I think you will
+understand me, Mr. Trent," he said in a voice that shook a little, "when
+I say that if such a possibility had occurred to me then, I would have
+taken any risk rather than make my escape by that way.... Oh, well!" he
+went on more coolly, "I suppose that to any one who didn't know her the
+idea of her being privy to her husband's murder might not seem so
+indescribably fatuous. Forgive the expression." He looked attentively at
+the burning end of his cigarette, studiously unconscious of the red flag
+that flew in Trent's eyes for an instant at his words and the tone of
+them.</p>
+
+<p>That emotion, however, was conquered at once. "Your remark is perfectly
+just," Trent said with answering coolness. "I can quite believe, too,
+that at the time you didn't think of the possibility I mentioned. But
+surely, apart from that, it would have been safer to do as I said: go by
+the window of an unoccupied room."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think so?" said Marlowe. "All I can say is I hadn't the nerve to
+do it. I tell you, when I entered Manderson's room I shut the door of it
+on more than half my terrors. I had the problem confined before me in a
+closed space, with only one danger in it, and that a <i>known</i> danger: the
+danger of Mrs. Manderson. The thing was almost done: I had only to wait
+until she was certainly asleep after her few moments of waking up, for
+which, as I told you, I was prepared as a possibility. Barring
+accidents, the way was clear. But now suppose that I, carrying
+Manderson's clothes and shoes, had opened that door again and gone in my
+shirt-sleeves and socks to enter one of the empty rooms. The moonlight
+was flooding the corridor through the end-window. Even if my face were
+concealed, nobody could mistake my standing figure for Manderson's.
+Martin might be going about the house in his silent way. Bunner might
+come out of his bedroom. One of the servants who were supposed to be in
+bed might come round the corner from the other passage&mdash;I had found
+C&eacute;lestine prowling about quite as late as it was then. None of these
+things was very likely; but they were all too likely for me. They were
+uncertainties. Shut off from the household in Manderson's room I knew
+exactly what I had to face. As I lay in my clothes in Manderson's bed
+and listened for the almost inaudible breathing through the open door I
+felt far more ease of mind, terrible as my anxiety was, than I had felt
+since I saw the dead body on the turf. I even congratulated myself that
+I had had the chance, through Mrs. Manderson's speaking to me, of
+tightening one of the screws in my scheme by repeating the statement
+about my having been sent to Southampton."</p>
+
+<p>Marlowe looked at Trent, who nodded as who should say that his point was
+met.</p>
+
+<p>"As for Southampton," pursued Marlowe, "you know what I did when I got
+there, I have no doubt. I had decided to take Manderson's story about
+the mysterious Harris and act it out on my own lines. It was a carefully
+prepared lie, better than anything I could improvise. I even went so far
+as to get through a trunk call to the hotel at Southampton from the
+library before starting, and ask if Harris was there. As I expected, he
+wasn't."</p>
+
+<p>"Was that why you telephoned?" Trent inquired quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"The reason for telephoning was to get myself into an attitude in which
+Martin couldn't see my face or anything but the jacket and hat, yet
+which was a natural and familiar attitude. But while I was about it, it
+was obviously better to make a genuine call. If I had simply pretended
+to be telephoning, the people at the exchange could have told you at
+once that there hadn't been a call from White Gables that night."</p>
+
+<p>"One of the first things I did was to make that inquiry," said Trent.
+"That telephone call, and the wire you sent from Southampton to the dead
+man, to say Harris hadn't turned up and you were returning&mdash;both those
+appealed to me."</p>
+
+<p>A constrained smile lighted Marlowe's face for a moment. "I don't know
+that there's anything more to tell. I returned to Marlstone, and faced
+your friend the detective with such nerve as I had left. The worst was
+when I heard you had been put on the case&mdash;no, that wasn't the worst.
+The worst was when I saw you walk out of the shrubbery the next day,
+coming away from the shed where I had laid the body. For one ghastly
+moment I thought you were going to give me in charge on the spot. Now
+I've told you everything, you don't look so terrible."</p>
+
+<p>He closed his eyes, and there was a short silence. Then Trent got
+suddenly to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Cross-examination?" inquired Marlowe, looking at him gravely.</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all," said Trent, stretching his long limbs. "Only stiffness of
+the legs. I don't want to ask any questions. I believe what you have
+told us. I don't believe it simply because I always liked your face, or
+because it saves awkwardness, which are the most usual reasons for
+believing a person, but because my vanity will have it that no man could
+lie to me steadily for an hour without my perceiving it. Your story is
+an extraordinary one; but Manderson was an extraordinary man, and so are
+you. You acted like a lunatic in doing what you did; but I quite agree
+with you that if you had acted like a sane man you wouldn't have had the
+hundredth part of a dog's chance with a judge and jury. One thing is
+beyond dispute on any reading of the affair: you are a man of courage."</p>
+
+<p>The color rushed into Marlowe's face, and he hesitated for words. Before
+he could speak Mr. Cupples arose with a dry cough.</p>
+
+<p>"For my part," he said, "I never supposed you guilty for a moment."
+Marlowe turned to him in grateful amazement, Trent with an incredulous
+stare. "But," pursued Mr. Cupples, holding up his hand, "there is one
+question which I should like to put."</p>
+
+<p>Marlowe bowed, saying nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose," said Mr. Cupples, "that someone else had been suspected of
+the crime and put upon trial. What would you have done?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think my duty was clear. I should have gone with my story to the
+lawyers for the defense, and put myself in their hands."</p>
+
+<p>Trent laughed aloud. Now that the thing was over his spirits were
+rapidly becoming ungovernable. "I can see their faces!" he said. "As a
+matter of fact, though, nobody else was ever in danger. There wasn't a
+shred of evidence against any one. I looked up Murch at the Yard this
+morning, and he told me he had come round to Bunner's view, that it was
+a case of revenge on the part of some American black-hand gang. So
+there's the end of the Manderson case. Holy, suffering Moses! <i>What</i> an
+ass a man can make of himself when he thinks he's being preternaturally
+clever!" He seized the bulky envelop from the table, and stuffed it into
+the heart of the fire. "There's for you, old friend! For want of you the
+world's course will not fail. But look here! It's getting late&mdash;nearly
+seven, and Cupples and I have an appointment at half-past. We must go.
+Mr. Marlowe, good-by." He looked into the other's eyes. "I am a man who
+has worked hard to put a rope round your neck. Considering the
+circumstances I don't know whether you will blame me. Will you shake
+hands?"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE LAST STRAW</h3>
+
+
+<p>"What was that you said about our having an appointment at half-past
+seven?" asked Mr. Cupples as the two came out of the great gateway of
+the pile of flats. "Have we such an appointment?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly we have," replied Trent. "You are dining with me. Only one
+thing can properly celebrate this occasion, and that is a dinner for
+which I pay. No, no! I asked you first. I have got right down to the
+bottom of a case that must be unique, a case that has troubled even my
+mind for over a year, and if that isn't a good reason for standing a
+dinner, I don't know what is. Cupples, we will not go to my club. This
+is to be a festival, and to be seen in a London club in a state of
+pleasurable emotion is more than enough to shatter any man's career.
+Besides that, the dinner there is always the same, or at least they
+always make it taste the same, I know not how. The eternal dinner at my
+club hath bored millions of members like me, and shall bore; but
+to-night let the feast be spread in vain, so far as we are concerned. We
+will not go where the satraps throng the hall. We will go to
+Sheppard's."</p>
+
+<p>"Who is Sheppard?" asked Mr. Cupples mildly, as they proceeded up
+Victoria Street. His companion went with an unnatural lightness, and a
+policeman observing his face, smiled indulgently at a look of happiness
+which he could only attribute to alcohol.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is Sheppard?" echoed Trent with bitter emphasis. "That question, if
+you will pardon me for saying so, Cupples, is thoroughly characteristic
+of the spirit of aimless inquiry prevailing in this restless day. I
+suggest our dining at Sheppard's and instantly you fold your arms and
+demand, in a frenzy of intellectual pride, to know who Sheppard is
+before you will cross the threshold of Sheppard's. I am not going to
+pander to the vices of the modern mind. Sheppard's is a place where one
+can dine. I do not know Sheppard. It never occurred to me that Sheppard
+existed. Probably he is a myth of totemistic origin. All I know is that
+you can get a bit of saddle of mutton at Sheppard's that has made many
+an American visitor curse the day that Christopher Columbus was
+born.... Taxi!"</p>
+
+<p>A cab rolled smoothly to the curb, and the driver received his
+instruction with a majestic nod.</p>
+
+<p>"Another reason I have for suggesting Sheppard's," continued Trent,
+feverishly lighting a cigarette, "is that I am going to be married to
+the most wonderful woman in the world. I trust the connection of ideas
+is clear."</p>
+
+<p>"You are going to marry Mabel!" cried Mr. Cupples. "My dear friend, what
+good news this is! Shake hands, Trent; this is glorious! I congratulate
+you both from the bottom of my heart. And may I say&mdash;I don't want to
+interrupt your flow of high spirits, which is very natural indeed, and I
+remember being just the same in similar circumstances long ago&mdash;but may
+I say how earnestly I have hoped for this? Mabel has seen so much
+unhappiness, yet she is surely a woman formed in the great purpose of
+humanity to be the best influence in the life of a good man. But I did
+not know her mind as regarded yourself. <i>Your</i> mind I have known for
+some time," Mr. Cupples went on, with a twinkle in his eye that would
+have done credit to the worldliest of creatures. "I saw it at once when
+you were both dining at my house, and you sat listening to Professor
+Peppm&uuml;ller and looking at her. Some of us older fellows have our wits
+about us still, my dear boy."</p>
+
+<p>"Mabel says she knew it before that," replied Trent with a slightly
+crestfallen air. "And I thought I was acting the part of a person who
+was not mad about her to the life. Well, I never was any good at
+dissembling. I shouldn't wonder if even old Peppm&uuml;ller noticed something
+through his double convex lenses. But however crazy I may have been as
+an undeclared suitor, I am going to be much worse now. Here's the
+place," he broke off, as the cab rushed down a side-street and swung
+round a corner into a broad and populous thoroughfare. "We're there
+already." The cab drew up.</p>
+
+<p>"Here we are," said Trent as he paid the man and led Mr. Cupples into a
+long paneled room set with many tables and filled with a hum of talk.
+"This is the house of fulfilment of craving, this is the bower with the
+roses around it. I see there are three bookmakers eating pork at my
+favorite table. We will have that one in the opposite corner."</p>
+
+<p>He conferred earnestly with a waiter, while Mr. Cupples, in a pleasant
+meditation, warmed himself before the great fire. "The wine here," Trent
+resumed, as they seated themselves, "is almost certainly made out of
+grapes. What shall we drink?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples came out of his reverie. "I think," he said, "I will have
+milk and soda-water."</p>
+
+<p>"Speak lower!" urged Trent. "The head-waiter has a weak heart, and he
+might hear you. Milk and soda-water! Cupples, you may think you have a
+strong constitution, and I don't say you have not, but I warn you that
+this habit of mixing drinks has been the death of many a robuster man
+than you. Be wise in time. Fill high the bowl with Samian wine; leave
+soda to the Turkish hordes. Here comes our food." He gave another order
+to the waiter, who ranged the dishes before them and darted away. Trent
+was, it seemed, a respected customer. "I have sent," he said, "for wine
+that I know, and I hope you will try it. If you have taken a vow, then
+in the name of all the teetotal saints drink water, which stands at your
+elbow, but don't seek a cheap notoriety by demanding milk and soda."</p>
+
+<p>"I have never taken any pledge," said Mr. Cupples, examining his mutton
+with a favorable eye. "I simply don't care about wine. I bought a bottle
+once and drank it to see what it was like, and it made me ill. But very
+likely it was bad wine. I will taste some of yours, as it is your
+dinner, and I do assure you, my dear Trent, I should like to do
+something unusual to show how strongly I feel on the present occasion. I
+have not been so delighted for many years. To think," he reflected aloud
+as the waiter filled his glass, "of the Manderson mystery disposed of,
+the innocent exculpated, and your own and Mabel's happiness crowned&mdash;all
+coming upon me together! I drink to you, my dear friend." And Mr.
+Cupples took a very small sip of the wine.</p>
+
+<p>"You have a great nature," said Trent, much moved. "Your outward
+semblance doth belie your soul's immensity. I should have expected as
+soon to see an elephant conducting at the opera as you drinking my
+health. Dear Cupples! May his beak retain ever that delicate
+rose-stain!&mdash;No, curse it all!" he broke out, surprising a shade of
+discomfort that fitted over his companion's face as he tasted the wine
+again. "I have no business to meddle with your tastes. I apologize. You
+shall have what you want, even if it causes the head-waiter to perish in
+his pride."</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. Cupples had been supplied with his monastic drink, and the
+waiter had retired, Trent looked across the table with significance. "In
+this babble of many conversations," he said, "we can speak as freely as
+if we were on a bare hill-side. The waiter is whispering soft nothings
+into the ear of the young woman at the pay-desk. We are alone. What do
+you think of that interview of this afternoon?" He began to dine with an
+appetite.</p>
+
+<p>Without pausing in the task of cutting his mutton into very small pieces
+Mr. Cupples replied: "The most curious feature of it, in my judgment,
+was the irony of the situation. We both held the clue to that mad hatred
+of Manderson's which Marlowe found so mysterious. We knew of his jealous
+obsession; which knowledge we withheld, as was very proper, if only in
+consideration of Mabel's feelings. Marlowe will never know of what he
+was suspected by that person. Strange! Nearly all of us, I venture to
+think, move unconsciously among a network of opinions, often quite
+erroneous, which other people entertain about us. With regard to
+Marlowe's story, it appeared to me entirely straightforward, and not, in
+its essential features, especially remarkable, once we have admitted, as
+we surely must, that in the case of Manderson we have to deal with a
+more or less disordered mind. It was Mr. Bunner, I think you said, who
+told you of his rooted and apparently hereditary temper of suspicious
+jealousy. When the pressure of his business labors brought on mental
+derangement, that abnormality increased until it dominated him
+entirely."</p>
+
+<p>Trent laughed loudly. "Not especially remarkable!" he said. "I confess
+that the affair struck me as a little unusual."</p>
+
+<p>"Only in the development of the details," argued Mr. Cupples. "What is
+there abnormal in the essential facts? A madman conceives a crazy
+suspicion; he hatches a cunning plot against his fancied injurer; it
+involves his own destruction. Put thus, what is there that any man with
+the least knowledge of the ways of lunatics would call remarkable? Turn
+now to Marlowe's proceedings. He finds himself in a perilous position
+from which, though he is innocent, telling the truth will not save him.
+Is that an unheard-of situation? He escapes by means of a bold and
+ingenious piece of deception. That seems to me a thing that might happen
+every day and probably does so." He attacked his now unrecognizable
+mutton.</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to know," said Trent after an alimentary pause in the
+conversation, "whether there is anything that ever happened on the face
+of the earth that you could not represent as quite ordinary and
+commonplace, by such a line of argument as that. You may say what you
+like, but the idea of impersonating Manderson in those circumstances was
+an extraordinarily ingenious idea."</p>
+
+<p>"Ingenious&mdash;certainly!" replied Mr. Cupples. "Extraordinarily so&mdash;no! In
+those circumstances (your own words) it was really not strange that it
+should occur to a clever man. It lay almost on the surface of the
+situation. Marlowe was famous for his imitation of Manderson's voice; he
+had a talent for acting; he knew the ways of the establishment
+intimately. I grant you that the idea was brilliantly carried out; but
+everything favored it. As for the essential idea, I do not place it, as
+regards ingenuity, in the same class with, for example, the idea of
+utilizing the force of recoil in a discharged firearm to actuate the
+mechanism of ejecting and reloading. I do, however, admit, as I did at
+the outset, that in respect of details the case had unusual features. It
+developed a high degree of complexity."</p>
+
+<p>"Did it really strike you in that way?" inquired Trent with desperate
+sarcasm.</p>
+
+<p>"The affair became complicated," proceeded Mr. Cupples quite unmoved,
+"because after Marlowe's suspicions were awakened a second subtle mind
+came in to interfere with the plans of the first. That sort of duel
+often happens in business and politics, but less frequently, I imagine,
+in the world of crime. One disturbing reflection was left on my mind by
+what we learned to-day. If Marlowe had suspected nothing and walked into
+the trap, he would almost certainly have been hanged. Now how often may
+not a plan to throw the guilt of murder on an innocent person have been
+practised successfully? There are, I imagine, numbers of cases in which
+the accused, being found guilty on circumstantial evidence, have died
+protesting their innocence. I shall never approve again of a
+death-sentence imposed in a case decided upon such evidence."</p>
+
+<p>"I never have done so, for my part," said Trent. "To hang in such cases
+seems to me flying in the face of the perfectly obvious and sound
+principle expressed in the saying that 'you never can tell.' I agree
+with the American jurist who lays it down that we should not hang a
+yellow dog for stealing jam on circumstantial evidence, not even if he
+has jam all over his nose. As for attempts being made by malevolent
+persons to fix crimes upon innocent men, of course it is constantly
+happening."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples mused a few moments. "We know," he said, "from the things
+Mabel and Mr. Bunner told you what may be termed the spiritual truth
+underlying this matter: the insane depth of jealous hatred which
+Manderson concealed. We can understand that he was capable of such a
+scheme. But as a rule it is in the task of penetrating to the spiritual
+truth that the administration of justice breaks down. Sometimes that
+truth is deliberately concealed, as in Manderson's case. Sometimes, I
+think, it is concealed because simple people are actually unable to
+express it, and nobody else divines it."</p>
+
+<p>"The law certainly does not shine when it comes to a case requiring much
+delicacy of perception," said Trent. "It goes wrong easily enough over
+the commonplace criminal. As for the people with temperaments who get
+mixed up in legal proceedings, they must feel as if they were in a
+forest of apes, whether they win or lose. Well, I dare say it's good for
+them and their sort to have their noses rubbed in reality now and again.
+But what would twelve red-faced realities in a jury-box have done to
+Marlowe? His story would, as he says, have been a great deal worse than
+no defense at all. It's not as if there were a single piece of evidence
+in support of his tale. Can't you imagine how the prosecution would tear
+it to rags? Can't you see the judge simply taking it in his stride when
+it came to the summing up? And the jury&mdash;you've served on juries, I
+expect&mdash;in their room, snorting with indignation over the feebleness of
+the lie, telling each other it was the clearest case they ever heard of,
+and that they'd have thought better of him if he hadn't lost his nerve
+at the crisis, and had cleared off with the swag as he intended. Imagine
+yourself on that jury, not knowing Marlowe, and trembling with
+indignation at the record unrolled before you&mdash;cupidity, murder,
+robbery, sudden cowardice, shameless, impenitent, desperate lying! Why,
+you and I believed him to be guilty until&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon! I beg your pardon!" interjected Mr. Cupples, laying
+down his knife and fork. "I was most careful, when we talked it all over
+the other night, to say nothing indicating such a belief. <i>I</i> was always
+certain that he was innocent."</p>
+
+<p>"You said something of the sort at Marlowe's just now. I wondered what
+on earth you could mean. Certain that he was innocent! How can you be
+certain? You are generally more careful about terms than that, Cupples."</p>
+
+<p>"I said 'certain,'" Mr. Cupples repeated firmly.</p>
+
+<p>Trent shrugged his shoulders. "If you really were, after reading my
+manuscript and discussing the whole thing as we did," he rejoined, "then
+I can only say that you must have totally renounced all trust in the
+operations of the human reason; an attitude which, while it is bad
+Christianity and also infernal nonsense, is oddly enough bad Positivism
+too, unless I misunderstand that system. Why, man&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Let me say a word," Mr. Cupples interposed again, folding his hands
+above his plate. "I assure you I am far from abandoning reason. I am
+certain he is innocent, and I always was certain of it, because of
+something that I know, and knew from the very beginning. You asked me
+just now to imagine myself on the jury at Marlowe's trial. That would be
+an unprofitable exercise of the mental powers, because I know that I
+should be present in another capacity. I should be in the witness box,
+giving evidence for the defense. You said just now, 'If there were a
+single piece of evidence in support of his tale.' There is, and it is my
+evidence. And," he added quietly, "it is conclusive." He took up his
+knife and fork and went contentedly on with his dinner.</p>
+
+<p>The pallor of excitement had turned Trent to marble while Mr. Cupples
+led laboriously up to this statement. At the last word the blood rushed
+to his face again and he struck the table with an unnatural laugh. "It
+can't be!" he exploded. "It's something you fancied, something you
+dreamed after one of those debauches of soda-and-milk. You can't really
+mean that all the time I was working on the case down there you knew
+Marlowe was innocent."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples, busy with his last mouthful, nodded brightly. He made an
+end of eating, wiped his sparse mustache, and then leaned forward over
+the table. "It's very simple," he said. "I shot Manderson myself."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"I am afraid I startled you," Trent heard the voice of Mr. Cupples say.
+He forced himself out of his stupefaction like a diver striking upward
+for the surface, and with a rigid movement raised his glass. But half of
+the wine splashed upon the cloth, and he put it carefully down again
+untasted. He drew a deep breath, which was exhaled in a laugh wholly
+without merriment. "Go on," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"It was not murder," began Mr. Cupples, slowly measuring off inches with
+a fork on the edge of the table. "I will tell you the whole story. On
+that Sunday night I was taking my before-bedtime constitutional, having
+set out from the hotel about a quarter past ten. I went along the
+field-path that runs behind White Gables, cutting off the great curve of
+the road, and came out on the road nearly opposite that gate that is
+just by the eighth hole on the golf-course. Then I turned in there,
+meaning to walk along the turf to the edge of the cliff, and go back
+that way. I had only gone a few steps when I heard the car coming, and
+then I heard it stop near the gate. I saw Manderson at once. Do you
+remember my telling you I had seen him once alive after our quarrel in
+front of the hotel? Well, this was the time. You asked me if I had, and
+I did not care to tell a falsehood."</p>
+
+<p>A slight groan came from Trent. He drank a little wine, and said
+stonily: "Go on, please."</p>
+
+<p>"It was, as you know," pursued Mr. Cupples, "a moonlight night; but I
+was in shadow under the trees by the stone wall, and anyhow they could
+not suppose there was any one near them. I heard all that passed just as
+Marlowe has narrated it to us, and I saw the car go off towards
+Bishopsbridge. I did not see Manderson's face as it went, because his
+back was to me, but he shook his left hand at the car with extraordinary
+violence, greatly to my amazement. Then I waited for him to go back to
+White Gables, as I did not want to meet him again. But he did not go. He
+opened the gate through which I had just passed, and he stood there on
+the turf of the green, quite still. His head was bent, his arms hung at
+his sides, and he looked somehow ... rigid. For a few moments he
+remained in this tense attitude; then all of a sudden his right arm
+moved swiftly, and his hand was at the pocket of his overcoat. I saw his
+face raised in the moonlight, the teeth bared and the eyes glittering,
+and all at once I knew that the man was mad. Almost as quickly as that
+flashed across my mind, something else flashed in the moonlight. He held
+the pistol before him, pointing at his breast.</p>
+
+<p>"Now I may say here I shall always be doubtful whether Manderson
+intended to kill himself then. Marlowe naturally thinks so, knowing
+nothing of my intervention. But I think it quite likely he only meant to
+wound himself, and to charge Marlowe with attempted murder and robbery.</p>
+
+<p>"At that moment, however, I assumed it was suicide. Before I knew what I
+was doing I had leapt out of the shadows and seized his arm. He shook me
+off with a furious snarling noise, giving me a terrific blow in the
+chest, and presented the revolver at my head. But I seized his wrists
+before he could fire, and clung with all my strength&mdash;you remember how
+bruised and scratched they were. I knew I was fighting for my own life
+now, for murder was in his eyes. We struggled like two beasts, without
+an articulate word, I holding his pistol-hand down and keeping a grip on
+the other. I never dreamed that I had the strength for such an
+encounter. Then, with a perfectly instinctive movement&mdash;I never knew I
+meant to do it&mdash;I flung away his free hand and clutched like lightning
+at the weapon, tearing it from his fingers. By a miracle it did not go
+off. I darted back a few steps, he sprang at my throat like a wild cat,
+and I fired blindly in his face. He would have been about a yard away, I
+suppose. His knees gave way instantly, and he fell in a heap on the
+turf.</p>
+
+<p>"I flung the pistol down, and bent over him. The heart's motion ceased
+under my hand. I knelt there staring, struck motionless; and I don't
+know how long it was before I heard the noise of the car returning.</p>
+
+<p>"Trent, all the time that Marlowe paced that green, with the moonlight
+on his white and working face, I was within a few yards of him,
+crouching in the shadow of the furze by the ninth tee. I dared not show
+myself. I was thinking. My public quarrel with Manderson the same
+morning was, I suspected, the talk of the hotel. I assure you that every
+horrible possibility of the situation for me had rushed across my mind
+the moment I saw Manderson fall. I became cunning. I knew what I must
+do. I must get back to the hotel as fast as I could, get in somehow
+unperceived, and play a part to save myself. I must never tell a word to
+any one. Of course I was assuming that Marlowe would tell everyone how
+he had found the body. I knew he would suppose it was suicide; I thought
+everyone would suppose so.</p>
+
+<p>"When Marlowe began at last to lift the body, I stole away down the wall
+and got out into the road by the club-house, where he could not see me.
+I felt perfectly cool and collected. I crossed the road, climbed the
+fence, and ran across the meadow to pick up the field-path I had come
+by, that runs to the hotel behind White Gables. I got back to the hotel
+very much out of breath."</p>
+
+<p>"Out of breath," repeated Trent mechanically, still staring at his
+companion as if hypnotized.</p>
+
+<p>"I had had a sharp run," said Mr. Cupples. "Well, approaching the hotel
+from the back I could see into the writing-room through the open window.
+There was nobody in there, so I climbed over the sill, walked to the
+bell and rang it, and then sat down to write a letter I had meant to
+write the next day. I saw by the clock that it was a little past eleven.
+When the waiter answered the bell I asked for a glass of milk and a
+postage-stamp. Soon afterwards I went up to bed. But I could not sleep."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Cupples, having nothing more to say, ceased speaking. He looked in
+mild surprise at Trent, who now sat silent, supporting his bent head in
+his hands.</p>
+
+<p>"He could not sleep!" murmured Trent at last in a hollow tone. "A
+frequent result of over-exertion during the day. Nothing to be alarmed
+about." He was silent again, then looked up with a pale face. "Cupples,
+I am cured. I will never touch a crime-mystery again. The Manderson
+affair shall be Philip Trent's last case. His high-blown pride at length
+breaks under him." Trent's smile suddenly returned. "I could have borne
+everything but that last revelation of the impotence of human reason.
+Cupples, I have absolutely nothing left to say, except this: you have
+beaten me. I drink your health in a spirit of self-abasement. And <i>you</i>
+shall pay for the dinner."</p>
+
+
+<p>THE END</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Woman in Black, by Edmund Clerihew Bentley
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Woman in Black, by Edmund Clerihew Bentley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Woman in Black
+
+Author: Edmund Clerihew Bentley
+
+Release Date: June 18, 2007 [EBook #21854]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMAN IN BLACK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Mary Meehan and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was made using scans of public domain works
+from the University of Michigan Digital Libraries.)
+
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+
+
+                           THE WOMAN IN BLACK
+
+                       BY EDMUND CLERIHEW BENTLEY
+
+
+
+
+    Copyright, 1913, by
+    The Century Co.
+    NEW YORK
+    _Published, March, 1913_
+
+
+
+
+        "... So shall you hear
+    Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
+    Of deaths put on by cunning, and forc'd cause,
+    And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
+    Fall'n on the inventors' heads ..."
+
+    --_Hamlet_.
+
+
+
+
+TO GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON
+
+
+_My dear Gilbert_:
+
+I dedicate this story to you. First: because the only really noble
+motive I had in writing it was the hope that you would enjoy it. Second:
+because I owe you a book in return for "The Man Who Was Thursday."
+Third: because I said I would when I unfolded the plan of it to you,
+surrounded by Frenchmen, two years ago. Fourth: because I remember the
+past.
+
+I have been thinking again to-day of those astonishing times when
+neither of us ever looked at a newspaper; when we were purely happy in
+the boundless consumption of paper, pencils, tea and our elders'
+patience; when we embraced the most severe literature, and ourselves
+produced such light reading as was necessary; when (in the words of
+Canada's poet) we studied the works of nature, also those little frogs;
+when, in short, we were extremely young.
+
+For the sake of that age I offer you this book.
+
+    Yours always,
+      E. C. BENTLEY.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+Prologue
+
+I Knocking the Town Endways
+
+II Breakfast
+
+III Handcuffs in the Air
+
+IV Poking About
+
+V Mr. Brunner on the Case
+
+VI The Lady in Black
+
+VII The Inquest
+
+VIII A Hot Scent
+
+IX The Wife of Dives
+
+X Hitherto Unpublished
+
+XI Evil Days
+
+XII Eruption
+
+XIII Writing a Letter
+
+XIV Double Cunning
+
+XV The Last Straw
+
+
+
+
+THE WOMAN IN BLACK
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we
+know judge wisely?
+
+When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered
+by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single
+tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of
+such wealth as this dead man had piled up--without making one loyal
+friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to
+the least honor. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to those
+living in the great vortices of business as if the earth, too, shuddered
+under a blow.
+
+In all the lurid commercial history of his country there had been no
+figure that had so imposed itself upon the mind of the trading world. He
+had a niche apart in its temples. Financial giants, strong to direct and
+augment the forces of capital, and taking an approved toll in millions
+for so doing, had existed before; but in the case of Manderson there had
+been this singularity, that a pale halo of piratical romance, a thing
+especially dear to the hearts of his countrymen, had remained
+incongruously about his head through the years when he stood in every
+eye as the unquestioned guardian of stability, the stamper-out of
+manipulated crises, the foe of the raiding chieftains that infest the
+borders of Wall Street.
+
+The fortune left by his grandfather, who had been one of those
+chieftains, on the smaller scale of his day, had descended to him with
+accretion through his father, who during a long life had quietly
+continued to lend money and never had margined a stock. Manderson, who
+had at no time known what it was to be without large sums to his hand,
+should have been altogether of that newer American plutocracy which is
+steadied by the tradition and habit of great wealth. But it was not so.
+While his nurture and education had taught him European ideas of a rich
+man's proper external circumstance; while they had rooted in him an
+instinct for quiet magnificence, the larger costliness which does not
+shriek of itself with a thousand tongues; there had been handed on to
+him, nevertheless, much of the Forty-Niner and financial buccaneer, his
+forbear. During that first period of his business career which had been
+called his early bad manner he had been little more than a gambler of
+genius, his hand against every man's, an infant prodigy who brought to
+the enthralling pursuit of speculation a brain better endowed than any
+opposed to it. At St. Helena it was laid down that war is _une belle
+occupation_, and so the young Manderson had found the multitudinous and
+complicated dog-fight of the Stock Exchange of New York.
+
+Then came his change. At his father's death, when Manderson was thirty
+years old, some new revelation of the power and the glory of the god he
+served seemed to have come upon him. With the sudden, elastic
+adaptability of his nation he turned to steady labor in his father's
+banking business, closing his ears to the sound of the battles of the
+Street. In a few years he came to control all the activity of the great
+firm whose unimpeached conservatism, safety and financial weight lifted
+it like a cliff above the angry sea of the markets. All mistrust founded
+on the performances of his youth had vanished. He was quite plainly a
+different man. How the change came about none could with authority say,
+but there was a story of certain last words spoken by his father, whom
+alone he had respected and perhaps loved.
+
+He began to tower above the financial situation. Soon his name was
+current in the bourses of the world. One who spoke the name of Manderson
+called up a vision of all that was broad-based and firm in the vast
+wealth of the United States. He planned great combinations of capital,
+drew together and centralized industries of continental scope, financed
+with unerring judgment the large designs of state or of private
+enterprise. Many a time when he "took hold" to smash a strike, or to
+federate the ownership of some great field of labor, he sent ruin upon a
+multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or steel-workers or cattlemen
+defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and ruthless
+than they. But this was done in the pursuit of legitimate business ends.
+Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but the financier
+and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a hand to protect
+or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of the country.
+Forcible, cold and unerring, in all he did he ministered to the national
+lust for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him the Colossus.
+
+But there was an aspect of Manderson in this later period that lay long
+unknown and unsuspected save by a few, his secretaries and lieutenants
+and certain of the associates of his bygone hurling time. This little
+circle knew that Manderson, the pillar of sound business and stability
+in the markets, had his hours of nostalgia for the lively times when the
+Street had trembled at his name. It was, said one of them, as if
+Blackbeard had settled down as a decent merchant in Bristol on the
+spoils of the Main. Now and then the pirate would glare suddenly out,
+the knife in his teeth and the sulphur matches sputtering in his
+hat-band. During such spasms of reversion to type a score of tempestuous
+raids upon the market had been planned on paper in the inner room of the
+offices of Manderson, Colefax and Company. But they were never carried
+out. Blackbeard would quell the mutiny of his old self within him and go
+soberly down to his counting-house--humming a stave or two of "Spanish
+Ladies," perhaps, under his breath. Manderson would allow himself the
+harmless satisfaction, as soon as the time for action had gone by, of
+pointing out to some Rupert of the markets how a coup worth a million to
+the depredator might have been made. "Seems to me," he would say almost
+wistfully, "the Street is getting to be a mighty dull place since I
+quit." By slow degrees this amiable weakness of the Colossus became
+known to the business world, which exulted greatly in the knowledge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the news of his death, panic went through the markets like a
+hurricane; for it came at a luckless time. Prices tottered and crashed
+like towers in an earthquake. For two days Wall Street was a clamorous
+inferno of pale despair. All over the United States, wherever
+speculation had its devotees, went a waft of ruin, a plague of suicide.
+In Europe also not a few took with their own hands lives that had become
+pitiably linked to the destiny of a financier whom most of them had
+never seen. In Paris a well-known banker walked quietly out of the
+Bourse and fell dead upon the broad steps among the raving crowd of
+Jews, a phial crushed in his hand. In Frankfort one leaped from the
+Cathedral top, leaving a redder stain where he struck the red tower. Men
+stabbed and shot and strangled themselves, drank death or breathed it as
+the air, because in a lonely corner of England the life had departed
+from one cold heart vowed to the service of greed.
+
+The blow could not have fallen at a more disastrous moment. It came when
+Wall Street was in a condition of suppressed "scare." Suppressed:
+because for a week past the great interests known to act with or to be
+actually controlled by the Colossus had been desperately combating the
+effects of the sudden arrest of Lucas Hahn, and the exposure of his
+plundering of the Hahn banks. This bombshell, in its turn, had fallen at
+a time when the market had been "boosted" beyond its real strength. In
+the language of the place, a slump was due. Reports from the corn-lands
+had not been good, and there had been two or three railway statements
+which had been expected to be much better than they were. But at
+whatever point in the vast area of speculation the shudder of the
+threatened break had been felt, "the Manderson crowd" had stepped in and
+held the market up. All through the week the speculator's mind, as
+shallow as it is quick-witted, as sentimental as greedy, had seen in
+this the hand of the giant stretched out in protection from afar.
+Manderson, said the newspapers in chorus, was in hourly communication
+with his lieutenants in the Street. One journal was able to give, in
+round figures, the sum spent on cabling between New York and Marlstone
+in the past twenty-four hours; it told how a small staff of expert
+operators had been sent down by the Post Office authorities to Marlstone
+to deal with the flood of messages. Another revealed that Manderson, on
+the first news of the Hahn crash, had arranged to abandon his holiday
+and return home by the _Lusitania_; but that he soon had the situation
+so well in hand that he had determined to remain where he was.
+
+All this was falsehood, more or less consciously elaborated by the
+"finance editors," consciously initiated and encouraged by the shrewd
+business men of the Manderson group, who knew that nothing could better
+help their plans than this illusion of hero-worship--knew also that no
+word had come from Manderson in answer to their messages, and that
+Howard B. Jeffrey, of Steel and Iron fame, was the true organizer of
+victory. So they fought down apprehension through four feverish days,
+and minds grew calmer. On Saturday, though the ground beneath the feet
+of Mr. Jeffrey yet rumbled now and then with AEtna-mutterings of
+disquiet, he deemed his task almost done. The market was firm and slowly
+advancing. Wall Street turned to its sleep of Sunday, worn out but
+thankfully at peace.
+
+In the first trading hour of Monday a hideous rumor flew round the sixty
+acres of the financial district. It came into being as the lightning
+comes, a blink that seems to begin nowhere; though it is to be suspected
+that it was first whispered over the telephone--together with an urgent
+selling order--by some employee in the cable service. In five minutes
+the dull noise of the curbstone market in Broad Street had leaped to a
+high note of frantic interrogation. From within the hive of the Exchange
+itself could be heard a droning hubbub of fear and men rushed hatless in
+and out. Was it true? asked every man; and every man replied, with
+trembling lips, that it was a lie put out by some unscrupulous "short"
+interest seeking to cover itself. In another quarter of an hour news
+came of a sudden and ruinous collapse of "Yankees" in London at the
+close of the Stock Exchange day. It was enough. New York had still four
+hours' trading in front of her. The strategy of pointing to Manderson as
+the savior and warden of the market had recoiled upon its authors with
+annihilating force, and Jeffrey, his ear at his private telephone,
+listened to the tale of disaster with a set jaw. The new Napoleon had
+lost his Marengo. He saw the whole financial landscape sliding and
+falling into chaos before him. In half an hour the news of the finding
+of Manderson's body, with the inevitable rumor that it was suicide, was
+printing in a dozen newspaper offices; but before a copy reached Wall
+Street the tornado of the panic was in full fury, and Howard B. Jeffrey
+and his collaborators were whirled away like leaves before its breath.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All this sprang out of nothing.
+
+Nothing in the texture of the general life had changed. The corn had not
+ceased to ripen in the sun. The rivers bore their barges and gave power
+to a myriad engines. The flocks fattened on the pastures, the herds were
+unnumbered. Men labored everywhere in the various servitudes to which
+they were born, and chafed not more than usual in their bonds. Bellona
+tossed and murmured as ever, yet still slept her uneasy sleep. To all
+mankind save a million or two of half-crazed gamblers, blind to all
+reality, the death of Manderson meant nothing; the life and work of the
+world went on. Weeks before he died strong hands had been in control of
+every wire in the huge network of commerce and industry that he had
+supervised. Before his corpse was buried his countrymen had made a
+strange discovery: that the existence of the potent engine of monopoly
+that went by the name of Sigsbee Manderson had not been a condition of
+even material prosperity. The panic blew itself out in two days, the
+pieces were picked up, the bankrupts withdrew out of sight; the market
+"recovered a normal tone."
+
+While the brief delirium was yet subsiding there broke out a domestic
+scandal in England that suddenly fixed the attention of two continents.
+Next morning the Chicago Limited was wrecked, and the same day a notable
+politician was shot down in cold blood by his wife's brother in the
+streets of New Orleans. Within a week of its arising "the Manderson
+story," to the trained sense of editors throughout the Union, was
+"cold." The tide of American visitors pouring through Europe made eddies
+round the memorial or statue of many a man who had died in poverty; and
+never thought of their most famous plutocrat. Like the poet who died in
+Rome, so young and poor, a hundred years ago, he was buried far away
+from his own land; but for all the men and women of Manderson's people
+who flock round the tomb of Keats in the cemetery under the Monte
+Testaccio, there is not one, nor ever will be, to stand in reverence by
+the rich man's grave beside the little church of Marlstone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+KNOCKING THE TOWN ENDWAYS
+
+
+In the only comfortably furnished room in the offices of the _Record_,
+the telephone on Sir James Molloy's table buzzed. Sir James made a
+motion with his pen, and Mr. Silver, his secretary, left his work and
+came over to the instrument.
+
+"Who is that?" he said. "Who?... I can't hear you ... Oh, it's Mr.
+Bunner, is it? Yes, but ... I know, but he's fearfully busy this
+afternoon. Can't you ... Oh, really? Well, in that case--just hold on,
+will you?"
+
+He placed the receiver before Sir James. "It's Calvin Bunner, Sigsbee
+Manderson's right hand man," he said concisely. "He insists on speaking
+to you personally. Says it is the gravest piece of news. He is talking
+from the house down by Bishopsbridge, so it will be necessary to speak
+clearly."
+
+Sir James looked at the telephone, not affectionately, and took up the
+receiver. "Well?" he said in his strong voice; and listened. "Yes," he
+said. The next moment Mr. Silver, eagerly watching him, saw a look of
+amazement and horror. "Good God," murmured Sir James. Clutching the
+instrument, he slowly rose to his feet, still bending ear intently. At
+intervals he repeated, "Yes." Presently, as he listened, he glanced at
+the clock, and spoke quickly to Mr. Silver over the top of the
+transmitter. "Go and hunt up Figgis and young Williams. Hurry!" Mr.
+Silver darted from the room.
+
+The great journalist was a tall, strong, clever Irishman of fifty, swart
+and black-mustached, a man of untiring business energy, well known in
+the world, which he understood very thoroughly, and played upon with the
+half-cynical competence of his race. Yet was he without a touch of the
+charlatan: he made no mysteries, and no pretenses of knowledge, and he
+saw instantly through these in others. In his handsome, well-bred,
+well-dressed appearance there was something a little sinister when anger
+or intense occupation put its imprint about his eyes and brow; but when
+his generous nature was under no restraint he was the most cordial of
+men. He was managing director of the company which owned that most
+powerful morning paper, the _Record_, and also that most indispensable
+evening paper, the _Sun_, which had its offices on the other side of the
+street. He was moreover editor-in-chief of the _Record_, to which he had
+in the course of years attached the most variously capable personnel in
+the country. It was a maxim of his that where you could not get gifts,
+you must do the best you could with solid merit; and he employed a great
+deal of both. He was respected by his staff as few are respected in a
+profession not favorable to the growth of the sentiment of reverence.
+
+"You're sure that's all?" asked Sir James, after a few minutes of
+earnest listening and questioning. "And how long has this been
+known?... Yes, of course, the police are; but the servants? Surely
+it's all over the place down there by now.... Well, we'll have a
+try.... Look here, Bunner, I'm infinitely obliged to you about this.
+I owe you a good turn. You know I mean what I say. Come and see me the
+first day you get to town.... All right, that's understood. Now I must
+act on your news. Good-by."
+
+Sir James hung up the receiver, and seized a railway time-table from the
+rack before him. After a rapid consultation of this oracle, he flung it
+down with a forcible word as Mr. Silver hurried into the room, followed
+by a hard-featured man with spectacles, and a youth with an alert eye.
+
+"I want you to jot down some facts, Figgis," said Sir James, banishing
+all signs of agitation and speaking with a rapid calmness. "When you
+have them, put them into shape just as quick you can for a special
+edition of the _Sun_." The hard-featured man nodded and glanced at the
+clock, which pointed to a few minutes past three; he pulled out a
+notebook and drew a chair up to the big writing-table. "Silver," Sir
+James went on, "go and tell Jones to wire our local correspondent very
+urgently, to drop everything and get down to Marlstone at once. He is
+not to say why in the telegram. There must not be an unnecessary word
+about this news until the _Sun_ is on the streets with it--you all
+understand. Williams, cut across the way and tell Mr. Anthony to hold
+himself ready for a two-column opening that will knock the town endways.
+Just tell him that he must take all measures and precautions for a
+scoop. Say that Figgis will be over in five minutes with the facts, and
+that he had better let him write up the story in his private room. As
+you go, ask Miss Morgan to see me here at once and tell the telephone
+people to see if they can get Mr. Trent on the wire for me. After seeing
+Mr. Anthony, return here and stand by." The alert-eyed young man
+vanished like a spirit.
+
+Sir James turned instantly to Mr. Figgis, whose pencil was poised over
+the paper. "Sigsbee Manderson has been murdered," he began quickly and
+clearly, pacing the floor with his hands behind him. Mr. Figgis
+scratched down a line of shorthand with as much emotion as if he had
+been told that the day was fine--the pose of his craft. "He and his wife
+and two secretaries have been for the past fortnight at the house called
+White Gables, at Marlstone, near Bishopsbridge. He bought it four years
+ago. He and Mrs. Manderson have since spent a part of each summer there.
+Last night he went to bed about half-past eleven, just as usual. No one
+knows when he got up and left the house. He was not missed until this
+morning. About ten o'clock his body was found by a gardener. It was
+lying by a shed in the grounds. He was shot in the head, through the
+left eye. Death must have been instantaneous. The body was not robbed,
+but there were marks on the wrists which pointed to a struggle having
+taken place. Dr. Stock, of Marlstone, was at once sent for, and will
+conduct the post-mortem examination. The police from Bishopsbridge, who
+were soon on the spot, are reticent, but it is believed that they are
+quite without a clue to the identity of the murderer. There you are,
+Figgis. Mr. Anthony is expecting you. Now I must telephone him and
+arrange things."
+
+Mr. Figgis looked up. "One of the ablest detectives at Scotland Yard,"
+he suggested, "has been put in charge of the case. It's a safe
+statement."
+
+"If you like," said Sir James.
+
+"And Mrs. Manderson? Was she there?"
+
+"Yes. What about her?"
+
+"Prostrated by the shock," hinted the reporter, "and sees nobody. Human
+interest."
+
+"I wouldn't put that in, Mr. Figgis," said a quiet voice. It belonged to
+Miss Morgan, a pale, graceful woman, who had silently made her
+appearance while the dictation was going on. "I have seen Mrs.
+Manderson," she proceeded, turning to Sir James. "She looks quite
+healthy and intelligent. Has her husband been murdered? I don't think
+the shock would prostrate her. She is more likely to be doing all she
+can to help the police."
+
+"Something in your own style, then, Miss Morgan," he said with a
+momentary smile. Her imperturbable efficiency was an office proverb.
+"Cut it out, Figgis. Off you go! Now, madam, I expect you know what I
+want."
+
+"Our Manderson biography happens to be well up-to-date," replied Miss
+Morgan, drooping her dark eye-lashes as she considered the position. "I
+was looking over it only a few months ago. It is practically ready for
+to-morrow's paper. I should think the _Sun_ had better use the sketch of
+his life they had about two years ago, when he went to Berlin and
+settled the potash difficulty. I remember it was a very good sketch, and
+they won't be able to carry much more than that. As for our paper, of
+course we have a great quantity of cuttings, mostly rubbish. The
+sub-editors shall have them as soon as they come in. Then we have two
+very good portraits that are our own property; the best is a drawing Mr.
+Trent made when they were both on the same ship somewhere. It is better
+than any of the photographs; but you say the public prefers a bad
+photograph to a good drawing. I will send them down to you at once, and
+you can choose. As far as I can see, the _Record_ is well ahead of the
+situation, except that you will not be able to get a special man down
+there in time to be of any use for to-morrow's paper."
+
+Sir James sighed deeply. "What are we good for, anyhow?" he inquired
+dejectedly of Mr. Silver, who had returned to his desk. "She even knows
+Bradshaw by heart."
+
+Miss Morgan adjusted her cuffs with an air of patience. "Is there
+anything else?" she asked, as the telephone bell rang.
+
+"Yes, one thing," replied Sir James as he took up the receiver. "I want
+you to make a bad mistake some time, Miss Morgan; an everlasting
+bloomer--just to put us in countenance." She permitted herself the
+fraction of what would have been a charming smile as she went out.
+
+"Anthony?" asked Sir James; and was at once deep in consultation with
+the editor on the other side of the road. He seldom entered the _Sun_
+building in person: the atmosphere of an evening paper, he would say,
+was all very well if you liked that kind of thing. Mr. Anthony, the
+Murat of Fleet Street, who delighted in riding the whirlwind and
+fighting a tumultuous battle against time, would say the same of a
+morning paper.
+
+It was some five minutes later that a uniformed boy came in to say that
+Mr. Trent was on the wire. Sir James abruptly closed his talk with Mr.
+Anthony. "They can put him through at once," he said to the boy.
+
+"Hullo!" he cried into the telephone after a few moments. A voice in the
+instrument replied: "Hullo be blowed! What do you want?"
+
+"This is Molloy," said Sir James.
+
+"I know it is," the voice said. "This is Trent. He is in the middle of
+painting a picture, and he has been interrupted at a critical moment.
+Well, I hope it's something important, that's all!"
+
+"Trent," said Sir James impressively, "it is important. I want you to do
+some work for us."
+
+"Some play, you mean," replied the voice. "Believe me, I don't want a
+holiday. The working fit is very strong. I am doing some really decent
+things. Why can't you leave a man alone?"
+
+"Something very serious has happened."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Sigsbee Manderson has been murdered--shot through the brain--and they
+don't know who has done it. They found the body this morning. It
+happened at his place near Bishopsbridge." Sir James proceeded to tell
+his hearer, briefly and clearly, the facts that he had communicated to
+Mr. Figgis. "What do you think of it?" he ended.
+
+A considering grunt was the only answer.
+
+"Come now!" urged Sir James.
+
+"Tempter!"
+
+"You will go down?"
+
+There was a brief pause. "Are you there?" said Sir James.
+
+"Look here, Molloy," the voice broke out querulously, "the thing may be
+a case for me, or it may not. We can't possibly tell. It may be a
+mystery: it may be as simple as bread and cheese. The body not being
+robbed looks interesting, but he may have been outed by some wretched
+tramp whom he found sleeping in the grounds and tried to kick out. It's
+the sort of thing he would do. Such a murderer might easily have sense
+enough to know that to leave the money and valuables was the safest
+thing. I tell you frankly, I wouldn't have a hand in hanging a poor
+devil who had let daylight into a man like Sig Manderson as a measure of
+social protest."
+
+Sir James smiled at the telephone: a smile of success. "Come, my boy,
+you're getting feeble. Admit you want to go and have a look at the case.
+You know you do. If it's anything you don't want to handle, you're free
+to drop it. By the bye, where are you?"
+
+"I am blown along a wandering wind," replied the voice irresolutely,
+"and hollow, hollow, hollow all delight."
+
+"Can you get here within an hour?" persisted Sir James.
+
+"I suppose I can," the voice grumbled. "How much time have I?"
+
+"Good man! Well, there's time enough--that's just the worst of it. I've
+got to depend on our local correspondent for to-night. The only good
+train of the day went half an hour ago. The next is a slow one, leaving
+Paddington at midnight. You could have the Buster, if you like"--Sir
+James referred to a very fast motor-car of his--"but you wouldn't get
+down in time to do anything to-night."
+
+"And I'd miss my sleep. No, thanks. The train for me. I am quite fond of
+railway-traveling, you know; I have a gift for it. I am the stoker and
+the stoked, I am the song the porter sings."
+
+"What's that you say?"
+
+"It doesn't matter," said the voice sadly. "I say," it continued, "will
+your people look out a hotel near the scene of action, and telegraph for
+a room?"
+
+"At once," said Sir James. "Come here as soon as you can!" He replaced
+the receiver. As he turned to his papers again a shrill outcry burst
+forth in the street below. He walked to the open window. A band of
+excited boys was rushing down the steps of the Sun building and up the
+narrow thoroughfare toward Fleet Street. Each carried a bundle of
+newspapers and a large broadsheet with the simple legend:
+
+     MURDER OF SIGSBEE MANDERSON
+
+Sir James smiled and rattled the money in his pockets cheerfully.
+
+"It makes a good bill," he observed to Mr. Silver, who stood at his
+elbow.
+
+Such was Manderson's epitaph.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+BREAKFAST
+
+
+At about eight o'clock in the morning of the following day Mr. Nathaniel
+Burton Cupples stood on the veranda of the hotel at Marlstone. He was
+thinking about breakfast. In his case the colloquialism must be taken
+literally; he really was thinking about breakfast, as he thought about
+every conscious act of his life when time allowed deliberation. He
+reflected that on the preceding day the excitement and activity
+following upon the discovery of the corpse had disorganized his appetite
+and led to his taking considerably less nourishment than usual. This
+morning he was very hungry, having already been up and about for an
+hour; and he decided to allow himself a third piece of toast and an
+additional egg; the rest as usual. The remaining deficit must be made up
+at luncheon; but that could be gone into later.
+
+So much being determined, Mr. Cupples applied himself to the enjoyment
+of the view for a few minutes before ordering his meal. With a
+connoisseur's eye he explored the beauty of the rugged coast, where a
+great pierced rock rose from a glassy sea, and the ordered loveliness of
+the vast tilted levels of pasture and tillage and woodland that sloped
+gently up from the cliffs toward the distant moor. Mr. Cupples delighted
+in landscape.
+
+He was a man of middle height and spare figure, nearly sixty years old,
+by constitution rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his
+age. A sparse and straggling beard and mustache did not conceal a thin
+but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and
+narrow jaw gave him very much the air of a priest, and this impression
+was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. He was a
+man of unusually conscientious, industrious and orderly mind, with
+little imagination. His father's household had been used to recruit its
+domestic establishment by means of advertisements in which it was
+truthfully described as a serious family. From that fortress of gloom he
+had escaped with two saintly gifts somehow unspoiled: an inexhaustible
+kindness of heart and a capacity for innocent gaiety which owed nothing
+to humor. In an earlier day and with a clerical training he might have
+risen to the scarlet hat. He was, in fact, a highly regarded member of
+the London Positivist Society, a retired banker, a widower without
+children. His austere but not unhappy life was spent largely among books
+and in museums; his profound and patiently accumulated knowledge of a
+number of curiously disconnected subjects which had stirred his interest
+at different times had given him a place in the quiet, half-lit world of
+professors and curators and devotees of research; at their amiable,
+unconvivial dinner-parties he was most himself. His favorite author was
+Montaigne.
+
+Just as Mr. Cupples was finishing his meal at a little table on the
+veranda, a big motor-car turned into the drive before the hotel. "Who is
+this?" he inquired of the waiter. "Id is der manager," said the young
+man listlessly. "He have been to meed a gendleman by der train."
+
+The car drew up and the porter hurried from the entrance. Mr. Cupples
+uttered an exclamation of pleasure as a long, loosely-built man, much
+younger than himself, stepped from the car and mounted the veranda,
+flinging his hat on a chair. His high-boned Quixotic face wore a
+pleasant smile, his rough tweed clothes, his hair and short mustache
+were tolerably untidy.
+
+"Cupples, by all that's miraculous!" cried the man, pouncing upon Mr.
+Cupples before he could rise, and seizing his outstretched hand in a
+hard grip. "My luck is serving me to-day," the newcomer went on
+spasmodically. "This is the second slice within an hour. How are you, my
+best of friends? And why are you here? Why sit'st thou by that ruined
+breakfast? Dost thou its former pride recall, or ponder how it passed
+away? I _am_ glad to see you!"
+
+"I was half expecting you, Trent," Mr. Cupples replied, his face
+wreathed in smiles. "You are looking splendid, my dear fellow. I will
+tell you all about it. But you cannot have had your own breakfast yet.
+Will you have it at my table here?"
+
+"Rather!" said the man. "An enormous great breakfast, too--with refined
+conversation and tears of recognition never dry. Will you get young
+Siegfried to lay a place for me while I go and wash? I sha'n't be three
+minutes." He disappeared into the hotel, and Mr. Cupples, after a
+moment's thought, went to the telephone in the porter's office.
+
+He returned to find his friend already seated, pouring out tea, and
+showing an unaffected interest in the choice of food. "I expect this to
+be a hard day for me," he said, with the curious jerky utterance which
+seemed to be his habit. "I sha'n't eat again till the evening, very
+likely. You guess why I'm here, don't you?"
+
+"Undoubtedly," said Mr. Cupples. "You have come down to write about the
+murder."
+
+"That is rather a colorless way of stating it," Trent replied, as he
+dissected a sole. "I should prefer to put it that I have come down in
+the character of avenger of blood, to hunt down the guilty and vindicate
+the honor of society. That is my line of business. Families waited on at
+their private residences. I say, Cupples, I have made a good beginning
+already. Wait a bit, and I'll tell you." There was a silence, during
+which the newcomer ate swiftly and abstractedly, while Mr. Cupples
+looked on happily.
+
+"Your manager here," said the tall man at last, "is a fellow of
+remarkable judgment. He is an admirer of mine. He knows more about my
+best cases than I do myself. The _Record_ wired last night to say I was
+coming, and when I got out of the train at seven o'clock this morning,
+there he was waiting for me with a motor-car the size of a haystack. He
+is beside himself with joy at having me here. It is fame." He drank a
+cup of tea and continued: "Almost his first words were to ask me if I
+would like to see the body of the murdered man--if so, he thought he
+could manage it for me. He is as keen as a razor. The body lies in Dr.
+Stock's surgery, you know, down in the village, exactly as it was when
+found. It's to be post-mortem'd this morning, by the way, so I was only
+just in time. Well, he ran me down here to the doctor's, giving me full
+particulars about the case all the way. I was pretty well _au fait_ by
+the time we arrived. I suppose the manager of a place like this has some
+sort of a pull with the doctor. Anyhow, he made no difficulties, nor did
+the constable on duty, though he was careful to insist on my not giving
+him away in the paper."
+
+"I saw the body before it was removed," remarked Mr. Cupples. "I should
+not have said there was anything remarkable about it, except that the
+shot in the eye had scarcely disfigured the face at all, and caused
+scarcely any effusion of blood, apparently. The wrists were scratched
+and bruised. I expect that, with your trained faculties, you were able
+to remark other details of a suggestive nature."
+
+"Other details, certainly; but I don't know that they suggest anything.
+They are merely odd. Take the wrists, for instance. How is it you could
+see bruises and scratches on them? I dare say you saw something of
+Manderson down here before the murder?"
+
+"Certainly," Mr. Cupples said.
+
+"Well, did you ever see his wrists?"
+
+Mr. Cupples reflected. "No. Now you raise the point, I am reminded that
+when I interviewed Manderson here he was wearing stiff cuffs, coming
+well down over his hands."
+
+"He always did," said Trent. "My friend the manager says so. I pointed
+out to him the fact you didn't observe, that there were no cuffs
+visible, and that they had indeed been dragged up inside the
+coat-sleeves, as yours would be if you hurried into a coat without
+pulling your cuffs down. That was why you saw his wrists."
+
+"Well, I call that suggestive," observed Mr. Cupples mildly. "You might
+infer, perhaps, that when he got up he hurried over his dressing."
+
+"Yes, but did he? The manager said just what you say. 'He was always a
+bit of a swell in his dress,' he told me, and he drew the inference that
+when Manderson got up in that mysterious way, before the house was
+stirring, and went out into the grounds, he was in a great hurry. 'Look
+at his shoes,' he said to me: 'Mr. Manderson was always specially neat
+about his foot-wear. But those shoe-laces were tied in a hurry.' I
+agreed. 'And he left his false teeth in his room,' said the manager.
+'Doesn't _that_ prove he was flustered and hurried?' I allowed that it
+looked like it. But I said, 'Look here: if he was so very much pressed,
+why did he part his hair so carefully? That parting is a work of art.
+Why did he put on so much?--for he had on a complete out-fit of
+underclothing, studs in his shirt, sock-suspenders, a watch and chain,
+money and keys and things in his pockets.' That's what I said to the
+manager. He couldn't find an explanation. Can you?"
+
+Mr. Cupples considered. "Those facts might suggest that he was hurried
+only at the end of his dressing. Coat and shoes would come last."
+
+"But not false teeth. You ask anybody who wears them. And besides, I'm
+told he hadn't washed at all on getting up, which in a neat man looks
+like his being in a violent hurry from the beginning. And here's another
+thing. One of his waistcoat pockets was lined with wash-leather for the
+reception of his gold watch. But he had put his watch into the pocket on
+the other side. Anybody who has settled habits can see how odd that is.
+The fact is, there are signs of great agitation and haste, and there are
+signs of exactly the opposite. For the present I am not guessing. I must
+reconnoiter the ground first, if I can manage to get the right side of
+the people of the house." Trent applied himself again to his breakfast.
+
+Mr. Cupples smiled at him benevolently. "That is precisely the point,"
+he said, "on which I can be of some assistance to you." Trent glanced up
+in surprise. "I told you I half expected you. I will explain the
+situation. Mrs. Manderson, who is my niece--"
+
+"What!" Trent laid down his knife and fork. "Cupples, you are jesting
+with me."
+
+"I am perfectly serious, Trent, really," returned Mr. Cupples earnestly.
+"Her father, John Peter Domecq, was my wife's brother. I never mentioned
+my niece or her marriage to you before, I suppose. To tell the truth, it
+has always been a painful subject to me, and I have avoided discussing
+it with anybody. To return to what I was about to say: last night, when
+I was over at the house--by the way, you can see it from here. You
+passed it in the car." He indicated a red roof among poplars some three
+hundred yards away, the only building in sight that stood separate from
+the tiny village in the gap below them.
+
+"Certainly I did," said Trent. "The manager told me all about it, among
+other things, as he drove me in from Bishopsbridge."
+
+"Other people here have heard of you and your performances," Mr. Cupples
+went on. "As I was saying, when I was over there last night, Mr. Bunner,
+who is one of Manderson's two secretaries, expressed a hope that the
+_Record_ would send you down to deal with the case, as the police seemed
+quite at a loss. He mentioned one or two of your past successes, and
+Mabel--my niece--was interested when I told her afterwards. She is
+bearing up wonderfully well, Trent; she has remarkable fortitude of
+character. She said she remembered reading your articles about the
+Abinger case. She has a great horror of the newspaper side of this sad
+business, and she had entreated me to do anything I could to keep
+journalists away from the place--I'm sure you can understand her
+feeling, Trent; it isn't really any reflection on that profession. But
+she said you appeared to have great powers as a detective, and she would
+not stand in the way of anything that might clear up the crime. Then I
+told her you were a personal friend of mine, and gave you a good
+character for tact and consideration of others' feelings; and it ended
+in her saying that if you should come, she would like you to be helped
+in every way."
+
+Trent leaned across the table and shook Mr. Cupples by the hand in
+silence. Mr. Cupples, much delighted with the way things were turning
+out, resumed:
+
+"I spoke to my niece on the telephone only just now, and she is glad you
+are here. She asks me to say that you may make any inquiries you like,
+and she puts the house and grounds at your disposal. She had rather not
+see you herself; she is keeping to her own sitting-room. She has already
+been interviewed by a detective officer who is there, and feels unequal
+to any more. She adds that she does not believe she could say anything
+that would be of the smallest use. The two secretaries and Martin, the
+butler (who is a most intelligent man) could tell you all you want to
+know, she thinks."
+
+Trent finished his breakfast with a thoughtful brow. He filled a pipe
+slowly, and seated himself on the rail of the veranda. "Cupples," he
+said quietly, "is there anything about this business that you know and
+would rather not tell me?"
+
+Mr. Cupples gave a slight start, and turned an astonished gaze on the
+questioner. "What do you mean?" he said.
+
+"I mean about the Mandersons. Look here! shall I tell you a thing that
+strikes me about this affair at the very beginning? Here's a man
+suddenly and violently killed; and nobody's heart seems to be broken
+about it, to say the least. The manager of this hotel spoke to me about
+him as coolly as if he'd never set eyes on him, though I understand
+they've been neighbors every summer for some years. Then you talk about
+the thing in the coldest of blood. And Mrs. Manderson--well, you won't
+mind my saying that I have heard of women being more cut up about their
+husbands being murdered than she seems to be. Is there something in
+this, Cupples, or is it my fancy? Was there something queer about
+Manderson? I traveled on the same boat with him once, but never spoke to
+him. I only know his public character, which was repulsive enough. You
+see, this may have a bearing on the case; that's the only reason why I
+ask."
+
+Mr. Cupples took time for thought. He fingered his sparse beard and
+looked out over the sea. At last he turned to Trent. "I see no reason,"
+he said, "why I shouldn't tell you as between ourselves, my dear fellow.
+I need not say that this must not be referred to, however distantly. The
+truth is that nobody really liked Manderson; and I think those who were
+nearest to him liked him least."
+
+"Why?" the other interjected.
+
+"Most people found a difficulty in explaining why. In trying to account
+to myself for my own sensations, I could only put it that one felt in
+the man a complete absence of the sympathetic faculty. There was nothing
+outwardly repellent about him. He was not ill-mannered, or vicious, or
+dull--indeed, he could be remarkably interesting. But I received the
+impression that there could be no human creature whom he would not
+sacrifice in the pursuit of his schemes, in his task of imposing himself
+and his will upon the world. Perhaps that was fanciful, but I think not
+altogether so. However, the point is that Mabel, I am sorry to say, was
+very unhappy. I am nearly twice your age, my dear boy, though you always
+so kindly try to make me feel as if we were contemporaries--I am getting
+to be an old man, and a great many people have been good enough to
+confide their matrimonial troubles to me; but I never knew another case
+like my niece's and her husband's. I have known her since she was a
+baby, Trent, and I know--you understand, I think, that I do not employ
+that word lightly--I _know_ that she is as amiable and honorable a
+woman, to say nothing of her other good gifts, as any man could wish.
+But Manderson, for some time past, had made her miserable."
+
+"What did he do?" asked Trent, as Mr. Cupples paused.
+
+"When I put that question to Mabel, her words were that he seemed to
+nurse a perpetual grievance. He maintained a distance between them, and
+he would say nothing. I don't know how it began or what was behind it;
+and all she would tell me on that point was that he had no cause in the
+world for his attitude. I think she knew what was in his mind, whatever
+it was; but she is full of pride. This seems to have gone on for months.
+At last, a week ago, she wrote to me. I am the only near relative she
+has. Her mother died when she was a child; and after John Peter died, I
+was something like a father to her until she married--that was five
+years ago. She asked me to come and help her, and I came at once. That
+is why I am here now."
+
+Mr. Cupples paused and drank some tea. Trent smoked and stared out at
+the hot June landscape.
+
+"I would not go to White Gables," Mr. Cupples resumed. "You know my
+views, I think, upon the economic constitution of society, and the
+proper relationship of the capitalist to the employee, and you know, no
+doubt, what use that person made of his vast economic power upon several
+very notorious occasions. I refer especially to the trouble in the
+Pennsylvania coal fields, three years ago. I regarded him, apart from
+all personal dislike, in the light of a criminal and a disgrace to
+society. I came to this hotel, and I saw my niece here. She told me what
+I have more briefly told you. She said that the worry and the
+humiliation of it, and the strain of trying to keep up appearances
+before the world, were telling upon her, and she asked for my advice. I
+said I thought she should face him and demand an explanation of his way
+of treating her. But she would not do that. She had always taken the
+line of affecting not to notice the change in his demeanor, and nothing,
+I knew, would persuade her to admit to him that she was injured, once
+pride had led her into that course. Life is quite full, my dear Trent,"
+said Mr. Cupples with a sigh, "of these obstinate silences and
+cultivated misunderstandings."
+
+"Did she love him?" Trent inquired abruptly. Mr. Cupples did not reply
+at once. "Had she any love left for him?" Trent amended.
+
+Mr. Cupples played with his teaspoon. "I am bound to say," he answered
+slowly, "that I think not. But you must not misunderstand the woman,
+Trent. No power on earth would have persuaded her to admit that to any
+one--even to herself, perhaps--so long as she considered herself bound
+to him. And I gather that, apart from this mysterious sulking of late,
+he had always been considerate and generous."
+
+"You were saying that she refused to have it out with him."
+
+"She did," replied Mr. Cupples. "And I knew by experience that it was
+quite useless to attempt to move a Domecq where the sense of dignity was
+involved. So I thought it over carefully, and next day I watched my
+opportunity and met Manderson as he passed by this hotel. I asked him to
+favor me with a few minutes' conversation, and he stepped inside the
+gate down there. We had held no communication of any kind since my
+niece's marriage, but he remembered me, of course. I put the matter to
+him at once and quite definitely. I told him what Mabel had confided to
+me. I said that I would neither approve nor condemn her action in
+bringing me into the business, but that she was suffering, and I
+considered it my right to ask how he could justify himself in placing
+her in such a position."
+
+"And how did he take that?" said Trent, smiling secretly at the
+landscape. The picture of this mildest of men calling the formidable
+Manderson to account pleased him.
+
+"Not very well," Mr. Cupples replied sadly. "In fact, far from well. I
+can tell you almost exactly what he said--it wasn't much. He said, 'See
+here, Cupples, you don't want to butt in. My wife can look after
+herself. I've found that out, along with other things.' He was perfectly
+quiet--you know he was said never to lose control of himself--though
+there was a light in his eyes that would have frightened a man who was
+in the wrong, I dare say. But I had been thoroughly roused by his last
+remark, and the tone of it, which I cannot reproduce. You see," said Mr.
+Cupples simply, "I love my niece. She is the only child that there has
+been in our--in my house. Moreover, my wife brought her up as a girl,
+and any reflection on Mabel I could not help feeling, in the heat of the
+moment, as an indirect reflection upon one who is gone."
+
+"You turned upon him," suggested Trent in a low tone. "You asked him to
+explain his words."
+
+"That is precisely what I did," said Mr. Cupples. "For a moment he only
+stared at me, and I could see a vein on his forehead swelling--an
+unpleasant sight. Then he said quite quietly: 'This thing has gone far
+enough, I guess,' and turned to go."
+
+"Did he mean your interview?" Trent asked thoughtfully.
+
+"From the words alone you would think so," Mr. Cupples answered. "But
+the way in which he uttered them gave me a strange and very apprehensive
+feeling. I received the impression that the man had formed some sinister
+resolve. But I regret to say I had lost the power of dispassionate
+thought. I fell into a great rage"--Mr. Cupples' tone was mildly
+apologetic--"and said a number of foolish things. I reminded him that
+the law allowed a measure of freedom to wives who received intolerable
+treatment. I made some utterly irrelevant references to his public
+record, and expressed the view that such men as he were unfit to live. I
+said these things, and others as ill-considered, under the eyes, and
+very possibly within earshot, of half a dozen persons sitting on this
+veranda. I noticed them, in spite of my agitation, looking at me as I
+walked up to the hotel again after relieving my mind--for it undoubtedly
+did relieve it," sighed Mr. Cupples, lying back in his chair.
+
+"And Manderson? Did he say no more?"
+
+"Not a word. He listened to me with his eyes on my face, as quiet as
+before. When I stopped he smiled very slightly, and at once turned away
+and strolled through the gate, making for White Gables."
+
+"And this happened--?"
+
+"On the Sunday morning."
+
+"Then I suppose you never saw him alive again?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Cupples. "Or rather, yes--once. It was later in the day,
+on the golf-course. But I did not speak to him. And next morning he was
+found dead."
+
+The two regarded each other in silence for a few moments. A party of
+guests who had been bathing came up the steps and seated themselves,
+with much chattering, at a table near them. The waiter approached. Mr.
+Cupples rose, and taking Trent's arm led him to a long tennis-lawn at
+the side of the hotel.
+
+"I have a reason for telling you all this," began Mr. Cupples as they
+paced slowly up and down.
+
+"Trust you for that," rejoined Trent, carefully filling his pipe again.
+He lit it, smoked a little and then said: "I'll try and guess what your
+reason is, if you like."
+
+Mr. Cupples' face of solemnity relaxed into a slight smile. He said
+nothing.
+
+"You thought it possible," said Trent meditatively, "may I say you
+thought it practically certain?--that I should find out for myself that
+there had been something deeper than a mere conjugal tiff between the
+Mandersons. You thought that my unwholesome imagination would begin at
+once to play with the idea of Mrs. Manderson having something to do with
+the crime. Rather than that I should lose myself in barren speculations
+about this, you decided to tell me exactly how matters stood, and
+incidentally to impress upon me, who know how excellent your judgment
+is, your opinion of your niece. Is that about right?"
+
+"It is perfectly right. Listen to me, my dear fellow," said Mr. Cupples
+earnestly, laying his hand on the other's arm. "I am going to be very
+frank. I am extremely glad that Manderson is dead. I believe him to have
+done nothing but harm in the world as an economic factor. I know that he
+was making a desert of the life of one who was like my own child to me.
+But I am under an intolerable dread of Mabel being involved in suspicion
+with regard to the murder. It is horrible to me to think of her delicacy
+and goodness being in contact, if only for a time, with the brutalities
+of the law. She is not fitted for it. It would mark her deeply. Many
+young women of twenty-five in these days could face such an ordeal, I
+suppose. I have observed a sort of imitative hardness about the products
+of the higher education of women to-day which would carry them through
+anything, perhaps. I am not prepared to say it is a bad thing in the
+conditions of feminine life prevailing at present. Mabel, however, is
+not like that. She is as unlike that as she is unlike the simpering
+misses that used to surround me as a child. She has plenty of brains;
+she is full of character; her mind and her tastes are cultivated; but it
+is all mixed up"--Mr. Cupples waved his hands in a vague gesture--"with
+ideals of refinement and reservation and womanly mystery. I fear she is
+not a child of the age. You never knew my wife, Trent. Mabel is my
+wife's child."
+
+The younger man bowed his head. They paced the length of the lawn before
+he asked gently: "Why did she marry him?"
+
+"I don't know," said Mr. Cupples briefly.
+
+"Admired him, I suppose," suggested Trent.
+
+Mr. Cupples shrugged his shoulders. "I have been told that a woman will
+usually be more or less attracted by the most successful man in her
+circle. Of course we cannot realize how a wilful, dominating personality
+like his would influence a girl whose affections were not bestowed
+elsewhere; especially if he laid himself out to win her. It is probably
+an overwhelming thing to be courted by a man whose name is known all
+over the world. She had heard of him, of course, as a financial great
+power, and she had no idea--she had lived mostly among people of
+artistic or literary propensities--how much soulless inhumanity that
+might involve. For all I know, she has no adequate idea of it to this
+day. When I first heard of the affair the mischief was done, and I knew
+better than to interpose my unsought opinions. She was of age, and there
+was absolutely nothing against him from the conventional point of view.
+Then I dare say his immense wealth would cast a spell over almost any
+woman. Mabel had some hundreds a year of her own; just enough, perhaps,
+to let her realize what millions really meant. But all this is
+conjecture. She certainly had not wanted to marry some scores of young
+fellows who, to my knowledge, had asked her; and though I don't believe,
+and never did believe, that she really loved this man of forty-five, she
+certainly did want to marry him. But if you ask me why, I can only say I
+don't know."
+
+Trent nodded, and after a few more paces looked at his watch. "You've
+interested me so much," he said, "that I had quite forgotten my main
+business. I mustn't waste my morning. I am going down the road to White
+Gables at once, and I dare say I shall be poking about there until
+mid-day. If you can meet me then, Cupples, I should like to talk over
+anything I find out with you, unless something detains me."
+
+"I am going for a walk this morning," Mr. Cupples replied. "I meant to
+have luncheon at a little inn near the golf-course, the Three Tuns. You
+had better join me there. It's further along the road, about a quarter
+of a mile beyond White Gables. You can just see the roof between those
+two trees. The food they give one there is very plain, but good."
+
+"So long as they have a cask of beer," said Trent, "they are all right.
+We will have bread and cheese, and oh, may Heaven our simple lives
+prevent from luxury's contagion, weak and vile! Till then, good-by." He
+strode off to recover his hat from the veranda, waved it to Mr. Cupples,
+and was gone.
+
+The old gentleman, seating himself in a deck-chair on the lawn, clasped
+his hands behind his head and gazed up into the speckless blue sky. "He
+is a dear fellow," he murmured. "The best of fellows. And a terribly
+acute fellow. Dear me! How curious it all is!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+HANDCUFFS IN THE AIR
+
+
+A painter and the son of a painter, Philip Trent had, while yet in his
+twenties, achieved some reputation within the world of English art.
+Moreover, his pictures sold. An original, forcible talent and a habit of
+leisurely but continuous working, broken by fits of strong creative
+enthusiasm, were at the bottom of it. His father's name had helped; a
+patrimony large enough to relieve him of the perilous imputation of
+being a struggling man had certainly not hindered. But his best aid to
+success had been an unconscious power of getting himself liked. Good
+spirits and a lively, humorous fancy will always be popular. Trent
+joined to these a genuine interest in others that gained him something
+deeper than popularity. His judgment of persons was penetrating, but its
+process was internal; no one felt on good behavior with a man who seemed
+always to be enjoying himself. Whether he was in a mood for floods of
+nonsense or applying himself vigorously to a task, his face seldom lost
+its expression of contained vivacity. Apart from a sound knowledge of
+his art and its history, his culture was large and loose, dominated by a
+love of poetry. At thirty-two he had not yet passed the age of laughter
+and adventure.
+
+His rise to a celebrity a hundred times greater than his proper work had
+won for him came of a momentary impulse. One day he had taken up a
+newspaper to find it chiefly concerned with a crime of a sort curiously
+rare in our country: a murder done in a railway train. The circumstances
+were puzzling; two persons were under arrest upon suspicion. Trent, to
+whom an interest in such affairs was a new sensation, heard the thing
+discussed among his friends, and set himself in a purposeless mood to
+read up the accounts given in several journals. He became intrigued; his
+imagination began to work, in a manner strange to him, upon facts; an
+excitement took hold of him such as he had only known before in his
+bursts of art-inspiration or of personal adventure. At the end of the
+day he wrote and despatched a long letter to the editor of the _Record_,
+which he chose only because it had contained the fullest and most
+intelligent version of the facts.
+
+In this letter he did very much what Poe had done in the case of the
+murder of Mary Rogers. With nothing but the newspapers to guide him, he
+drew attention to the significance of certain apparently negligible
+facts, and ranged the evidence in such a manner as to throw grave
+suspicion upon a man who had presented himself as a witness. Sir James
+Molloy had printed this letter in leaded type. The same evening he was
+able to announce in the _Sun_ the arrest and full confession of the
+incriminated man.
+
+Sir James, who knew all the worlds of London, had lost no time in making
+Trent's acquaintance. The two men got on well; for Trent possessed some
+secret of native tact which had the effect of almost abolishing
+differences of age between himself and others. The great rotary presses
+in the basement of the _Record_ building had filled him with a new
+enthusiasm: he had painted there, and Sir James had bought at sight,
+what he called a machinery-scape in the manner of Heinrich Kley.
+
+Then a few months later came the affair known as the Ilkley mystery. Sir
+James had invited Trent to an emollient dinner, and thereafter offered
+him what seemed to the young man a fantastically large sum for his
+temporary services as special representative of the _Record_ at Ilkley.
+"You could do it," the editor had urged. "You can write good stuff, and
+you know how to talk to people, and I can teach you all the
+technicalities of a reporter's job in half an hour. And you have a head
+for a mystery; you have imagination and cool judgment along with it.
+Think how it would feel if you pulled it off!" Trent had admitted that
+it would be rather a lark; he had smoked, frowned, and at last convinced
+himself that the only thing that held him back was fear of an unfamiliar
+task. To react against fear had become a fixed moral habit with him, and
+he had accepted Sir James's offer.
+
+He had pulled it off. For the second time he had given the authorities a
+start and a beating, and his name was on all tongues. He withdrew and
+painted pictures. He felt no leaning towards journalism, and Sir James,
+who knew a good deal about art, honorably refrained--as other editors
+did not--from tempting him with a good salary. But in the course of a
+few years he had applied to him perhaps thirty times for his services in
+the unraveling of similar problems at home and abroad. Sometimes Trent,
+busy with work that held him, had refused; sometimes he had been
+forestalled in the discovery of the truth. But the result of his
+irregular connection with the _Record_ had been to make his name one of
+the best-known in England. It was characteristic of him that his name
+was almost the only detail of his personality known to the public. He
+had imposed absolute silence about himself upon the Molloy papers; and
+the others were not going to advertise one of Sir James's men.
+
+The Manderson case, he told himself as he walked rapidly up the sloping
+road to White Gables, might turn out to be terribly simple. Cupples was
+a wise old boy, but it was probably impossible for him to have an
+impartial opinion about his niece. Yet it was true that the manager of
+the hotel, who had spoken of her beauty in terms that aroused his
+attention, had spoken even more emphatically of her goodness. Not an
+artist in words, the manager had yet conveyed a very definite idea to
+Trent's mind. "There isn't a child about here that don't brighten up at
+the sound of her voice," he had said, "nor yet a grown-up, for the
+matter of that. Everybody used to look forward to her coming over in the
+summer. I don't mean that she's one of those women that are all kind
+heart and nothing else. There's backbone with it, if you know what I
+mean--pluck--any amount of go. There's nobody in Marlstone that isn't
+sorry for the lady in her trouble--not but what some of us may think
+she's lucky at the last of it." Trent wanted very much to meet Mrs.
+Manderson.
+
+He could see now, beyond a spacious lawn and shrubbery, the front of the
+two-storied house of dull red brick, with the pair of great gables from
+which it had its name. He had had but a glimpse of it from the car that
+morning. A modern house, he saw; perhaps ten years old. The place was
+beautifully kept, with that air of opulent peace that clothes even the
+smallest houses of the well-to-do in an English country-side. Before it,
+beyond the road, the rich meadow-land ran down to the edge of the
+cliffs; behind it a woody landscape stretched away across a broad vale
+to the moors. That such a place could be the scene of a crime of
+violence seemed fantastic; it lay so quiet and well-ordered, so eloquent
+of disciplined service and gentle living. Yet there beyond the house,
+and near the hedge that rose between the garden and the hot, white road,
+stood the gardener's tool-shed, by which the body had been found, lying
+tumbled against the wooden wall.
+
+Trent walked past the gate of the drive and along the road until he was
+opposite this shed. Some forty yards further along, the road turned
+sharply away from the house, to run between thick plantations; and just
+before this turn the grounds of the house ended, with a small white gate
+at the angle of the boundary hedge. He approached this gate, which was
+plainly for the use of gardeners and the service of the establishment;
+it swung easily on its hinges, and he passed slowly up a path that led
+towards the back of the house between the outer hedge and a tall wall of
+rhododendrons. Through a gap in this wall a track led him to the little
+neatly-built erection of wood, which stood among trees that faced a
+corner of the front. The body had lain on the side away from the house;
+a servant, he thought, looking out of the nearer windows in the earlier
+hours of the day before, might have glanced unseeing at the hut, as she
+wondered what it could be like to be as rich as Manderson.
+
+He examined the place carefully, and ransacked the hut within, but he
+could note no more than the trodden appearance of the uncut grass where
+the body had lain. Crouching low, with keen eyes and feeling fingers, he
+searched the ground minutely over a wide area; but the search was
+fruitless.
+
+It was interrupted by the sound--the first he had heard from the
+house--of the closing of the front door. Trent unbent his long legs and
+stepped to the edge of the drive. A man was walking quickly away from
+the house in the direction of the great gate.
+
+At the noise of a footstep on the gravel, the man wheeled with nervous
+swiftness and looked earnestly at Trent. The sudden sight of his face
+was almost terrible, so white and worn it was. Yet it was a young man's
+face. There was not a wrinkle about the haggard blue eyes, for all their
+tale of strain and desperate fatigue. As the two approached each other,
+Trent noted with admiration the man's breadth of shoulder and lithe,
+strong figure. In his carriage, inelastic as weariness had made it, in
+his handsome, regular features, in his short, smooth yellow hair and in
+his voice as he addressed Trent, the influence of a special sort of
+training was confessed. "Oxford was your playground, I think, my young
+friend," said Trent to himself.
+
+"If you are Mr. Trent," said the young man pleasantly, "you are
+expected. Mr. Cupples 'phoned from the hotel. My name is Marlowe."
+
+"You were secretary to Mr. Manderson, I believe," said Trent. He was
+much inclined to like young Mr. Marlowe. Though he seemed so near a
+physical break-down, he gave out none the less that air of clean living
+and inward health that is the peculiar glory of his social type at his
+years. But there was something in the tired eyes that was a challenge to
+Trent's penetration; an habitual expression, as he took it to be, of
+meditating and weighing things not present to their sight. It was a look
+too intelligent, too steady and purposeful, to be called dreamy. Trent
+thought he had seen such a look before somewhere. He went on to say: "It
+is a terrible business for all of you. I fear it has upset you
+completely, Mr. Marlowe."
+
+"A little limp, that's all," replied the young man wearily. "I was
+driving the car all Sunday night and most of yesterday, and I didn't
+sleep last night, after hearing the news--who would? But I have an
+appointment now, Mr. Trent, down at the doctor's--arranging about the
+inquest. I expect it'll be to-morrow. If you will go up to the house and
+ask for Mr. Bunner, you'll find him expecting you; he will tell you all
+about things and show you round. He's the other secretary; an American,
+and the best of fellows; he'll look after you. There's a detective here,
+by the way; Inspector Murch, from Scotland Yard. He came yesterday."
+
+"Murch!" Trent exclaimed. "But he and I are old friends. How under the
+sun did he get here so soon?"
+
+"I have no idea," Mr. Marlowe answered. "But he was here last evening,
+before I got back from Southampton, interviewing everybody, and he's
+been about here since eight this morning. He's in the library
+now--that's where the open French window is that you see at the end of
+the house there. Perhaps you would like to step down there and talk
+about things."
+
+"I think I will," said Trent. Mr. Marlowe nodded and went on his way.
+The thick turf of the lawn round which the drive took its circular sweep
+made Trent's footsteps as noiseless as a cat's. In a few moments he was
+looking in through the open leaves of the window at the southward end of
+the house, considering with a smile a very broad back and a bent head
+covered with short grizzled hair. The man within was stooping over a
+number of papers laid out on the table.
+
+"'Twas ever thus," said Trent in a melancholy tone, at the first sound
+of which the man within turned round with startling swiftness. "From
+childhood's hour I've seen my fondest hopes decay. I did think I was
+ahead of Scotland Yard this time, and now here is the largest officer in
+the entire Metropolitan force already occupying the position."
+
+The detective smiled grimly and came to the window. "I was expecting
+you, Mr. Trent," he said. "This is the sort of case that you like."
+
+"Since my tastes were being considered," Trent replied, stepping into
+the room, "I wish they had followed up the idea by keeping my hated
+rival out of the business. You have got a long start, too--I know all
+about it." His eyes began to wander round the room. "How did you manage
+it? You are a quick mover, I know; the dun deer's hide on fleeter foot
+was never tied; but I don't see how you got here in time to be at work
+yesterday evening. Has Scotland Yard secretly started an aviation corps?
+Or is it in league with the infernal powers? In either case the Home
+Secretary should be called upon to make a statement."
+
+"It's simpler than that," said Mr. Murch with professional stolidity. "I
+happened to be on leave with the Missus at Halvey, which is only twelve
+mile or so along the coast. As soon as our people there heard of the
+murder they told me. I wired to the Chief, and was put in charge of the
+case at once. I bicycled over yesterday evening, and have been at it
+since then."
+
+"Arising out of that reply," said Trent inattentively, "how is Mrs.
+Inspector Murch?"
+
+"Never better, thank you," answered the inspector, "and frequently
+speaks of you and the games you used to have with our kids. But you'll
+excuse me saying, Mr. Trent, that you needn't trouble to talk your
+nonsense to me while you're using your eyes. I know your ways by now. I
+understand you've fallen on your feet as usual, and have the lady's
+permission to go over the place and make inquiries."
+
+"Such is the fact," said Trent. "I am going to cut you out again,
+Inspector. I owe you one for beating me over the Abinger case, you old
+fox. But if you really mean that you're not inclined for the social
+amenities just now, let us leave compliments and talk business." He
+stepped to the table, glanced through the papers arranged there in
+order, and then turned to the open roll-top desk. He looked into the
+drawers swiftly. "I see this has been cleared out. Well now, inspector,
+I suppose we play the game as before."
+
+Trent had found himself on several occasions in the past thrown into the
+company of Inspector Murch, who stood high in the councils of the
+Criminal Investigation Department. He was a quiet, tactful and very
+shrewd officer, a man of great courage, with a vivid history in
+connection with the more dangerous class of criminals. His humanity was
+as broad as his frame, which was large even for a policeman. Trent and
+he, through some obscure working of sympathy, had appreciated one
+another from the beginning, and had formed one of those curious
+friendships with which it was the younger man's delight to adorn his
+experience. The inspector would talk more freely to him than to any one,
+under the rose, and they would discuss details and possibilities of
+every case, to their mutual enlightenment. There were necessarily rules
+and limits. It was understood between them that Trent made no
+journalistic use of any point that could only have come to him from an
+official source. Each of them, moreover, for the honor and prestige of
+the institution he represented, openly reserved the right to withhold
+from the other any discovery or inspiration that might come to him which
+he considered vital to the solution of the difficulty. Trent had
+insisted on carefully formulating these principles of what he called
+detective sportsmanship. Mr. Murch, who loved a contest, and who only
+stood to gain by his association with the keen intelligence of the
+other, entered very heartily into "the game." In these strivings for the
+credit of the press and of the police, victory sometimes attended the
+experience and method of the officer, sometimes the quicker brain and
+livelier imagination of Trent, his gift of instinctively recognizing the
+significant through all disguises.
+
+The inspector, then, replied to Trent's last words with cordial
+agreement. Leaning on either side of the French window, with the deep
+peace and hazy splendor of the summer landscape before them, they
+reviewed the case.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Trent had taken out a thin notebook, and as they talked he began to
+make, with light, sure touches, a rough sketch plan of the room. It was
+a thing he did habitually on such occasions, and often quite idly, but
+now and then the habit had served him to good purpose.
+
+This was a large, light apartment at the corner of the house, with
+generous window-space in two walls. A broad table stood in the middle.
+As one entered by the window the roll-top desk stood just to the left of
+it against the wall. The inner door was in the wall to the left, at the
+farther end of the room; and was faced by a broad window divided into
+openings of the casement type. A beautifully carved old corner-cupboard
+rose high against the wall beyond the door, and another cupboard filled
+a recess beside the fireplace. Some colored prints of Harunobu, with
+which Trent promised himself a better acquaintance, hung on what little
+wall-space was unoccupied by books. These had a very uninspiring
+appearance of having been bought by the yard and never taken from their
+shelves. Bound with a sober luxury, the great English novelists,
+essayists, historians and poets stood ranged like an army struck dead in
+its ranks. There were a few chairs made, like the cupboard and table, of
+old carved oak; a modern arm-chair and a swivel office-chair before the
+desk. The room looked costly but very bare. Almost the only portable
+objects were a great porcelain bowl of a wonderful blue on the table, a
+clock and some cigar boxes on the mantel-shelf, and a movable telephone
+standard on the top of the desk.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Seen the body?" inquired the inspector.
+
+Trent nodded. "And the place where it lay," he said.
+
+"First impressions of this case rather puzzle me," said the inspector.
+"From what I heard at Halvey I guessed it might be common robbery and
+murder by some tramp, though such a thing is very far from common in
+these parts. But as soon as I began my inquiries I came on some curious
+points, which by this time I dare say you've noted for yourself. The man
+is shot in his own grounds, quite near the house, to begin with. Yet
+there's not the slightest trace of any attempt at burglary. And the body
+wasn't robbed. In fact, it would be as plain a case of suicide as you
+could wish to see, if it wasn't for certain facts. Here's another thing:
+for a month or so past, they tell me, Manderson had been in a queer
+state of mind. I expect you know already that he and his wife had some
+trouble between them. The servants had noticed a change in his manner to
+her for a long time, and for the past week he had scarcely spoken to
+her. They say he was a changed man, moody and silent--whether on account
+of that or something else. The lady's maid says he looked as if
+something was going to arrive. It's always easy to remember that people
+looked like that, after something has happened to them. Still, that's
+what they say. There you are again, then: suicide! Now, why wasn't it
+suicide, Mr. Trent?"
+
+"The facts, so far as I know them, are really all against it," Trent
+replied, sitting on the threshold of the window and clasping his knees.
+"First, of course, no weapon is to be found. I've searched, and you've
+searched, and there's no trace of any firearm anywhere within a stone's
+throw of where the body lay. Second, the marks on the wrists, flesh
+scratches and bruises, which we can only assume to have been done in a
+struggle with somebody. Third, who ever heard of anybody shooting
+himself in the eye? Then I heard from the manager of the hotel here
+another fact, which strikes me as the most curious detail in this
+affair. Manderson had dressed himself fully before going out there, but
+he forgot his false teeth. Now how could a suicide who dressed himself
+to make a decent appearance as a corpse forget his teeth?"
+
+"That last argument hadn't struck me," admitted Mr. Murch. "There's
+something in it. But on the strength of the other points, which had
+occurred to me, I am not considering suicide. I have been looking about
+for ideas in this house, this morning. I expect you were thinking of
+doing the same."
+
+"That is so. It is a case for ideas, it seems to me. Come, Murch, let us
+make an effort; let us bend our spirits to a temper of general
+suspicion. Let us suspect everybody in the house, to begin with. Listen:
+I will tell you whom I suspect. I suspect Mrs. Manderson, of course. I
+also suspect both the secretaries--I hear there are two, and I hardly
+know which of them I regard as more thoroughly open to suspicion. I
+suspect the butler and the lady's maid. I suspect the other domestics,
+and especially do I suspect the boot-boy. By the way, what domestics are
+there? I have more than enough suspicion to go round, whatever the size
+of the establishment; but as a matter of curiosity I should like to
+know."
+
+"All very well to laugh," replied the inspector, "but at the first stage
+of affairs it's the only safe principle, and you know that as well as I
+do, Mr. Trent. However, I've seen enough of the people here, last night
+and to-day, to put a few of them out of my mind for the present at
+least. You will form your own conclusions. As for the establishment,
+there's the butler and lady's maid, cook and three other maids, one a
+young girl. One chauffeur, who's away with a broken wrist. No boy."
+
+"What about the gardener? You say nothing about that shadowy and
+sinister figure, the gardener. You are keeping him in the background,
+Murch. Out with him!"
+
+"The garden is attended to by a man in the village, who comes twice a
+week. I've talked to him. He was here last on Friday."
+
+"Then I suspect him all the more," said Trent. "And now as to the house
+itself. What I propose to do, to begin with, is to sniff about a little
+in this room, where I am told Manderson spent a great deal of his time,
+and in his bedroom; especially the bedroom. But since we're in this
+room, let's start here. You seem to be at the same stage of the inquiry.
+Perhaps you've done the bedroom already?"
+
+The inspector nodded. "I've been through Manderson's and his wife's.
+Nothing to be got there, I think. Very simple and bare, no signs of any
+sort--that _I_ could see. Seems to have insisted on the simple life,
+does Manderson. Never employed a valet. The room's almost like a cell,
+except for the clothes and shoes. You'll find it all exactly as I found
+it; and they tell me that's exactly as Manderson left it at we don't
+know what o'clock yesterday morning. Opens into Mrs. Manderson's
+bedroom--not much of the cell about that, I can tell you. I should say
+the lady was as fond of pretty things as most. But she cleared out of it
+on the morning of the discovery--told the maid she could never sleep in
+a room opening into her murdered husband's room. Very natural feeling in
+a woman, Mr. Trent. She's camping out, so to say, in one of the spare
+bedrooms now."
+
+"Come, my friend," Trent was saying to himself, as he made a few notes
+in his little book. "Have you got your eye on Mrs. Manderson? Or haven't
+you? I know that colorless tone of the inspectorial voice. I wish I had
+seen her. Either you've got something against her and you don't want me
+to get hold of it; or else you've made up your mind she's innocent, but
+have no objection to my wasting my time over her. Well, it's all in the
+game; which begins to look extremely interesting as we go on." To Mr.
+Murch he said aloud: "Well, I'll draw the bedroom later on. What about
+this?"
+
+"They call it the library," said the inspector. "Manderson used to do
+his writing and that in here; passed most of the time he spent indoors
+here. Since he and his wife ceased to hit it off together, he had taken
+to spending his evenings alone, and when at this house he always spent
+'em in here. He was last seen alive, as far as the servants are
+concerned, in this room."
+
+Trent rose and glanced again through the papers set out on the table.
+"Business letters and documents, mostly," said Mr. Murch. "Reports,
+prospectuses, and that. A few letters on private matters, nothing in
+them that I can see. The American secretary--Bunner his name is, and a
+queerer card I never saw turned--he's been through this desk with me
+this morning. He had got it into his head that Manderson had been
+receiving threatening letters, and that the murder was the outcome of
+that. But there's no trace of any such thing; and we looked at every
+blessed paper. The only unusual things we found were some packets of
+bank-notes to a very considerable amount, and a couple of little bags of
+unset diamonds. I asked Mr. Bunner to put them in a safer place. It
+appears that Manderson had begun buying diamonds lately as a
+speculation--it was a new game to him, the secretary said, and it seemed
+to amuse him."
+
+"What about these secretaries?" Trent inquired. "I met one called
+Marlowe just now outside; a nice-looking chap with singular eyes,
+unquestionably English. The other, it seems, is an American. What did
+Manderson want with an English secretary?"
+
+"Mr. Marlowe explained to me how that was. The American was his
+right-hand business man, one of his office staff, who never left him.
+Mr. Marlowe had nothing to do with Manderson's business as a financier,
+knew nothing of it. His job was to look after Manderson's horses and
+motors and yacht and sporting arrangements and that--make himself
+generally useful, as you might say. He had the spending of a lot of
+money, I should think. The other was confined entirely to the office
+affairs, and I dare say he had his hands full. As for his being English,
+it was just a fad of Manderson's to have an English secretary. He'd had
+several before Mr. Marlowe."
+
+"He showed his taste," observed Trent. "It might be more than
+interesting, don't you think, to be minister to the pleasures of a
+modern plutocrat with a large P? Only they say that Manderson's were
+exclusively of an innocent kind. Certainly Marlowe gives me the
+impression that he would be weak in the part of Petronius. But to return
+to the matter in hand." He looked at his notes. "You said just now that
+he was last seen alive here, 'so far as the servants were concerned.'
+That meant--?"
+
+"He had a conversation with his wife on going to bed. But for that, the
+man-servant, Martin by name, last saw him in this room. I had his story
+last night, and very glad he was to tell it. An affair like this is meat
+and drink to the servants of the house."
+
+Trent considered for some moments, gazing through the open window over
+the sun-flooded slopes. "Would it bore you to hear what he has to say
+again?" he asked at length. For reply, Mr. Murch rang the bell. A spare,
+clean-shaven, middle-aged man, having the servant's manner in its most
+distinguished form, answered it.
+
+"This is Mr. Trent, who is authorized by Mrs. Manderson to go over the
+house and make inquiries," explained the detective. "He would like to
+hear your story." Martin bowed distantly. He recognized Trent for a
+gentleman. Time would show whether he was what Martin called a gentleman
+in every sense of the word.
+
+"I observed you approaching the house, sir," said Martin with impassive
+courtesy. He spoke with a slow and measured utterance. "My instructions
+are to assist you in every possible way. Should you wish me to recall
+the circumstances of Sunday night?"
+
+"Please," said Trent with ponderous gravity. Martin's style was making
+clamorous appeal to his sense of comedy. He banished with an effort all
+vivacity of expression from his face.
+
+"I last saw Mr. Manderson--"
+
+"No, not that yet," Trent checked him quietly. "Tell me all you saw of
+him that evening--after dinner, say. Try to recollect every little
+detail."
+
+"After dinner, sir?--yes. I remember that after dinner Mr. Manderson and
+Mr. Marlowe walked up and down the path through the orchard, talking. If
+you ask me for details, it struck me they were talking about something
+important, because I heard Mr. Manderson say something when they came in
+through the back entrance. He said, as near as I can remember: 'If
+Harris is there, every minute is of importance. You want to start right
+away. And not a word to a soul.' Mr. Marlowe answered: 'Very well. I
+will just change out of these clothes and then I'm ready'--or words to
+that effect. I heard this plainly as they passed the window of my
+pantry. Then Mr. Marlowe went up to his bedroom and Mr. Manderson
+entered the library and rang for me. He handed me some letters for the
+postman in the morning and directed me to sit up, as Mr. Marlowe had
+persuaded him to go for a drive in the car by moonlight."
+
+"That was curious," remarked Trent.
+
+"I thought so, sir. But I recollected what I had heard about 'not a word
+to a soul,' and I concluded that this about a moonlight drive was
+intended to mislead."
+
+"What time was this?"
+
+"It would be about ten, sir, I should say. After speaking to me, Mr.
+Manderson waited until Mr. Marlowe had come down and brought round the
+car. He then went into the drawing-room, where Mrs. Manderson was."
+
+"Did that strike you as curious?"
+
+Martin looked down his nose. "If you ask me the question, sir," he said
+with reserve, "I had not known him enter that room since we came here
+this year. He preferred to sit in the library in the evenings. That
+evening he only remained with Mrs. Manderson for a few minutes. Then he
+and Mr. Marlowe started immediately."
+
+"You saw them start?"
+
+"Yes, sir. They took the direction of Bishopsbridge."
+
+"And you saw Mr. Manderson again later?"
+
+"After an hour or thereabouts, sir, in the library. That would have been
+about a quarter past eleven, I should say; I had noticed eleven striking
+from the church. I may say I am peculiarly quick of hearing, sir."
+
+"Mr. Manderson had rung the bell for you, I suppose. Yes? And what
+passed when you answered it?"
+
+"Mr. Manderson had put out the decanter of whisky and a syphon and
+glass, sir, from the cupboard where he kept them--"
+
+Trent held up his hand. "While we are on that point, Martin, I want to
+ask you plainly, did Mr. Manderson drink very much? You understand this
+is not impertinent curiosity on my part. I want you to tell me because
+it may possibly help in the clearing up of this case."
+
+"Perfectly, sir," replied Martin gravely. "I have no hesitation in
+telling you what I have already told the inspector. Mr. Manderson was,
+considering his position in life, a remarkably abstemious man. In my
+four years of service with him I never knew anything of an alcoholic
+nature pass his lips except a glass or two of wine at dinner, very
+rarely a little at luncheon, and from time to time a whisky-and-soda
+before going to bed. He never seemed to form a habit of it. Often I used
+to find his glass in the morning with only a little soda water in it;
+sometimes he would have been having whisky with it, but never much. He
+never was particular about his drinks; ordinary soda was what he
+preferred, though I had ventured to suggest some of the natural
+minerals, having personally acquired a taste for them in my previous
+service. He used to keep them in the cupboard here because he had a
+great dislike of being waited on more than was necessary. It was an
+understood thing that I never came near him after dinner unless sent
+for. And when he sent for anything, he liked it brought quick, and to be
+left alone again at once. He hated to be asked if he required anything
+more. Amazingly simple in his tastes, sir, Mr. Manderson was."
+
+"Very well; and he rang for you that night about a quarter past eleven.
+Now can you remember exactly what he said?"
+
+"I think I can tell you with some approach to accuracy, sir. It was not
+much. First he asked me if Mr. Bunner had gone to bed, and I replied
+that he had been gone up some time. He then said that he wanted someone
+to sit up until twelve-thirty, in case an important message should come
+by telephone, and that Mr. Marlowe having gone to Southampton for him in
+the motor, he wished me to do this, and that I was to take down the
+message if it came, and not disturb him. He also ordered a fresh syphon
+of soda-water. I believe that was all, sir."
+
+"You noticed nothing unusual about him, I suppose."
+
+"No, sir, nothing unusual. When I answered the ring, he was seated at
+the desk listening at the telephone, waiting for a number, as I
+supposed. He gave his orders and went on listening at the same time.
+When I returned with the syphon he was engaged in conversation over the
+wire."
+
+"Do you remember anything of what he was saying?"
+
+"Very little, sir; it was something about somebody being at some
+hotel--of no interest to me. I was only in the room just time enough to
+place the syphon on the table and withdraw. As I closed the door he was
+saying: 'You're sure he isn't in the hotel?' or words to that effect."
+
+"And that was the last you saw and heard of him alive?"
+
+"No, sir. A little later, at half-past eleven, when I had settled down
+in my pantry with the door ajar, and a book to pass the time, I heard
+Mr. Manderson go upstairs to bed. I immediately went to close the
+library window, and slipped the lock of the front door. I did not hear
+anything more."
+
+Trent considered. "I suppose you didn't doze at all," he said
+tentatively, "while you were sitting up waiting for the telephone
+message."
+
+"Oh, no, sir! I am always very wakeful about that time. I'm a bad
+sleeper, especially in the neighborhood of the sea, and I generally read
+in bed until somewhere about midnight."
+
+"And did any message come?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"No. And I suppose you sleep with your window open, these warm nights."
+
+"It is never closed at night, sir."
+
+Trent added a last note; then he looked thoughtfully through those he
+had taken. He rose and paced up and down the room for some moments with
+a downcast eye. At length he paused opposite Martin. "It all seems
+perfectly ordinary and simple," he said. "I just want to get a few
+details clear. You went to shut the windows in the library before going
+to bed. Which windows?"
+
+"The French window, sir. It had been open all day. The windows opposite
+the door were seldom opened."
+
+"And what about the curtains? I am wondering whether anyone outside the
+house could have seen into the room."
+
+"Easily, sir, I should say, if he had got into the grounds on that side.
+The curtains were never drawn in the hot weather. Mr. Manderson would
+often sit right in the doorway at nights, smoking and looking out into
+the darkness. But nobody could have seen him who had any business to be
+there."
+
+"I see. And now tell me this. Your hearing is very acute, you say, and
+you heard Mr. Manderson enter the house when he came in after dinner
+from the garden. Did you hear him re-enter it after returning from the
+motor-drive?"
+
+Martin paused. "Now you mention it, sir, I remember that I did not. His
+ringing the bell in this room was the first I knew of his being back. I
+should have heard him come in, if he had come in by the front. I should
+have heard the door go. But he must have come in by the window." The man
+reflected for a moment, then added: "As a general rule, Mr. Manderson
+would come in by the front, hang up his hat and coat in the hall, and
+pass down the hall into the study. It seems likely to me that he was in
+a great hurry to use the telephone, and so went straight across the lawn
+to the window--he was like that, sir, when there was anything important
+to be done. He had on his hat, now I remember, and had thrown his
+great-coat over the end of the table. He gave his order very sharp, too,
+as he always did when busy. A very precipitate man indeed, was Mr.
+Manderson; a hustler, as they say."
+
+"Ah! He appeared to be busy. But didn't you say just now that you
+noticed nothing unusual about him?"
+
+A melancholy smile flitted momentarily over Martin's face. "That
+observation shows that you did not know Mr. Manderson, sir, if you will
+pardon my saying so. His being like that was nothing unusual; quite the
+contrary. It took me long enough to get used to it. Either he would be
+sitting quite still and smoking a cigar, thinking or reading, or else he
+would be writing, dictating, and sending off wires all at the same time,
+till it almost made one dizzy to see it, sometimes for an hour or more
+at a stretch. As for being in a hurry over a telephone message, I may
+say it wasn't in him to be anything else."
+
+Trent turned to the inspector, who met his eye with a look of answering
+intelligence. Not sorry to show his understanding of the line of inquiry
+opened by Trent, Mr. Murch for the first time put a question:
+
+"Then you left him telephoning by the open window, with the lights on,
+and the drinks on the table; is that it?"
+
+"That is so, Mr. Murch." The delicacy of the change in Martin's manner
+when called upon to answer the detective momentarily distracted Trent's
+appreciative mind. But the big man's next question brought it back to
+the problem at once.
+
+"About those drinks. You say Mr. Manderson often took no whisky before
+going to bed. Did he have any that night?"
+
+"I could not say. The room was put to rights in the morning by one of
+the maids, and the glass washed, I presume, as usual. I know that the
+decanter was nearly full that evening; I had refilled it a few days
+before, and I glanced at it when I brought the fresh syphon, just out of
+habit, to make sure there was a decent-looking amount."
+
+The inspector went to the tall corner-cupboard and opened it. He took
+out a decanter of cut glass, and set it on the table before Martin. "Was
+it fuller than that?" he asked quietly. "That's how I found it this
+morning." The decanter was more than half empty.
+
+For the first time Martin's self-possession wavered. He took up the
+decanter quickly, tilted it before his eyes, and then stared amazedly at
+the others. He said slowly: "There's not much short of half a bottle
+gone out of this since I last set eyes on it--and that was Sunday
+night."
+
+"Nobody in the house, I suppose--" suggested Trent discreetly.
+
+"Out of the question," replied Martin briefly. Then he added: "I beg
+pardon, sir, but this is a most extraordinary thing to me. Such a thing
+never happened in all my experience of Mr. Manderson. As for the
+women-servants, they never touch anything. I can answer for it; and as
+for me, when I want a drink I can help myself without going to the
+decanters." He took up the decanter again, and aimlessly renewed his
+observation of the contents, while the inspector eyed him with a look of
+serene satisfaction, as a master contemplates his handiwork.
+
+Trent turned to a fresh page of his notebook, and tapped it thoughtfully
+with his pencil. Then he looked up and said: "I suppose Mr. Manderson
+had dressed for dinner that night."
+
+"Certainly, sir. He had on a suit with a dress-jacket, what he used to
+refer to as a Tuxedo, which he usually wore when dining at home or
+informally."
+
+"And he was dressed like that when you saw him last?"
+
+"All but the jacket, sir. When he spent the evening in the library, as
+usually happened, he would change it for an old shooting-jacket after
+dinner, a light-colored tweed, a little too loud in pattern for English
+tastes, perhaps. He had it on when I saw him last. It used to hang in
+this cupboard here"--Martin opened the door of it as he spoke--"along
+with Mr. Manderson's fishing-rods and such things, so that he could slip
+it on after dinner without going upstairs."
+
+"Leaving the dinner-jacket in the cupboard?"
+
+"Yes, sir. The housemaid used to take it upstairs in the morning."
+
+"In the morning," Trent repeated slowly. "And now that we are speaking
+of the morning, will you tell me exactly what you know about that. I
+understand that Mr. Manderson was not missed until the body was found
+about ten o'clock."
+
+"That is so, sir. Mr. Manderson would never be called, or have anything
+brought to him in the morning. He occupied a separate bedroom. Usually
+he would get up about eight and go round to the bathroom, and he would
+come down some time before nine. But often he would sleep till nine or
+ten o'clock. Mrs. Manderson was always called at seven. The maid would
+take in tea to her. Yesterday morning Mrs. Manderson took breakfast
+about eight in her sitting-room as usual, and everyone supposed that Mr.
+Manderson was still in bed and asleep when Evans came rushing up to the
+house with the shocking intelligence."
+
+"I see," said Trent. "And now another thing. You say you slipped the
+lock of the front door before going to bed. Was that all the locking-up
+you did?"
+
+"To the front-door, sir, yes; I slipped the lock. No more is considered
+necessary in these parts. But I had locked both the doors at the back,
+and seen to the fastenings of all the windows on the ground-floor. In
+the morning everything was as I had left it."
+
+"As you had left it. Now here is another point--the last, I think. Were
+the clothes in which the body was found the clothes that Mr. Manderson
+would naturally have worn that day?"
+
+Martin rubbed his chin. "You remind me how surprised I was when I first
+set eyes on the body, sir. At first I couldn't make out what was unusual
+about the clothes, and then I saw what it was. The collar was a shape of
+collar Mr. Manderson never wore except with evening dress. Then I found
+that he had put on all the same things that he had worn the night
+before--large-fronted shirt and all--except just the coat and waistcoat
+and trousers, and the brown shoes and blue tie. As for the suit, it was
+one of half a dozen he might have worn. But for him to have simply put
+on all the rest just because they were there, instead of getting out the
+kind of shirt and things he always wore by day--well, sir, it was
+unprecedented. It shows, like some other things, what a hurry he must
+have been in when getting up."
+
+"Of course," said Trent. "Well, I think that's all I wanted to know. You
+have put everything with admirable clearness, Martin. If we want to ask
+any more questions later on, I suppose you will be somewhere about."
+
+"I shall be at your disposal, sir." Martin bowed and went out quietly.
+
+Trent flung himself into the arm-chair and exhaled a long breath.
+"Martin is a great creature," he said. "He is far, far better than a
+play. There is none like him, none--nor will be when our summers have
+deceased. Straight, too: not an atom of harm in dear old Martin. Do you
+know, Murch, you are wrong in suspecting that man."
+
+"I never said a word about suspecting him." The inspector was taken
+aback. "_You_ know, Mr. Trent, he would never have told his story like
+that if he thought I suspected him."
+
+"I dare say he doesn't think so. He is a wonderful creature, a great
+artist; but in spite of that he is not at all a sensitive type. It has
+never occurred to his mind that you, Murch, could suspect him, Martin,
+the complete, the accomplished. But I know it. You must understand,
+inspector, that I have made a special study of the psychology of
+officers of the law. It is a grossly neglected branch of knowledge. They
+are far more interesting than criminals, and not nearly so easy. All the
+time I was questioning him I saw handcuffs in your eye. Your lips were
+mutely framing the syllables of those tremendous words: 'It is my duty
+to tell you that anything you now say will be taken down and used in
+evidence against you.' Your manner would have deceived most men, but it
+could not deceive me."
+
+Mr. Murch laughed heartily. Trent's nonsense never made any sort of
+impression on his mind, but he took it as a mark of esteem, which indeed
+it was; so it never failed to please him. "Well, Mr. Trent," he said,
+"you're perfectly right. There's no point in denying it. I have got my
+eye on him. Not that there's anything definite; but you know, as well as
+I do, how often servants are mixed up in affairs of this kind, and this
+man is such a very quiet customer. You remember the case of Lord William
+Russell's valet, who went in as usual in the morning to draw up the
+blinds in his master's bedroom, as quiet and starchy as you please, a
+few hours after he had murdered him in his bed. I've talked to all the
+women of the house, and I don't believe there's a morsel of harm in one
+of them. But Martin's not so easy set aside. I don't like his manner; I
+believe he's hiding something. If so, I shall find it out."
+
+"Cease!" said Trent. "Drain not to its dregs the urn of bitter prophecy.
+Let us get back to facts. Have you, as a matter of evidence, anything at
+all to bring against Martin's story as he has told it to us?"
+
+"Nothing whatever at present. As for his suggestion that Manderson came
+in by way of the window after leaving Marlowe and the car, that's right
+enough, I should say. I questioned the servant who swept the room next
+morning, and she tells me there were gravelly marks near the window, on
+this plain drugget that goes round the carpet. And there's a footprint
+in this soft new gravel just outside." The inspector took a folding rule
+from his pocket and with it pointed out the traces. "One of the patent
+shoes Manderson was wearing that night exactly fits that print--you'll
+find them," he added, "on the top shelf in the bedroom, near the
+window-end, the only patents in the row. The girl who polished them in
+the morning picked them out for me."
+
+Trent bent down and studied the faint marks keenly. "Good!" he said.
+"You have covered a lot of ground, Murch, I must say. That was excellent
+about the whisky--you made your point finely. I felt inclined to shout
+'Encore!' It's a thing that I shall have to think over."
+
+"I thought you might have fitted it in already," said Mr. Murch. "Come,
+Mr. Trent, we're only at the beginning of our inquiries, but what do you
+say to this for a preliminary theory? There's a plan of burglary--say a
+couple of men in it and Martin squared. They know where the plate is,
+and all about the handy little bits of stuff in the drawing-room and
+elsewhere. They watch the house; see Manderson off to bed; Martin comes
+to shut the window, and leaves it ajar--accidentally on purpose. They
+wait till Martin goes to bed at twelve-thirty; then they just walk into
+the library, and begin to sample the whisky first thing. Now suppose
+Manderson isn't asleep, and suppose they make a noise opening the
+window, or however it might be. He hears it; thinks of burglars; gets up
+very quietly to see if anything's wrong; creeps down on them, perhaps,
+just as they're getting ready for work. They cut and run; he chases them
+down to the shed, and collars one; there's a fight; one of them loses
+his temper and his head, and makes a swinging job of it. Now, Mr. Trent,
+pick that to pieces."
+
+"Very well," said Trent. "Just to oblige you, Murch--especially as I
+know you don't believe a word of it. First: no traces of any kind left
+by your burglar or burglars, and the window found fastened in the
+morning--according to Martin. Not much force in that, I allow. Next:
+nobody in the house hears anything of this stampede through the library,
+nor hears any shout from Manderson either inside the house or outside.
+Next: Manderson goes down without a word to anybody, though Bunner and
+Martin are both at hand. Next: did you ever hear in your long experience
+of a householder getting up in the night to pounce on burglars, who
+dressed himself fully, with underclothing, shirt, collar and tie,
+trousers, waistcoat and coat, socks and hard leather shoes; and who gave
+the finishing touches to a somewhat dandified toilet by doing his hair
+and putting on his watch and chain? Personally, I call that
+over-dressing the part. The only decorative detail he seems to have
+forgotten is his teeth."
+
+The inspector leaned forward thinking, his large hands clasped before
+him. "No," he said at last. "Of course there's no help in that theory. I
+rather expect we have some way to go before we find out why a man gets
+up before the servants are awake, dresses himself fully, and is murdered
+within sight of his house early enough to be cold and stiff by ten in
+the morning."
+
+Trent shook his head. "We can't build anything on that last
+consideration. I've gone into the subject with people who know. I
+shouldn't wonder," he added, "if the traditional notions about loss of
+temperature and rigor after death had occasionally brought an innocent
+man to the gallows, or near it. Dr. Stock has them all, I feel sure:
+most general practitioners of the older generation have. That Dr. Stock
+will make an ass of himself at the inquest is almost as certain as that
+to-morrow's sun will rise. I've seen him. He will say the body must have
+been dead about so long, because of the degree of coldness and _rigor
+mortis_. I can see him nosing it all out in some text-book that was out
+of date when he was a student. Listen, Murch, and I will tell you some
+facts which will be a great hindrance to you in your professional
+career. There are many things that may hasten or retard the cooling of
+the body. This one was lying in the long dewy grass on the shady side of
+the shed. As for rigidity, if Manderson died in a struggle, or laboring
+under sudden emotion, his corpse might stiffen practically
+instantaneously: there are dozens of cases noted, particularly in cases
+of injury to the skull, like this one. On the other hand, the stiffening
+might not have begun until eight or ten hours after death. You can't
+hang anybody on _rigor mortis_ nowadays, inspector, much as you may
+resent the limitation. No; what we _can_ say is this. If he had been
+shot after the hour at which the world begins to get up and go about its
+business, it would have been heard and very likely seen, too. In fact,
+we must reason--to begin with, at any rate--on the assumption that he
+wasn't shot at a time when people might be awake--it isn't done in these
+parts. Put that time at six-thirty A. M. Manderson went up to bed at
+eleven P. M. and Martin sat up till twelve-thirty. Assuming that he went
+to sleep at once on turning in, that leaves us something like six hours
+for the crime to be committed in; and that is a long time. But whenever
+it took place, I wish you would suggest a reason why Manderson, who was a
+fairly late riser, was up and dressed at or before six-thirty; and why
+neither Martin, who sleeps lightly, nor Bunner, nor his wife heard him
+moving about, or letting himself out of the house. He must have been
+careful. He must have crept about like a cat.... Do you feel as I do,
+Murch, about all this: that it is very, very strange and baffling?"
+
+"That's how it looks," agreed the inspector.
+
+"And now," said Trent, rising to his feet, "I'll leave you to your
+meditations, and take a look at the bedrooms. Perhaps the explanation of
+all this will suddenly burst upon you while I am poking about up there.
+But," concluded Trent in a voice of sudden exasperation, turning round
+in the doorway, "if you can tell me at any time how under the sun a man
+who put on all those clothes could forget to put in his teeth, you may
+kick me from here to the nearest lunatic asylum, and hand me over as an
+incipient dement."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+POKING ABOUT
+
+
+There are moments in life, as one might think, when that which is within
+us, busy about its secret affair, lets escape into consciousness some
+hint of a fortunate thing ordained. Who does not know what it is to feel
+at times a wave of unaccountable persuasion that it is about to go well
+with him?--not the feverish confidence of men in danger of a blow from
+fate, not the persistent illusion of the optimist, but an unsought
+conviction, springing up like a bird from the heather, that success is
+at hand in some great or little thing. The general suddenly knows at
+dawn that the day will bring him victory; the man on the green suddenly
+knows that he will put down the long putt. As Trent mounted the stairway
+outside the library door he seemed to rise into certainty of
+achievement.
+
+A host of guesses and inferences swarmed apparently unsorted through his
+mind; a few secret observations that he had made, and which he felt must
+have significance, still stood unrelated to any plausible theory of the
+crime; yet as he went up he seemed to know indubitably that light was
+going to appear.
+
+The bedrooms lay on either side of a broad carpeted passage, lighted by
+a tall end-window. It went the length of the house until it ran at right
+angles into a narrower passage, out of which the servants' rooms opened.
+Martin's room was the exception: it opened out of a small landing
+halfway to the upper floor. As Trent passed it, he glanced within. A
+little square room, clean and commonplace. In going up the rest of the
+stairway he stepped with elaborate precaution against noise, hugging the
+wall closely and placing each foot with care; but a series of very
+audible creaks marked his passage.
+
+He knew that Manderson's room was the first on the right hand when the
+bedroom floor was reached, and he went to it at once. He tried the latch
+and the lock, which worked normally, and examined the wards of the key.
+Then he turned to the room.
+
+It was a small apartment, strangely bare. The plutocrat's toilet
+appointments were of the simplest. All remained just as it had been on
+the morning of the ghastly discovery in the grounds. The sheets and
+blankets of the unmade bed lay tumbled over a narrow wooden bedstead,
+and the sun shone brightly through the window upon them. It gleamed,
+too, upon the gold parts of the delicate work of dentistry that lay in
+water in a shallow bowl of glass placed on a small, plain table by the
+bedside. On this also stood a wrought-iron candlestick. Some clothing
+lay untidily over one of the two rush-bottomed chairs. Various objects
+on the top of a chest of drawers, which had been used as a dressing
+table, lay in such disorder as a hurried man might make--toilet
+articles, a book of flies, an empty pocket-book with a burst strap, a
+pocket compass and other trifles. Trent looked them over with a
+questioning eye. He noted also that the occupant of the room had neither
+washed nor shaved. With his finger he turned over the dental plate in
+the bowl, and frowned again at its incomprehensible presence.
+
+The emptiness and disarray of the little room, flooded by the sunbeams,
+were producing in Trent a sense of gruesomeness. His fancy called up a
+picture of a haggard man dressing himself in careful silence by the
+first light of dawn, glancing constantly at the inner door behind which
+his wife slept, his eyes full of some terror.
+
+Trent shivered, and to fix his mind again on actualities opened two tall
+cupboards in the wall on either side of the bed. They contained
+clothing, a large choice of which had evidently been one of the very few
+conditions of comfort for the man who had slept there.
+
+In the matter of shoes, also, Manderson had allowed himself the
+advantage of wealth. An extraordinary number of these, treed and
+carefully kept, was ranged on two long low shelves against the wall.
+Trent, himself an amateur of good shoe-leather, now turned to them, and
+glanced over the collection with an appreciative eye. It was to be seen
+that Manderson had been inclined to pride himself on a rather small and
+well-formed foot. The shoes were of a distinctive shape, narrow and
+round-toed, beautifully made; all were evidently from the same last.
+
+Suddenly his eyes narrowed themselves over a pair of patent-leather
+shoes on the upper shelf.
+
+These were the shoes of which the inspector had already described the
+position to him; the shoes worn by Manderson the night before his death.
+They were a well-worn pair, he saw at once; he saw, too, that they had
+been very recently polished. Something about the uppers of these shoes
+had seized his attention. He bent lower and frowned over them, comparing
+what he saw with the appearance of the neighboring shoes. Then he took
+them up and examined the line of juncture of the uppers with the soles.
+
+As he did this, Trent began unconsciously to whistle faintly, and with
+great precision, an air which Inspector Murch, if he had been present,
+would have recognized.
+
+Most men who have the habit of self-control have also some involuntary
+trick which tells those who know them that they are suppressing
+excitement. The inspector had noted that, when Trent had picked up a
+strong scent, he whistled faintly a certain melodious passage; though
+the inspector could not have told you that it was, in fact, the opening
+movement of Mendelssohn's _Lied ohne Woerter_ in A major.
+
+He turned the shoes over, made some measurements with a marked tape, and
+looked minutely at the bottoms. On each, in the angle between the heel
+and the instep, he detected a faint trace of red gravel.
+
+Trent placed the shoes on the floor, and walked with his hands behind
+him to the window, out of which, still faintly whistling, he gazed with
+eyes that saw nothing. Once his lips opened to emit mechanically the
+Englishman's expletive of sudden enlightenment. At length he turned to
+the shelves again, and swiftly but carefully examined every one of the
+shoes there.
+
+This done, he took up the garments from the chair, looked them over
+closely and replaced them. He turned to the wardrobe cupboards again,
+and hunted through them carefully. The litter on the dressing table now
+engaged his attention for the second time. Then he sat down on the empty
+chair, took his head in his hands, and remained in that attitude,
+staring at the carpet, for some minutes. He rose at last and opened the
+inner door leading to Mrs. Manderson's room.
+
+It was evident at a glance that the big room had been hurriedly put down
+from its place as the lady's bower. All the array of objects that belong
+to a woman's dressing table had been removed; on bed and chairs and
+smaller tables there were no garments or hats, bags or boxes; no trace
+remained of the obstinate conspiracy of gloves and veils, handkerchiefs
+and ribbons, to break the captivity of the drawer. The room was like an
+unoccupied guest-chamber. Yet in every detail of furniture and
+decoration it spoke of an unconventional but exacting taste. Trent, as
+his expert eye noted the various perfection of color and form amid which
+the ill-mated lady dreamed her dreams and thought her loneliest
+thoughts, knew that she had at least the resources of an artistic
+nature. His interest in this unknown personality grew stronger; and his
+brows came down heavily as he thought of the burdens laid upon it, and
+of the deed of which the history was now shaping itself with more and
+more of substance before his busy mind.
+
+He went first to the tall French window in the middle of the wall that
+faced the door, and opening it, stepped out upon a small balcony with an
+iron railing. He looked down on a broad stretch of lawn that began
+immediately beneath him, separated from the house-wall only by a narrow
+flower-bed, and stretched away with an abrupt dip at the farther end,
+toward the orchard. The other window opened with a sash above the
+garden-entrance to the library. In the further inside corner of the room
+was a second door giving upon the passage; the door by which the maid
+was wont to come in, and her mistress to go out, in the morning.
+
+Trent, seated on the bed, quickly sketched in his notebook a plan of the
+room and its neighbor. The bed stood in the angle between the
+communicating-door and the sash-window, its head against the wall
+dividing the room from Manderson's. Trent stared at the pillows; then he
+lay down with deliberation on the bed and looked through the open door
+into the adjoining room.
+
+This observation taken, he rose again and proceeded to note on his plan
+that on either side of the bed was a small table with a cover. Upon that
+farthest from the door was a graceful electric-lamp standard of copper
+connected by a free wire with the wall. Trent looked at it thoughtfully,
+then at the switches connected with the other lights in the room. They
+were, as usual, on the wall just within the door, and some way out of
+his reach as he sat on the bed. He rose, and satisfied himself that the
+lights were all in order. Then he turned on his heel, walked quickly
+into Manderson's room, and rang the bell.
+
+"I want your help again, Martin," he said, as the butler presented
+himself, upright and impassive, in the doorway. "I want you to prevail
+upon Mrs. Manderson's maid to grant me an interview."
+
+"Certainly, sir," said Martin.
+
+"What sort of a woman is she? Has she her wits about her?"
+
+"She's French, sir," replied Martin succinctly; adding after a pause:
+"She has not been with us long, sir, but I have formed the impression
+that the young woman knows as much of the world as is good for
+her--since you ask me."
+
+"You think butter might possibly melt in her mouth, do you?" said Trent.
+"Well, I am not afraid. I want to put some questions to her."
+
+"I will send her up immediately, sir." The butler withdrew, and Trent
+wandered round the little room with his hands at his back. Sooner than
+he had expected, a small, neat figure in black appeared quietly before
+him.
+
+The lady's maid, with her large brown eyes, had taken favorable notice
+of Trent from a window when he had crossed the lawn, and had been hoping
+desperately that the resolver of mysteries (whose reputation was as
+great below-stairs as elsewhere) would send for her. For one thing, she
+felt the need to make a scene; her nerves were overwrought. But her
+scenes were at a discount with the other domestics, and as for Mr.
+Murch, he had chilled her into self-control with his official manner.
+Trent, her glimpse of him had told her, had not the air of a policeman,
+and at a distance he had appeared _sympathetique_.
+
+As she entered the room, however, instinct decided for her that any
+approach to coquetry would be a mistake, if she sought to make a good
+impression at the beginning. It was with an air of amiable candor, then,
+that she said, "Monsieur desire to speak with me?" She added helpfully,
+"I am called Celestine."
+
+"Naturally," said Trent with businesslike calm. "Now what I want you to
+tell me, Celestine, is this: when you took tea to your mistress
+yesterday morning at seven o'clock, was the door between the two
+bedrooms--this door here--open?"
+
+Celestine became intensely animated in an instant. "Oh, yes," she said,
+using her favorite English idiom. "The door was open as always,
+monsieur, and I shut it as always. But it is necessary to explain.
+Listen! When I enter the room of madame from the other door in
+there--ah! but if monsieur will give himself the pain to enter the other
+room, all explains itself." She tripped across to the door, and urged
+Trent before her into the larger bedroom with a hand on his arm. "See! I
+enter the room with the tea like this. I approach the bed. Before I come
+quite near the bed, here is the door to my right hand--open, always--so!
+But monsieur can perceive that I see nothing in the room of Monsieur
+Manderson. The door opens to the bed, not to me who approach from down
+there. I shut it without seeing in. It is the order. Yesterday it was as
+ordinary. I see nothing of the next room. Madame sleep like an
+angel--she see nothing. I shut the door. I place the plateau--I open the
+curtains--I prepare the toilette--I retire--voila!" Celestine paused for
+breath, and spread her hands abroad.
+
+Trent, who had followed her movements and gesticulations with deepening
+gravity, nodded his head. "I see exactly how it was now," he said.
+"Thank you, Celestine. So Mr. Manderson was supposed to be still in his
+room while your mistress was getting up, and dressing, and having
+breakfast in her boudoir."
+
+"Oui, monsieur."
+
+"Nobody missed him, in fact," remarked Trent. "Well, Celestine, I am
+very much obliged to you." He re-opened the door to the outer bedroom.
+
+"It is nothing, monsieur," said Celestine, as she crossed the small
+room. "I hope that monsieur will catch the assassin of Monsieur
+Manderson.... But I not regret him too much," she added with sudden and
+amazing violence, turning round with her hand on the knob of the outer
+door. She set her teeth with an audible sound, and the color rose in her
+small, dark face. English departed from her. "Je ne le regrette pas du
+tout, du tout!" she cried with a flood of words. "Madame--ah! je me
+jetterais au feu pour madame--une femme si charmante, si adorable. Mais
+un homme comme, monsieur--maussade, boudeur, impassible! Ah, non!--de ma
+vie! J'en avais pardessus la tete, de monsieur! Ah! vrai! Est-ce
+insupportable, tout de meme, qu'il existe des types comme ca? Je vous
+jure que--"
+
+"Finissez ce chahut, Celestine!" Trent broke in sharply. Celestine's
+tirade had brought back the memory of his student days in Paris with a
+rush. "En voila une scene! C'est rasant, vous savez. Faut rentrer ca,
+mademoiselle. Du reste, c'est bien imprudent, croyez-moi. Hang it! have
+some common sense! If the inspector downstairs heard you saying that
+kind of thing, you would get into trouble. And don't wave your fists
+about so much; you might hit something. You seem," he went on more
+pleasantly, as Celestine grew calmer under his authoritative eye, "to be
+even more glad than other people that Mr. Manderson is out of the way. I
+could almost suspect, Celestine, that Mr. Manderson did not take as much
+notice of you, as you thought necessary and right."
+
+"A peine s'il m'avait regarde!" Celestine answered simply.
+
+"Ca, c'est un comble!" observed Trent. "You are a nice young woman for a
+small tea-party, I don't think. A star upon your birthday burned, whose
+fierce, serene, red, pulseless planet never yearned in heaven,
+Celestine. Mademoiselle, I am busy. Bon jour. You certainly are a
+beauty!"
+
+Celestine took this as a scarcely-expected compliment. The surprise
+restored her balance. With a sudden flash of her eyes and teeth at Trent
+over her shoulder, the lady's maid opened the door and swiftly
+disappeared.
+
+Trent, left alone in the little bedroom, relieved his mind with two
+forcible descriptive terms in Celestine's language, and turned to his
+problem.
+
+He took the pair of shoes which he had already examined, and placed them
+on one of the two chairs in the room, then seated himself on the other
+opposite to this. With his hands in his pockets he sat with eyes fixed
+upon those two dumb witnesses. Now and then he whistled, almost
+inaudibly, a few bars. It was very still in the room. A subdued
+twittering came from the trees through the open window. From time to
+time a breeze rustled in the leaves of the thick creeper about the sill.
+But the man in the room, his face grown hard and somber now with his
+thoughts, never moved.
+
+So he sat for the space of half an hour. Then he rose quickly to his
+feet. He replaced the shoes on their shelf with care, and stepped out
+upon the landing.
+
+Two bedroom doors faced him on the other side of the passage. He opened
+that which was immediately opposite, and entered a bedroom by no means
+austerely tidy. Some sticks and fishing-rods stood confusedly in one
+corner, a pile of books in another. The housemaid's hand had failed to
+give a look of order to the jumble of heterogeneous objects left on the
+dressing-table and the mantel-shelf--pipes, pen-knives, pencils, keys,
+golf-balls, old letters, photographs, small boxes, tins and bottles. Two
+fine etchings and some water-color sketches hung on the walls; leaning
+against the end of the wardrobe, unhung, were a few framed engravings. A
+row of shoes and boots was ranged beneath the window. Trent crossed the
+room and studied them intently; then he measured some of them with his
+tape, whistling very softly. This done, he sat on the side of the bed,
+and his eyes roamed gloomily about the room.
+
+The photographs on the mantel-shelf attracted him presently. He rose and
+examined one representing Marlowe and Manderson on horseback. Two others
+were views of famous peaks in the Alps. There was a faded print of three
+youths--one of them unmistakably his acquaintance of the haggard blue
+eyes--clothed in tatterdemalion soldier's gear of the sixteenth century.
+Another was a portrait of a majestic old lady, slightly resembling
+Marlowe. Trent, mechanically taking a cigarette from an open box on the
+mantel-shelf, lit it and stared at the photographs. Next he turned his
+attention to a flat leathern case that lay by the cigarette-box.
+
+It opened easily. A small and light revolver of beautiful workmanship
+was disclosed, with a score or so of loose cartridges. On the stock were
+engraved the initials "J. M."
+
+A step was heard on the stairs, and as Trent opened the breech and
+peered into the barrel of the weapon, Inspector Murch appeared at the
+open door of the room. "I was wondering"--he began; then stopped as he
+saw what the other was about. His intelligent eyes opened slightly.
+"Whose is the revolver, Mr. Trent?" he asked in a conversational tone.
+
+"Evidently it belongs to the occupant of the room, Mr. Marlowe," replied
+Trent with similar lightness, pointing to the initials. "I found this
+lying about on the mantel-piece. It seems a handy little pistol to me,
+and it has been very carefully cleaned, I should say, since the last
+time it was used. But I know little about firearms."
+
+"Well, I know a good deal," rejoined the inspector quietly, taking the
+revolver from Trent's outstretched hand. "It's a bit of a specialty with
+me, is firearms, as I think you know, Mr. Trent. But it don't require an
+expert to tell one thing." He replaced the revolver in its case on the
+mantel-shelf, took out one of the cartridges, and laid it on the
+spacious palm of one hand; then, taking a small object from his
+waistcoat pocket, he laid it beside the cartridge. It was a little
+leaden bullet, slightly battered about the nose, and having upon it some
+bright new scratches.
+
+"Is that _the_ one?" Trent murmured as he bent over the inspector's
+hand.
+
+"That's him," replied Mr. Murch. "Lodged in the bone at the back of the
+skull. Dr. Stock got it out within the last hour, and handed it to the
+local officer, who has just sent it on to me. These bright scratches you
+see, were made by the doctor's instruments. These other marks were made
+by the rifling of the barrel--a barrel like this one." He tapped the
+revolver. "Same make, same caliber."
+
+With the pistol in its case between them, Trent and the inspector looked
+into each other's eyes for some moments. Trent was the first to speak.
+"This mystery is all wrong," he observed. "It is insanity. The symptoms
+of mania are very marked. Let us see how we stand. We were not in any
+doubt, I believe, about Manderson having despatched Marlowe in the car
+to Southampton, or about Marlowe having gone, returning late last night,
+many hours after the murder was committed."
+
+"There _is_ no doubt whatever about all that," said Mr. Murch, with a
+slight emphasis on the verb.
+
+"And now," pursued Trent, "we are invited by this polished and
+insinuating firearm to believe the following line of propositions: that
+Marlowe never went to Southampton; that he returned to the house in the
+night; that he somehow, without waking Mrs. Manderson or anybody else,
+got Manderson to get up, dress himself, and go out into the grounds;
+that he then and there shot the said Manderson with his incriminating
+pistol; that he carefully cleaned the said pistol, returned to the house
+and, again without disturbing any one, replaced it in its case in a
+favorable position to be found by the officers of the law; that he then
+withdrew and spent the rest of the day in hiding--_with_ a large
+motor-car; and that he turned up, feigning ignorance of the whole
+affair, at--what time was it?"
+
+"A little after nine P. M." The inspector still stared moodily
+at Trent. "As you say, Mr. Trent, that is the first theory suggested by
+this find, and it seems wild enough--at least it would do, if it didn't
+fall to pieces at the very start. When the murder was done Marlowe must
+have been fifty to a hundred miles away. He _did_ go to Southampton."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"I questioned him last night, and took down his story. He arrived in
+Southampton about six-thirty on the Monday morning."
+
+"Come off!" exclaimed Trent bitterly. "What do I care about his story?
+What do you care about his story? I want to know how you _know_ he went
+to Southampton."
+
+Mr. Murch chuckled. "I thought I should take a rise out of you, Mr.
+Trent," he said. "Well, there's no harm in telling you. After I arrived
+yesterday evening, as soon as I had got the outlines of the story from
+Mrs. Manderson and the servants, the first thing I did was to go to the
+telegraph office and wire to our people in Southampton. Manderson had
+told his wife when he went to bed that he had changed his mind, and sent
+Marlowe to Southampton to get some important information from someone
+who was crossing by the next day's boat. It seemed right enough; but you
+see, Marlowe was the only one of the household who wasn't under my hand,
+so to speak; he didn't return in the car until later in the evening; so
+before thinking the matter out any further, I wired to Southampton
+making certain inquiries. Early this morning I got this reply." He
+handed a series of telegraph slips to Trent, who read:
+
+     Person answering description in motor answering description arrived
+     Bedford Hotel here 6:30 this morning gave name Marlowe left car
+     hotel garage told attendant car belonged Manderson had bath and
+     breakfast went out heard of later at docks inquiring for passenger
+     name Harris on Havre boat inquired repeatedly until boat left at
+     noon next heard of at hotel where he lunched about 1:15, left soon
+     afterwards in car company's agents inform berth was booked name
+     Harris last week but Harris did not travel by boat. Burke
+     Inspector.
+
+"Simple and satisfactory," observed Mr. Murch as Trent, after twice
+reading the message, returned it to him. "His own story corroborated in
+every particular. He told me he hung about the dock for half an hour or
+so on the chance of Harris turning up late, then strolled back, lunched
+and decided to return at once. He sent a wire to Manderson: 'Harris not
+turned up missed boat returning Marlowe,' which was duly delivered here
+in the afternoon, and placed among the dead man's letters. He motored
+back at a good rate, and arrived dog-tired. When he heard of Manderson's
+death from Martin, he nearly fainted. What with that and the being
+without sleep for so long, he was rather a wreck when I came to
+interview him last night; but he was perfectly coherent."
+
+Trent picked up the revolver and twirled the cylinder idly for a few
+moments. "It was unlucky for Manderson that Marlowe left his pistol and
+cartridges about so carelessly," he remarked at length, as he put it
+back in the case. "It was throwing temptation in somebody's way, don't
+you think?"
+
+Mr. Murch shook his head. "There isn't really much to lay hold of about
+the revolver, when you come to think. That particular make of revolver
+is common enough in England. It was introduced from the States. Half the
+people who buy a revolver to-day for self-defense or mischief provide
+themselves with that make, of that caliber. It is very reliable, and
+easily carried in the hip-pocket. There must be thousands of them in the
+possession of crooks and honest men. For instance," continued the
+inspector with an air of unconcern, "Manderson himself had one, the
+double of this. I found it in one of the top drawers of the desk
+downstairs, and it's in my overcoat pocket now."
+
+"Aha! so you were going to keep that little detail to yourself."
+
+"I was," said the inspector, "but as you've found one revolver, you may
+as well know about the other. As I say, neither of them may do us any
+good. The people in the house--"
+
+Both men started, and the inspector checked his speech abruptly, as the
+half-closed door of the bedroom was slowly pushed open, and a man stood
+in the doorway. His eyes turned from the pistol in its open case to the
+faces of Trent and the inspector. They, who had not heard a sound to
+herald this entrance, simultaneously looked at his long, narrow feet. He
+wore rubber-soled tennis shoes.
+
+"You must be Mr. Bunner," said Trent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+MR. BUNNER ON THE CASE
+
+
+"Calvin C. Bunner, at your service," amended the newcomer, with a touch
+of punctilio, as he removed an unlighted cigar from his mouth. He was
+used to finding Englishmen slow and ceremonious with strangers, and
+Trent's quick remark plainly disconcerted him a little. "You are Mr.
+Trent, I expect," he went on. "Mrs. Manderson was telling me a while
+ago. Captain, good-morning." Mr. Murch acknowledged the greeting with a
+nod. "I was coming up to my room, and I heard a strange voice in here,
+so I thought I would take a look in." Mr. Bunner laughed easily. "You
+thought I might have been eavesdropping, perhaps," he said. "No, sir; I
+heard a word or two about a pistol--this one, I guess--and that's all."
+
+Mr. Bunner was a thin, rather short young man with a shaven, pale, bony,
+almost girlish face and large, dark, intelligent eyes. His waving dark
+hair was parted in the middle. His lips, usually occupied with a cigar,
+in its absence were always half open with a curious expression as of
+permanent eagerness. By smoking or chewing a cigar this expression was
+banished, and Mr. Bunner then looked the consummately cool and sagacious
+Yankee that he was.
+
+Born in Connecticut, he had gone into a broker's office on leaving
+college, and had attracted the notice of Manderson, whose business with
+his firm he had often handled. The Colossus had watched him for some
+time, and at length offered him the post of private secretary. Mr.
+Bunner was a pattern business man, trustworthy, long-headed, methodical
+and accurate. Manderson could have found many men with those virtues:
+but he engaged Mr. Bunner because he was also swift and secret, and had
+besides a singular natural instinct in regard to the movements of the
+stock market.
+
+Trent and the American measured one another coolly with their eyes. Both
+appeared satisfied with what they saw. "I was having it explained to
+me," said Trent pleasantly, "that my discovery of a pistol that might
+have shot Manderson does not amount to very much. I am told it is a
+favorite weapon among your people, and has become quite popular over
+here."
+
+Mr. Bunner stretched out a bony hand and took the pistol from its case.
+"Yes, sir," he said, handling it with an air of familiarity, "the
+captain is right. This is what we call out home a Little Arthur, and I
+dare say there are duplicates of it in a hundred thousand hip-pockets
+this minute. I consider it too light in the hand myself," Mr. Bunner
+went on, mechanically feeling under the tail of his jacket, and
+producing an ugly-looking weapon. "Feel of that, now, Mr. Trent--it's
+loaded, by the way. Now this Little Arthur--Marlowe bought it just
+before we came over this year, to please the old man. Manderson said it
+was ridiculous for a man to be without a pistol in the twentieth
+century. So he went out and bought what they offered him, I guess--never
+consulted me. Not but what it's a good gun," Mr. Bunner conceded,
+squinting along the sights. "Marlowe was poor with it at first, but I've
+coached him some in the last month or so, and he's practised until he is
+pretty good. But he never could get the habit of carrying it around.
+Why, it's as natural to me as wearing my pants. I have carried one for
+some years now, because there was always likely to be somebody laying
+for Manderson. And now," Mr. Bunner concluded sadly, "they got him when
+I wasn't around. Well, gentlemen, you must excuse me. I am going in to
+Bishopsbridge. There is a lot to do these days, and I have to send off a
+bunch of cables big enough to choke a cow."
+
+"I must be off, too," said Trent. "I have an appointment at the Three
+Tuns inn."
+
+"Let me give you a lift in the automobile," said Mr. Bunner cordially.
+"I go right by that joint. Say, Cap, are you coming my way, too? No?
+Then come along, Mr. Trent, and help me get out the car. The chauffeur
+is out of action, and we have to do 'most everything ourselves except
+clean the dirt off her."
+
+Still tirelessly talking in his measured drawl, Mr. Bunner led Trent
+downstairs and through the house to the garage at the back. It stood at
+a little distance from the house, and made a cool retreat from the blaze
+of the mid-day sun.
+
+Mr. Bunner seemed to be in no hurry to get out the car. He offered Trent
+a cigar, which was accepted, and for the first time lit his own. Then he
+seated himself on the foot-board of the car, his thin hands clasped
+between his knees, and looked keenly at the other.
+
+"See here, Mr. Trent," he said after a few moments. "There are some
+things I can tell you that may be useful to you. I know your record. You
+are a smart man, and I like dealing with smart men. I don't know if I
+have that detective sized up right, but he strikes me as a mutt. I would
+answer any questions he had the gumption to ask me--I have done so, in
+fact--but I don't feel encouraged to give him any notions of mine
+without his asking. See?"
+
+Trent nodded. "That is a feeling many people have in the presence of our
+police," he said. "It's the official manner, I suppose. But let me tell
+you Murch is anything but what you think. He is one of the shrewdest
+officers in Europe. He is not very quick with his mind, but he is very
+sure. And his experience is immense. My forte is imagination, but I
+assure you in police work experience outweighs it by a great deal."
+
+"Outweighs nothing!" replied Mr. Bunner crisply. "This is no ordinary
+case, Mr. Trent. I will tell you one reason why. I believe the old man
+knew there was something coming to him. Another thing. I believe it was
+something he thought he couldn't dodge."
+
+Trent pulled a crate opposite to Mr. Bunner's place on the foot-board
+and seated himself. "This sounds like business," he said. "Tell me your
+ideas."
+
+"I say what I do because of the change in the old man's manner this last
+few weeks. I dare say you have heard, Mr. Trent, that he was a man who
+always kept himself well in hand. That was so. I have always considered
+him the coolest and hardest head in business. That man's calm was just
+deadly--I never saw anything to beat it. And I knew Manderson as nobody
+else did. I was with him in the work he really lived for. I guess I knew
+him a heap better than his wife did, poor woman. I knew him better than
+Marlowe could--he never saw Manderson in his office when there was a big
+thing on. I knew him better than any of his friends."
+
+"Had he any friends?" interjected Trent.
+
+Mr. Bunner glanced at him sharply. "Somebody has been putting you next,
+I see that," he remarked. "No: properly speaking, I should say not. He
+had many acquaintances among the big men, people he saw 'most every day;
+they would even go yachting or hunting together. But I don't believe
+there ever was a man that Manderson opened a corner of his heart to. But
+what I was going to say was this: some months ago the old man began to
+get like I never knew him before--gloomy and sullen, just as if he was
+everlastingly brooding over something bad, something that he couldn't
+fix. This went on without any break; it was the same down town as it was
+up home, he acted just as if there was something lying heavy on his
+mind. But it wasn't until a few weeks back that his self-restraint began
+to go; and let me tell you this, Mr. Trent"--the American laid his bony
+claw on the other's knee--"I'm the only man that knows it. With everyone
+else he would be just morose and dull; but when he was alone with me in
+his office, or anywhere where we would be working together, if the least
+little thing went wrong, by George! he would fly off the handle to beat
+the Dutch. In this library here I have seen him open a letter with
+something that didn't just suit him in it, and he would rip around and
+carry on like an Indian, saying he wished he had the man that wrote it
+here, he wouldn't do a thing to him, and so on, till it was just
+pitiful. I never saw such a change. And here's another thing. For a week
+before he died Manderson neglected his work, for the first time in my
+experience. He wouldn't answer a letter or a cable, though things looked
+like going all to pieces over there. I supposed that this anxiety of
+his, whatever it was, had got onto his nerves till they were worn out.
+Once I advised him to see a doctor, and he told me to go to hell. But
+nobody saw this side of him but me. If he was having one of these rages
+in the library here, for example, and Mrs. Manderson would come into the
+room, he would be all calm and cold again in an instant."
+
+"And you put this down to some secret anxiety, a fear that somebody had
+designs on his life?" asked Trent.
+
+The American nodded.
+
+"I suppose," Trent resumed, "you had considered the idea of there being
+something wrong with his mind--a break-down from overstrain, say. That
+is the first thought that your account suggests to me. Besides, it is
+what is always happening to your big business men in America, isn't it?
+That is the impression one gets from the newspapers."
+
+"Don't let them slip you any of that bunk," said Mr. Bunner earnestly.
+"It's only the ones who have got rich too quick, and can't make good,
+who go crazy. Think of all our really big men--the men anywhere near
+Manderson's size: did you ever hear of any one of them losing his
+senses? They don't do it--believe _me_. I know they say every man has
+his loco point," Mr. Bunner added reflectively, "but that doesn't mean
+genuine, sure-enough craziness; it just means some personal eccentricity
+in a man ... like hating cats ... or my own weakness of not being able
+to touch any kind of fish-food."
+
+"Well, what was Manderson's?"
+
+"He was full of them--the old man. There was his objection to all the
+unnecessary fuss and luxury that wealthy people don't kick at much, as a
+general rule. He didn't have any use for expensive trifles and
+ornaments. He wouldn't have anybody do little things for him; he hated
+to have servants tag around after him unless he wanted them. And
+although Manderson was as careful about his clothes as any man I ever
+knew, and his shoes--well, sir, the amount of money he spent on shoes
+was sinful--in spite of that, I tell you, he never had a valet. He never
+liked to have anybody touch him. All his life nobody ever shaved him."
+
+"I've heard something of that," Trent remarked. "Why was it, do you
+think?"
+
+"Well," Mr. Bunner answered slowly, "it was the Manderson habit of mind,
+I guess; a sort of temper of general suspicion and jealousy. They say
+his father and grandfather were just the same.... Like a dog with a
+bone, you know, acting as if all the rest of creation was laying for a
+chance to steal it. He didn't really _think_ the barber would start in
+to saw his head off; he just felt there was a possibility that he
+_might_, and he was taking no risks. Then again in business he was
+always convinced that somebody else was after his bone--which was true
+enough a good deal of the time; but not all the time. The consequence of
+that was that the old man was the most cautious and secret worker in the
+world of finance; and that had a lot to do with his success, too.... But
+that doesn't amount to being a lunatic, Mr. Trent; not by a long way.
+You ask me if Manderson was losing his mind before he died. I say I
+believe he was just worn out with worrying over something, and was
+losing his nerve."
+
+Trent smoked thoughtfully. He wondered how much Mr. Bunner knew of the
+domestic difficulty in his chief's household, and decided to put out a
+feeler. "I understood that he had trouble with his wife."
+
+"Sure," replied Mr. Bunner. "But do you suppose a thing like that was
+going to upset Sig Manderson that way? No, sir! He was a sight too big a
+man to be all broken up by any worry of that kind."
+
+Trent looked half-incredulously into the eyes of the young man. But
+behind all their shrewdness and intensity he saw a massive innocence.
+Mr. Bunner really believed a serious breach between husband and wife to
+be a minor source of trouble for a big man.
+
+"What _was_ the trouble between them?" Trent inquired.
+
+"You can search me," Mr. Bunner replied briefly. He puffed at his cigar.
+"Marlowe and I have often talked about it, and we could never make out a
+solution. I had a notion at first," said Mr. Bunner in a lower voice,
+leaning forward, "that the old man was disappointed and vexed because he
+had expected a child; but Marlowe told me that the disappointment on
+that score was the other way around, likely as not. His idea was all
+right, I guess; he gathered it from something said by Mrs. Manderson's
+French maid."
+
+Trent looked up at him quickly. "Celestine!" he said; and his thought
+was: "So that was what she was getting at!"
+
+Mr. Bunner misunderstood his glance. "Don't you think I'm giving a man
+away, Mr. Trent," he said. "Marlowe isn't that kind. Celestine just took
+a fancy to him because he talks French like a native, and she would
+always be holding him up for a gossip. French servants are quite unlike
+English that way. And servant or no servant," added Mr. Bunner with
+emphasis, "I don't see how a woman could mention such a subject to a
+man. But the French beat me." He shook his head slowly.
+
+"But to come back to what you were telling me just now," Trent said.
+"You believe that Manderson was going in terror of his life for some
+time. Who should threaten it? I am quite in the dark."
+
+"Terror--I don't know," replied Mr. Bunner meditatively. "Anxiety, if
+you like ... or suspense--that's rather my idea of it. The old man was
+hard to terrify, anyway; and more than that, he wasn't taking any
+precautions--he was actually avoiding them. It looked more like he was
+asking for a quick finish--supposing there's any truth in my idea. Why,
+he would sit in that library window, nights, looking out into the dark,
+with his white shirt just a target for anybody's gun. As for who should
+threaten his life--well, sir," said Mr. Bunner with a faint smile, "it's
+certain you have not lived in the States. To take the Pennsylvania coal
+hold-up alone, there were thirty thousand men, with women and children
+to keep, who would have jumped at the chance of drilling a hole through
+the man who fixed it so that they must starve or give in to his terms.
+Thirty thousand of the toughest aliens in the country, Mr. Trent.
+There's a type of desperado you find in that kind of push who has been
+known to lay for a man for years, and kill him when he had forgotten
+what he did. They have been known to dynamite a man in Idaho who had
+done them dirt in New Jersey ten years before. Do you suppose the
+Atlantic is going to stop them?... It takes some sand, I tell you, to be
+a big business man in our country. No, sir: the old man knew--had always
+known--that there was a whole crowd of dangerous men scattered up and
+down the States who had it in for him. My belief is that he had somehow
+got to know that some of them were definitely after him at last. What
+licks me altogether is why he should have just laid himself open to them
+the way he did--why he never tried to dodge, but walked right down into
+the garden yesterday morning to be shot at."
+
+Mr. Bunner ceased to speak, and for a little while both men sat with
+wrinkled brows, faint blue vapors rising from their cigars. Then Trent
+rose. "Your theory is quite fresh to me," he said. "It's perfectly
+rational, and it's only a question of whether it fits all the facts. I
+mustn't give away what I'm doing for my newspaper, Mr. Bunner, but I
+will say this: I have already satisfied myself that this was a
+premeditated crime, and an extraordinarily cunning one at that. I'm
+deeply obliged to you. We must talk it over again." He looked at his
+watch. "I have been expected for some time by my friend. Shall we make a
+move?"
+
+"Two o'clock," said Mr. Bunner, consulting his own as he got up from the
+foot-board. "Ten A. M. in little old New York. You don't know Wall
+Street, Mr. Trent. Let's you and I hope we never see anything nearer
+hell than what's loose in the Street this minute."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE LADY IN BLACK
+
+
+The sea broke raging upon the foot of the cliff under a good breeze; the
+sun flooded the land with life from a dappled blue sky. In this
+perfection of English weather, Trent, who had slept ill, went down
+before eight o'clock to a pool among the rocks, the direction of which
+had been given him, and dived deep into clear water. Between vast gray
+boulders he swam out to the tossing open, forced himself some little way
+against a coast-wise current, and then returned to his refuge battered
+and refreshed. Ten minutes later he was scaling the cliff again, and his
+mind, cleared for the moment of a heavy disgust for the affair he had in
+hand, was turning over his plans for the morning.
+
+It was the day of the inquest, the day after his arrival in the place.
+He had carried matters not much farther after parting with the American
+on the road to Bishopsbridge. In the afternoon he had walked from the
+inn into the town, accompanied by Mr. Cupples, and had there made
+certain purchases at a chemist's shop, conferred privately for some time
+with a photographer, sent off a reply-paid telegram, and made an inquiry
+at the telephone-exchange. He had said but little about the case to Mr.
+Cupples, who seemed incurious on his side, and nothing at all about the
+results of his investigation or the steps he was about to take. After
+their return from Bishopsbridge, Trent had written a long dispatch for
+the _Record_, and sent it to be telegraphed by the proud hands of the
+paper's local representative.
+
+This morning as he scaled the cliff he told himself that he had never
+taken up a case he liked so little, or which absorbed him so much. The
+more he contemplated it in the golden sunshine of this new day, the more
+evil and the more challenging it appeared. All that he suspected and all
+that he almost knew had occupied his questing brain for hours to the
+exclusion of sleep; and in this glorious light and air, though washed in
+body and spirit by the fierce purity of the sea, he only saw the more
+clearly the darkness of the guilt in which he believed, and was more
+bitterly repelled by the motive at which he guessed. But now at least
+his zeal was awake again, and the sense of the hunt quickened. He would
+neither slacken nor spare; here need be no compunction. In the course of
+the day, he hoped, his net would be complete. He had work to do in the
+morning; and with very vivid expectancy, though not much serious hope,
+he awaited the answer to the telegram which he had shot into the sky, as
+it were, the day before.
+
+The path back to the hotel wound for some way along the top of the
+cliff, and on nearing a spot he had marked from the sea-level, where the
+face had fallen away long ago, he approached the edge and looked down,
+hoping to follow with his eyes the most delicately beautiful of all the
+movements of water, the wash of a light sea over broken rock. But no
+rock was there. A few feet below him a broad ledge stood out, a rough
+platform as large as a great room, thickly grown with wiry grass and
+walled in steeply on three sides. There, close to the verge where the
+cliff at last dropped sheer, a woman was sitting, her arms about her
+drawn-up knees, her eyes fixed on the trailing smoke of a distant liner,
+her face full of some dream.
+
+This woman seemed to Trent, whose training had taught him to live in his
+eyes, to make the most beautiful picture he had ever seen. Her face of
+Southern pallor, touched by the kiss of the wind with color on the
+cheek, presented to him a profile of delicate regularity in which there
+was nothing hard; nevertheless the black brows bending down toward the
+point where they almost met gave her in repose a look of something like
+severity, strangely redeemed by the open curves of the mouth. Trent said
+to himself that the absurdity or otherwise of a lover writing sonnets to
+his mistress's eyebrow depended after all on the quality of the eyebrow.
+Her nose was of the straight and fine sort, exquisitely escaping the
+perdition of too much length. Her hat lay pinned to the grass beside
+her, and the lively breeze played with her thick dark hair, blowing
+backward the two broad bandeaux that should have covered much of her
+forehead, and agitating a hundred tiny curls from the mass gathered at
+the nape.
+
+Everything about this lady was black, from her shoes of suede to the hat
+that she had discarded; lusterless black covered her to her bare throat.
+All she wore was fine and well put on. Dreamy and delicate of spirit as
+her looks declared her, it was very plain that she was long-practised as
+only a woman grown can be in dressing well, the oldest of the arts, and
+had her touch of primal joy in the excellence of the body that was so
+admirably curved now in the attitude of embraced knees. With the
+suggestion of French taste in her clothes, she made a very modern figure
+seated there, until one looked at her face and saw the glow and triumph
+of all vigorous beings that ever faced sun and wind and sea together in
+the prime of the year. One saw, too, a womanhood unmixed and vigorous,
+unconsciously sure of itself.
+
+Trent, who had halted only for a moment in the surprise of seeing the
+woman in black, had passed by on the cliff above her, perceiving and
+feeling as he went the things set down. At all times his keen vision and
+active brain took in and tasted details with an easy swiftness that was
+marvelous to men of slower chemistry; the need to stare, he held, was
+evidence of blindness. Now the feeling of beauty was awakened and
+exultant, and doubled the power of his sense. In these instants a
+picture was printed on his memory that would never pass away.
+
+As he went by unheard on the turf the woman, still alone with her
+thoughts, suddenly moved. She unclasped her long hands from about her
+knees, stretched her limbs and body with feline grace, then slowly
+raised her head and extended her arms with open, curving fingers, as if
+to gather to her all the glory and overwhelming sanity of the morning.
+This was a gesture not to be mistaken: it was a gesture of freedom, the
+movement of a soul's resolution to be, to possess, to go forward,
+perhaps to enjoy.
+
+So he saw her for an instant as he passed, and he did not turn. He knew
+suddenly who the woman must be, and it was as if a curtain of gloom were
+drawn between him and the splendor of the day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You were planning to go to White Gables before the inquest, I think,"
+remarked Trent to Mr. Cupples as they finished their breakfast. "You
+ought to be off, if you are to get back to the court in time. I have
+something to attend to there myself, so we might walk up together. I
+will just go and get my camera."
+
+"By all means," Mr. Cupples answered; and they set off at once in the
+ever-growing warmth of the morning. The roof of White Gables, a surly
+patch of dull red against the dark trees, seemed to harmonize with
+Trent's mood; he felt heavy, sinister and troubled. If a blow must fall
+that might strike down that creature radiant of beauty and life whom he
+had seen that morning, he did not wish it to come from his hand. An
+exaggerated chivalry had lived in him since the first teachings of his
+mother; but at this moment the horror of bruising anything so lovely was
+almost as much the artist's revulsion as the gentleman's. On the other
+hand, was the hunt to end in nothing? The quality of the affair was such
+that the thought of forbearance was an agony. There never was such a
+case; and he alone, he was confident, held the truth of it under his
+hand. At least, he determined, that day should show whether what he
+believed was a delusion. He would trample his compunction underfoot
+until he was quite sure that there was any call for it. That same
+morning he would know.
+
+As they entered at the gate of the drive they saw Marlowe and the
+American standing in talk before the front door. In the shadow of the
+porch was the lady in black.
+
+She saw them, and came gravely forward over the lawn, moving as Trent
+had known that she would move, erect and balanced, stepping lightly.
+When she welcomed him on Mr. Cupples' presentation, her eyes of
+golden-flecked brown observed him kindly. In her pale composure, worn as
+the mask of distress, there was no trace of the emotion that had seemed
+a halo about her head on the ledge of the cliff. She spoke the
+appropriate commonplace in a low and even voice. After a few words to
+Mr. Cupples she turned her eyes on Trent again.
+
+"I hope you will succeed," she said earnestly. "Do you think you will
+succeed?"
+
+He made his mind up as the words left her lips. He said: "I believe I
+shall do so, Mrs. Manderson. When I have the case sufficiently complete
+I shall ask you to let me see you and tell you about it. It may be
+necessary to consult you before the facts are published."
+
+She looked puzzled, and distress showed for an instant in her eyes. "If
+it is necessary, of course you shall do so," she said.
+
+On the brink of his next speech Trent hesitated. He remembered that the
+lady had not wished to repeat to him the story already given to the
+inspector-or to be questioned at all. He was not unconscious that he
+desired to hear her voice and watch her face a little longer, if it
+might be; but the matter he had to mention really troubled his mind, it
+was a queer thing that fitted nowhere into the pattern within whose
+corners he had by this time brought the other queer things in the case.
+It was very possible that she could explain it away in a breath: it was
+unlikely that any one else could. He summoned his resolution.
+
+"You have been so kind," he said, "in allowing me access to the house
+and every opportunity of studying the case, that I am going to ask leave
+to put a question or two to yourself--nothing that you would rather not
+answer, I think. May I?"
+
+She glanced at him wearily. "It would be stupid of me to refuse. Ask
+your questions, Mr. Trent."
+
+"It's only this," said Trent hurriedly. "We know that your husband
+lately drew an unusually large sum of ready money from his London
+bankers, and was keeping it here. It is here now, in fact. Have you any
+idea why he should have done that?"
+
+She opened her eyes in astonishment. "I cannot imagine," she said. "I
+did not know he had done so. I am very much surprised to hear it."
+
+"Why is it surprising?"
+
+"I thought my husband had very little money in the house. On Sunday
+night, just before he went out in the motor, he came into the
+drawing-room where I was sitting. He seemed to be irritated about
+something, and asked me at once if I had any notes or gold I could let
+him have until next day. I was surprised at that, because he was never
+without money; he made it a rule to carry a hundred pounds or so about
+him always in a note-case. I unlocked my escritoire, and gave him all I
+had by me. It was nearly thirty pounds."
+
+"And he did not tell you why he wanted it?"
+
+"No. He put it in his pocket, and then said that Mr. Marlowe had
+persuaded him to go for a run in the motor by moonlight, and he thought
+it might help him to sleep. He had been sleeping badly, as perhaps you
+know. Then he went off with Mr. Marlowe. I thought it odd he should need
+money on Sunday night, but I soon forgot about it. I never remembered it
+again until now."
+
+"It was curious, certainly," said Trent, staring into the distance. Mr.
+Cupples began to speak to his niece of the arrangements for the inquest,
+and Trent moved away to where Marlowe was pacing slowly upon the lawn.
+The young man seemed relieved to talk about the coming business of the
+day. Though he still seemed tired out and nervous, he showed himself not
+without a quiet humor in describing the pomposities of the local police
+and the portentous airs of Dr. Stock. Trent turned the conversation
+gradually toward the problem of the crime, and all Marlowe's gravity
+returned.
+
+"Bunner has told me what he thinks," he said when Trent referred to the
+American's theory. "I don't find myself convinced by it, because it
+doesn't really explain some of the oddest facts. But I have lived long
+enough in the United States to know that such a stroke of revenge, done
+in a secret, melodramatic way, is not an unlikely thing. It is quite a
+characteristic feature of certain sections of the labor movement there.
+Americans have a taste and a talent for that sort of business. Do you
+know 'Huckleberry Finn?'"
+
+"Do I know my own name?" exclaimed Trent.
+
+"Well, I think the most American thing in that great American epic is
+Tom Sawyer's elaboration of an extremely difficult and romantic scheme,
+taking days to carry out, for securing the escape of the nigger Jim,
+which could have been managed quite easily in twenty minutes. You know
+how fond they are of lodges and brotherhoods. Every college club has its
+secret signs and handgrips. You've heard of the Know-Nothing movement in
+politics, I dare say, and the Ku Klux Klan. Then look at Brigham Young's
+penny-dreadful tyranny in Utah, with real blood. The founders of the
+Mormon state were of the purest Yankee stock in America; and you know
+what they did. It's all part of the same mental tendency. Americans make
+fun of it among themselves. For my part, I take it very seriously."
+
+"It can have a very hideous side to it, certainly," said Trent, "when
+you get it in connection with crime. Or with vice. Or even mere luxury.
+But I have a sort of sneaking respect for the determination to make life
+interesting and lively in spite of civilization. To return to the matter
+in hand, however: has it struck you as a possibility that Manderson's
+mind was affected to some extent by this menace that Bunner believes in?
+For instance, it was rather an extraordinary thing to send you posting
+off like that in the middle of the night."
+
+"About ten o'clock, to be exact," replied Marlowe. "Though mind you, if
+he'd actually roused me out of my bed at midnight I shouldn't have been
+very much surprised. It all chimes in with what we've just been saying.
+Manderson wasn't mad in the least, but he had a strong streak of the
+national taste for dramatic proceedings; he was rather fond of his
+well-earned reputation for unexpected strokes and for going for his
+object with ruthless directness through every opposing consideration. He
+had decided suddenly that he wanted to have word from this man Harris--"
+
+"Who is Harris?" interjected Trent.
+
+"Nobody knows. Even Bunner never heard of him, and can't imagine what
+the business in hand was. All I know is that when I went up to London
+last week to attend to various things I booked a deck-cabin, at
+Manderson's request, for a Mr. George Harris on the boat that sailed on
+Monday. It seems that Manderson suddenly found he wanted news from
+Harris which presumably was of a character too secret for the telegraph;
+and there was no train that served; so I was sent off as you know."
+
+Trent looked round to make sure that they were not overheard, then faced
+the other gravely. "There is one thing I may tell you," he said quietly,
+"that I don't think you know. Martin the butler caught a few words at
+the end of your conversation with Manderson in the orchard before you
+started with him in the car. He heard him say: 'If Harris is there every
+moment is of importance.' Now, Mr. Marlowe, you know my business here. I
+am sent to make inquiries, and you mustn't take offense. I want to ask
+you if, in the face of that sentence, you will repeat that you know
+nothing of what the business was."
+
+Marlowe shook his head. "I know nothing, indeed. I'm not easily
+offended, and your question is quite fair. What passed during that
+conversation I have already told the detective. Manderson plainly said
+to me that he could not tell me what it was all about. He simply wanted
+me to find Harris, tell him that he desired to know how matters stood,
+and bring back a letter or message from him. Harris, I was further told,
+might not turn up. If he did, 'every moment was of importance.' And now
+you know as much as I do."
+
+"That talk took place _before_ he told his wife that you were taking him
+for a moonlight run. Why did he conceal your errand in that way, I
+wonder."
+
+The young man made a gesture of helplessness. "Why? I can guess no
+better than you."
+
+"Why," muttered Trent as if to himself, gazing on the ground, "did he
+conceal it--from Mrs. Manderson?" He looked up at Marlowe.
+
+"And from Martin," the other amended coolly. "He was told the same
+thing."
+
+With a sudden movement of his head Trent seemed to dismiss the subject.
+He drew from his breast-pocket a letter-case, and thence extracted two
+small leaves of clean, fresh paper.
+
+"Just look at these two slips, Mr. Marlowe," he said. "Did you ever see
+them before? Have you any idea where they come from?" he added, as
+Marlowe took one in each hand and examined them curiously.
+
+"They seem to have been cut with a knife or scissors from a small diary
+for this year--from the October pages," Marlowe observed, looking them
+over on both sides. "I see no writing of any kind on them. Nobody here
+has any such diary so far as I know. What about them?"
+
+"There may be nothing in it," Trent said dubiously. "Any one in the
+house, of course, might have such a diary without your having seen it.
+But I didn't much expect you would be able to identify the leaves--in
+fact, I should have been surprised if you had."
+
+He stopped speaking as Mrs. Manderson came towards them. "My uncle
+thinks we should be going now," she said.
+
+"I think I will walk on with Mr. Bunner," Mr. Cupples said as he joined
+them. "There are certain business matters that must be disposed of as
+soon as possible. Will you come on with these two gentlemen, Mabel? We
+will wait for you before we reach the place."
+
+Trent turned to her. "Mrs. Manderson will excuse me, I hope," he said.
+"I really came up this morning in order to look about me here for some
+indications I thought I might possibly find. I had not thought of
+attending the--the court just yet."
+
+She looked at him with eyes of perfect candor. "Of course, Mr. Trent.
+Please do exactly as you wish. We are all relying upon you. If you will
+wait a few moments, Mr. Marlowe, I shall be ready."
+
+She entered the house. Her uncle and the American had already strolled
+towards the gate.
+
+Trent looked into the eyes of his companion. "That is a wonderful
+woman," he said in a lowered voice.
+
+"You say so without knowing her," replied Marlowe in a similar tone.
+"She is more than that."
+
+Trent said nothing to this. He stared out over the fields towards the
+sea. In the silence a noise of hobnailed haste rose on the still air. A
+little distance down the road a boy appeared trotting towards them from
+the direction of the hotel. In his hand was the orange envelope,
+unmistakable afar off, of a telegram. Trent watched him with a carefully
+indifferent eye as he met and passed the two others. Then he turned to
+Marlowe. "Apropos of nothing in particular," he said, "were you at
+Oxford?"
+
+"Yes," said the young man. "Why do you ask?"
+
+"I just wondered if I was right in my guess. It's one of the things you
+can very often tell about a man, isn't it?"
+
+"I suppose so," Marlowe admitted. "Well, each of us is marked in one way
+or another, perhaps. I should have said you were an artist, if I hadn't
+known it."
+
+"Why? Does my hair want cutting?"
+
+"Oh, no! It's only that you look at things and people as I've seen
+artists do, with an eye that moves steadily from detail to
+detail--rather looking them over than looking at them."
+
+The boy came up panting. "Telegram for you, sir," he said to Trent.
+"Just come, sir."
+
+Trent tore open the envelop with an apology, and his eyes lighted up so
+visibly as he read the slip that Marlowe's tired face softened in a
+smile.
+
+"It must be good news," he murmured half to himself.
+
+Trent turned on him a glance in which nothing could be read. "Not
+exactly news," he said. "It only tells me that another little guess of
+mine was a good one."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE INQUEST
+
+
+The coroner, who fully realized that for that one day of his life as a
+provincial solicitor he was living in the gaze of the world, had
+resolved to be worthy of the fleeting eminence. He was a large man of
+jovial temper, with a strong interest in the dramatic aspects of his
+work, and the news of Manderson's mysterious death within his
+jurisdiction had made him the happiest coroner in England. A respectable
+capacity for marshaling facts was fortified in him by a copiousness of
+impressive language that made juries as clay in his hands and sometimes
+disguised a doubtful interpretation of the rules of evidence.
+
+The court was held in a long unfurnished room lately built onto the
+hotel, and intended to serve as a ball-room or concert-hall. A regiment
+of reporters was entrenched in the front seats, and those who were to be
+called on to give evidence occupied chairs to one side of the table
+behind which the coroner sat, while the jury, in double row, with
+plastered hair and a spurious ease of manner, flanked him on the other
+side. An undistinguished public filled the rest of the space, and
+listened, in an awed silence, to the opening solemnities. The newspaper
+men, well used to these, muttered among themselves. Those of them who
+knew Trent by sight, assured the rest that he was not in the court.
+
+The identity of the dead man was proved by his wife, the first witness
+called, from whom the coroner, after some inquiry into the health and
+circumstances of the deceased, proceeded to draw an account of the last
+occasion on which she had seen her husband alive. Mrs. Manderson was
+taken through her evidence by the coroner with the sympathy which every
+man felt for that dark figure of grief. She lifted her thick veil before
+beginning to speak, and the extreme paleness and unbroken composure of
+the lady produced a singular impression. This was not an impression of
+hardness. Interesting femininity was the first thing to be felt in her
+presence. She was not even enigmatic. It was only clear that the force
+of a powerful character was at work to master the emotions of her
+situation. Once or twice as she spoke she touched her eyes with her
+handkerchief, but her voice was low and clear to the end.
+
+Her husband, she said, had come up to his bedroom about his usual hour
+for retiring on the Sunday night. His room was really a dressing-room
+attached to her own bedroom, communicating with it by a door which was
+usually kept open during the night. Both dressing-room and bedroom were
+entered by other doors giving on the passage. Her husband had always had
+a preference for the greatest simplicity in his bedroom arrangements,
+and liked to sleep in a small room. She had not been awake when he came
+up, but had been half-aroused, as usually happened, when the light was
+switched on in her husband's room. She had spoken to him. She had no
+clear recollection of what she had said, as she had been very drowsy at
+the time; but she had remembered that he had been out for a moonlight
+run in the car, and she believed she had asked whether he had had a good
+run, and what time it was. She had asked what the time was because she
+felt as if she had only been a very short time asleep, and she had
+expected her husband to be out very late. In answer to her question he
+had told her it was half-past eleven, and had gone on to say that he had
+changed his mind about going for a run.
+
+"Did he say why?" the coroner asked.
+
+"Yes," replied the lady, "he did explain why. I remember very well what
+he said, because--" she stopped with a little appearance of confusion.
+
+"Because--" the coroner insisted gently.
+
+"Because my husband was not as a rule communicative about his business
+affairs," answered the witness, raising her chin with a faint touch of
+defiance. "He did not--did not think they would interest me, and as a
+rule referred to them as little as possible. That is why I was rather
+surprised when he told me that he had sent Mr. Marlowe to Southampton to
+bring back some important information from a man who was leaving for
+Paris by the next day's boat. He said that Mr. Marlowe could do it quite
+easily if he had no accident. He said that he had started in the car,
+and then walked back home a mile or so, and felt all the better for it."
+
+"Did he say any more?"
+
+"Nothing, as well as I remember," the witness said. "I was very sleepy,
+and I dropped off again in a few moments. I just remember my husband
+turning his light out, and that is all. I never saw him again alive."
+
+"And you heard nothing in the night?"
+
+"No; I never woke until my maid brought my tea in the morning at seven
+o'clock. She closed the door leading to my husband's room, as she always
+did, and I supposed him to be still there. He always needed a great deal
+of sleep. He sometimes slept until quite late in the morning. I had
+breakfast in my sitting-room. It was about ten when I heard that my
+husband's body had been found." The witness dropped her head and
+silently waited for her dismissal.
+
+But it was not to be yet.
+
+"Mrs. Manderson." The coroner's voice was sympathetic, but it had a hint
+of firmness in it now. "The question I am going to put to you must, in
+these sad circumstances, be a painful one; but it is my duty to ask it.
+Is it the fact that your relations with your late husband had not been,
+for some time past, relations of mutual affection and confidence? Is it
+the fact that there was an estrangement between you?"
+
+The lady drew herself up again and faced her questioner, the color
+rising in her cheeks. "If that question is necessary," she said with
+cold distinctness, "I will answer it so that there shall be no
+misunderstanding. During the last few months of my husband's life his
+attitude towards me had given me great anxiety and sorrow. He had
+changed towards me; he had become very reserved and seemed mistrustful.
+I saw much less of him than before; he seemed to prefer to be alone. I
+can give no explanation at all of the change. I tried to work against
+it; I did all I could with justice to my own dignity, as I thought.
+Something was between us, I did not know what, and he never told me. My
+own obstinate pride prevented me from asking what it was in so many
+words; I only made a point of being to him exactly as I had always been,
+so far as he would allow me. I suppose I shall never know now what it
+was." The witness, whose voice had trembled in spite of her
+self-control, over the last few sentences, drew down her veil when she
+had said this, and stood erect and quiet.
+
+One of the jury asked a question, not without obvious hesitation. "Then
+was there never anything of the nature of what they call Words between
+you and your husband, ma'am?"
+
+"Never." The word was colorlessly spoken; but everyone felt that a crass
+misunderstanding of the possibilities of conduct in the case of a person
+like Mrs. Manderson had been visited with some severity.
+
+Did she know, the coroner asked, of any other matter which might have
+been preying upon her husband's mind recently?
+
+Mrs. Manderson knew of none whatever. The coroner intimated that her
+ordeal was at an end, and the veiled lady made her way to the door. The
+general attention, which followed her for a few moments, was now eagerly
+directed upon Martin, whom the coroner had proceeded to call.
+
+It was at this moment that Trent appeared at the doorway, and edged his
+way into the great room. But he did not look at Martin. He was observing
+the well-balanced figure that came quickly toward him along an opening
+path in the crowd, and his eye was gloomy. He started, as he stood aside
+from the door with a slight bow, to hear Mrs. Manderson address him by
+name in a low voice. He followed her a pace or two into the hall.
+
+"I wanted to ask you," she said in a voice now weak and oddly broken,
+"if you would give me your arm a part of the way to the house. I could
+not see my uncle near the door, and I suddenly felt rather faint.... I
+shall be better in the air.... No, no! I cannot stay here--please, Mr.
+Trent!" she said, as he began to make an obvious suggestion. "I must go
+to the house." Her hand tightened momentarily on his arm as if, for all
+her weakness, she could drag him from the place; then again she leaned
+heavily upon it, and with that support, and with bent head, she walked
+slowly from the hotel and along the oak-shaded path toward White Gables.
+
+Trent went in silence, his thoughts whirling, dancing insanely to a
+chorus of "Fool! fool!" All that he alone knew, all that he guessed and
+suspected of this affair rushed through his brain in a rout; but the
+touch of her unnerved hand upon his arm never for an instant left his
+consciousness, filling him with an exaltation that enraged and
+bewildered him. He was still cursing himself furiously behind the mask
+of conventional solicitude that he turned to the lady when he had
+attended her to the house, and seen her sink upon a couch in the morning
+room. Raising her veil, she thanked him gravely and frankly, with a look
+of sincere gratitude in her eyes. She was much better now, she said, and
+a cup of tea would work a miracle upon her. She hoped she had not taken
+him away from anything important. She was ashamed of herself; she
+thought she could go through with it, but she had not expected those
+last questions. "I am glad you did not hear me," she said when he
+explained. "But of course you will read it all in the reports. It shook
+me so to have to speak of that," she added simply, "and to keep from
+making an exhibition of myself took it out of me. And all those staring
+men by the door! Thank you again for helping me when I asked you.... I
+thought I might," she ended queerly, with a little tired smile; and
+Trent took himself away, his hand still quivering from the cool touch of
+her fingers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A HOT SCENT
+
+
+"Come in," called Trent.
+
+Mr. Cupples entered his sitting-room at the hotel. It was the early
+evening of the day on which the coroner's jury, without leaving the box,
+had pronounced the expected denunciation of a person or persons unknown.
+Trent, with a hasty glance upward, continued his intent study of what
+lay in a photographic dish of enameled metal, which he moved slowly
+about in the light of the window. He looked very pale and his movements
+were nervous.
+
+"Sit on the sofa," he advised. "The chairs are a job lot bought at the
+sale after the suppression of the Holy Inquisition in Spain. This is a
+pretty good negative," he went on, holding it up to the light with his
+head at the angle of discriminating judgment. "Washed enough now, I
+think. Let us leave it to dry, and get rid of all this mess."
+
+Mr. Cupples, as the other busily cleared the table of a confusion of
+basins, dishes, racks, boxes and bottles, picked up first one and then
+another of the objects and studied them with innocent curiosity.
+
+"That is called hypo-eliminator," said Trent as Mr. Cupples uncorked and
+smelled at one of the bottles. "Very useful when you're in a hurry with
+a negative. I shouldn't drink it, though, all the same. It eliminates
+sodium hypophosphite, but I shouldn't wonder if it would eliminate human
+beings too." He found a place for the last of the litter on the crowded
+mantel-shelf, and came to sit before Mr. Cupples on the table. "The
+great thing about a hotel sitting-room is that its beauty does not
+distract the mind from work. It is no place for the May-fly pleasures of
+a mind at ease. Have you ever been in this room before, Cupples? I have,
+hundreds of times. It has pursued me all over England for years. I
+should feel lost without it if, in some fantastic, far-off hotel, they
+were to give me some other sitting-room. Look at this table-cover; there
+is the ink I spilled on it when I had this room in Halifax. I burnt that
+hole in the carpet when I had it in Ipswich. But I see they have mended
+the glass over the picture of 'Silent Sympathy,' which I threw a boot at
+in Banbury. I do all my best work here. This afternoon, for instance,
+since the inquest, I have finished several excellent negatives. There is
+a very good dark-room downstairs."
+
+"The inquest--that reminds me," said Mr. Cupples, who knew that this
+sort of talk in Trent meant the excitement of action, and was wondering
+what he could be about. "I came in to thank you, my dear fellow, for
+looking after Mabel this morning. I had no idea she was going to feel
+ill after leaving the box; she seemed quite unmoved, and really she is a
+woman of such extraordinary self-command, I thought I could leave her to
+her own devices and hear out the evidence, which I thought it important
+I should do. It was a very fortunate thing she found a friend to assist
+her, and she is most grateful. She is quite herself again now."
+
+Trent, with his hands in his pockets and a slight frown on his brow,
+made no reply to this. "I tell you what," he said after a short pause,
+"I was just getting to the really interesting part of the job when you
+came in. Come: would you like to see a little bit of high-class police
+work? It's the very same kind of work that old Murch ought to be doing
+at this moment. Perhaps he is; but I hope to glory he isn't." He sprang
+off the table and disappeared into his bedroom. Presently he came out
+with a large drawing-board on which a number of heterogeneous objects
+was ranged.
+
+"First I must introduce you to these little things," he said, setting
+them out on the table. "Here is a big ivory paper-knife; here are two
+leaves cut out of a diary--my own diary; here is a bottle containing
+dentifrice; here is a little case of polished walnut. Some of these
+things have to be put back where they belong in somebody's bedroom at
+White Gables before night. That's the sort of man I am--nothing stops
+me. I borrowed them this very morning when everyone was down at the
+inquest, and I dare say some people would think it rather an odd
+proceeding if they knew. Now there remains one object on the board. Can
+you tell me, without touching it, what it is?"
+
+"Certainly I can," said Mr. Cupples, peering at it with great interest.
+"It is an ordinary glass bowl. It looks like a finger-bowl. I see
+nothing odd about it," he added after some moments of close scrutiny.
+
+"That," replied Trent, "is exactly where the fun comes in. Now take this
+little fat bottle, Cupples, and pull out the cork. Do you recognize that
+powder inside it? You have swallowed pounds of it in your time, I
+expect. They give it to babies. Gray powder is its ordinary
+name--mercury and chalk. It is great stuff. Now while I hold the basin
+side-ways over this sheet of paper, I want you to pour a little powder
+out of the bottle over this part of the bowl--just here.... Perfect! Sir
+Edward Henry himself could not have handled the powder better. You have
+done this before, Cupples, I can see. You are an old hand."
+
+"I really am not," said Mr. Cupples seriously, as Trent returned the
+fallen powder to the bottle. "I assure you it is all a complete mystery
+to me. What did I do then?"
+
+"I brush the powdered part of the bowl lightly with this camel-hair
+brush. Now look at it again. You saw nothing odd about it before. Do you
+see anything now?"
+
+Mr. Cupples peered again. "How curious," he said. "Yes, there are two
+large gray finger-marks on the bowl. They were not there before."
+
+"I am Hawkshaw the detective," observed Trent. "Would it interest you to
+hear a short lecture on the subject of glass finger-bowls? When you take
+one up with your hand you leave traces upon it, usually practically
+invisible, which may remain for days or months. You leave the marks of
+your fingers. The human hand, even when quite clean, is never quite dry,
+and sometimes--in moments of great anxiety, for instance, Cupples--it is
+very moist. It leaves a mark on any cold smooth surface it may touch.
+That bowl was moved by somebody with a rather moist hand quite lately."
+He sprinkled the powder again. "Here on the other side, you see, is the
+thumb-mark--very good impressions all of them." He spoke without raising
+his voice, but Mr. Cupples could perceive that he was ablaze with
+excitement as he stared at the faint gray marks. "This one should be the
+index finger. I need not tell a man of your knowledge of the world that
+the pattern of it is a single-spiral whorl, with deltas symmetrically
+disposed. This, the print of the second finger, is a simple loop, with a
+staple core and fifteen counts. I know there are fifteen, because I have
+just the same two prints on this negative, which I have examined in
+detail. Look--!" he held one of the negatives up to the light of the
+declining sun and demonstrated with a pencil point. "You can see they're
+the same. You see the bifurcation of that ridge. There it is in the
+other. You see that little scar near the center. There it is in the
+other. There are a score of ridge-characteristics on which an expert
+would swear in the witness-box that the marks on that bowl and the marks
+I have photographed on this negative were made by the same hand."
+
+"And where did you photograph them? What does it all mean?" asked Mr.
+Cupples, wide-eyed.
+
+"I found them on the inside of the left-hand leaf of the front-window in
+Mrs. Manderson's bedroom. As I could not bring the window with me, I
+photographed them, sticking a bit of black paper on the other side of
+the glass for the purpose. The bowl comes from Manderson's room. It is
+the bowl in which his false teeth were placed at night. I could bring
+that away, so I did."
+
+"But those cannot be Mabel's finger-marks."
+
+"I should think not!" said Trent with decision. "They are twice the size
+of any print Mrs. Manderson could make."
+
+"Then they must be her husband's."
+
+"Perhaps they are. Now shall we see if we can match them once more? I
+believe we can." Whistling faintly, and very white in the face, Trent
+opened another small squat bottle containing a dense black powder.
+"Lamp-black," he explained. "Hold a bit of paper in your hand for a
+second or two, and this little chap will show you the pattern of your
+fingers." He carefully took up with a pair of tweezers one of the leaves
+cut from his diary, and held it out for the other to examine. No marks
+appeared on the leaf. He tilted some of the powder out upon one surface
+of the paper, then, turning it over, upon the other; then shook the leaf
+gently to rid it of the loose powder. He held it out to Mr. Cupples in
+silence. On one side of the paper appeared unmistakably, clearly printed
+in black, the same two finger-prints that he had already seen on the
+bowl and on the photographic plate. He took up the bowl and compared
+them. Trent turned the paper over, and on the other side was a bold
+black replica of the thumb-mark that was printed in gray on the glass in
+his hand.
+
+"Same man, you see," Trent said with a short laugh. "I felt that it must
+be so, and now I know." He walked to the window and looked out. "Now I
+know," he repeated in a low voice, as if to himself. His tone was
+bitter. Mr. Cupples, understanding nothing, stared at his motionless
+back for a few moments.
+
+"I am still completely in the dark," he ventured presently. "I have
+often heard of this finger-print business, and wondered how the police
+went to work about it. It is of extraordinary interest to me, but upon
+my life I cannot see how in this case Manderson's finger-prints are
+going--"
+
+"I am very sorry, Cupples," Trent broke in upon his meditative speech
+with a swift return to the table. "When I began this investigation I
+meant to take you with me every step of the way. You mustn't think I
+have any doubts about your discretion if I say now that I must hold my
+tongue about the whole thing, at least for a time. I will tell you this:
+I have come upon a fact that looks too much like having terrible
+consequences if it is discovered by any one else." He looked at the
+other with a hard and darkened face, and struck the table with his hand.
+"It is terrible for me here and now. Up to this moment I was hoping
+against hope that I was wrong about the fact. I may still be wrong in
+the surmise that I base upon that fact. There is only one way of finding
+out that is open to me, and I must nerve myself to take it." He smiled
+suddenly at Mr. Cupples' face of consternation. "All right--I'm not
+going to be tragic any more, and I'll tell you all about it when I can.
+Look here, I'm not half through my game with the powder-bottles yet."
+
+He drew one of the defamed chairs to the table and sat down to test the
+broad ivory blade of the paper knife. Mr. Cupples, swallowing his
+amazement, bent forward in an attitude of deep interest and handed Trent
+the bottle of lamp-black.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE WIFE OF DIVES
+
+
+Mrs. Manderson stood at the window of her sitting-room at White Gables
+gazing out upon a wavering landscape of fine rain and mist. The weather
+had broken as it seldom does in that part in June. White wreathings
+drifted up the fields from the sullen sea; the sky was an unbroken gray
+deadness shedding pin-point moisture that was now and then blown against
+the panes with a crepitation of despair. The lady looked out on the dim
+and chilling prospect with a woeful face. It was a bad day for a woman
+bereaved, alone and without a purpose in life.
+
+There was a knock, and she called, "Come in!" drawing herself up with an
+unconscious gesture that always came when she realized that the
+weariness of the world had been gaining upon her spirit. Mr. Trent had
+called, the maid said; he apologized for coming at such an early hour,
+but hoped that Mrs. Manderson would see him on a matter of urgent
+importance. Mrs. Manderson would see Mr. Trent. She walked to a mirror,
+looked into the olive face she saw reflected there, shook her head at
+herself with the flicker of a grimace, and turned to the door as Trent
+was shown in.
+
+His appearance, she noted, was changed. He had the jaded look of the
+sleepless, and a new and reserved expression, in which her quick
+sensibilities felt something not propitious, took the place of his
+half-smile of fixed good-humor.
+
+"May I come to the point at once?" he said when she had given him her
+hand. "There is a train I ought to catch at Bishopsbridge at twelve
+o'clock, but I cannot go until I have settled this thing, which concerns
+you only, Mrs. Manderson. I have been working half the night, and
+thinking the rest; and I know now what I ought to do."
+
+"You look wretchedly tired," she said kindly. "Won't you sit down?--this
+is a very restful chair. Of course it is about this terrible business
+and your work as correspondent. Please ask me anything you think I can
+properly tell you, Mr. Trent. I know that you won't make it worse for me
+than you can help in doing your duty here. If you say you must see me
+about something, I know it must be because, as you say, you ought to do
+it."
+
+"Mrs. Manderson," said Trent, slowly measuring his words, "I won't make
+it worse for you than I can help. But I am bound to make it bad for
+you--only between ourselves, I hope. As to whether you can properly tell
+me what I shall ask you, you will decide that; but I tell you this on my
+word of honor: I shall ask you only as much as will decide me whether to
+publish or to withhold certain grave things that I have found out about
+your husband's death, things not suspected by any one else, nor, I
+think, likely to be so. What I have discovered--what I believe that I
+have practically proved--will be a great shock to you in any case. But
+it may be worse for you than that; and if you give me reason to think it
+would be so, then I shall destroy this manuscript"--he laid a long
+envelop on the small table beside him--"and nothing of what it has to
+tell shall ever be printed. It consists, I may tell you, of a short
+private note to my editor, followed by a long despatch for publication
+in the _Record_. Now you may refuse to say anything to me. If you do
+refuse, my duty to my employers, as I see it, is to take this up to
+London with me to-day and leave it with my editor to be dealt with at
+his discretion. My view is, you understand, that I am not entitled to
+suppress it on the strength of a mere possibility that presents itself
+to my imagination. But if I gather from you--and I can gather it from no
+other person--that there is substance in that imaginary possibility I
+speak of, then I have only one thing to do as a gentleman and as one
+who"--he hesitated for a phrase--"wishes you well. I shall suppress that
+despatch of mine. In some directions I decline to assist the police.
+Have you followed me so far?" he asked with a touch of anxiety in his
+careful coldness; for her face, but for its pallor, gave no sign as she
+regarded him, her hands clasped before her and her shoulders drawn back
+in a pose of rigid calm. She looked precisely as she had looked at the
+inquest.
+
+"I understand quite well," said Mrs. Manderson in a low voice. She drew
+a deep breath, and went on: "I don't know what dreadful thing you have
+found out, or what the possibility that has occurred to you can be, but
+it was good--it was honorable of you to come to me about it. Now will
+you please tell me?"
+
+"I cannot do that," Trent replied. "The secret is my newspaper's, if it
+is not yours. If I find it is yours, you shall have my manuscript to
+read and destroy. Believe me," he broke out with something of his old
+warmth, "I detest such mystery-making from the bottom of my soul, but it
+is not I who have made this mystery. This is the most painful hour of my
+life, and you make it worse by not treating me like a hound. The first
+thing I ask you to tell me"--he reverted with an effort to his colorless
+tone--"is this: is it true, as you stated at the inquest, that you had
+no idea at all of the reason why your late husband had changed his
+attitude toward you, and become mistrustful and reserved, during the
+last few months of his life?"
+
+Mrs. Manderson's dark brows lifted and her eyes flamed; she quickly rose
+from her chair. Trent got up at the same moment, and took his envelop
+from the table; his manner said that he perceived the interview to be at
+an end. But she held up a hand, and there was color in her cheeks and
+quick breathing in her voice as she said: "Do you know what you ask, Mr.
+Trent? You ask me if I perjured myself."
+
+"I do," he answered unmoved; and he added after a pause: "You knew
+already that I had not come here to preserve the polite fictions, Mrs.
+Manderson. The theory that no reputable person, being on oath, could
+withhold a part of the truth under any circumstances is a polite
+fiction." He still stood as awaiting dismissal; but she was silent. She
+walked to the window, and he stood miserably watching the slight
+movement of her shoulders until it subsided. Then with face averted,
+looking out on the dismal weather, she spoke at last clearly.
+
+"Mr. Trent," she said, "you inspire confidence in people, and I feel
+that things which I don't want known or talked about are safe with you.
+And I know you must have a very serious reason for doing what you are
+doing, though I don't know what it is. I suppose it would be assisting
+justice in some way if I told you the truth about what you asked me just
+now. To understand that truth you ought to know about what went before;
+I mean about my marriage. After all, a good many people could tell you
+as well as I can that it was not ... a very successful union. I was only
+twenty. I admired his force and courage and certainty; he was the only
+strong man I had ever known. But it did not take me long to find out
+that he cared for his business more than for me, and I think I found out
+even sooner that I had been deceiving myself and blinding myself,
+promising myself impossible things and wilfully misunderstanding my own
+feelings, because I was dazzled by the idea of having more money to
+spend than an English girl ever dreams of. I have been despising myself
+for that for five years. My husband's feeling for me ... well, I cannot
+speak of that ... what I want to say is that along with it there had
+always been a belief of his that I was the sort of woman to take a great
+place in society, and that I should throw myself into it with enjoyment
+and become a sort of personage and do him great credit--that was his
+idea; and the idea remained with him after other delusions had
+gone. I was a part of his ambition. That was his really bitter
+disappointment--that I failed him as a social success. I think he was
+too shrewd not to have known in his heart that such a man as he was,
+twenty years older than I, with great business responsibilities that
+filled every hour of his life, and caring for nothing else--he must have
+felt that there was a risk of great unhappiness in marrying the sort of
+girl I was, brought up to music and books and unpractical ideas, always
+enjoying myself in my own way. But he had really reckoned on me as a
+wife who would do the honors of his position in the world; and I found I
+couldn't."
+
+Mrs. Manderson had talked herself into a more emotional mood than she
+had yet shown to Trent. Her words flowed freely, and her voice had begun
+to ring and give play to a natural expressiveness that must hitherto
+have been dulled, he thought, by the shock and self-restraint of the
+past few days. Now she turned swiftly from the window and faced him as
+she went on, her beautiful face flushed and animated, her eyes gleaming,
+her hands moving in slight emphatic gestures, as she surrendered herself
+to the impulse of giving speech to things long pent up.
+
+"The people!" she said. "Oh, those people! Can you imagine what it must
+be for any one who has lived in a world where there was always creative
+work in the background, work with some dignity about it, men and women
+with professions or arts to follow, with ideals and things to believe in
+and quarrel about, some of them wealthy, some of them quite poor,--can
+you think what it means to step out of that into another world where you
+_have_ to be very rich, shamefully rich, to exist at all--where money is
+the only thing that counts and the first thing in everybody's
+thoughts--where the men who make the millions are so jaded by the work
+that sport is the only thing they can occupy themselves with when they
+have any leisure, and the men who don't have to work are even duller
+than the men who do, and vicious as well; and the women live for display
+and silly amusements and silly immoralities--do you know how awful that
+life is?... Of course I know there are clever people and people of taste
+in that set, but they're swamped and spoiled, and it's the same thing in
+the end--empty, empty! Oh! I suppose I'm exaggerating, and I did make
+friends and have some happy times; but that's how I feel after it all.
+The seasons in New York and London! How I hated them! And our
+house-parties and cruises in the yacht and the rest--the same people,
+the same emptiness!
+
+"And you see, don't you, that my husband couldn't have an idea of all
+this? _His_ life was never empty. He did not live it in society, and
+when he was in society he had always his business plans and difficulties
+to occupy his mind. He hadn't a suspicion of what I felt, and I never
+let him know--I couldn't; it wouldn't have been fair. I felt I must do
+_something_ to justify myself as his wife, sharing his position and
+fortune; and the only thing I could do was to try, and try, to live up
+to his idea about my social qualities.... I did try. I acted my best.
+And it became harder year by year.... I never was what they call a
+popular hostess--how could I be? I was a failure; but I went on
+trying.... I used to steal holidays now and then. I used to feel as if I
+was not doing my part of a bargain--it sounds horrid to put it like
+that, I know, but it _was_ so--when I took one of my old school-friends,
+who couldn't afford to travel, away to Italy for a month or two, and we
+went about cheaply all by ourselves and were quite happy; or when I went
+and made a long stay in London with some quiet people who had known me
+all my life, and we all lived just as in the old days, when we had to
+think twice about seats at the theater, and told each other about cheap
+dress-makers. Those and a few other expeditions of the same sort were my
+best times after I was married, and they helped me to go through with it
+the rest of the time. But I felt my husband would have hated to know how
+much I enjoyed every hour of those returns to the old life.
+
+"And in the end, in spite of everything I could do, he came to
+know.... He could see through anything, I think, once his attention was
+turned to it. He had always been able to see that I was not fulfilling
+his idea of me as a figure in the social world, and I suppose he thought
+it was my misfortune rather than my fault. But the moment he began to
+see, in spite of my pretending, that I wasn't playing my part with any
+spirit, he knew the whole story; he divined how I loathed and was weary
+of the luxury and the brilliancy and the masses of money just because
+of the people who lived among them--who were made so by them, I
+suppose.... It happened last year. I don't know just how or when. It may
+have been suggested to him by some woman--for _they_ all understood, of
+course. He said nothing to me, and I think he tried not to change in his
+manner to me at first; but such things hurt--and it was working in both
+of us. I knew that he knew. After a time we were just being polite and
+considerate to each other. Before he found me out we had been on a
+footing of--how can I express it to you?--of intelligent companionship,
+I might say. We talked without restraint of many things of the kind we
+could agree or disagree about without its going very deep ... if you
+understand. And then that came to an end. I felt that the only possible
+basis of our living in each other's company was going under my feet. And
+at last it was gone.
+
+"It had been like that," she ended simply, "for months before he died."
+She sank into the corner of a sofa by the window, as though relaxing her
+body after an effort. For a few moments both were silent. Trent was
+hastily sorting out a tangle of impressions. He was amazed at the
+frankness of Mrs. Manderson's story. He was amazed at the vigorous
+expressiveness in her telling of it. In this vivid being, carried away
+by an impulse to speak, talking with her whole personality, he had seen
+the real woman in a temper of activity, as he had already seen the real
+woman by chance in a temper of reverie and unguarded emotion. In both
+she was very unlike the pale, self-disciplined creature of majesty that
+she had been to the world. With that amazement of his went something
+like terror of her dark beauty, which excitement kindled into an
+appearance scarcely mortal in his eyes. Incongruously there rushed into
+his mind, occupied as it was with the affair of the moment, a little
+knot of ideas ... she was unique not because of her beauty but because
+of its being united with intensity of nature; in England all the very
+beautiful women were placid, all the fiery women seemed to have burnt up
+the best of their beauty; that was why no beautiful woman had ever cast
+this sort of spell on him before; when it was a question of wit in women
+he had preferred the brighter flame to the duller, without much
+regarding the lamp. "All this is very disputable," said his reason; and
+instinct answered, "Yes--except that I am under a spell"; and a deeper
+instinct cried out, "Away with it!" He forced his mind back to her
+story, and found growing swiftly in him an irrepressible conviction. It
+was all very fine; but it would not do.
+
+"I feel as if I had led you into saying more than you meant to say, or
+than I wanted to learn," he said slowly. "But there is one brutal
+question which is the whole point of my inquiry." He braced his frame
+like one preparing for a plunge into cold waters. "Mrs. Manderson, will
+you assure me that your husband's change toward you had nothing to do
+with John Marlowe?"
+
+And what he had dreaded came. "Oh!" she cried with a sound of anguish,
+her face thrown up and open hands stretched out as if for pity; and then
+the hands covered the burning face, and she flung herself aside among
+the cushions at her elbow, so that he saw nothing but her heavy crown of
+black hair and her body moving with sobs that stabbed his heart, and a
+foot turned inward gracefully in an abandonment of misery. Like a tall
+tower suddenly breaking apart she had fallen in ruins, helplessly
+weeping.
+
+Trent stood up, his face white and calm. With a senseless particularity
+he placed his envelop exactly in the center of the little polished
+table. He walked to the door, closed it noiselessly as he went out, and
+in a few minutes was tramping through the rain out of sight of White
+Gables, going nowhere, seeing nothing, his soul shaken in the fierce
+effort to kill and trample the raving impulse that had seized him in the
+presence of her shame, that clamored to him to drag himself before her
+feet, to pray for pardon, to pour out words--he knew not what words, but
+he knew that they had been straining at his lips--to wreck his
+self-respect forever, and hopelessly defeat even the crazy purpose that
+had almost possessed him, by drowning her wretchedness in disgust, by
+babbling with the tongue of infatuation to a woman with a husband not
+yet buried, to a woman who loved another man.
+
+Such was the magic of her tears, quickening in a moment the thing which,
+as his heart had known, he must not let come to life. For Philip Trent
+was a young man, younger in nature even than his years, and a way of
+life that kept his edge keen and his spirit volcanic had prepared him
+very ill for the meeting that comes once in the early manhood of most of
+us, usually--as in his case, he told himself harshly--to no purpose but
+the testing of virtue and the power of the will.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+"HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED"
+
+
+(_Being the report which was not sent to the Record._)
+
+
+     _Marlstone, June 16th._
+
+     My Dear Molloy: This is in case I don't find you at your office. I
+     have found out who killed Manderson, as this despatch will show.
+     That was my problem; yours is to decide what use to make of it. It
+     definitely charges an unsuspected person with having a hand in the
+     crime, and practically accuses him of being the murderer, so I
+     don't suppose you will publish it before his arrest, and I believe
+     it is illegal to do so afterwards until he has been tried and found
+     guilty. You may decide to publish it then; and you may find it
+     possible to make some use or other before then of the facts I have
+     given. That is your affair. Meanwhile, will you communicate with
+     Scotland Yard, and let them see what I have written? I have done
+     with the Manderson mystery, and I wish to God I had never touched
+     it. Here follows my despatch.
+
+     P. T.
+
+I begin this, my third and probably my final despatch to the _Record_
+upon the Manderson murder, with conflicting feelings. I have a strong
+sense of relief, because in my two previous despatches I was obliged, in
+the interests of justice, to withhold facts ascertained by me which
+would, if published then, have put a certain person upon his guard and
+possibly have led to his escape; for he is a man of no common boldness
+and resource. Those facts I shall now set forth. But I have, I confess,
+no liking for the story of treachery and perverted cleverness which I
+have to tell. It leaves an evil taste in the mouth, a savor of something
+revolting in the deeper puzzle of motive underlying the puzzle of the
+crime itself, which I believe I have solved.
+
+It will be remembered that in my first despatch I described the
+situation as I found it on reaching this place early on Tuesday morning.
+I told how the body was found, and in what state; dwelt upon the
+complete mystery surrounding the crime and mentioned one or two local
+theories about it; gave some account of the dead man's domestic
+surroundings; and furnished a somewhat detailed description of his
+movements on the evening before his death. I gave, too, a little fact
+which may or may not have seemed irrelevant: that a quantity of whisky
+much larger than Manderson habitually drank at night had disappeared
+from his private decanter since the last time he was seen alive. On the
+following day, the day of the inquest, I wired little more than an
+abstract of the proceedings in the coroner's court, of which a verbatim
+report was made at my request by other representatives of the _Record_;
+and it will be remembered that the police evidence showed that two
+revolvers, with either of which the crime might have been committed, had
+been found--one in Manderson's bureau and the other in the room of the
+secretary, Marlowe; but that no importance could be attached to this, as
+the weapons were of an extremely popular make. I write these lines in
+the last hours of the same day; and I have now completed an
+investigation which has led me directly to the man who must be called
+upon to clear himself of the guilt of the death of Manderson.
+
+Apart from the central mystery of Manderson's having arisen long before
+his usual hour to go out and meet his death, there were two minor points
+of oddity about this affair which, I suppose, must have occurred to
+thousands of those who have read the accounts in the newspapers; points
+apparent from the very beginning. The first of these was that, whereas
+the body was found at a spot not thirty yards from the house, all the
+people of the house declared that they had heard no cry or other noise
+in the night. Manderson had not been gagged; the marks on his wrists
+pointed to a struggle with his assailant; and there had been at least
+one pistol-shot. (I say at least one, because it is the fact that in
+murders with firearms, especially if there has been a struggle, the
+criminal commonly misses his victim at least once.) This odd fact seemed
+all the more odd to me when I learned that Martin, the butler, was a bad
+sleeper, very keen of hearing, and that his bedroom, with the window
+open, faced almost directly toward the shed by which the body was found.
+
+The second odd little fact that was apparent from the outset was
+Manderson's leaving his dental plate by the bedside. It appeared that he
+had risen and dressed himself fully, down to his necktie and watch and
+chain, and had gone out-of-doors without remembering to put in this
+plate, which he had carried in his mouth every day for years, and which
+contained all the visible teeth of the upper jaw. It had evidently not
+been a case of frantic hurry; and even if it had been, he would have
+been more likely to forget almost anything than this denture. Any one
+who wears such a removable plate will agree that the putting it in on
+rising is a matter of second nature. Speaking as well as eating, to say
+nothing of appearances, depend upon it.
+
+Neither of these queer details, however, seemed to lead to anything at
+the moment. They only awakened in me a suspicion of something lurking in
+the shadows, something that lent more mystery to the already mysterious
+question how and why and through whom Manderson met his end.
+
+With this much of preamble I come at once to the discovery which, in the
+first few hours of my investigation, set me upon the path which so much
+ingenuity had been directed to concealing.
+
+I have already described Manderson's bedroom, the rigorous simplicity of
+its furnishings, contrasted so strangely with the multitude of clothes
+and shoes, and the manner of its communication with Mrs. Manderson's
+room. On the upper of the two long shelves on which the shoes were
+ranged I found, where I had been told I should find them, the pair of
+patent leather shoes which Manderson had worn on the evening before his
+death. I had glanced over the row, not with any idea of their giving me
+a clue, but merely because it happens that I am a judge of shoes, and
+all these shoes were of the very best workmanship.
+
+But my attention was at once caught by a little peculiarity in this
+particular pair. They were the lightest kind of lace-up dress shoes,
+very thin in the sole, without toe-caps, and beautifully made, like all
+the rest. These shoes were old and well-worn; but being carefully
+polished and fitted, as all the shoes were, upon their trees, they
+looked neat enough. What caught my eye was a slight splitting of the
+leather in that part of the upper known as the vamp, a splitting at the
+point where the two laced parts of the shoe rise from the upper. It is
+at this point that the strain comes when a tight shoe of this sort is
+forced upon the foot, and it is usually guarded with a strong stitching
+across the bottom of the opening. In both the shoes I was examining this
+stitching had parted, and the leather below had given way. The splitting
+was a tiny affair in each case, not an eighth of an inch long, and the
+torn edges having come together again on the removal of the strain,
+there was nothing that a person who was not something of a connoisseur
+of shoe-leather would have noticed. Even less noticeable, and indeed not
+to be seen at all unless one were looking for it, was a slight straining
+of the stitches uniting the upper to the sole. At the toe and on the
+outer side of each shoe this stitching had been dragged until it was
+visible on a close inspection of the joining.
+
+These indications, of course, could mean only one thing. The shoes had
+been worn by someone for whom they were too small.
+
+Now it was clear at a glance that Manderson was always thoroughly well
+shod and careful, perhaps a little vain, of his small and narrow feet.
+Not one of the other shoes in the collection, as I soon ascertained,
+bore similar marks; they had not belonged to a man who squeezed himself
+into tight shoe-leather. Someone who was not Manderson had worn these
+shoes, and worn them recently; the edges of the tears were quite fresh.
+
+The possibility of someone having worn them since Manderson's death was
+not worth considering; the body had only been found about twenty-six
+hours when I was examining the shoes; besides, why should any one wear
+them? The possibility of someone having borrowed Manderson's shoes and
+spoiled them for him, while he was alive, seemed about as negligible.
+With others to choose from he would not have worn these. Besides, the
+only men in the place were the butler and the two secretaries. But I do
+not say that I gave those possibilities even as much consideration as
+they deserved; for my thoughts were running away with me; and I have
+always found it good policy, in cases of this sort, to let them have
+their heads. Ever since I had got out of the train at Marlstone early
+that morning I had been steeped in details of the Manderson affair; the
+thing had not once been out of my head. Suddenly the moment had come
+when the daemon wakes and begins to range.
+
+Let me put it less fancifully. After all, it is a detail of psychology
+familiar enough to all whose business or inclination brings them in
+contact with difficult affairs of any sort. Swiftly and spontaneously,
+when chance or effort puts one in possession of the key-fact in any
+system of baffling circumstances, one's ideas seem to rush to group
+themselves anew in relation to that fact, so that they are suddenly
+rearranged almost before one has consciously grasped the significance of
+the key-fact itself. In the present instance, my brain had scarcely
+formulated within itself the thought, 'Somebody who was not Manderson
+has been wearing those shoes,' when there flew into my mind a flock of
+ideas, all of the same character and all bearing upon this new notion.
+It was unheard-of for Manderson to drink much whisky at night. It was
+very unlike him to be untidily dressed, as the body was when found--the
+cuffs dragged up inside the sleeves, the shoes unevenly laced; very
+unlike him not to wash, when he rose, and to put on last night's evening
+shirt and collar and underclothing; very unlike him to have his watch in
+the waistcoat pocket that was not lined with leather for its reception.
+(In my first despatch I mentioned all these points, but neither I nor
+any one else saw anything significant in them, when examining the body.)
+It was very strange, in the existing domestic situation, that Manderson
+should be communicative to his wife about his doings, especially at the
+time of his going to bed, when he seldom spoke to her at all. It was
+extraordinary that Manderson should leave his bedroom without his false
+teeth.
+
+All these thoughts, as I say, came flocking into my mind together, drawn
+from various parts of my memory of the morning's inquiries and
+observations. They had all presented themselves, in far less time than
+it takes to read them as set down here, as I was turning over the shoes,
+confirming my own certainty on the main point. And yet when I confronted
+the definite idea that had sprung up suddenly and unsupported before
+me,--_It was not Manderson who was in the house that night_--it seemed a
+stark absurdity at the first formulating. It was certainly Manderson who
+had dined at the house and gone out with Marlowe in the car. People had
+seen him at close quarters. But was it he who returned at ten? That
+question too seemed absurd enough. But I could not set it aside. It
+seemed to me as if a faint light was beginning to creep over the whole
+expanse of my mind, as it does over land at dawn, and that presently the
+sun would be rising. I set myself to think over, one by one, the points
+that had just occurred to me, so as to make out, if possible, why any
+man masquerading as Manderson should have done these things that
+Manderson would not have done.
+
+I had not to cast about very long for the motive a man might have in
+forcing his feet into Manderson's narrow shoes. The examination of
+footmarks is very well understood by the police. But not only was the
+man concerned to leave no footmarks of his own. He was concerned to
+leave Manderson's, if any; his whole plan, if my guess was right, must
+have been directed to producing the belief that Manderson was in the
+place that night. Moreover, his plan did not turn upon leaving
+footmarks. He meant to leave the shoes themselves, and he did so. The
+maidservant had found them outside the bedroom door, as Manderson always
+left his shoes, and had polished them, replacing them on the
+shoe-shelves later in the morning, after the body had been found.
+
+When I came to consider in this new light the leaving of the false
+teeth, an explanation of what had seemed the maddest part of the affair
+broke upon me at once. A dental plate is not inseparable from its owner.
+If my guess was right, the unknown had brought the denture to the house
+with him, and left it in the bedroom, with the same object as he had in
+leaving the shoes; to make it impossible that any one should doubt that
+Manderson had been in the house and had gone to bed there. This, of
+course, led me to the inference that _Manderson was dead before the
+false Manderson came to the house_; and other things confirmed this.
+
+For instance, the clothing, to which I now turned in my review of the
+position: if my guess was right, the unknown in Manderson's shoes had
+certainly had possession of Manderson's trousers, waistcoat and shooting
+jacket. They were there before my eyes in the bedroom; and Martin had
+seen the jacket--which nobody could have mistaken--upon the man who sat
+at the telephone in the library. It was now quite plain (if my guess was
+right) that this unmistakable garment was a cardinal feature of the
+unknown's plan. He knew that Martin would take him for Manderson at the
+first glance.
+
+And there my thinking was interrupted by the realization of a thing that
+had escaped me before. So strong had been the influence of the
+unquestioned assumption that it was Manderson who was present that
+night, that neither I nor, so far as I know, any one else had noted the
+point. _Martin had not seen the man's face; nor had Mrs. Manderson._
+
+Mrs. Manderson (judging by her evidence at the inquest, of which, as I
+have said, I had a full report made by the _Record_ stenographers in
+court) had not seen the man at all. She hardly could have done, as I
+shall show presently. She had merely spoken with him as she lay half
+asleep, resuming a conversation which she had had with her living
+husband about an hour before. Martin, I perceived, could only have seen
+the man's back, as he sat crouching over the telephone; no doubt a
+characteristic pose was imitated there. And the man had worn his hat,
+Manderson's broad-brimmed hat! There is too much character in the back
+of a head and neck. The unknown, in fact, supposing him to have been of
+about Manderson's build, had had no need for any disguise, apart from
+the jacket and the hat and his powers of mimicry.
+
+I paused there to contemplate the coolness and ingenuity of the man. The
+thing, I now began to see, was so safe and easy, provided that his
+mimicry was good enough, and that his nerve held. Those two points
+assured, only some wholly unlikely accident could unmask him.
+
+To come back to my puzzling out of the matter as I sat in the dead man's
+bedroom with the tell-tale shoes before me:--the reason for the entrance
+by the window instead of by the front-door will already have occurred to
+any one reading this. Entering by the door, the man would almost
+certainly have been heard by the sharp-eared Martin in his pantry just
+across the hall; he might have met him face to face.
+
+Then there was the problem of the whisky. I had not attached much
+importance to it; whisky will sometimes vanish in very queer ways in a
+household of eight or nine persons; but it had seemed strange that it
+should go in that way on that evening. Martin had been plainly quite
+dumfounded by the fact. It seemed to me now that many a man--fresh, as
+this man in all likelihood was, from a bloody business, from the
+unclothing of a corpse, and with a desperate part still to play--would
+turn to that decanter as to a friend. No doubt he had a drink before
+sending for Martin; after making that trick with ease and success, he
+probably drank more.
+
+But he had known when to stop. The worst part of the enterprise was
+before him, the business--clearly of such vital importance to him, for
+whatever reason--of shutting himself in Manderson's room and preparing a
+mass of convincing evidence of its having been occupied by Manderson;
+and this with the risk--very slight, as no doubt he understood, but how
+unnerving!--of the woman on the other side of the half-open door awaking
+and somehow discovering him. True, if he kept out of her limited field
+of vision from the bed, she could only see him by getting up and going
+to the door. I found that to a person lying in her bed, which stood with
+its head to the wall a little beyond the door, nothing was visible
+through the doorway but one of the cupboards by Manderson's bed-head.
+Moreover, since this man knew the ways of the household, he would think
+it most likely that Mrs. Manderson was asleep. Another point with him, I
+guessed, might have been the estrangement between the husband and wife,
+which they had tried to cloak by keeping up, among other things, their
+usual practice of sleeping in connected rooms, but which was well known
+to all who had anything to do with them. He would hope from this that if
+Mrs. Manderson heard him, she would take no notice of the supposed
+presence of her husband.
+
+So, pursuing my hypothesis, I followed the unknown up to the bedroom,
+and saw him setting about his work. And it was with a catch in my own
+breath that I thought of the hideous shock with which he must have heard
+the sound of all others he was dreading most: the drowsy voice from the
+adjoining room.
+
+What Mrs. Manderson actually said, she was unable to recollect at the
+inquest. She thinks she asked her supposed husband whether he had had a
+good run in the car. And now what does the unknown do? Here, I think, we
+come to a supremely significant point. Not only does he--standing rigid
+there, as I picture him, before the dressing-table, listening to the
+sound of his own leaping heart--not only does he answer the lady in the
+voice of Manderson; he volunteers an explanatory statement. He tells her
+that he has, on a sudden inspiration, sent Marlowe in the car to
+Southampton; that he has sent him to bring back some important
+information from a man leaving for Paris by the steamboat that morning.
+Why these details from a man who had long been uncommunicative to his
+wife, and that upon a point scarcely likely to interest her? Why these
+details _about Marlowe_?
+
+Having taken my story so far, I now put forward the following definite
+propositions: that between a time somewhere about ten, when the car
+started, and a time somewhere about eleven, Manderson was shot--probably
+at a considerable distance from the house, as no shot was heard; that
+the body was brought back, left by the shed, and stripped of its outer
+clothing, while the car was left in hiding somewhere at hand; that at
+some time round about eleven o'clock a man who was not Manderson,
+wearing Manderson's shoes, hat and jacket, entered the library by the
+garden-window; that he had with him Manderson's black trousers,
+waistcoat and motor-coat, the denture taken from Manderson's mouth, and
+the weapon with which he had been murdered; that he concealed these,
+rang the bell for the butler, and sat down at the telephone with his hat
+on and his back to the door; that he was occupied with the telephone all
+the time Martin was in the room; that on going up to the bedroom-floor
+he quietly entered Marlowe's room and placed the revolver with which the
+crime had been committed--Marlowe's revolver--in the case on the
+mantel-piece from which it had been taken; and that he then went to
+Manderson's room, placed Manderson's shoes outside the door, threw
+Manderson's garments on a chair, placed the denture in the bowl by the
+bedside, and selected a suit of clothes, a pair of shoes and a tie from
+those in the bedroom.
+
+Here I will pause in my statement of this man's proceedings to go into a
+question for which the way is now sufficiently prepared.
+
+_Who was the false Manderson?_
+
+Reviewing what was known to me, or might almost with certainty be
+surmised, about that person, I set down the following five conclusions:
+
+(1) He had been in close relations with the dead man. In his acting
+before Martin and his speaking to Mrs. Manderson he had made no mistake.
+
+(2) He was of a build not unlike Manderson's, especially as to height
+and breadth of shoulder, which mainly determine the character of the
+back of a seated figure when the head is concealed and the body loosely
+clothed. But his feet were larger, though not greatly larger, than
+Manderson's.
+
+(3) He had considerable aptitude for mimicry and acting--probably some
+experience too.
+
+(4) He had a minute acquaintance with the ways of the Manderson
+household.
+
+(5) He was under a vital necessity of creating the belief that Manderson
+was alive and in that house until some time after midnight on the Sunday
+night.
+
+So much I took as either certain or next door to it. It was as far as I
+could see. And it was far enough.
+
+I proceed to give, in an order corresponding with the numbered
+paragraphs above, such relevant facts as I was able to obtain about Mr.
+John Marlowe, from himself and other sources.
+
+(1) He had been Manderson's private secretary, upon a footing of great
+intimacy, for nearly three years.
+
+(2) The two men were nearly of the same height, about five feet, eleven
+inches; both were powerfully built and heavy in the shoulder; Marlowe,
+who was the younger by some twenty years, was slighter about the body,
+though Manderson was a man in good physical condition. Marlowe's shoes
+(of which I examined several pairs) were roughly about one shoemaker's
+size longer and broader than Manderson's.
+
+(3) In the afternoon of the first day of my investigation, after
+arriving at the results already detailed, I sent a telegram to a
+personal friend, a fellow of a college at Oxford, whom I knew to be
+interested in theatrical matters, in these terms:
+
+     Please wire John Marlowe's record in connection with acting at
+     Oxford some time past decade very urgent and confidential.
+
+My friend replied in the following telegram, which reached me next
+morning (the morning of the inquest):
+
+     Marlowe was member O.U.D.S. for three years and president 19--
+     played Bardolph Cleon and Mercutio excelled in character acting and
+     imitations in great demand at smokers was hero of some historic
+     hoaxes.
+
+I had been led to send the telegram which brought this very helpful
+answer by seeing on the mantel-shelf in Marlowe's bedroom a photograph
+of himself and two others in the costume of Falstaff's three followers,
+with an inscription from _The Merry Wives_, and by noting that it bore
+the imprint of an Oxford firm of photographers.
+
+(4) During his connection with Manderson, Marlowe had lived as one of
+the family. No other person, apart from the servants, had his
+opportunities for knowing the domestic life of the Mandersons in detail.
+
+(5) I ascertained beyond doubt that Marlowe arrived at a hotel in
+Southampton on the Monday morning at six-thirty, and there proceeded to
+carry out the commission which, according to his story, and to the
+statement made to Mrs. Manderson in the bedroom by the false Manderson,
+had been entrusted to him by his employer. He had then returned in the
+car to Marlstone, where he had shown great amazement and horror at the
+news of the murder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These, I say, are the relevant facts about Marlowe. We must now examine
+fact number _five_ (as set out above) in connection with conclusion
+number _five_ about the false Manderson.
+
+I would first draw attention to one important fact. _The only person who
+professed to have heard Manderson mention Southampton at all before he
+started in the car was Marlowe._ His story--confirmed to some extent by
+what the butler overheard--was that the journey was all arranged in a
+private talk before they set out, and he could not say, when I put the
+question to him, why Manderson should have concealed his intentions by
+giving out that he was going with Marlowe for a moonlight drive. This
+point, however, attracted no attention. Marlowe had an absolutely
+air-tight alibi in his presence at Southampton by six-thirty; nobody
+thought of him in connection with a murder which must have been
+committed after twelve-thirty--the hour at which Martin, the butler, had
+gone to bed. But it was the Manderson who came back from the drive who
+went out of his way to mention Southampton openly to two persons. _He
+even went so far as to ring up a hotel at Southampton and ask questions
+which bore out Marlowe's story of his errand._ This was the call he was
+busy with when Martin was in the library.
+
+Now let us consider the alibi. If Manderson was in the house that night,
+and if he did not leave it until some time after twelve-thirty, Marlowe
+could not by any possibility have had a direct hand in the murder. It is
+a question of the distance between Marlstone and Southampton. If he had
+left Marlstone in the car at the hour when he is supposed to have done
+so--between ten and ten-thirty--with a message from Manderson, the run
+would be quite an easy one to do in the time. But it would be physically
+impossible for the car--a fifteen horse-power four-cylinder
+Northumberland, an average medium-power car--to get to Southampton by
+half-past six unless it left Marlstone by midnight at latest. Motorists
+who will examine the road-map and make the calculations required, as I
+did in Manderson's library that day, will agree that on the facts as
+they appeared there was absolutely no case against Marlowe.
+
+But even if they were not as they appeared; if Manderson was dead by
+eleven o'clock, and if at about that time Marlowe impersonated him at
+White Gables; if Marlowe retired to Manderson's bedroom--how can all
+this be reconciled with his appearance next morning at Southampton? _He
+had to get out of the house, unseen and unheard, and away in the car by
+midnight._ And Martin, the sharp-eared Martin, was sitting up until
+twelve-thirty in his pantry, with the door open, listening for the
+telephone bell. Practically he was standing sentry over the foot of the
+staircase, the only staircase leading down from the bedroom floor.
+
+With this difficulty we arrive at the last and crucial phase of my
+investigation. Having the foregoing points clearly in mind, I spent the
+rest of the day before the inquest in talking to various persons and in
+going over my story, testing it link by link. I could only find the one
+weakness which seemed to be involved in Martin's sitting up until
+twelve-thirty; and since his having been instructed to do so was
+certainly a part of the plan, meant to clinch the alibi for Marlowe, I
+knew there must be an explanation somewhere. If I could not find that
+explanation my theory was valueless. I must be able to show that at the
+time Martin went up to bed, the man who had shut himself in Manderson's
+bedroom might have been many miles away on the road to Southampton.
+
+I had, however, a pretty good idea already--as perhaps the reader of
+these lines has by this time, if I have made myself clear--of how the
+escape of the false Manderson before midnight had been contrived. But I
+did not want what I was now about to do to be known. If I had chanced to
+be discovered at work, there would have been no concealing the direction
+of my suspicions. I resolved not to test them on this point until the
+next day, during the opening proceedings at the inquest. This was to be
+held, I knew, at the hotel, and I reckoned upon having White Gables to
+myself so far as the principal inmates were concerned.
+
+So in fact it happened. By the time the proceedings at the hotel had
+begun, I was hard at work at White Gables. I had a camera with me. I
+made search, on principles well known to and commonly practised by the
+police, and often enough by myself, for certain indications. Without
+describing my search, I may say at once that I found and was able to
+photograph two fresh finger-prints, very large and distinct, on the
+polished front of the right-hand top drawer of the chest of drawers in
+Manderson's bedroom; five more (among a number of smaller and less
+recent impressions made by other hands) on the glasses of the French
+window in Mrs. Manderson's room, a window which always stood open at
+night with a curtain before it; and three more upon the glass bowl in
+which Manderson's dental plate had been found lying.
+
+I took the bowl with me from White Gables. I took also a few articles
+which I selected from Marlowe's bedroom, as bearing the most distinct of
+the innumerable finger-prints which are always to be found upon
+toilet-articles in daily use. I already had in my possession, made upon
+leaves cut from my pocket diary, some excellent finger-prints of
+Marlowe's, which he had made in my presence without knowing it. I had
+shown him the leaves, asking if he recognized them; and the few seconds
+during which he had held them in his fingers had sufficed to leave
+impressions which I was afterward able to bring out.
+
+By six o'clock in the evening, two hours after the jury had brought in
+their verdict against a person or persons unknown, I had completed my
+work, and was in a position to state that two of the five large prints
+made on the window-glasses, and the three on the bowl, were made by the
+left hand of Marlowe; that the remaining three on the window and the two
+on the drawer were made by his right hand.
+
+By eight o'clock I had made at the establishment of Mr. H. T. Copper,
+photographer, of Bishopsbridge, and with his assistance, a dozen
+enlarged prints of the finger-marks of Marlowe, clearly showing the
+identity of those which he unknowingly made in my presence and those
+left upon articles in his bedroom, with those found by me as I have
+described, and thus establishing the facts that Marlowe was recently in
+Manderson's bedroom, where he had in the ordinary way no business, and
+in Mrs. Manderson's room, where he had still less. I hope it may be
+possible to reproduce these prints for publication with this despatch.
+
+At nine o'clock I was back in my room at the hotel and sitting down to
+begin this manuscript. I had my story complete.
+
+I bring it to a close by advancing these further propositions: that on
+the night of the murder the impersonator of Manderson, being in
+Manderson's bedroom, told Mrs. Manderson, as he had already told Martin,
+that Marlowe was at that moment on his way to Southampton; that having
+made his dispositions in the room, he switched off the light, and lay in
+the bed in his clothes; that he waited until he was assured that Mrs.
+Manderson was asleep; that he then arose and stealthily crossed Mrs.
+Manderson's bedroom in his stocking feet, having under his arm the
+bundle of clothing and shoes for the body; that he stepped behind the
+curtain, pushing the doors of the window a little further open with his
+hands, strode over the iron railing of the balcony, and let himself down
+until only a drop of a few feet separated him from the soft turf of the
+lawn.
+
+All this might very well have been accomplished within half an hour of
+his entering Manderson's bedroom, which according to Martin he did at
+about half-past eleven.
+
+What followed your readers and the authorities may conjecture for
+themselves. The corpse was found next morning clothed--rather untidily.
+Marlowe in the car appeared at Southampton by half-past six.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I bring this manuscript to an end in my sitting-room at the hotel at
+Marlstone. It is four o'clock in the morning. I leave for London by the
+noon train from Bishopsbridge. By this evening these pages will be in
+your hands, and I ask you to communicate the substance of them to the
+Criminal Investigation Department.
+
+PHILIP TRENT.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+EVIL DAYS
+
+
+"I am returning the check you sent for what I did on the Manderson
+case," Trent wrote to Sir James Molloy from Munich, whither he had gone
+immediately after handing in at the _Record_ office a brief despatch
+bringing his work on the case to an unexciting close. "What I sent you
+wasn't worth one-tenth of the amount; but I should have no scruple about
+pocketing it, if I hadn't taken a fancy--never mind why--not to touch
+any money at all for this business. I should like you, if there is no
+objection, to pay for the stuff at your ordinary space-rate, and hand
+the money to some charity which does not devote itself to bullying
+people, if you know of any such. I have come to this place to see some
+old friends and arrange my ideas, and the idea that comes out upper-most
+is that for a little while I want some employment with activity in it. I
+find I can't paint at all; I couldn't paint a fence. Will you try me as
+your Own Correspondent somewhere? If you can find me a good adventure I
+will send you good accounts. After that I could settle down and work."
+
+Sir James sent him instructions by telegram to proceed at once to
+Kurland and Livonia, where Citizen Browning was abroad again, and town
+and country-side blazed in revolt. It was a roving commission, and for
+two months Trent followed his luck. It served him not less well than
+usual. He was the only correspondent who saw General Dragilew killed in
+the street at Volmar by a girl of eighteen. He saw burnings, lynchings,
+fusillades, hangings; each day his soul sickened afresh at the
+imbecilities born of misrule. Many nights he lay down in danger. Many
+days he went fasting. But there was never an evening or a morning when
+he did not see the face of the woman whom he hopelessly loved.
+
+He discovered in himself an unhappy pride at the lasting force of this
+infatuation. It interested him as a phenomenon; it amazed and
+enlightened him. Such a thing had not visited him before; it confirmed
+so much that he had found dubious in the recorded experience of men.
+
+It was not that, at thirty-two, he could pretend to ignorance of this
+world of emotion. About his knowledge, let it be enough to say that what
+he had learned had come unpursued and unpurchased, and was without
+intolerable memories; broken to the realities of sex, he was still
+troubled by its inscrutable history; he went through life full of a
+strange respect for certain feminine weakness and a very simple terror
+of certain feminine strength. He had held to a rather lukewarm faith
+that something remained in him to be called forth, and that the voice
+that should call would be heard in its own time, if ever, and not
+through any seeking.
+
+But he had not thought of the possibility that, if this proved true some
+day, the truth might come in a sinister shape. The two things that had
+taken him utterly by surprise in the matter of his feeling towards Mabel
+Manderson were the insane suddenness of its uprising in full strength
+and its extravagant hopelessness. Before it came, he had been much
+disposed to laugh at the permanence of unrequited passion as a generous
+boyish delusion. He knew now that he had been wrong, and he was living
+bitterly in the knowledge.
+
+Before the eye of his fancy the woman always came just as she was when
+he had first had sight of her, with the gesture which he had surprised
+as he walked past unseen on the edge of the cliff; that great gesture of
+passionate joy in her new liberty which had told him more plainly than
+speech that her widowhood was a release from torment, and had confirmed
+with terrible force the suspicion, active in his mind before, that it
+was her passport to happiness with a man whom she loved. He could not
+with certainty name to himself the moment when he had first suspected
+that it might be so. The seed of the thought must have been sown, he
+believed, at his first meeting with Marlowe; his mind would have noted
+automatically that such evident strength and grace, with the sort of
+looks and manners that the tall young man possessed, might go far with
+any woman of unfixed affections. And the connection of this with what
+Mr. Cupples had told him of the Mandersons' married life must have
+formed itself in the unconscious depths of his mind. Certainly it had
+presented itself as an already established thing when he began, after
+satisfying himself of the identity of the murderer, to cast about for
+the motive of the crime. Motive, motive! How desperately he had sought
+for another, turning his back upon that grim thought, that
+Marlowe--obsessed by passion like himself, and privy perhaps to
+maddening truths about the wife's unhappiness--had taken a leaf, the
+guiltiest, from the book of Bothwell. But in all his investigations at
+the time, in all his broodings on the matter afterwards, he had been
+able to discover nothing else that could prompt Marlowe to such a
+deed--nothing but that temptation, the whole strength of which he could
+not know, but which if it had existed must have pressed urgently upon a
+bold spirit in which scruple had been somehow paralyzed. If he could
+trust his senses at all, the young man was neither insane nor by nature
+evil. But that could not clear him. Murder for a woman's sake, he
+thought, was not a rare crime, Heaven knew! If the modern feebleness of
+impulse in the comfortable classes, and their respect for the modern
+apparatus of detection, had made it rare among them, it was yet far from
+impossible; it only needed a man of equal daring and intelligence, his
+soul drugged with the vapors of an intoxicating intrigue, to plan and
+perform such a deed.
+
+A thousand times, with a heart full of anguish, he had sought to reason
+away the dread that Mabel Manderson had known too much of what had been
+intended against her husband's life. That she knew all the truth after
+the thing was done, he could not doubt; her unforgettable collapse in
+his presence when the question about Marlowe was suddenly and bluntly
+put had swept away his last hope that there was no love between the
+pair, and had seemed to him, moreover, to speak of dread of discovery.
+In any case, she knew the truth after reading what he had left with her;
+and it was certain that no public suspicion had been cast upon Marlowe
+since. She had destroyed his manuscript, then, and taken him at his word
+to keep the secret that threatened her lover's life.
+
+But it was the monstrous thought that she might have known murder was
+brewing, and guiltily kept silence, that haunted Trent's mind. She might
+have suspected, have guessed something; was it conceivable that she was
+aware of the whole plot, that she connived? He could never forget that
+his first suspicion of Marlowe's motive in the crime had been roused by
+the fact that his escape was made through the lady's room. At that time,
+when he had not yet seen her, he had been ready enough to entertain the
+idea of her equal guilt and her cooeperation. He had figured to himself
+some passionate _hysterique_, merciless as a tiger in her hate and her
+love, a zealous abettor, perhaps even the ruling spirit in the crime.
+
+Then he had seen her, had spoken with her, had helped her in her
+weakness; and such suspicions, since their first meeting, had seemed the
+vilest of infamy. He had seen her eyes and her mouth; he had breathed
+the woman's atmosphere. Trent was one of those who fancy they can scent
+true wickedness in the air. In her presence he had felt an inward
+certainty of her ultimate goodness of heart; and it was nothing against
+this, that she had abandoned herself a moment, that day on the cliff, to
+the sentiment of relief at the ending of her bondage, of her years of
+starved sympathy and unquickened motherhood. That she had turned to
+Marlowe in her destitution he believed; that she had any knowledge of
+his deadly purpose he did not believe.
+
+And yet, morning and evening, the sickening doubts returned, and he
+recalled again that it was almost in her very presence that Marlowe had
+made his preparations in the bedroom of the murdered man, that it was
+from the window of her own chamber that he had escaped from the house.
+Had he forgotten his cunning and taken the risk of telling her then? Or
+had he, as Trent thought more likely, still played his part with her
+then, and stolen off while she slept? He did not think she had known of
+the masquerade when she gave evidence at the inquest; it read like
+honest evidence. Or--the question would never be silenced, though he
+scorned it--had she lain expecting the footstep in the room and the
+whisper that should tell her it was done? Among the foul possibilities
+of human nature, was it possible that black ruthlessness and black
+deceit as well were hidden behind that good and straight and gentle
+seeming?
+
+These thoughts would scarcely leave him when he was alone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Trent served Sir James, well earning his pay, for six months, and then
+returned to Paris, where he went to work again with a better heart. His
+powers had returned to him, and he began to live more happily than he
+had expected among a tribe of strangely-assorted friends, French,
+English and American, artists, poets, journalists, policemen,
+hotel-keepers, soldiers, lawyers, business men and others. His old
+faculty of sympathetic interest in his fellows won for him, just as in
+his student days, privileges seldom extended to the Briton. He enjoyed
+again the rare experience of being taken into the bosom of a Frenchman's
+family. He was admitted to the momentous confidence of _les jeunes_, and
+found them as sure that they had surprised the secrets of art and life
+as the departed _jeunes_ of ten years before had been.
+
+One morning in June, as he descended the slope of the Rue des Martyrs,
+he saw approaching a figure that he remembered. He glanced quickly
+round, for the thought of meeting Mr. Bunner again was unacceptable. For
+some time he had recognized that his wound was healing under the spell
+of creative work; he thought less often of the woman he loved, and with
+less pain. He would not have the memory of those three days re-opened.
+
+But the straight and narrow thoroughfare offered no refuge, and the
+American saw him almost at once.
+
+His unforced geniality made Trent ashamed, for he had liked the man.
+They sat long over a meal, and Mr. Bunner talked. Trent listened to him,
+now that he was in for it, with genuine pleasure, now and then
+contributing a question or remark. Besides liking his companion, he
+enjoyed his conversation for its own sake.
+
+Mr. Bunner was, it appeared, resident in Paris as the chief Continental
+agent of the Manderson firm, and fully satisfied with his position and
+prospects. He discoursed on these for some twenty minutes. This subject
+at length exhausted, he went on to tell Trent, who confessed that he had
+been away from England for a year, that Marlowe had shortly after the
+death of Manderson entered his father's business, which was now again in
+a flourishing state, and had already come to be virtually in control of
+it. They had kept up their intimacy, and were even now planning a
+holiday for the summer. Mr. Bunner spoke with generous admiration of his
+friend's talent for affairs. "Jack Marlowe has a natural big head," he
+declared, "and if he had more experience, I wouldn't want to have him up
+against me. He would put a crimp in me every time."
+
+As the American's talk flowed on, Trent listened with growing surprise
+and anxiety. It became more and more plain that something was very wrong
+in his theory of the situation; there was no mention of its central
+figure. Presently Mr. Bunner mentioned that Marlowe was engaged to be
+married to an Irish girl, whose charms he celebrated with native
+enthusiasm.
+
+Trent clasped his hands savagely together beneath the table. What could
+have happened? His ideas were sliding and shifting. At last he forced
+himself to put a direct question.
+
+Mr. Bunner was not very fully informed. He knew that Mrs. Manderson had
+left England immediately after the settlement of her husband's affairs,
+and had lived for some time in Italy. She had returned not long ago to
+London, where she had decided not to live in the house in Mayfair, and
+had bought a smaller one in the Hampstead neighborhood; also, he
+understood, one somewhere in the country. She was said to go but little
+into society. "And all the good hard dollars just waiting for someone to
+spraddle them around!" said Mr. Bunner with a note of pathos in his
+voice. "Why, she has money to burn--money to feed to the birds--and
+nothing doing! The old man left her more than half his wad. And think of
+the figure she might make in the world! She is beautiful, and she is the
+best woman I ever met, too. But she couldn't ever seem to get the habit
+of spending money the way it ought to be spent."
+
+His words now became a soliloquy: Trent's thoughts were occupying all
+his attention. He pleaded business soon, and the two men parted with
+cordiality.
+
+Half an hour later Trent was in his studio, swiftly and mechanically
+"cleaning up." He wanted to know what had happened; somehow he must find
+out. He could never approach herself, he knew; he would never bring back
+to her the shame of that last encounter with him; it was scarcely likely
+that he would even set eyes on her. But he must know!... Cupples was in
+London, Marlowe was there.... And anyhow he was sick of Paris.
+
+Such thoughts came, and went; and below them all strained the fibers of
+an unseen cord that dragged mercilessly at his heart, and that he cursed
+bitterly in the moments when he could not deny to himself that it was
+there.... The folly, the useless, pitiable folly of it!
+
+In twenty-four hours his feeble roots in Paris had been torn out. He was
+looking over a leaden sea at the shining fortress-wall of the Dover
+cliffs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But though he had instinctively picked out the lines of a set purpose
+from among the welter of promptings in his mind, he found it delayed at
+the very outset.
+
+He had decided that he must first see Mr. Cupples, who would be in a
+position to tell him much more than the American knew. But Mr. Cupples
+was away on his travels, not expected to come back for a month; and
+Trent had no reasonable excuse for hastening his return. Marlowe he
+would not confront until he had tried at least to reconnoiter the
+position. He constrained himself not to commit the crowning folly of
+seeking out Mrs. Manderson's house in Hampstead; he could not enter it,
+and the thought of the possibility of being seen by her lurking in its
+neighborhood brought the blood to his face.
+
+He stayed at a hotel, took a studio, and while he awaited Mr. Cupples'
+return attempted vainly to lose himself in work.
+
+At the end of a week he had an idea that he acted upon with eager
+precipitancy. She had let fall some word, at their last meeting, of a
+taste for music. Trent went that evening, and thenceforward regularly,
+to the opera. He might see her; and if, in spite of his caution, she
+caught sight of him, they could be blind to each other's
+presence--anybody might happen to go to the opera.
+
+So he went alone each evening, passing as quickly as he might through
+the people in the vestibule; and each evening he came away knowing that
+she had not been in the house. It was a habit that yielded him a sort of
+satisfaction along with the guilty excitement of his search; for he too
+loved music, and nothing gave him so much peace while its magic endured.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One night as he entered, hurrying through the brilliant crowd, he felt a
+touch on his arm. Flooded with an incredible certainty at the touch, he
+turned.
+
+It was she: so much more radiant in the absence of grief and anxiety, in
+the fact that she was smiling, and in the allurement of evening dress,
+that he could not speak. She, too, breathed a little quickly, and there
+was a light of daring in her eyes and cheeks as she greeted him.
+
+Her words were few. "I wouldn't miss a note of _Tristan_," she said,
+"nor must you. Come and see me in the interval." She gave him the number
+of the box.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ERUPTION
+
+
+The following two months were a period in Trent's life that he has never
+since remembered without shuddering. He met Mrs. Manderson half a dozen
+times, and each time her cool friendliness, a nicely calculated mean
+between mere acquaintance and the first stage of intimacy, baffled and
+maddened him. At the opera he had found her, to his further amazement,
+with a certain Mrs. Wallace, a frisky matron whom he had known from
+childhood. Mrs. Manderson, it appeared, on her return from Italy, had
+somehow wandered into circles to which he belonged by nurture and
+disposition. It came, she said, of her having pitched her tent in their
+hunting-grounds; several of his friends were near neighbors.
+
+He had a dim but horrid recollection of having been on that occasion
+unlike himself, ill at ease, burning in the face, talking with idiot
+loquacity of his adventures in the Baltic provinces, and finding from
+time to time that he was addressing himself exclusively to Mrs. Wallace.
+The other lady, when he joined them, had completely lost the slight
+appearance of agitation with which she had stopped him in the vestibule.
+She had spoken pleasantly to him of her travels, of her settlement in
+London and of people whom they both knew.
+
+During the last half of the opera, which he had stayed in the box to
+hear, he had been conscious of nothing, as he sat behind them, but the
+angle of her cheek and the mass of her hair, the lines of her shoulder
+and arm, her hand upon the cushion. The black hair had seemed at last a
+forest, immeasurable, pathless and enchanted, luring him to a fatal
+adventure. At the end he had been pale and subdued, parting with them
+rather formally.
+
+The next time he saw her--it was at a country house where both were
+guests--and the subsequent times, he had had himself in hand. He had
+matched her manner and had acquitted himself, he thought, decently,
+considering ... considering that he lived in an agony of bewilderment
+and remorse and longing. He could make nothing, absolutely nothing, of
+her attitude. That she had read his manuscript, and understood the
+suspicion indicated in his last question to her at White Gables, was
+beyond the possibility of doubt. Then how could she treat him thus
+amiably and frankly, as she treated all the world of men who had done
+her no injury?
+
+For it had become clear to his intuitive sense, for all the absence of
+any shade of differentiation in her outward manner, that an injury had
+been done, and that she had felt it. Several times, on the rare and
+brief occasions when they had talked apart, he had warning from the same
+sense that she was approaching this subject; and each time he had turned
+the conversation with the ingenuity born of fear. Two resolutions he
+made. The first was that when he had completed a commissioned work which
+tied him to London he would go away, and stay away. The strain was too
+great. He no longer burned to know the truth; he wanted nothing to
+confirm his fixed internal conviction by faith, that he had blundered,
+that he had misread the situation, misinterpreted her tears, written
+himself down a slanderous fool. He speculated no more on Marlowe's
+motive in the killing of Manderson. Mr. Cupples returned to London, and
+Trent asked him nothing. He knew now that he had been right in those
+words--Trent remembered them for the emphasis with which they were
+spoken--"So long as she considered herself bound to him ... no power on
+earth could have persuaded her." He met Mrs. Manderson at dinner at her
+uncle's large and tomb-like house in Bloomsbury, and there he conversed
+most of the evening with a professor of archaeology from Berlin.
+
+His other resolution was that he would not be with her alone.
+
+But when, a few days after, she wrote asking him to come and see her on
+the following afternoon, he made no attempt to excuse himself. This was
+a formal challenge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While she celebrated the rites of tea, and for some little time
+thereafter, she joined with such natural ease in his slightly fevered
+conversation on matters of the day that he began to hope she had changed
+what he could not doubt had been her resolve, to corner him and speak to
+him gravely. She was to all appearances careless now, smiling so that he
+recalled, not for the first time since that night at the opera, what was
+written long ago of a Princess of Brunswick: "Her mouth has ten thousand
+charms that touch the soul." She made a tour of the beautiful room where
+she had received him, singling out this treasure or that from the spoils
+of a hundred bric-a-brac shops, laughing over her quests, discoveries
+and bargainings. And when he asked if she would delight him again with a
+favorite piece of his which he had heard her play at another house, she
+consented at once.
+
+She played with a perfection of execution and feeling that moved him now
+as it had moved him before. "You are a musician born," he said quietly
+when she had finished, and the last tremor of the music had passed away.
+"I knew that before I first heard you play."
+
+"I have played a great deal ever since I can remember. It has been a
+great comfort to me," she said simply, and half-turned to him smiling.
+"When did you first detect music in me? Oh, of course! I was at the
+opera. But that wouldn't prove much, would it?"
+
+"No," he said, abstractedly, his sense still busy with the music that
+had just ended. "I think I knew it the first time I saw you." Then
+understanding of his own words came to him, and turned him rigid. For
+the first time the past had been invoked.
+
+There was a short silence. Mrs. Manderson looked at Trent, then hastily
+looked away. Color began to rise in her cheeks, and she pursed her lips
+as if for whistling. Then with a defiant gesture of the shoulders which
+he remembered she rose suddenly from the piano and placed herself in a
+chair opposite to him.
+
+"That speech of yours will do as well as anything," she began slowly,
+looking at the point of her shoe, "to bring us to what I wanted to say.
+I asked you here to-day on purpose, Mr. Trent, because I couldn't bear
+it any longer. Ever since the day you left me at White Gables I have
+been saying to myself that it didn't matter what you thought of me in
+that affair; that you were certainly not the kind of man to speak to
+others of what you believed about me, after what you had told me of your
+reasons for suppressing your manuscript. I asked myself how it could
+matter. But all the time, of course, I knew it did matter. It mattered
+horribly. Because what you thought was not true." She raised her eyes
+and met his gaze calmly. Trent, with a completely expressionless face,
+returned her look.
+
+"Since I began to know you," he said, "I have ceased to think it."
+
+"Thank you," said Mrs. Manderson; and blushed suddenly and deeply. Then,
+playing with a glove, she added: "But I want you to know what _was_
+true."
+
+"I did not know if I should ever see you again," she went on in a lower
+voice, "but I felt that if I did I must speak to you about this. I
+thought it would not be hard to do so, because you seemed to me an
+understanding person, and besides, a woman who has been married isn't
+expected to have the same sort of difficulty as a young girl in speaking
+about such things when it is necessary. And then we did meet again, and
+I discovered that it was very difficult indeed. You made it difficult."
+
+"How?" he asked quietly.
+
+"I don't know," said the lady. "But yes--I do know. It was just because
+you treated me exactly as if you had never thought or imagined anything
+of that sort about me. I had always supposed that if I saw you again you
+would turn on me that hard, horrible sort of look you had when you asked
+me that last question--do you remember?--at White Gables. Instead of
+that you were just like any other acquaintance. You were just"--she
+hesitated and spread her hands--"nice. You know. After that first time
+at the opera when I spoke to you I went home positively wondering if you
+had really recognized me. I mean, I thought you might have recognized my
+face without remembering who it was."
+
+A short laugh broke from Trent in spite of himself, but he said nothing.
+
+She smiled deprecatingly. "Well, I couldn't remember if you had spoken
+my name; and I thought it might be so. But the next time, at the
+Wallaces', you did speak it, so I knew; and a dozen times during those
+few days I almost brought myself to tell you, but never quite. I began
+to feel that you wouldn't let me, that you would slip away from the
+subject if I approached it. Wasn't I right? Tell me, please." He nodded.
+"But why?" He remained silent.
+
+"Well," she said, "I will finish what I had to say, and then you will
+tell me, I hope, why you had to make it so hard. When I began to
+understand that you wouldn't let me talk of the matter to you, it made
+me more determined than ever. I suppose you didn't realize that I would
+insist on speaking even if you were quite discouraging. I dare say I
+couldn't have done it if I had been guilty, as you thought. You walked
+into my parlor to-day, never thinking I should dare. Well, now you see."
+
+Mrs. Manderson had lost all her air of hesitancy. She had, as she was
+wont to say, talked herself enthusiastic, and in the ardor of her
+purpose to annihilate the misunderstanding that had troubled her so long
+she felt herself mistress of the situation.
+
+"I am going to tell you the story of the mistake you made," she
+continued, as Trent, his hands clasped between his knees, still looked
+at her enigmatically. "You will have to believe it, Mr. Trent; it is so
+utterly true to life, with its confusions and hidden things and
+cross-purposes and perfectly natural mistakes that nobody thinks twice
+about taking for facts. Please understand that I don't blame you in the
+least, and never did, for jumping to the conclusion you did. You knew
+that I had no love for my husband, and you knew what that so often
+means. You knew before I told you, I expect, that he had taken up an
+injured attitude towards me; and I was silly enough to try and explain
+it away. I gave you the explanation of it that I had given myself at
+first, before I realized the wretched truth; I told you he was
+disappointed in me because I couldn't take a brilliant lead in society.
+Well, that was true. He was so. But I could see you weren't convinced.
+You had guessed what it took me much longer to see, because I knew how
+irrational it was. Yes; my husband was jealous of John Marlowe; you had
+divined that.
+
+"Then I behaved like a fool when you let me see you had divined it; it
+was such a blow, you understand, when I had supposed all the humiliation
+and strain was at an end, and that his delusion had died with him. You
+practically asked me if my husband's secretary was not my lover, Mr.
+Trent--I _have_ to say it, because I want you to understand why I broke
+down and made a scene. You took that for a confession; you thought I was
+guilty of that, and I think you even thought I might be a party to the
+crime, that I had consented.... That did hurt me; but perhaps you
+couldn't have thought anything else--I don't know."
+
+Trent, who had not hitherto taken his eyes from her face, hung his head
+at the words. He did not raise it again as she continued. "But really it
+was simple shock and distress that made me give way, and the memory of
+all the misery that mad suspicion had meant to me. And when I pulled
+myself together again you had gone."
+
+She rose and went to an escritoire beside the window, unlocked a drawer,
+and drew out a long, sealed envelop.
+
+"This is the manuscript you left with me," she said. "I have read it
+through again and again. I have always wondered, as everybody does, at
+your cleverness in things of this kind." A faintly mischievous smile
+flashed upon her face and was gone. "I thought it was splendid, Mr.
+Trent--I almost forgot that the story was my own, I was so interested.
+And I want to say now, while I have this in my hand, how much I thank
+you for your generous, chivalrous act in sacrificing this triumph of
+yours rather than put a woman's reputation in peril. If all had been as
+you supposed, the facts must have come out when the police took up the
+case you put in their hands. Believe me, I understood just what you had
+done, and I never ceased to be grateful even when I felt most crushed by
+your suspicion."
+
+As she spoke her thanks her voice shook a little, and her eyes were
+bright. Trent perceived nothing of this. His head was still bent. He did
+not seem to hear. She put the envelop into his hand as it lay open, palm
+upwards, on his knee. There was a touch of gentleness about the act
+which made him look up.
+
+"Can you--" he began slowly.
+
+She raised her hand as she stood before him. "No, Mr. Trent, let me
+finish before you say anything. It is such an unspeakable relief to me
+to have broken the ice at last, and I want to end the story while I am
+still feeling the triumph of beginning it." She sank down into the sofa
+from which she had first risen. "I am telling you a thing that nobody
+else knows. Everybody knew, I suppose, that something had come between
+us, though I did everything in my power to hide it. But I don't think
+any one in the world ever guessed what my husband's notion was. People
+who know me don't think that sort of thing about me, I believe. And his
+fancy was so ridiculously opposed to the facts. I will tell you what the
+situation was. Mr. Marlowe and I had been friendly enough since he came
+to us. For all his cleverness--my husband said he had a keener brain
+than any man he knew--I looked upon him as practically a boy. You know I
+am a little older than he is, and he had a sort of amiable lack of
+ambition that made me feel it the more. One day my husband asked me what
+I thought was the best thing about Marlowe, and not thinking much about
+it I said, 'His manners.' He surprised me very much by looking black at
+that, and after a silence he said, 'Yes, Marlowe is a gentleman, that's
+so'--not looking at me.
+
+"Nothing was ever said about that again until about a year ago, when I
+found that Mr. Marlowe had done what I always expected and hoped he
+would do--fallen desperately in love with an American girl. But to my
+disgust he had picked out the most worthless girl, I do believe, of all
+those whom we used to meet. She was the daughter of wealthy parents, and
+she did as she liked with them; very beautiful, well-educated, very good
+at games--what they call a woman-athlete--and caring for nothing on
+earth but her own amusement. She was one of the most unprincipled flirts
+I ever knew, and quite the cleverest. Everyone knew it, and Mr. Marlowe
+must have heard it; but she made a complete fool of him, brain and
+all.... I don't know how she managed it, but I can imagine.... She liked
+him, of course; but it was quite plain to me that she was playing with
+him. The whole affair was so idiotic, I became perfectly furious. One
+day I asked him to row me in a boat on the lake--all this happened at
+our house by Lake George. We had never been alone together for any
+length of time before. In the boat I talked to him. I was very kind
+about it, I think, and he took it admirably, but he didn't believe me a
+bit. He had the impudence to tell me that I misunderstood Alice's
+nature. When I hinted at his prospects--I knew he had scarcely anything
+of his own--he said that if she loved him he could make himself a
+position in the world. I dare say that was true, with his abilities and
+his friends; he is rather well-connected, you know, as well as popular.
+But his enlightenment came very soon after that.
+
+"My husband helped me out of the boat when we came back. He joked with
+Mr. Marlowe about something, I remember; for through all that followed
+he never once changed in his manner to him, and that was one reason why
+I took so long to realize what he thought about him and myself. But to
+me he was reserved and silent that evening--not angry. He was always
+perfectly cold and expressionless to me after he took this idea into his
+head. After dinner he only spoke to me once. Mr. Marlowe was telling him
+about some horse he had bought for the farm in Kentucky, and my husband
+looked at me and said, 'Marlowe may be a gentleman, but he seldom quits
+loser in a horse trade.' I was surprised at that, but at that time--and
+even on the next occasion when he found us together--I didn't understand
+what was in his mind. That next time was the morning when Mr. Marlowe
+received a sweet little note from the girl asking for his
+congratulations on her engagement. It was in our New York house. He
+looked so wretched at breakfast that I thought he was ill, and
+afterwards I went to the room where he worked, and asked what was the
+matter. He didn't say anything, but just handed me the note, and turned
+away to the window. I was very glad that was all over, but terribly
+sorry for him too, of course. I don't remember what I said, but I
+remember putting my hand on his arm as he stood there staring out on the
+garden; and just then my husband appeared at the open door with some
+papers. He just glanced at us, and then turned and walked quietly back
+to his study. I thought he might have heard what I was saying to comfort
+Mr. Marlowe, and that it was rather nice of him to slip away. Mr.
+Marlowe neither saw nor heard him. My husband left the house that
+morning for the West while I was out. Even then I did not understand. He
+used often to go off suddenly like that, if some business project called
+him.
+
+"It was not until he returned a week later that I grasped the situation.
+He was looking white and strange, and as soon as he saw me he asked me
+where Mr. Marlowe was. Somehow the tone of his question told me
+everything in a flash.
+
+"I almost gasped. I was wild with indignation. You know, Mr. Trent, I
+don't think I should have minded at all if any one had thought me
+capable of openly breaking with my husband and leaving him for somebody
+else. I dare say I might have done that. But that coarse suspicion ... a
+man whom he trusted ... and the notion of concealment. It made me see
+scarlet. Every shred of pride in me was strung up till I quivered, and I
+swore to myself on the spot that I would never show by any word or sign
+that I was conscious of his having such a thought about me. I would
+behave exactly as I always had behaved, I determined--and that I did, up
+to the very last. Though I knew that a wall had been made between us now
+that could never be broken down--even if he asked my pardon and obtained
+it--I never once closed the door between our rooms at night.
+
+"And so it went on. I never could go through such a time again. My
+husband showed silent and cold politeness to me always when we were
+alone--and that was only when it was unavoidable. He never once alluded
+to what was in his mind; but I felt it, and he knew that I felt it. Both
+of us were stubborn in our different attitudes. To Mr. Marlowe he was
+more friendly, if anything, than before--heaven only knows why. I
+fancied he was planning some sort of revenge; but that was only a fancy.
+Certainly Mr. Marlowe never knew what was suspected of him. He and I
+remained good friends, though we never spoke of anything intimate after
+that disappointment of his; but I made a point of seeing no less of him
+than I had always done. Then we came over to England and to White
+Gables, and after that followed--my husband's dreadful end."
+
+She threw out her right hand in a gesture of finality. "You know about
+the rest--so much more than any other man," she added; and glanced up at
+him with a quaint expression.
+
+Trent wondered at that look. But the wonder was only a passing shadow on
+his thought. Inwardly his whole being was possessed by thankfulness. All
+the vivacity had returned to his face. Long before Mrs. Manderson ended
+her story he had recognized the certainty of its truth, as from the
+first days of their renewed acquaintance he had doubted the story that
+his imagination had built up at White Gables, upon foundations that
+seemed so good to him.
+
+He said: "I don't know how to begin the apologies I have to make. There
+are no words to tell you how ashamed and disgraced I feel when I realize
+what a crude, cock-sure blundering at a conclusion my suspicion was.
+Yes, I suspected--you! I had almost forgotten that I was ever such a
+fool. Almost; not quite. Sometimes when I have been alone I have
+remembered that folly, and poured contempt on it. I have tried to
+imagine what the facts were. I have tried to excuse myself."
+
+She interrupted him quickly. "What nonsense. Do be sensible, Mr. Trent.
+You had only seen me on two occasions in your life before you came to me
+with your solution of the mystery." Again the quaint expression came and
+was gone. "If you talk of folly, it really is folly for a man like you
+to pretend to a woman like me that I had innocence written all over me
+in large letters--so large that you couldn't believe very strong
+evidence against me after seeing me twice." Mrs. Manderson laughed, and
+her laugh carried him away with it. He knew well by this time that
+sudden rush of cascading notes of mirth, the perfect expression of
+enjoyment; he had many times tried to amuse her merely for his delight
+in the sound of it. "And now it's all over, and you know--and we'll
+never speak of it any more."
+
+"I hope not," Trent said in sincere relief. "If you're resolved to be so
+kind as this about it, I am not high-principled enough to insist on your
+blasting me with your lightnings. And now, Mrs. Manderson, I had better
+go. Changing the subject after this would be like playing
+puss-in-the-corner after an earthquake." He rose to his feet.
+
+"You are right," she said. "But no! Wait. There is another thing--part
+of the same subject; and we ought to pick up all the pieces now while we
+are about it. Please sit down." She took the envelop containing Trent's
+manuscript despatch from the table where he had laid it. "I want to
+speak about this."
+
+His brows bent, and he looked at her questioningly. "So do I, if you
+do," he said slowly. "I want very much to know one thing."
+
+"Tell me."
+
+"Since my reason for suppressing that information was all a fantasy, why
+did you never make any use of it? When I began to realize that I had
+been wrong about you, I explained your silence to myself by saying that
+you could not bring yourself to do a thing that would put a rope round a
+man's neck, whatever he might have done. I can quite understand that
+feeling. Was that what it was? Another possibility I thought of was that
+you knew of something that was by way of justifying or excusing
+Marlowe's act. Or I thought you might have a simple horror, quite apart
+from humanitarian scruples, of appearing publicly in connection with a
+murder trial. Many important witnesses in such cases have to be
+practically forced into giving their evidence. They feel there is
+defilement even in the shadow of the scaffold."
+
+Mrs. Manderson tapped her lips with the envelop without quite concealing
+a smile. "You didn't think of another possibility, I suppose, Mr.
+Trent," she said.
+
+"No." He looked puzzled.
+
+"I mean the possibility of your having been wrong about Mr. Marlowe as
+well as about me. No, no; you needn't tell me that the chain of evidence
+is complete. I know it is. But evidence of what? Of Mr. Marlowe having
+impersonated my husband that night, and having escaped by way of my
+window, and built up an alibi. I have read your despatch again and
+again, Mr. Trent, and I don't see that those things can be doubted."
+
+Trent gazed at her with narrowed eyes. He said nothing to fill the brief
+pause that followed. Mrs. Manderson smoothed her skirt with a
+preoccupied air, as one collecting her ideas.
+
+"I did not make any use of the facts found out by you," she slowly said
+at last, "because it seemed to me very likely that they would be fatal
+to Mr. Marlowe."
+
+"I agree with you," Trent remarked in a colorless tone.
+
+"And," pursued Mrs. Manderson, looking up at him with a mild
+reasonableness in her eyes, "as I knew that he was innocent I was not
+going to expose him to that risk."
+
+There was another little pause. Trent rubbed his chin, with an
+affectation of turning over the idea. Inwardly he was telling himself,
+somewhat feebly, that this was very right and proper; that it was quite
+feminine, and that he liked her to be feminine. It was permitted to
+her--more than permitted--to set her loyal belief in the character of a
+friend above the clearest demonstrations of the intellect. Nevertheless,
+it chafed him. He would have had her declaration of faith a little less
+positive in form. It was too irrational to say she "knew." In fact (he
+put it to himself bluntly) it was quite unlike her. If to be
+unreasonable when reason led to the unpleasant was a specially feminine
+trait, and if Mrs. Manderson had it, she was accustomed to wrap it up
+better than any woman he had known.
+
+"You suggest," he said at length, "that Marlowe constructed an alibi for
+himself, by means which only a desperate man would have attempted, to
+clear himself of a crime he did not commit. Did he tell you he was
+innocent?"
+
+She uttered a little laugh of impatience. "So you think he has been
+talking me round! No, that is not so. I am merely sure he did not do it.
+Ah! I see you think that absurd. But see how unreasonable you are, Mr.
+Trent! Just now you were explaining to me quite sincerely that it was
+foolishness in you to have had a certain suspicion of me." Trent started
+in his chair. She glanced at him, and went on: "Now I know a great deal
+more about Mr. Marlowe than you know about me even now. I saw him
+constantly for several years. I don't pretend to know all about him; but
+I do know that he is incapable of a crime of bloodshed. The idea of his
+planning a murder is as unthinkable to me as the idea of your picking a
+poor woman's pocket, Mr. Trent. I can imagine you killing a man, you
+know ... if the man deserved it and had an equal chance of killing you.
+I could kill a person myself in some circumstances. But Mr. Marlowe was
+incapable of doing it. I don't care what the provocation might be. He
+had a temper that nothing could shake, and he looked upon human nature
+with a sort of cold magnanimity that would find excuses for absolutely
+anything. It wasn't a pose; you could see it was a part of him. He never
+put it forward, but it was there always. It was quite irritating at
+times.... He really loathed and hated physical violence. He was a very
+strange man in some ways, Mr. Trent. He gave one a feeling that he might
+do unexpected things--do you know that feeling one has about some
+people?... What part he really played in the events of that night I have
+never been able to guess. But nobody who knew anything about him could
+possibly believe in his deliberately taking a man's life." Again the
+movement of her head expressed finality, and she leaned back in the
+sofa, calmly regarding him.
+
+"Then," said Trent, who had followed this with earnest attention, "we
+are forced back on two other possibilities, which I had not thought
+worth much consideration until this moment. Accepting what you say, he
+might still conceivably have killed in self-defense; or he might have
+done so by accident."
+
+The lady nodded. "Of course I thought of those two explanations when I
+read your manuscript."
+
+"And I suppose you felt, as I did myself, that in either of those cases
+the natural thing, and obviously the safest thing, for him to do was to
+make a public statement of the truth, instead of setting up a series of
+deceptions which would certainly stamp him as guilty in the eyes of the
+law, if anything went wrong with them."
+
+"Yes," she said wearily, "I thought over all that until my head ached.
+And I thought somebody else might have done it, and that he was somehow
+screening the guilty person. But that seemed wild. I could see no light
+in the mystery, and after a while I simply let it alone. All I was clear
+about was that Mr. Marlowe was not a murderer, and that if I told what
+you had found out, the judge and jury would probably think he was. I
+promised myself that I would speak to you about it if we should meet
+again; and now I've kept my promise."
+
+Trent, his chin resting on his hand, was staring at the carpet. The
+excitement of the hunt for the truth was steadily rising in him. He had
+not in his own mind accepted Mrs. Manderson's account of Marlowe's
+character as unquestionable. But she had spoken forcibly; he could by no
+means set it aside, and his theory was much shaken.
+
+"There is only one thing for it," he said, looking up. "I must see
+Marlowe. It worries me too much to have the thing left like this. I will
+get at the truth. Can you tell me," he broke off, "how he behaved after
+the day I left White Gables?"
+
+"I never saw him after that," said Mrs. Manderson simply. "For some days
+after you went away I was ill, and didn't go out of my room. When I was
+about again he had left and was in London, settling things with the
+lawyers. He did not come down to the funeral. Immediately after that I
+went abroad. After some weeks a letter from him reached me, saying he
+had concluded his business and given the solicitors all the assistance
+in his power. He thanked me very nicely for what he called all my
+kindness, and said good-by. There was nothing in it about his plans for
+the future, and I thought it particularly strange that he said not a
+word about my husband's death. I didn't answer. Knowing what I knew, I
+couldn't. In those days I shuddered whenever I thought of that
+masquerade in the night. Rather than face him, I was ready to go on in
+ignorance of what had really happened. I never wanted to see or hear of
+him again."
+
+"Then you don't know what has become of him?"
+
+"No: but I dare say Uncle Burton--Mr. Cupples, you know--could tell you.
+Some time ago he told me that he had met Mr. Marlowe in London, and had
+some talk with him. I changed the conversation." She paused and smiled
+with a trace of mischief. "I rather wonder what you supposed had
+happened to Mr. Marlowe, after you withdrew from the scene of the drama
+that you had put together so much to your satisfaction."
+
+Trent flushed. "Do you really want to know?" he said.
+
+"I ask you," she retorted quietly.
+
+"You ask me to humiliate myself again, Mrs. Manderson. Very well. I will
+tell you what I thought I should most likely find when I returned to
+London this year: that you had married Marlowe and gone to live abroad."
+
+She heard him with unmoved composure. "We certainly couldn't have lived
+very comfortably in England on his money and mine," she observed
+thoughtfully. "He had practically nothing then."
+
+He stared at her--"gaped," she told him some time afterwards. At the
+moment she laughed with a little embarrassment. "Dear me, Mr. Trent!
+Have I said anything dreadful? You surely must know ... I thought
+everybody understood by now ... I'm sure I've had to explain it often
+enough ... if I marry again I lose everything that my husband left me."
+
+The effect of this speech upon Trent was curious. For an instant his
+face was flooded with the emotion of surprise. As this passed away he
+gradually drew himself together as he sat into a tense attitude. He
+looked, she thought as she saw his knuckles grow white on the arms of
+the chair, like a man prepared for pain under the hand of the surgeon.
+But all he said, in a voice lower than his usual tone, was: "I had no
+idea of it."
+
+"It is so," she said calmly, trifling with a ring on her finger.
+"Really, Mr. Trent, it is not such a very unusual thing.... I think I am
+glad of it. For one thing, it has secured me--at least since it became
+generally known--from a good many attentions of a kind that a woman in
+my position has to put up with as a rule."
+
+"No doubt," he said gravely. "And ... the other kind?"
+
+She looked at him questioningly. "Ah!" she laughed. "The other kind
+trouble me even less. I have not yet met a man silly enough to want to
+marry a widow with a selfish disposition, and luxurious habits and
+tastes, and nothing but the little my father left me."
+
+She shook her head slowly, and something in the gesture shattered the
+last remnants of Trent's self-possession. "Haven't you, by God!" he
+exclaimed, rising with a violent movement and advancing a step towards
+her. "Then I am going to show you that human passion is not always
+stifled by the smell of money. I am going to end the business--my
+business. I am going to tell you what I dare say scores of better men
+have wanted to tell you, but couldn't summon up what I have summoned
+up--the infernal cheek to do it. They were afraid of making fools of
+themselves. I am not. You have accustomed me to the feeling this
+afternoon." He laughed aloud in his rush of words, and spread out his
+hands. "Look at me! It is the sight of the century! It is the one who
+says he loves you, and would ask you to give up very great wealth to
+stand at his side."
+
+She was hiding her face in her hands. He heard her say brokenly:
+"Please ... don't speak in that way."
+
+He answered: "It will make a great difference to me if you will allow me
+to say all I have to say before I leave you. Perhaps it is in bad taste,
+but I will risk that--I want to relieve my soul, it needs open
+confession. This is the truth. You have troubled me ever since the first
+time I saw you--and you did not know it--as you sat under the edge of
+the cliff at Marlstone and held out your arms to the sea. It was only
+your beauty that filled my mind then. As I passed by you it seemed as if
+all the life in the place were crying out a song about you in the wind
+and the sunshine. And the song stayed in my ears; but even your beauty
+would be no more than an empty memory to me by now if that had been all.
+It was when I led you from the hotel there to your house, with your hand
+on my arm, that--what was it that happened? I only knew that your
+stronger magic had struck home, and that I never should forget that day,
+whatever the love of my life should be. Till that day I had admired as I
+should admire the loveliness of a still lake; but that day I felt the
+spell of the divinity of the lake. And next morning the waters were
+troubled, and she rose--the morning when I came to you with my
+questions, tired out with doubts that were as bitter as pain, and when I
+saw you without your pale, sweet mask of composure--when I saw you moved
+and glowing, with your eyes and your hands alive, and when you made me
+understand that for such a creature as you there had been emptiness and
+the mere waste of yourself for so long. Madness rose in me then, and my
+spirit was clamoring to say what I say at last now--that life would
+never seem a full thing again because you could not love me, that I was
+taken forever in the nets of your black hair and by the incantation of
+your voice--"
+
+"Oh, stop!" she cried, suddenly throwing back her head, her face flaming
+and her hands clutching the cushions beside her. She spoke fast and
+disjointedly, her breath coming quick. "You shall not talk me into
+forgetting common sense. What does all this mean? Oh! I do not recognize
+you at all--you seem another man. We are not children--have you
+forgotten that? You speak like a boy in love for the first time. It is
+foolish, unreal--I know that if you do not. I will not hear it. What has
+happened to you?" She was half sobbing. "How can these sentimentalities
+come from a man like you? Where is your self-restraint?"
+
+"Gone!" exclaimed Trent with an abrupt laugh. "It has got right away! I
+am going after it in a minute." He looked gravely down into her eyes. "I
+don't care so much now. I never could declare myself to you under the
+cloud of your great fortune. It was too great. There's nothing
+creditable in that feeling, as I look at it; as a matter of simple fact,
+it was a form of cowardice--fear of what you would think, and very
+likely say--fear of the world's comment too, I suppose. But the cloud
+being rolled away I have spoken, and I don't care so much. I can face
+things with a quiet mind now that I have told you the truth in its own
+terms. You may call it sentimentality or any other nickname you like. It
+is quite true that it was not intended for a scientific statement. Since
+it annoys you, let it be extinguished. But please believe that it was
+serious to me if it was comedy to you. I have said that I love you and
+honor you and would hold you dearest of all the world. Now give me leave
+to go."
+
+But she held out her hands to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+WRITING A LETTER
+
+
+"If you insist," Trent said, "I suppose you will have your way. But I
+had much rather write it when I am not with you. However, if I must,
+bring me a tablet whiter than a star, or hand of hymning angel. Don't
+underestimate the sacrifice I am making. I never felt less like
+correspondence in my life."
+
+She rewarded him.
+
+"What shall I say?" he inquired, his pen hovering over the paper. "Shall
+I compare him to a summer's day? What _shall_ I say?"
+
+"Say what you want to say," she suggested helpfully.
+
+He shook his head. "What I want to say--what I have been wanting for the
+past twenty-four hours to say to every man, woman, and child I met--is
+'Mabel and I are betrothed, and joy is borne on burning wheels.' But
+that wouldn't be a very good opening for a letter of strictly formal,
+not to say sinister character. I have got as far as 'Dear Mr. Marlowe.'
+What comes next?"
+
+"I am sending you a manuscript which I thought you might like to see,"
+she prompted as she came to his chair before the escritoire. "Something
+of that kind. Please try. I want to see what you write, and I want it to
+go to him at once. You see, I would be contented enough to leave things
+as they are; but you say you must get at the truth, and if you must, I
+want it to be as soon as possible. Do it now--you know you can if you
+will--and I'll send it off the moment it is ready. Don't you ever feel
+that?--the longing to get the worrying letter into the post and off your
+hands, so that you can't recall it if you would, and it's no use fussing
+any more about it."
+
+"I will do as you wish," he said, and turned to the paper, which he
+dated as from his hotel. Mrs. Manderson looked down at his bent head
+with a gentle light in her eyes, and made as if to place a smoothing
+hand upon his rather untidy crop of hair. But she did not touch it.
+Going in silence to the piano, she began to play very softly. It was ten
+minutes before Trent spoke.
+
+"At last I am his faithfully. Do you want to see it?"
+
+She ran across the twilight room, and turned on a reading lamp beside
+the escritoire. Then, leaning on his shoulder, she read what follows:
+
+     Dear Mr. Marlowe:
+
+     You will perhaps remember that we met, under unhappy circumstances,
+     in June of last year at Marlstone.
+
+     On that occasion it was my duty, as representing a newspaper, to
+     make an independent investigation of the circumstances of the death
+     of the late Sigsbee Manderson. I did so, and I arrived at certain
+     conclusions. You may learn from the enclosed manuscript, which was
+     originally written as a despatch for my newspaper, what those
+     conclusions were. For reasons which it is not necessary to state I
+     decided at the last moment not to make them public, or to
+     communicate them to you, and they are known to only two persons
+     beside myself.
+
+At this point Mrs. Manderson raised her eyes quickly from the letter.
+Her dark brows were drawn together. "Two persons?" she said with a note
+of inquiry.
+
+"Your uncle is the other. I sought him out last night and told him the
+whole story. Have you anything against it? I always felt uneasy at
+keeping it from him as I did, because I had led him to expect I should
+tell him all I discovered, and my silence looked like mystery-making.
+Now that it is to be cleared up finally, and there is no question of
+shielding you, I wanted him to know everything. He is a very shrewd
+adviser, too, in a way of his own; and I should like to have him with me
+when I see Marlowe. I have a feeling that two heads will be better than
+one on my side of the interview."
+
+She sighed. "Yes, of course, uncle ought to know the truth. I hope there
+is nobody else at all." She pressed his hand. "I so much want all that
+horror buried--buried deep. I am very happy now, dear, but I shall be
+happier still when you have satisfied that curious mind of yours and
+found out everything, and stamped down the earth upon it all." She
+continued her reading.
+
+     Quite recently, however, (the letter went on) facts have come to my
+     knowledge which have led me to change my decision. I do not mean
+     that I shall publish what I discovered, but that I have determined
+     to approach you and ask you for a private statement. If you have
+     anything to say which would place the matter in another light, I
+     can imagine no reason why you should withhold it.
+
+     I expect, then, to hear from you when and where I may call upon
+     you; unless you would prefer the interview to take place at my
+     hotel. In either case I desire that Mr. Cupples, whom you will
+     remember, and who has read the enclosed document, should be present
+     also.
+
+     Faithfully yours,
+
+     PHILIP TRENT.
+
+"What a very stiff letter!" she said. "Now I am sure you couldn't have
+made it any stiffer in your own rooms."
+
+Trent slipped the letter and enclosure into a long envelop. "This thing
+mustn't run any risk of going wrong. It would be best to send a special
+messenger with orders to deliver it into his own hands. If he's away it
+oughtn't to be left."
+
+She nodded. "I can arrange that. Wait here for a little."
+
+When Mrs. Manderson returned, he was hunting through the music-cabinet.
+She sank on the carpet beside him in a wave of dark brown skirts. "Tell
+me something, Philip," she said.
+
+"If it is among the few things that I know."
+
+"When you saw uncle last night, did you tell him about--about us?"
+
+"I did not," he answered. "I remembered you had said nothing about
+telling any one. It is for you--isn't it?--to decide whether we take the
+world into our confidence at once or later on."
+
+"Then will you tell him?" She looked down at her clasped hands. "I wish
+_you_ to tell him. Perhaps if you think you will guess why. There! that
+is settled." She lifted her eyes again to his, and for a time there was
+silence between them.
+
+He leaned back at length in the deep chair. "What a world!" he said.
+"Mabel, will you play something on the piano that expresses mere joy,
+the genuine article, nothing feverish or like thorns under a pot, but
+joy that has decided in favor of the universe. It's a mood that can't
+last altogether, so we had better get all we can out of it."
+
+She went to the instrument and struck a few chords while she thought.
+Then she began to work with all her soul at the theme in the last
+movement of the Ninth Symphony which is like the sound of the opening of
+the gates of Paradise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+DOUBLE CUNNING
+
+
+An old oaken desk with a deep body stood by the window in a room that
+overlooked St. James's Park from a height. The room was large, furnished
+and decorated in the mode by someone who had brought taste to the work;
+but the hand of the bachelor lay heavy upon it. John Marlowe unlocked
+the desk and drew a long, stout envelop from the back of the well.
+
+"I understand," he said to Mr. Cupples, "that you have read this."
+
+"I read it for the first time two days ago," replied Mr. Cupples, who,
+seated on a sofa, was peering about the room with a benignant face. "We
+have discussed it fully."
+
+Marlowe turned to Trent. "There is your manuscript," he said, laying the
+envelop on the table. "I have gone over it three times. I do not believe
+there is another man who could have got at as much of the truth as you
+have set down there."
+
+Trent ignored the compliment. He sat by the table gazing stonily at the
+fire, his long legs twisted beneath his chair. "You mean, of course," he
+said, drawing the envelop towards him, "that there is more of the truth
+to be disclosed now. We are ready to hear you as soon as you like. I
+expect it will be a long story, and the longer the better, so far as I
+am concerned; I want to understand thoroughly. What we should both like,
+I think, is some preliminary account of Manderson and your relations
+with him. It seemed to me from the first that the character of the dead
+man must be somehow an element in the business."
+
+"You were right," Marlowe answered grimly. He crossed the room and
+seated himself on a corner of the tall cushion-topped fender. "I will
+begin as you suggest."
+
+"I ought to tell you beforehand," said Trent, looking him in the eyes,
+"that although I am here to listen to you, I have not as yet any reason
+to doubt the conclusions I have stated here." He tapped the envelop. "It
+is a defense that you will be putting forward--you understand that?"
+
+"Perfectly." Marlowe was cool and in complete possession of himself, a
+man different indeed from the worn-out, nervous being Trent remembered
+at Marlstone a year and a half ago. His tall, lithe figure was held with
+the perfection of muscular tone. His brow was candid, his blue eyes were
+clear, though they still had, as he paused collecting his ideas, the
+look that had troubled Trent at their first meeting. Only the lines of
+his mouth showed that he knew himself in a position of difficulty, and
+meant to face it.
+
+"Sigsbee Manderson was not a man of normal mind," Marlowe began in his
+quiet voice. "Most of the very rich men I met with in America had become
+so by virtue of abnormal greed, or abnormal industry, or abnormal
+personal force, or abnormal luck. None of them had remarkable
+intellects. Manderson delighted too in heaping up wealth; he worked
+incessantly at it; he was a man of dominant will; he had quite his share
+of luck; but what made him singular was his brain-power. In his own
+country they would perhaps tell you that it was his ruthlessness in
+pursuit of his aims that was his most striking characteristic; but there
+are hundreds of them who would have carried out his plans with just as
+little consideration for others if they could have formed the plans.
+
+"I used to think that his strain of Indian blood, remote as it was,
+might have something to do with the cunning and pitilessness of the man.
+Strangely enough, the existence of that strain was unknown to anyone but
+himself and me. It was when he asked me to apply my taste for
+genealogical work to his own obscure family history that I made the
+discovery that he had in him a share of the blood of the Iroquois chief
+Montour and his French wife, a terrible woman who ruled the savage
+politics of the tribes of the Wilderness two hundred years ago. The
+Mandersons were active in the fur trade on the Pennsylvania border in
+those days, and more than one of them married Indian women. Other Indian
+blood than Montour's may have descended to Manderson, for all I can say,
+through previous and subsequent unions; some of the wives' antecedents
+were quite untraceable, and there were so many generations of pioneering
+before the whole country was brought under civilization. Manderson was
+thunderstruck at what I told him, and was anxious to conceal it from
+every soul. Of course I never gave it away while he lived, and I don't
+think he supposed I would; but I have thought since that his mind took a
+turn against me from that time onward. It happened about a year before
+his death."
+
+"Had Manderson," asked Mr. Cupples, so unexpectedly that the other
+started, "any definable religious attitude?"
+
+Marlowe considered a moment. "None that I ever heard of," he said.
+"Worship and prayer were quite unknown to him, so far as I could see,
+and I never heard him mention religion. I should doubt if he had any
+real sense of God at all, or if he was capable of knowing God through
+the emotions. But I understood that as a child he had had a religious
+up-bringing with a strong moral side to it. His private life was, in the
+usual limited sense, blameless. He was almost ascetic in his habits,
+except as to smoking. I lived with him five years without ever knowing
+him to tell a direct verbal falsehood, constantly as he used to practise
+deceit in other forms. Can you understand the soul of a man who never
+hesitated to take steps that would have the effect of hoodwinking
+people, who would use every trick of the markets to mislead, and who was
+at the same time scrupulous never to utter a direct lie on the most
+insignificant matter? Manderson was like that, and he was not the only
+one. I suppose you might compare the state of mind to that of a soldier
+who is personally a truthful man, but who will stick at nothing to
+deceive the enemy. The rules of the game allow it; and the same may be
+said of business as many business men regard it. Only with them it is
+always war-time."
+
+"It is a sad world," observed Mr. Cupples.
+
+"As you say," Marlowe agreed. "Now I was saying that one could always
+take Manderson's word if he gave it in a definite form. The first time I
+ever heard him utter a downright lie was on the night he died; and
+hearing it, I believe, saved me from being hanged as his murderer."
+
+Marlowe stared at the light above his head, and Trent moved impatiently
+in his chair. "Before we come to that," he said, "will you tell us
+exactly on what footing you were with Manderson during the years you
+were with him."
+
+"We were on very good terms from beginning to end," answered Marlowe.
+"Nothing like friendship--he was not a man for making friends--but the
+best of terms as between a trusted employee and his chief. I went to him
+as private secretary just after getting my degree at Oxford. For a long
+time I liked the position greatly. When one is attached to an active
+American plutocrat in the prime of life one need not have many dull
+moments. Besides, it made me independent. My father had some serious
+business reverses about that time, and I was glad to be able to do
+without an allowance from him. At the end of the first year Manderson
+doubled my salary. 'It's big money,' he said, 'but I guess I don't
+lose.'
+
+"You see, by that time I was doing a great deal more than accompany him
+on horseback in the morning and play chess in the evening, which was
+mainly what he had required. I was attending to his houses, his farm in
+Ohio, his shooting in Maine, his horses, his cars and his yacht. I had
+become a walking railway-guide and an expert cigar-buyer. I was always
+learning something.
+
+"Well, now you understand what my position was in regard to Manderson
+during the last few years of my connection with him. It was a happy life
+for me on the whole. I was busy, my work was varied and interesting. I
+had time to amuse myself, too, and money to spend. At one time I made a
+fool of myself about a girl, and that was not a happy time; but it
+taught me to understand the great goodness of Mrs. Manderson." Marlowe
+inclined his head to Mr. Cupples as he said this. "She may choose to
+tell you about it. As for her husband, he had never varied in his
+attitude towards me, in spite of the change that came over him in the
+last months of his life, as you know. He treated me well and generously
+in his unsympathetic way, and I never had a feeling that he was less
+than satisfied with his bargain--that was the sort of footing we lived
+upon. And it was that continuance of his attitude right up to the end
+that made the revelation so shocking when I was suddenly shown, on the
+night on which he met his end, the depth of crazy hatred of myself that
+was in Manderson's soul."
+
+The eyes of Trent and Mr. Cupples met for an instant.
+
+"You never suspected that he hated you before that time?" asked Trent,
+and Mr. Cupples asked at the same moment: "To what did you attribute
+it?"
+
+"I never guessed until that night," answered Marlowe, "that he had the
+smallest ill-feeling toward me. How long it had existed I do not know. I
+cannot imagine why it was there. I was forced to think, when I
+considered the thing in those awful days after his death, that it was a
+case of a madman's delusion, that he believed me to be plotting against
+him, as they so often do. Some such insane conviction must have been at
+the root of it. But who can sound the abysses of a lunatic's fancy? Can
+you imagine the state of mind in which a man dooms himself to death with
+the object of delivering someone he hates to the hangman?"
+
+Mr. Cupples moved sharply in his chair. "You say Manderson was
+responsible for his own death?" he asked. Trent glanced at him with an
+eye of impatience, and resumed his intent watch upon the face of
+Marlowe. In the relief of speech it was now less pale and drawn.
+
+"I do say so," Marlowe answered concisely, and looked his questioner in
+the face. Mr. Cupples nodded.
+
+"Before we proceed to the elucidation of your statement," observed the
+old gentleman, in the tone of one discussing a point of abstract
+science, "it may be remarked that the state of mind which you attribute
+to Manderson--"
+
+"Suppose we have the story first," Trent interrupted, gently laying a
+hand on Mr. Cupples' arm. "You were telling us," he went on, turning to
+Marlowe, "how things stood between you and Manderson. Now will you tell
+us the facts of what happened that night?"
+
+Marlowe flushed at the barely perceptible emphasis which Trent laid upon
+the word "facts." He drew himself up.
+
+"Bunner and myself dined with Mr. and Mrs. Manderson that Sunday
+evening," he began, speaking carefully. "It was just like other dinners
+at which the four of us had been together. Manderson was taciturn and
+gloomy, as we had latterly been accustomed to see him. We others kept a
+conversation going. We rose from the table, I suppose, about nine. Mrs.
+Manderson went to the drawing-room, and Bunner went up to the hotel to
+see an acquaintance. Manderson asked me to come into the orchard behind
+the house, saying he wished to have a talk. We paced up and down the
+pathway there, out of earshot from the house, and Manderson, as he
+smoked his cigar, spoke to me in his cool, deliberate way. He had never
+seemed more sane, or more well-disposed to me.
+
+"He said he wanted me to do him an important service. There was a big
+thing on. It was a secret affair. Bunner knew nothing of it, and the
+less I knew the better. He wanted me to do exactly as he directed, and
+not bother my head about reasons.
+
+"This, I may say, was quite characteristic of Manderson's method of
+going to work. If at times he required a man to be a mere tool in his
+hand, he would tell him so. He had used me in the same kind of way a
+dozen times. I assured him he could rely on me, and said I was ready.
+'Right now?' he asked. I said, of course I was.
+
+"He nodded, and said--I tell you his words as well as I can recollect
+them--'Well, attend to this. There is a man in England now who is in
+this thing with me. He was to have left to-morrow for Paris by the noon
+boat from Southampton to Havre. His name is George Harris--at least
+that's the name he is going by. Do you remember that name?' 'Yes,' I
+said, 'when I went up to London a week ago you asked me to book a cabin
+in that name on the boat that goes to-morrow. I gave you the ticket.'
+'Here it is,' he said, producing it from his pocket.
+
+"'Now,' Manderson said to me, poking his cigar-butt at me with each
+sentence in a way he used to have, 'George Harris cannot leave England
+to-morrow. I find I shall want him where he is. And I want Bunner where
+_he_ is. But somebody has got to go by that boat and take certain papers
+to Paris. Or else my plan is going to fall to pieces. Will you go?' I
+said, 'Certainly. I am here to obey orders.'
+
+"He bit his cigar, and said: 'That's all right: but these are not just
+ordinary orders;--not the kind of thing one can ask of a man in the
+ordinary way of his duty to an employer. The point is this. The deal I
+am busy with is one in which neither myself nor any one known to be
+connected with me must appear as yet. That is vital. But these people I
+am up against know your face as well as they know mine. If my secretary
+is known in certain quarters to have crossed to Paris at this time and
+to have interviewed certain people--and that would be known as soon as
+it happened--then the game is up.' He threw away his cigar-end and
+looked at me questioningly.
+
+"I didn't like it much, but I liked failing Manderson at a pinch still
+less. I spoke lightly. I said I supposed I should have to conceal my
+identity, and I would do my best. I told him I used to be pretty good at
+make-up.
+
+"He nodded in approval. He said: 'That's good. I judged you would not
+let me down.' Then he gave me my instructions--'You take the car right
+now and start for Southampton--there's no train that will fit in. You'll
+be driving all night. Barring accidents, you ought to get there by six
+in the morning. But whenever you arrive, drive straight to the Grand
+Hotel and ask for George Harris. If he's there, tell him you are to go
+over instead of him, and ask him to telephone me here. It is very
+important he should know that at the earliest moment possible. But if he
+isn't there, that means he has got the instructions I wired to-day, and
+hasn't gone to Southampton. In that case you don't want to trouble about
+him any more, but just wait for the boat. You can leave the car at a
+garage under a fancy name--mine must not be given. See about changing
+your appearance--I don't care how, so you do it well. Travel by the boat
+as George Harris. Let on to be anything you like, but be careful, and
+don't talk much to anybody. When you arrive, take a room at the Hotel
+St. Petersburg. You will receive a note or message there, addressed to
+George Harris, telling you where to take the wallet I shall give you.
+The wallet is locked, and you want to take good care of it. Have you got
+all that clear?'
+
+"I repeated the instructions. I asked if I should return from Paris
+after handing over the wallet. 'As soon as you like,' he said. 'And mind
+this--whatever happens, don't communicate with me at any stage of the
+journey. If you don't get the message in Paris at once, just wait until
+you do--days, if necessary. But not a line of any sort to me.
+Understand? Now get ready as quick as you can. I'll go with you in the
+car a little way. Hurry!'
+
+"That is, so far as I can remember, the exact substance of what
+Manderson said to me that night. I went to my room, changed into day
+clothes, and hastily threw a few necessaries into a kit-bag. My mind was
+in a whirl, not so much at the nature of the business as at the
+suddenness of it. I think I remember telling you the last time we
+met"--he turned to Trent--"that Manderson had rather a fondness for
+doing things in a story-book style. Other things being equal, he
+delighted in a bit of mystification and melodrama, and I told myself
+that this was Manderson all over. I hurried downstairs with my bag and
+rejoined him in the library. He handed me a stout leather letter-case,
+about eight inches by six, fastened with a strap with a lock on it. I
+could just squeeze it into my side-pocket. Then I went to get out the
+car from the garage behind the house.
+
+"As I was bringing it round to the front a disconcerting thought struck
+me. I remembered that I had only a few shillings in my pocket.
+
+"For some time past I had been keeping myself very short of cash, and
+for this reason--which I tell you because it is a vital point, as you
+will see in a minute. I was living temporarily on borrowed money. I had
+always been careless about money while I was with Manderson, and being a
+gregarious animal I had made many friends, most of them belonging to a
+New York set that had little to do but get rid of the large incomes
+given them by their parents. Still, I was very well paid, and I was too
+busy even to attempt to go very far with them in that amusing
+occupation. I was still well on the right side of the ledger until I
+began, merely out of curiosity, to play at speculation. It's a very old
+story--particularly in Wall Street. I thought it was easy; I was lucky
+at first; I would always be prudent--and so on. Then came the day when I
+went out of my depth. In one week I was separated from my roll, as
+Bunner expressed it when I told him; and I owed money, too. I had had my
+lesson. Now in this pass I went to Manderson and told him what I had
+done and how I stood. He heard me with a very grim smile, and then, with
+the nearest approach to sympathy I had ever found in him, he advanced me
+a sum on account of my salary that would clear me. 'Don't play the
+markets any more,' was all he said.
+
+"Now on that Sunday night Manderson knew that I was practically without
+any money in the world. He knew that Bunner knew it, too. He may have
+known that I had even borrowed a little more from Bunner for
+pocket-money until my next check was due, which, owing to my
+anticipation of my salary, would not have been a large one. Bear this
+knowledge of Manderson's in mind.
+
+"As soon as I had brought the car round I went into the library and
+stated the difficulty to Manderson.
+
+"What followed gave me, slight as it was, my first impression of
+something odd being afoot. As soon as I mentioned the word 'expenses'
+his hand went mechanically to his left hip-pocket, where he always kept
+a little case containing notes to the value of about a hundred pounds in
+our money. This was such a rooted habit in him that I was astonished to
+see him check the movement suddenly. Then, to my greater amazement, he
+swore viciously under his breath. I had never heard him do this before;
+but Bunner had told me that of late he had often shown irritation in
+this way when they were alone. 'Has he mislaid his note-case?' was the
+question that flashed through my mind. But it seemed to me that it could
+not affect his plan at all, and I will tell you why. The week before,
+when I had gone up to London to carry out various commissions, including
+the booking of a berth for Mr. George Harris, I had drawn a thousand
+pounds for Manderson from his bankers; and all, at his request, in notes
+of small amounts. I did not know what this unusually large sum in cash
+was for; but I did know that the packets of notes were in his locked
+desk in the library, or had been earlier in the day, when I had seen him
+fingering them as he sat at the desk.
+
+"But instead of turning to the desk, Manderson stood looking at me.
+There was fury in his face, and it was a strange sight to see him
+gradually master it until his eyes grew cold again. 'Wait in the car,'
+he said slowly. 'I will get some money.' We both went out, and as I was
+getting into my overcoat in the hall I saw him enter the drawing-room,
+which, you remember, was on the other side of the entrance hall.
+
+"I stepped out onto the lawn before the house and smoked a cigarette,
+pacing up and down. I was asking myself again and again where that
+thousand pounds was; whether it was in the drawing-room; and if so, why.
+Presently, as I passed one of the drawing-room windows, I noticed Mrs.
+Manderson's shadow on the thin silk curtain. She was standing at her
+escritoire. The window was open, and as I passed I heard her say: 'I
+have not quite thirty pounds here. Will that be enough?' I did not hear
+the answer, but next moment Manderson's shadow was mingled with hers,
+and I heard the chink of money. Then, as he stood by the window, and as
+I was moving away, these words of his came to my ears--and these at
+least I can repeat exactly, for astonishment stamped them on my
+memory--'I'm going out now. Marlowe has persuaded me to go for a
+moonlight run in the car. He is very urgent about it. He says it will
+help me to sleep, and I guess he is right.'
+
+"I have told you that in the course of four years I had never once heard
+Manderson utter a direct lie about anything great or small. I believed
+that I understood the man's queer skin-deep morality, and I could have
+sworn that if he was firmly pressed with a question that could not be
+evaded he would either refuse to answer or tell the truth. But what had
+I just heard? No answer to any question. A voluntary statement, precise
+in terms, that was utterly false. The unimaginable had happened. It was
+almost as if one's dearest friend, in a moment of closest sympathy, had
+suddenly struck one in the face. The blood rushed to my head, and I
+stood still on the grass. I stood there until I heard his step at the
+front-door, and then I pulled myself together and stepped quickly to the
+car. He handed me a banker's paper bag with gold and notes in it.
+'There's more than you'll want there,' he said, and I pocketed it
+mechanically.
+
+"For a minute or so I stood discussing with Manderson--it was by one of
+those _tours de force_ of which one's mind is capable under great
+excitement--certain points about the route of the long drive before me.
+I had made the run several times by day, and I believe I spoke quite
+calmly and naturally about it. But while I spoke my mind was seething in
+a flood of suddenly-born suspicion and fear. I did not know what I
+feared. I simply felt fear, somehow--I did not know how--connected with
+Manderson. My soul once opened to it, fear rushed in like an assaulting
+army. I felt--I knew--that something was altogether wrong and sinister,
+and I felt myself to be the object of it. Yet Manderson was surely no
+enemy of mine. Then my thoughts reached out wildly for an answer to the
+question why he had told that lie. And all the time the blood hammered
+in my ears: 'Where is that money?' Reason struggled hard to set up the
+suggestion that the two things were not necessarily connected. The
+instinct of a man in danger would not listen to it. As we started, and
+the car took the curve into the road, it was merely the unconscious part
+of me that steered and controlled it, and that made occasional empty
+remarks as we slid along in the moonlight. Within me was a confusion and
+vague alarm that was far worse than any definite terror I ever felt.
+
+"About a mile from the house, you remember, one passed on one's left a
+gate on the other side of which was the golf-course. There Manderson
+said he would get down, and I stopped the car. 'You've got it all
+clear?' he asked. With a sort of wrench I forced myself to remember and
+repeat the directions given me. 'That's O. K.,' he said. 'Good-by, then.
+Stay with that wallet.' Those were the last words I heard him speak as
+the car moved gently away from him."
+
+Marlowe rose from his chair and pressed his hands to his eyes. He was
+flushed with the excitement of his own narrative, and there was in his
+look a horror of recollection that held both the listeners silent. He
+shook himself with a movement like a dog's, and then, his hands behind
+him, stood erect before the fire as he continued his tale.
+
+"I expect you both know what the back-reflector of a motor-car is."
+
+Trent nodded quickly, his face alive with anticipation; but Mr. Cupples,
+who cherished a mild but obstinate prejudice against motor-cars, readily
+confessed to ignorance.
+
+"It is a small round or more often rectangular mirror," Marlowe
+explained, "rigged out from the right side of the screen in front of the
+driver, and adjusted in such a way that he can see, without turning
+round, if anything is coming up behind to pass him. It is quite an
+ordinary appliance, and there was one on this car. As the car moved on,
+and Manderson ceased speaking behind me, I saw in that mirror a thing
+that I wish I could forget."
+
+Marlowe was silent for a moment, staring at the wall before him.
+
+"Manderson's face," he said in a low tone. "He was standing in the road,
+looking after me, only a few yards behind, and the moonlight was full on
+his face. The mirror happened to catch it for an instant.
+
+"Physical habit is a wonderful thing. I did not shift hand or foot on
+the controlling mechanism of the car. Indeed, I dare say it steadied me
+against the shock to have myself braced to the business of driving. You
+have read in books, I dare say, of hell looking out of a man's eyes, but
+perhaps you don't know what a good metaphor that is. If I had not known
+Manderson was there, I should not have recognized the face. It was that
+of a madman, distorted, hideous in the imbecility of hate, the teeth
+bared in a simian grin of ferocity and triumph, the eyes--! In the
+little mirror I had this glimpse of the face alone; I saw nothing of
+whatever gesture there may have been as that writhing white mask glared
+after me. And I saw it only for a flash. The car went on, gathering
+speed, and as it went, my brain, suddenly purged of the vapors of doubt
+and perplexity, was as busy as the throbbing engine before my feet. I
+knew.
+
+"You say something in that manuscript of yours, Mr. Trent, about the
+swift, automatic way in which one's ideas arrange themselves about some
+new, illuminating thought. It is quite true. The awful intensity of
+ill-will that had flamed after me from those straining eyeballs had
+poured over my mind like a search-light. I was thinking quite clearly
+now, and almost coldly, for I knew what--at least I knew whom--I had to
+fear, and instinct warned me that it was not a time to give room to the
+emotions that were fighting to possess me. The man hated me insanely.
+That incredible fact I suddenly knew. But the face had told me--it would
+have told anybody--more than that. It was a face of hatred gratified, it
+proclaimed some damnable triumph. It had gloated over me driving away to
+my fate. This too was plain to me. And to what fate?
+
+"I stopped the car. It had gone about two hundred and fifty yards, and a
+sharp bend of the road hid the spot where I had set Manderson down. I
+lay back in the seat and thought it out. Something was to happen to me.
+In Paris? Probably--why else should I be sent there, with money and a
+ticket? But why Paris? That puzzled me, for I had no melodramatic ideas
+about Paris. I put the point aside for a moment. I turned to the other
+things that had roused my attention that evening. The lie about my
+'persuading him to go for a moonlight run.' What was the intention of
+that? Manderson, I said to myself, will be returning without me while I
+am on my way to Southampton. What will he tell them about me? How
+account for his returning alone and without the car? As I asked myself
+that sinister question there rushed into my mind the last of my
+difficulties: 'Where are the thousand pounds?' And in the same instant
+came the answer: 'The thousand pounds are in my pocket.'
+
+"I got up and stepped from the car. My knees trembled and I felt very
+sick. I saw the plot now--as I thought. The whole of the story about the
+papers and the necessity of their being taken to Paris was a blind. With
+Manderson's money about me, of which he would declare I had robbed him,
+I was to all appearance attempting to escape from England, with every
+precaution that guilt could suggest. He would communicate with the
+police at once, and would know how to put them on my track. I should be
+arrested in Paris--if I got so far--living under a false name, after
+having left the car under a false name, disguised myself, and traveled
+in a cabin which I had booked in advance, also under a false name. It
+would be plainly the crime of a man without money, and for some reason
+desperately in want of it. As for my account of the affair, it would be
+too preposterous.
+
+"As this ghastly array of incriminating circumstances rose up before me,
+I dragged the stout letter-case from my pocket. In the intensity of the
+moment I never entertained the faintest doubt that I was right, and that
+the money was there. It would easily hold the packets of notes. But as I
+felt it and weighed it in my hands it seemed to me there must be more
+than this. It was too bulky. What more was to be laid to my charge?
+After all, a thousand pounds was not much to tempt a man like myself to
+run the risk of penal servitude. In this new agitation, scarcely knowing
+what I did, I caught the surrounding strap in my fingers just above the
+fastening and tore the staple out of the lock. These locks, you know,
+are pretty flimsy as a rule."
+
+Here Marlowe paused and walked to the oaken desk before the window.
+Opening a drawer full of miscellaneous objects, he took out a box of odd
+keys, and selected a small one distinguished by a piece of pink tape.
+
+He handed it to Trent. "I keep that by me as a sort of morbid memento.
+It is the key to the lock I smashed. I might have saved myself the
+trouble if I had known that this key was at that moment in the left-hand
+side-pocket of my overcoat. Manderson must have slipped it in, either
+while the coat was hanging in the hall or while he sat at my side in the
+car. I might not have found the tiny thing there for weeks--as a matter
+of fact I did find it two days after Manderson was dead--but a police
+search would have found it in five minutes. And then I--I with the case
+and its contents in my pocket, my false name and my sham spectacles and
+the rest of it--I should have had no explanation to offer but the highly
+convincing one that I didn't know the key was there."
+
+Trent dangled the key by its tape idly. Then--"How do you know this is
+the key of that case?" he asked quickly.
+
+"I tried it. As soon as I found it I went up and fitted it to the lock.
+I knew where I had left the thing. So do you, I think, Mr. Trent. Don't
+you?" There was a faint shade of mockery in Marlowe's voice.
+
+"Touche!" Trent said, with a dry smile. "I found a large empty
+letter-case with a burst lock lying with other odds and ends on the
+dressing-table in Manderson's room. Your statement is that you put it
+there. I could make nothing of it." He closed his lips.
+
+"There was no reason for hiding it," said Marlowe. "But to get back to
+my story. I burst the lock of the strap. I opened the case before one of
+the lamps of the car. The first thing I found in it I ought to have
+expected, of course; but I hadn't." He paused and glanced at Trent.
+
+"It was--" began Trent mechanically; and then stopped himself. "Try not
+to bring me in any more, if you don't mind," he said, meeting the
+other's eye. "I have complimented you already in that document on your
+cleverness. You need not prove it by making the judge help you out with
+your evidence."
+
+"All right," agreed Marlowe. "I couldn't resist just that much. If _you_
+had been in my place you would have known before I did that Manderson's
+little pocket case was there. As soon as I saw it, of course, I
+remembered his not having had it about him when I asked for money, and
+his surprising anger. He had made a false step. He had already fastened
+his note-case up with the rest of what was to figure as my plunder, and
+placed it in my hands. I opened it. It contained a few notes as usual--I
+didn't count them.
+
+"Tucked into the flaps of the big case in packets were the other notes,
+just as I had brought them from London. And with them were two small
+wash-leather bags, the look of which I knew well. My heart jumped
+sickeningly again, for this too was utterly unexpected. In those bags
+Manderson kept the diamonds in which he had been investing for some time
+past. I didn't open them; I could feel the tiny stones shifting under
+the pressure of my fingers. How many thousands of pounds' worth there
+were there I have no idea. We had regarded Manderson's diamond-buying as
+merely a speculative fad. I believe now that it was the earliest
+movement in the scheme for my ruin. For any one like myself to be
+represented as having robbed him there ought to be a strong inducement
+shown. That had been provided with a vengeance.
+
+"Now, I thought, I have the whole thing plain, and I must act. I saw
+instantly what I must do. I had left Manderson about a mile from the
+house. It would take him twenty minutes, fifteen if he walked fast, to
+get back to the house, where he would of course immediately tell his
+story of robbery, and probably telephone at once to the police in
+Bishopsbridge. I had left him only five or six minutes ago--for all that
+I have just told you was as quick thinking as I ever did. It would be
+easy to overtake him in the car before he neared the house. There would
+be an awkward interview--I set my teeth as I thought of it, and all my
+fears vanished as I began to savor the gratification of telling him my
+opinion of him. There are probably few people who ever positively looked
+forward to an awkward interview with Manderson; but I was mad with rage.
+My honor and my liberty had been plotted against with detestable
+treachery. I did not consider what would follow the interview. That
+would arrange itself.
+
+"I had started and turned the car--I was already going fast--when I
+heard the sound of a shot in front of me, to the right.
+
+"Instantly I stopped the car. My first wild thought was that Manderson
+was shooting at me. Then I realized that the noise had not been close at
+hand. I could see nobody on the road, though the moonlight flooded it. I
+had left Manderson at a spot just round a corner that was now some fifty
+yards ahead of me. I started again, and turned the corner at a slow
+pace. Then I stopped again with a jar, and for a moment I sat perfectly
+still.
+
+"Manderson lay dead a few steps from me on the turf within the gate,
+clearly visible to me in the moonlight."
+
+Marlowe made another pause, and Trent, with a puckered brow, inquired:
+"On the golf-course?"
+
+"Obviously," remarked Mr. Cupples. "The eighth green is just there." He
+had grown more and more interested as Marlowe went on, and was now
+playing feverishly with his thin beard.
+
+"On the green, quite close to the flag," said Marlowe. "He lay on his
+back, his arms were stretched abroad, his jacket and heavy overcoat were
+open; the light shone hideously on his white face and his shirt-front;
+it glistened on his bared teeth and one of the eyes. The other ... you
+saw it. The man was certainly dead. As I sat there stunned, unable for
+the moment to think at all, I could even see a thin dark line of blood
+running down from the shattered socket to the ear. Close by lay his soft
+black hat, and at his feet a pistol.
+
+"I suppose it was only a few seconds that I sat helplessly staring at
+the body. Then I rose and moved to it with dragging feet; for now the
+truth had come to me at last, and I realized the fullness of my
+appalling danger. It was not only my liberty or my honor that the maniac
+had undermined. It was death that he had planned for me; death with the
+degradation of the scaffold. To strike me down with certainty he had not
+hesitated to end his life--a life which was, no doubt, already
+threatened by a melancholic impulse to self-destruction; and the last
+agony of the suicide had been turned, perhaps, to a devilish joy by the
+thought that he dragged down my life with his. For, so far as I could
+see at the moment, my situation was utterly hopeless. If it had been
+desperate on the assumption that Manderson meant to denounce me as a
+thief, what was it now that his corpse denounced me as a murderer?
+
+"I picked up the revolver and saw, almost without emotion, that it was
+my own--Manderson had taken it from my room, I suppose, while I was
+getting out the car. At the same moment I remembered that it was by
+Manderson's suggestion that I had had it engraved with my initials, to
+distinguish it from a precisely similar weapon which he had of his own.
+
+"I bent over the body and satisfied myself that there was no life left
+in it. I must tell you here that I did not notice, then or afterwards,
+the scratches and marks on the wrists which were taken as evidence of a
+struggle with an assailant. But I have no doubt that Manderson
+deliberately injured himself in this way before firing the shot; it was
+a part of his plan.
+
+"Though I never perceived that detail, however, it was evident enough as
+I looked at the body that Manderson had not forgotten, in his last act
+on earth, to tie me tighter by putting out of court the question of
+suicide. He had clearly been at pains to hold the pistol at arm's
+length, and there was not a trace of smoke or of burning on the face.
+The wound was absolutely clean, and was already ceasing to bleed
+outwardly. I rose and paced the green, reckoning up the points in the
+crushing case against me.
+
+"I was the last to be seen with Manderson. I had persuaded him--so he
+had lied to his wife and, as I afterwards knew, to the butler--to go
+with me for the drive from which he never returned. My pistol had killed
+him. It was true that by discovering his plot I had saved myself from
+heaping up further incriminating facts--flight, concealment, the
+possession of the treasure. But what need of them, after all? As I
+stood, what hope was there? What could I do?"
+
+Marlowe came to the table and leaned forward with his hands upon it. "I
+want," he said very earnestly, "to try to make you understand what was
+in my mind when I decided to do what I did. I hope you won't be bored,
+because I must do it. You may both have thought I acted like a fool. But
+after all the police never suspected me. I walked that green for a
+quarter of an hour, I suppose, thinking the thing out like a game of
+chess. I had to think ahead and think coolly; for my safety depended on
+upsetting the plans of one of the longest-headed men who ever lived. And
+remember that, for all I knew, there were details of the scheme still
+hidden from me, waiting to crush me.
+
+"Two plain courses presented themselves at once. Either of them, I
+thought, would certainly prove fatal. I could, in the first place, do
+the completely straightforward thing: take back the dead man, tell my
+story, hand over the notes and diamonds, and trust to the saving power
+of truth and innocence. I could have laughed as I thought of it. I saw
+myself bringing home the corpse and giving an account of myself,
+boggling with sheer shame over the absurdity of my wholly unsupported
+tale as I brought a charge of mad hatred and fiendish treachery against
+a man who had never, so far as I knew, had a word to say against me. At
+every turn the cunning of Manderson had forestalled me. His careful
+concealment of such a hatred was a characteristic feature of the
+stratagem; only a man of his iron self-restraint could have done it. You
+can see for yourselves how every fact in my statement would appear, in
+the shadow of Manderson's death, a clumsy lie. I tried to imagine myself
+telling such a story to the counsel for my defense. I could see the face
+with which he would listen to it; I could read in the lines of it his
+thought, that to put forward such an impudent farrago would mean merely
+the disappearance of any chance there might be of a commutation of the
+capital sentence.
+
+"True, I had not fled; I had brought back the body; I had handed over
+the property. But how did that help me? It would only suggest that I had
+yielded to a sudden funk after killing my man, and had no nerve left to
+clutch at the fruits of the crime; it would suggest, perhaps, that I had
+not set out to kill but only to threaten, and that, when I found that I
+had done murder, the heart went out of me. Turn it which way I would, I
+could see no hope of escape by this plan of action.
+
+"The second of the obvious things that I might do was to take the hint
+offered by the situation, and to fly at once. That too must prove fatal.
+There was the body. I had no time to hide it in such a way that it would
+not be found at the first systematic search. But whatever I should do
+with the body, Manderson's not returning to the house would cause
+uneasiness in two or three hours at most. Martin would suspect an
+accident to the car, and would telephone to the police. At daybreak the
+roads would be scoured and inquiries telegraphed in every direction. The
+police would act on the possibility of there being foul play. They would
+spread their nets with energy in such a big business as the
+disappearance of Manderson. Ports and railway termini would be watched.
+Within twenty-four hours the body would be found, and the whole country
+would be on the alert for me--all Europe scarcely less; I did not
+believe there was a spot in Christendom where the man accused of
+Manderson's murder could pass unchallenged, with every newspaper crying
+the fact of his death into the ears of all the world. Every stranger
+would be suspected; every man, woman and child would be a detective. The
+car, wherever I should abandon it, would put people on my track. If I
+had to choose between two utterly hopeless courses, I decided, I would
+take that of telling the preposterous truth.
+
+"But now I cast about desperately for some tale that would seem more
+plausible than the truth. Could I save my neck by a lie? One after
+another came into my mind; I need not trouble to remember them now. Each
+had its own futilities and perils; but every one split upon the fact--or
+what would be taken for fact--that I had induced Manderson to go out
+with me, and the fact that he had never returned alive. Notion after
+notion I swiftly rejected as I paced there by the dead man, and doom
+seemed to settle down upon me more heavily as the moments passed. Then a
+strange thought came to me.
+
+"Several times I had repeated to myself half-consciously, as a sort of
+refrain, the words in which I had heard Manderson tell his wife that I
+had induced him to go out. 'Marlowe has persuaded me to go for a
+moonlight run in the car. He is very urgent about it.' All at once it
+struck me that, without meaning to do so, I was saying this in
+Manderson's voice.
+
+"As you found out for yourself, Mr. Trent, I have a natural gift of
+mimicry. I had imitated Manderson's voice many times so successfully as
+to deceive even Bunner, who had been much more in his company than his
+own wife. It was, you remember,"--Marlowe turned to Mr. Cupples--"a
+strong, metallic voice, of great carrying power, so unusual as to make
+it a very fascinating voice to imitate, and at the same time very easy.
+I said the words carefully to myself again, like this--" he uttered
+them, and Mr. Cupples opened his eyes in amazement--"and then I struck
+my hand upon the low wall beside me. 'Manderson never returned alive?' I
+said aloud. 'But Manderson _shall_ return alive!'
+
+"In thirty seconds the bare outline of the plan was complete in my mind.
+I did not wait to think over details. Every instant was precious now; I
+lifted the body and laid it on the floor of the car, covered with a rug.
+I took the hat and the revolver. Not one trace remained on the green, I
+believe, of that night's work. As I drove back to White Gables my design
+took shape before me with a rapidity and ease that filled me with a wild
+excitement. I should escape yet! It was all so easy if I kept my pluck.
+Putting aside the unusual and unlikely, I should not fail. I wanted to
+shout, to scream! Nearing the house I slackened speed, and carefully
+reconnoitered the road. Nothing was moving. I turned the car into the
+open field on the other side of the road, about twenty paces short of
+the little door at the extreme corner of the grounds. I brought it to
+rest behind a stack. When, with Manderson's hat on my head and the
+pistol in my pocket, I had staggered with the body across the moonlit
+road and through that door, I left much of my apprehension behind me.
+With swift action and an unbroken nerve, I thought I ought to succeed."
+
+With a long sigh Marlowe threw himself into one of the deep chairs at
+the fireside, and passed his handkerchief over his damp forehead. Each
+of his hearers, too, drew a deep breath, but not audibly.
+
+"Everything else you know," he said. He took a cigarette from a box
+beside him and lighted it. Trent watched the very slight quiver of the
+hand that held the match, and privately noted that his own at the moment
+was not so steady.
+
+"The shoes that betrayed me to you," pursued Marlowe after a short
+silence, "were painful all the time I wore them, but I never dreamed
+that they had given anywhere. I knew that no footstep of mine must
+appear by any accident in the soft ground about the hut where I laid the
+body, or between the hut and the house, so I took the shoes off and
+crammed my feet into them as soon as I was inside the little door. I
+left my own shoes, with my own jacket and overcoat, near the body, ready
+to be resumed later. I made a clear footmark on the soft gravel outside
+the French window, and several on the drugget round the carpet. The
+stripping off of the outer clothing of the body and the dressing of it
+afterwards in the brown suit and shoes, and putting the things into the
+pockets, was a horrible business; and getting the teeth out of the mouth
+was worse. The head ... but you don't want to hear about it. I didn't
+feel it much at the time. I was wriggling my own head out of a noose,
+you see. I wish I had thought of pulling down the cuffs, and had tied
+the shoes more neatly. And putting the watch in the wrong pocket was a
+bad mistake. It had all to be done so hurriedly.
+
+"You were wrong, by the way, about the whisky. After one stiffish drink
+I had no more; but I filled up a flask that was in the cupboard, and
+pocketed it. I had a night of peculiar anxiety and effort in front of
+me, and I didn't know how I should stand it. I had to take some once or
+twice during the drive. Speaking of that, you give rather a generous
+allowance of time in your document for doing that run by night. You say
+that to get to Southampton by half-past six in that car under the
+conditions, a man must, even if he drove like a demon, have left
+Marlstone by twelve at latest. I had not got the body dressed in
+the other suit, with tie and watch-chain and so forth, until nearly
+ten minutes past; and then I had to get to the car and start it
+going.... But then I don't suppose any demon would have taken the risks
+I did in that car at night, without a head-light. It turns me cold to
+think of it now.
+
+"There's nothing much to say about what I did in the house. I spent the
+time after Martin had left me in carefully thinking over the remaining
+steps in my plan, while I unloaded and thoroughly cleaned the revolver,
+using my handkerchief and a penholder from the desk. I also placed the
+packets of notes, the note-case and the diamonds in the roll-top desk,
+which I opened and re-locked with Manderson's key. When I went upstairs
+it was a trying moment, for though I was safe from the eyes of Martin as
+he sat in his pantry, there was a faint possibility of somebody being
+about on the bedroom floor. I had sometimes found the French maid
+wandering about there when the other servants were in bed. Bunner, I
+knew, was a deep sleeper. Mrs. Manderson, I had gathered from things I
+had heard her say, was usually asleep by eleven; I had thought it
+possible that her gift of sleep had helped her to retain all her beauty
+and vitality in spite of a marriage which we all knew was an unhappy
+one. Still, it was uneasy work mounting the stairs and holding myself
+ready to retreat to the library again at the least sound from above. But
+nothing happened.
+
+"The first thing I did on reaching the corridor was to enter my room and
+put the revolver and cartridges back in the case. Then I turned off the
+light and went quietly into Manderson's room.
+
+"What I had to do there you know. I had to take off the shoes and put
+them outside the door, leave Manderson's jacket, waistcoat, trousers and
+black tie, after taking everything out of the pockets, select a suit and
+tie and shoes for the body, and place the dental plate in the bowl,
+which I moved from the washing-stand to the bedside, leaving those
+ruinous finger-marks as I did so. The marks on the drawer must have been
+made when I shut it after taking out the tie. Then I had to lie down in
+the bed and tumble it. You know all about it--all except my state of
+mind, which you couldn't imagine, and I couldn't describe.
+
+"The worst came when I had hardly begun my operations; the moment when
+Mrs. Manderson spoke from the room where I supposed her asleep. I was
+prepared for it happening; it was a possibility; but I nearly lost my
+nerve all the same. However....
+
+"By the way, I may tell you this: in the extremely unlikely contingency
+of Mrs. Manderson remaining awake and so putting out of the question my
+escape by way of her window, I had planned simply to remain where I was
+a few hours, and then, not speaking to her, to leave the house quickly
+and quietly by the ordinary way. Martin would have been in bed by that
+time. I might have been heard to leave, but not seen. I should have done
+just as I had planned with the body, and then made the best time I could
+in the car to Southampton. The difference would have been that I
+couldn't have furnished an unquestionable alibi by turning up at the
+hotel at six-thirty. I should have made the best of it by driving
+straight to the docks and making my ostentatious inquiries there. I
+could in any case have got there long before the boat left at noon. I
+couldn't see that anybody could suspect me of the supposed murder in any
+case; but if any one had, and if I hadn't arrived until ten o'clock,
+say, I shouldn't have been able to answer: 'It is impossible for me to
+have got to Southampton so soon after shooting him.' I should simply
+have had to say I was delayed by a break-down after leaving Manderson at
+half-past ten, and challenged any one to produce any fact connecting me
+with the crime. They couldn't have done it. The pistol, left openly in
+my room, might have been used by anybody, even if it could be proved
+that that particular pistol was used. Nobody could reasonably connect me
+with the shooting so long as it was believed that it was Manderson who
+had returned to the house. The suspicion could not, I was confident,
+enter any one's mind. All the same, I wanted to introduce the element of
+absolute physical impossibility; I knew I should feel ten times as safe
+with that.
+
+"So when I knew from the sound of her breathing that Mrs. Manderson was
+asleep again I walked quickly across her room in my stocking feet and
+was on the grass with my bundle in ten seconds. I don't think I made the
+least noise. The curtain before the window was of soft, thick stuff and
+didn't rustle, and when I pushed the glass doors further open there was
+not a sound."
+
+"Tell me," said Trent as the other stopped to light a new cigarette,
+"why you took the risk of going through Mrs. Manderson's room to escape
+from the house? I could see when I looked into the thing on the spot why
+it had to be on that side of the house; there was a danger of being seen
+by Martin or by some servant at a bedroom window if you got out by a
+window on one of the other sides. But there were three unoccupied rooms
+on that side: two spare bedrooms and Mrs. Manderson's sitting-room. I
+should have thought it would have been safer, after you had done what
+was necessary to your plan in Manderson's room, to leave it quietly and
+escape through one of those three rooms.... The fact that you went
+through her window, you know," he added coldly, "might have suggested,
+if it became known, a certain suspicion in regard to the lady herself. I
+think you understand me."
+
+Marlowe turned upon him with a glowing face. "And I think you will
+understand me, Mr. Trent," he said in a voice that shook a little, "when
+I say that if such a possibility had occurred to me then, I would have
+taken any risk rather than make my escape by that way.... Oh, well!" he
+went on more coolly, "I suppose that to any one who didn't know her the
+idea of her being privy to her husband's murder might not seem so
+indescribably fatuous. Forgive the expression." He looked attentively at
+the burning end of his cigarette, studiously unconscious of the red flag
+that flew in Trent's eyes for an instant at his words and the tone of
+them.
+
+That emotion, however, was conquered at once. "Your remark is perfectly
+just," Trent said with answering coolness. "I can quite believe, too,
+that at the time you didn't think of the possibility I mentioned. But
+surely, apart from that, it would have been safer to do as I said: go by
+the window of an unoccupied room."
+
+"Do you think so?" said Marlowe. "All I can say is I hadn't the nerve to
+do it. I tell you, when I entered Manderson's room I shut the door of it
+on more than half my terrors. I had the problem confined before me in a
+closed space, with only one danger in it, and that a _known_ danger: the
+danger of Mrs. Manderson. The thing was almost done: I had only to wait
+until she was certainly asleep after her few moments of waking up, for
+which, as I told you, I was prepared as a possibility. Barring
+accidents, the way was clear. But now suppose that I, carrying
+Manderson's clothes and shoes, had opened that door again and gone in my
+shirt-sleeves and socks to enter one of the empty rooms. The moonlight
+was flooding the corridor through the end-window. Even if my face were
+concealed, nobody could mistake my standing figure for Manderson's.
+Martin might be going about the house in his silent way. Bunner might
+come out of his bedroom. One of the servants who were supposed to be in
+bed might come round the corner from the other passage--I had found
+Celestine prowling about quite as late as it was then. None of these
+things was very likely; but they were all too likely for me. They were
+uncertainties. Shut off from the household in Manderson's room I knew
+exactly what I had to face. As I lay in my clothes in Manderson's bed
+and listened for the almost inaudible breathing through the open door I
+felt far more ease of mind, terrible as my anxiety was, than I had felt
+since I saw the dead body on the turf. I even congratulated myself that
+I had had the chance, through Mrs. Manderson's speaking to me, of
+tightening one of the screws in my scheme by repeating the statement
+about my having been sent to Southampton."
+
+Marlowe looked at Trent, who nodded as who should say that his point was
+met.
+
+"As for Southampton," pursued Marlowe, "you know what I did when I got
+there, I have no doubt. I had decided to take Manderson's story about
+the mysterious Harris and act it out on my own lines. It was a carefully
+prepared lie, better than anything I could improvise. I even went so far
+as to get through a trunk call to the hotel at Southampton from the
+library before starting, and ask if Harris was there. As I expected, he
+wasn't."
+
+"Was that why you telephoned?" Trent inquired quickly.
+
+"The reason for telephoning was to get myself into an attitude in which
+Martin couldn't see my face or anything but the jacket and hat, yet
+which was a natural and familiar attitude. But while I was about it, it
+was obviously better to make a genuine call. If I had simply pretended
+to be telephoning, the people at the exchange could have told you at
+once that there hadn't been a call from White Gables that night."
+
+"One of the first things I did was to make that inquiry," said Trent.
+"That telephone call, and the wire you sent from Southampton to the dead
+man, to say Harris hadn't turned up and you were returning--both those
+appealed to me."
+
+A constrained smile lighted Marlowe's face for a moment. "I don't know
+that there's anything more to tell. I returned to Marlstone, and faced
+your friend the detective with such nerve as I had left. The worst was
+when I heard you had been put on the case--no, that wasn't the worst.
+The worst was when I saw you walk out of the shrubbery the next day,
+coming away from the shed where I had laid the body. For one ghastly
+moment I thought you were going to give me in charge on the spot. Now
+I've told you everything, you don't look so terrible."
+
+He closed his eyes, and there was a short silence. Then Trent got
+suddenly to his feet.
+
+"Cross-examination?" inquired Marlowe, looking at him gravely.
+
+"Not at all," said Trent, stretching his long limbs. "Only stiffness of
+the legs. I don't want to ask any questions. I believe what you have
+told us. I don't believe it simply because I always liked your face, or
+because it saves awkwardness, which are the most usual reasons for
+believing a person, but because my vanity will have it that no man could
+lie to me steadily for an hour without my perceiving it. Your story is
+an extraordinary one; but Manderson was an extraordinary man, and so are
+you. You acted like a lunatic in doing what you did; but I quite agree
+with you that if you had acted like a sane man you wouldn't have had the
+hundredth part of a dog's chance with a judge and jury. One thing is
+beyond dispute on any reading of the affair: you are a man of courage."
+
+The color rushed into Marlowe's face, and he hesitated for words. Before
+he could speak Mr. Cupples arose with a dry cough.
+
+"For my part," he said, "I never supposed you guilty for a moment."
+Marlowe turned to him in grateful amazement, Trent with an incredulous
+stare. "But," pursued Mr. Cupples, holding up his hand, "there is one
+question which I should like to put."
+
+Marlowe bowed, saying nothing.
+
+"Suppose," said Mr. Cupples, "that someone else had been suspected of
+the crime and put upon trial. What would you have done?"
+
+"I think my duty was clear. I should have gone with my story to the
+lawyers for the defense, and put myself in their hands."
+
+Trent laughed aloud. Now that the thing was over his spirits were
+rapidly becoming ungovernable. "I can see their faces!" he said. "As a
+matter of fact, though, nobody else was ever in danger. There wasn't a
+shred of evidence against any one. I looked up Murch at the Yard this
+morning, and he told me he had come round to Bunner's view, that it was
+a case of revenge on the part of some American black-hand gang. So
+there's the end of the Manderson case. Holy, suffering Moses! _What_ an
+ass a man can make of himself when he thinks he's being preternaturally
+clever!" He seized the bulky envelop from the table, and stuffed it into
+the heart of the fire. "There's for you, old friend! For want of you the
+world's course will not fail. But look here! It's getting late--nearly
+seven, and Cupples and I have an appointment at half-past. We must go.
+Mr. Marlowe, good-by." He looked into the other's eyes. "I am a man who
+has worked hard to put a rope round your neck. Considering the
+circumstances I don't know whether you will blame me. Will you shake
+hands?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE LAST STRAW
+
+
+"What was that you said about our having an appointment at half-past
+seven?" asked Mr. Cupples as the two came out of the great gateway of
+the pile of flats. "Have we such an appointment?"
+
+"Certainly we have," replied Trent. "You are dining with me. Only one
+thing can properly celebrate this occasion, and that is a dinner for
+which I pay. No, no! I asked you first. I have got right down to the
+bottom of a case that must be unique, a case that has troubled even my
+mind for over a year, and if that isn't a good reason for standing a
+dinner, I don't know what is. Cupples, we will not go to my club. This
+is to be a festival, and to be seen in a London club in a state of
+pleasurable emotion is more than enough to shatter any man's career.
+Besides that, the dinner there is always the same, or at least they
+always make it taste the same, I know not how. The eternal dinner at my
+club hath bored millions of members like me, and shall bore; but
+to-night let the feast be spread in vain, so far as we are concerned. We
+will not go where the satraps throng the hall. We will go to
+Sheppard's."
+
+"Who is Sheppard?" asked Mr. Cupples mildly, as they proceeded up
+Victoria Street. His companion went with an unnatural lightness, and a
+policeman observing his face, smiled indulgently at a look of happiness
+which he could only attribute to alcohol.
+
+"Who is Sheppard?" echoed Trent with bitter emphasis. "That question, if
+you will pardon me for saying so, Cupples, is thoroughly characteristic
+of the spirit of aimless inquiry prevailing in this restless day. I
+suggest our dining at Sheppard's and instantly you fold your arms and
+demand, in a frenzy of intellectual pride, to know who Sheppard is
+before you will cross the threshold of Sheppard's. I am not going to
+pander to the vices of the modern mind. Sheppard's is a place where one
+can dine. I do not know Sheppard. It never occurred to me that Sheppard
+existed. Probably he is a myth of totemistic origin. All I know is that
+you can get a bit of saddle of mutton at Sheppard's that has made many
+an American visitor curse the day that Christopher Columbus was
+born.... Taxi!"
+
+A cab rolled smoothly to the curb, and the driver received his
+instruction with a majestic nod.
+
+"Another reason I have for suggesting Sheppard's," continued Trent,
+feverishly lighting a cigarette, "is that I am going to be married to
+the most wonderful woman in the world. I trust the connection of ideas
+is clear."
+
+"You are going to marry Mabel!" cried Mr. Cupples. "My dear friend, what
+good news this is! Shake hands, Trent; this is glorious! I congratulate
+you both from the bottom of my heart. And may I say--I don't want to
+interrupt your flow of high spirits, which is very natural indeed, and I
+remember being just the same in similar circumstances long ago--but may
+I say how earnestly I have hoped for this? Mabel has seen so much
+unhappiness, yet she is surely a woman formed in the great purpose of
+humanity to be the best influence in the life of a good man. But I did
+not know her mind as regarded yourself. _Your_ mind I have known for
+some time," Mr. Cupples went on, with a twinkle in his eye that would
+have done credit to the worldliest of creatures. "I saw it at once when
+you were both dining at my house, and you sat listening to Professor
+Peppmueller and looking at her. Some of us older fellows have our wits
+about us still, my dear boy."
+
+"Mabel says she knew it before that," replied Trent with a slightly
+crestfallen air. "And I thought I was acting the part of a person who
+was not mad about her to the life. Well, I never was any good at
+dissembling. I shouldn't wonder if even old Peppmueller noticed something
+through his double convex lenses. But however crazy I may have been as
+an undeclared suitor, I am going to be much worse now. Here's the
+place," he broke off, as the cab rushed down a side-street and swung
+round a corner into a broad and populous thoroughfare. "We're there
+already." The cab drew up.
+
+"Here we are," said Trent as he paid the man and led Mr. Cupples into a
+long paneled room set with many tables and filled with a hum of talk.
+"This is the house of fulfilment of craving, this is the bower with the
+roses around it. I see there are three bookmakers eating pork at my
+favorite table. We will have that one in the opposite corner."
+
+He conferred earnestly with a waiter, while Mr. Cupples, in a pleasant
+meditation, warmed himself before the great fire. "The wine here," Trent
+resumed, as they seated themselves, "is almost certainly made out of
+grapes. What shall we drink?"
+
+Mr. Cupples came out of his reverie. "I think," he said, "I will have
+milk and soda-water."
+
+"Speak lower!" urged Trent. "The head-waiter has a weak heart, and he
+might hear you. Milk and soda-water! Cupples, you may think you have a
+strong constitution, and I don't say you have not, but I warn you that
+this habit of mixing drinks has been the death of many a robuster man
+than you. Be wise in time. Fill high the bowl with Samian wine; leave
+soda to the Turkish hordes. Here comes our food." He gave another order
+to the waiter, who ranged the dishes before them and darted away. Trent
+was, it seemed, a respected customer. "I have sent," he said, "for wine
+that I know, and I hope you will try it. If you have taken a vow, then
+in the name of all the teetotal saints drink water, which stands at your
+elbow, but don't seek a cheap notoriety by demanding milk and soda."
+
+"I have never taken any pledge," said Mr. Cupples, examining his mutton
+with a favorable eye. "I simply don't care about wine. I bought a bottle
+once and drank it to see what it was like, and it made me ill. But very
+likely it was bad wine. I will taste some of yours, as it is your
+dinner, and I do assure you, my dear Trent, I should like to do
+something unusual to show how strongly I feel on the present occasion. I
+have not been so delighted for many years. To think," he reflected aloud
+as the waiter filled his glass, "of the Manderson mystery disposed of,
+the innocent exculpated, and your own and Mabel's happiness crowned--all
+coming upon me together! I drink to you, my dear friend." And Mr.
+Cupples took a very small sip of the wine.
+
+"You have a great nature," said Trent, much moved. "Your outward
+semblance doth belie your soul's immensity. I should have expected as
+soon to see an elephant conducting at the opera as you drinking my
+health. Dear Cupples! May his beak retain ever that delicate
+rose-stain!--No, curse it all!" he broke out, surprising a shade of
+discomfort that fitted over his companion's face as he tasted the wine
+again. "I have no business to meddle with your tastes. I apologize. You
+shall have what you want, even if it causes the head-waiter to perish in
+his pride."
+
+When Mr. Cupples had been supplied with his monastic drink, and the
+waiter had retired, Trent looked across the table with significance. "In
+this babble of many conversations," he said, "we can speak as freely as
+if we were on a bare hill-side. The waiter is whispering soft nothings
+into the ear of the young woman at the pay-desk. We are alone. What do
+you think of that interview of this afternoon?" He began to dine with an
+appetite.
+
+Without pausing in the task of cutting his mutton into very small pieces
+Mr. Cupples replied: "The most curious feature of it, in my judgment,
+was the irony of the situation. We both held the clue to that mad hatred
+of Manderson's which Marlowe found so mysterious. We knew of his jealous
+obsession; which knowledge we withheld, as was very proper, if only in
+consideration of Mabel's feelings. Marlowe will never know of what he
+was suspected by that person. Strange! Nearly all of us, I venture to
+think, move unconsciously among a network of opinions, often quite
+erroneous, which other people entertain about us. With regard to
+Marlowe's story, it appeared to me entirely straightforward, and not, in
+its essential features, especially remarkable, once we have admitted, as
+we surely must, that in the case of Manderson we have to deal with a
+more or less disordered mind. It was Mr. Bunner, I think you said, who
+told you of his rooted and apparently hereditary temper of suspicious
+jealousy. When the pressure of his business labors brought on mental
+derangement, that abnormality increased until it dominated him
+entirely."
+
+Trent laughed loudly. "Not especially remarkable!" he said. "I confess
+that the affair struck me as a little unusual."
+
+"Only in the development of the details," argued Mr. Cupples. "What is
+there abnormal in the essential facts? A madman conceives a crazy
+suspicion; he hatches a cunning plot against his fancied injurer; it
+involves his own destruction. Put thus, what is there that any man with
+the least knowledge of the ways of lunatics would call remarkable? Turn
+now to Marlowe's proceedings. He finds himself in a perilous position
+from which, though he is innocent, telling the truth will not save him.
+Is that an unheard-of situation? He escapes by means of a bold and
+ingenious piece of deception. That seems to me a thing that might happen
+every day and probably does so." He attacked his now unrecognizable
+mutton.
+
+"I should like to know," said Trent after an alimentary pause in the
+conversation, "whether there is anything that ever happened on the face
+of the earth that you could not represent as quite ordinary and
+commonplace, by such a line of argument as that. You may say what you
+like, but the idea of impersonating Manderson in those circumstances was
+an extraordinarily ingenious idea."
+
+"Ingenious--certainly!" replied Mr. Cupples. "Extraordinarily so--no! In
+those circumstances (your own words) it was really not strange that it
+should occur to a clever man. It lay almost on the surface of the
+situation. Marlowe was famous for his imitation of Manderson's voice; he
+had a talent for acting; he knew the ways of the establishment
+intimately. I grant you that the idea was brilliantly carried out; but
+everything favored it. As for the essential idea, I do not place it, as
+regards ingenuity, in the same class with, for example, the idea of
+utilizing the force of recoil in a discharged firearm to actuate the
+mechanism of ejecting and reloading. I do, however, admit, as I did at
+the outset, that in respect of details the case had unusual features. It
+developed a high degree of complexity."
+
+"Did it really strike you in that way?" inquired Trent with desperate
+sarcasm.
+
+"The affair became complicated," proceeded Mr. Cupples quite unmoved,
+"because after Marlowe's suspicions were awakened a second subtle mind
+came in to interfere with the plans of the first. That sort of duel
+often happens in business and politics, but less frequently, I imagine,
+in the world of crime. One disturbing reflection was left on my mind by
+what we learned to-day. If Marlowe had suspected nothing and walked into
+the trap, he would almost certainly have been hanged. Now how often may
+not a plan to throw the guilt of murder on an innocent person have been
+practised successfully? There are, I imagine, numbers of cases in which
+the accused, being found guilty on circumstantial evidence, have died
+protesting their innocence. I shall never approve again of a
+death-sentence imposed in a case decided upon such evidence."
+
+"I never have done so, for my part," said Trent. "To hang in such cases
+seems to me flying in the face of the perfectly obvious and sound
+principle expressed in the saying that 'you never can tell.' I agree
+with the American jurist who lays it down that we should not hang a
+yellow dog for stealing jam on circumstantial evidence, not even if he
+has jam all over his nose. As for attempts being made by malevolent
+persons to fix crimes upon innocent men, of course it is constantly
+happening."
+
+Mr. Cupples mused a few moments. "We know," he said, "from the things
+Mabel and Mr. Bunner told you what may be termed the spiritual truth
+underlying this matter: the insane depth of jealous hatred which
+Manderson concealed. We can understand that he was capable of such a
+scheme. But as a rule it is in the task of penetrating to the spiritual
+truth that the administration of justice breaks down. Sometimes that
+truth is deliberately concealed, as in Manderson's case. Sometimes, I
+think, it is concealed because simple people are actually unable to
+express it, and nobody else divines it."
+
+"The law certainly does not shine when it comes to a case requiring much
+delicacy of perception," said Trent. "It goes wrong easily enough over
+the commonplace criminal. As for the people with temperaments who get
+mixed up in legal proceedings, they must feel as if they were in a
+forest of apes, whether they win or lose. Well, I dare say it's good for
+them and their sort to have their noses rubbed in reality now and again.
+But what would twelve red-faced realities in a jury-box have done to
+Marlowe? His story would, as he says, have been a great deal worse than
+no defense at all. It's not as if there were a single piece of evidence
+in support of his tale. Can't you imagine how the prosecution would tear
+it to rags? Can't you see the judge simply taking it in his stride when
+it came to the summing up? And the jury--you've served on juries, I
+expect--in their room, snorting with indignation over the feebleness of
+the lie, telling each other it was the clearest case they ever heard of,
+and that they'd have thought better of him if he hadn't lost his nerve
+at the crisis, and had cleared off with the swag as he intended. Imagine
+yourself on that jury, not knowing Marlowe, and trembling with
+indignation at the record unrolled before you--cupidity, murder,
+robbery, sudden cowardice, shameless, impenitent, desperate lying! Why,
+you and I believed him to be guilty until--"
+
+"I beg your pardon! I beg your pardon!" interjected Mr. Cupples, laying
+down his knife and fork. "I was most careful, when we talked it all over
+the other night, to say nothing indicating such a belief. _I_ was always
+certain that he was innocent."
+
+"You said something of the sort at Marlowe's just now. I wondered what
+on earth you could mean. Certain that he was innocent! How can you be
+certain? You are generally more careful about terms than that, Cupples."
+
+"I said 'certain,'" Mr. Cupples repeated firmly.
+
+Trent shrugged his shoulders. "If you really were, after reading my
+manuscript and discussing the whole thing as we did," he rejoined, "then
+I can only say that you must have totally renounced all trust in the
+operations of the human reason; an attitude which, while it is bad
+Christianity and also infernal nonsense, is oddly enough bad Positivism
+too, unless I misunderstand that system. Why, man--"
+
+"Let me say a word," Mr. Cupples interposed again, folding his hands
+above his plate. "I assure you I am far from abandoning reason. I am
+certain he is innocent, and I always was certain of it, because of
+something that I know, and knew from the very beginning. You asked me
+just now to imagine myself on the jury at Marlowe's trial. That would be
+an unprofitable exercise of the mental powers, because I know that I
+should be present in another capacity. I should be in the witness box,
+giving evidence for the defense. You said just now, 'If there were a
+single piece of evidence in support of his tale.' There is, and it is my
+evidence. And," he added quietly, "it is conclusive." He took up his
+knife and fork and went contentedly on with his dinner.
+
+The pallor of excitement had turned Trent to marble while Mr. Cupples
+led laboriously up to this statement. At the last word the blood rushed
+to his face again and he struck the table with an unnatural laugh. "It
+can't be!" he exploded. "It's something you fancied, something you
+dreamed after one of those debauches of soda-and-milk. You can't really
+mean that all the time I was working on the case down there you knew
+Marlowe was innocent."
+
+Mr. Cupples, busy with his last mouthful, nodded brightly. He made an
+end of eating, wiped his sparse mustache, and then leaned forward over
+the table. "It's very simple," he said. "I shot Manderson myself."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I am afraid I startled you," Trent heard the voice of Mr. Cupples say.
+He forced himself out of his stupefaction like a diver striking upward
+for the surface, and with a rigid movement raised his glass. But half of
+the wine splashed upon the cloth, and he put it carefully down again
+untasted. He drew a deep breath, which was exhaled in a laugh wholly
+without merriment. "Go on," he said.
+
+"It was not murder," began Mr. Cupples, slowly measuring off inches with
+a fork on the edge of the table. "I will tell you the whole story. On
+that Sunday night I was taking my before-bedtime constitutional, having
+set out from the hotel about a quarter past ten. I went along the
+field-path that runs behind White Gables, cutting off the great curve of
+the road, and came out on the road nearly opposite that gate that is
+just by the eighth hole on the golf-course. Then I turned in there,
+meaning to walk along the turf to the edge of the cliff, and go back
+that way. I had only gone a few steps when I heard the car coming, and
+then I heard it stop near the gate. I saw Manderson at once. Do you
+remember my telling you I had seen him once alive after our quarrel in
+front of the hotel? Well, this was the time. You asked me if I had, and
+I did not care to tell a falsehood."
+
+A slight groan came from Trent. He drank a little wine, and said
+stonily: "Go on, please."
+
+"It was, as you know," pursued Mr. Cupples, "a moonlight night; but I
+was in shadow under the trees by the stone wall, and anyhow they could
+not suppose there was any one near them. I heard all that passed just as
+Marlowe has narrated it to us, and I saw the car go off towards
+Bishopsbridge. I did not see Manderson's face as it went, because his
+back was to me, but he shook his left hand at the car with extraordinary
+violence, greatly to my amazement. Then I waited for him to go back to
+White Gables, as I did not want to meet him again. But he did not go. He
+opened the gate through which I had just passed, and he stood there on
+the turf of the green, quite still. His head was bent, his arms hung at
+his sides, and he looked somehow ... rigid. For a few moments he
+remained in this tense attitude; then all of a sudden his right arm
+moved swiftly, and his hand was at the pocket of his overcoat. I saw his
+face raised in the moonlight, the teeth bared and the eyes glittering,
+and all at once I knew that the man was mad. Almost as quickly as that
+flashed across my mind, something else flashed in the moonlight. He held
+the pistol before him, pointing at his breast.
+
+"Now I may say here I shall always be doubtful whether Manderson
+intended to kill himself then. Marlowe naturally thinks so, knowing
+nothing of my intervention. But I think it quite likely he only meant to
+wound himself, and to charge Marlowe with attempted murder and robbery.
+
+"At that moment, however, I assumed it was suicide. Before I knew what I
+was doing I had leapt out of the shadows and seized his arm. He shook me
+off with a furious snarling noise, giving me a terrific blow in the
+chest, and presented the revolver at my head. But I seized his wrists
+before he could fire, and clung with all my strength--you remember how
+bruised and scratched they were. I knew I was fighting for my own life
+now, for murder was in his eyes. We struggled like two beasts, without
+an articulate word, I holding his pistol-hand down and keeping a grip on
+the other. I never dreamed that I had the strength for such an
+encounter. Then, with a perfectly instinctive movement--I never knew I
+meant to do it--I flung away his free hand and clutched like lightning
+at the weapon, tearing it from his fingers. By a miracle it did not go
+off. I darted back a few steps, he sprang at my throat like a wild cat,
+and I fired blindly in his face. He would have been about a yard away, I
+suppose. His knees gave way instantly, and he fell in a heap on the
+turf.
+
+"I flung the pistol down, and bent over him. The heart's motion ceased
+under my hand. I knelt there staring, struck motionless; and I don't
+know how long it was before I heard the noise of the car returning.
+
+"Trent, all the time that Marlowe paced that green, with the moonlight
+on his white and working face, I was within a few yards of him,
+crouching in the shadow of the furze by the ninth tee. I dared not show
+myself. I was thinking. My public quarrel with Manderson the same
+morning was, I suspected, the talk of the hotel. I assure you that every
+horrible possibility of the situation for me had rushed across my mind
+the moment I saw Manderson fall. I became cunning. I knew what I must
+do. I must get back to the hotel as fast as I could, get in somehow
+unperceived, and play a part to save myself. I must never tell a word to
+any one. Of course I was assuming that Marlowe would tell everyone how
+he had found the body. I knew he would suppose it was suicide; I thought
+everyone would suppose so.
+
+"When Marlowe began at last to lift the body, I stole away down the wall
+and got out into the road by the club-house, where he could not see me.
+I felt perfectly cool and collected. I crossed the road, climbed the
+fence, and ran across the meadow to pick up the field-path I had come
+by, that runs to the hotel behind White Gables. I got back to the hotel
+very much out of breath."
+
+"Out of breath," repeated Trent mechanically, still staring at his
+companion as if hypnotized.
+
+"I had had a sharp run," said Mr. Cupples. "Well, approaching the hotel
+from the back I could see into the writing-room through the open window.
+There was nobody in there, so I climbed over the sill, walked to the
+bell and rang it, and then sat down to write a letter I had meant to
+write the next day. I saw by the clock that it was a little past eleven.
+When the waiter answered the bell I asked for a glass of milk and a
+postage-stamp. Soon afterwards I went up to bed. But I could not sleep."
+
+Mr. Cupples, having nothing more to say, ceased speaking. He looked in
+mild surprise at Trent, who now sat silent, supporting his bent head in
+his hands.
+
+"He could not sleep!" murmured Trent at last in a hollow tone. "A
+frequent result of over-exertion during the day. Nothing to be alarmed
+about." He was silent again, then looked up with a pale face. "Cupples,
+I am cured. I will never touch a crime-mystery again. The Manderson
+affair shall be Philip Trent's last case. His high-blown pride at length
+breaks under him." Trent's smile suddenly returned. "I could have borne
+everything but that last revelation of the impotence of human reason.
+Cupples, I have absolutely nothing left to say, except this: you have
+beaten me. I drink your health in a spirit of self-abasement. And _you_
+shall pay for the dinner."
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Woman in Black, by Edmund Clerihew Bentley
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