Max Carrados/The Tilling Shaw Mystery
“I will see Miss George now,” assented Carrados. Parkinson retired and Greatorex looked round from his chair. The morning “clearing-up” was still in progress.
“Shall I go?” he inquired.
“Not unless the lady desires it. I don’t know her at all.”
The secretary was not unobservant and he had profited from his association with Mr Carrados. Without more ado, he began to get his papers quietly together.
The door opened and a girl of about twenty came eagerly yet half timorously into the room. Her eyes for a moment swept Carrados with an anxious scrutiny. Then, with a slight shade of disappointment, she noticed that they were not alone.
“I have come direct from Oakshire to see you, Mr Carrados,” she announced, in a quick, nervous voice that was evidently the outcome of a desperate resolution to be brave and explicit. “The matter is a dreadfully important one to me and I should very much prefer to tell it to you alone.”
There was no need for Carrados to turn towards his secretary; that discriminating young gentleman was already on his way. Miss George flashed him a shy look of thanks and filled in the moment with a timid survey of the room.
“Is it something that you think I can help you with?”
“I had hoped so. I had heard in a roundabout way of your wonderful power—ought I to tell you how—does it matter?”
“Not in the least if it has nothing to do with the case,” replied Carrados.
“When this dreadful thing happened I instinctively thought of you. I felt sure that I ought to come and get you to help me at once. But I—I have very little money, Mr Carrados, only a few pounds, and I am not so childish as not to know that very clever men require large fees. Then when I got here my heart sank, for I saw at once from your house and position that what seemed little even to me would be ridiculous to you—that if you did help me it would be purely out of kindness of heart and generosity.”
“Suppose you tell me what the circumstances are,” suggested Carrados cautiously. Then, to afford an opening, he added: “You have recently gone into mourning, I see.”
“See!” exclaimed the girl almost sharply. “Then you are not blind?”
“Oh yes,” he replied; “only I use the familiar expression, partly from custom, partly because it sounds unnecessarily pedantic to say, ‘I deduce from certain observations.’”
“I beg your pardon. I suppose I was startled not so much by the expression as by your knowledge. I ought to have been prepared. But I am already wasting your time and I came so determined to be business-like. I got a copy of the local paper on the way, because I thought that the account in it would be clearer to you than I could tell it. Shall I read it?”
“Please; if that was your intention.”
“It is The Stinbridge Herald,” explained the girl, taking a closely folded newspaper from the handbag which she carried. “Stinbridge is our nearest town—about six miles from Tilling Shaw, where we live. This is the account:
“‘MYSTERIOUS TRAGEDY AT TILLING
“‘Well-known Agriculturalist Attempts Murder and Commits Suicide
“‘The districts of Great Tilling, Tilling Shaw and the immediate neighbourhood were thrown into a state of unusual excitement on Thursday last by the report of a tragedy in their midst such as has rarely marked the annals of our law-abiding country-side.
“‘A Herald representative was early on the scene, and his inquiries elucidated the fact that it was only too true that in this case rumour had not exaggerated the circumstances, rather the reverse indeed.
“‘On the afternoon of the day in question, Mr Frank Whitmarsh, of High Barn, presented himself at Barony, the residence of his uncle, Mr William Whitmarsh, with the intention of seeing him in reference to a dispute that was pending between them. This is understood to be connected with an alleged trespass in pursuit of game, each relative claiming exclusive sporting rights over a piece of water known as Hunstan Mere.
“‘On this occasion the elder gentleman was not at home and Mr Frank Whitmarsh, after waiting for some time, departed, leaving a message to the effect that he would return, and, according to one report, “have it out with Uncle William,” later in the evening.
“‘This resolution he unfortunately kept. Returning about eight-forty-five p.m. he found his uncle in and for some time the two men remained together in the dining-room. What actually passed between them has not yet transpired, but it is said that for half-an-hour there had been nothing to indicate to the other occupants of the house that anything unusual was in progress when suddenly two shots rang out in rapid succession. Mrs Lawrence, the housekeeper at Barony, and a servant were the soonest on the spot, and, conquering the natural terror that for a moment held them outside the now silent room, they summoned up courage to throw open the door and to enter. The first thing that met their eyes was the body of Mr Frank Whitmarsh lying on the floor almost at their feet. In their distressed state it was immediately assumed by the horrified women that he was dead, or at least seriously wounded, but a closer examination revealed the fact that the gentleman had experienced an almost miraculous escape. At the time of the tragedy he was wearing a large old-fashioned silver watch; and in this the bullet intended for his heart was found, literally embedded deep in the works. The second shot had, however, effected its purpose, for at the other side of the room, still seated at the table, was Mr William Whitmarsh, already quite dead, with a terrible wound in his head and the weapon, a large-bore revolver of obsolete pattern, lying at his feet.
“‘Mr Frank Whitmarsh subsequently explained that the shock of the attack, and the dreadful appearance presented by his uncle when, immediately afterwards, he turned his hand against himself, must have caused him to faint.
“‘Readers of The Herald will join in our expression of sympathy for all members of the Whitmarsh family, and in our congratulations to Mr Frank Whitmarsh on his providential escape.
“‘The inquest is fixed for Monday and it is anticipated that the funeral will take place on the following day.’”
“That is all,” concluded Miss George.
“All that is in the paper,” amended Carrados.
“It is the same everywhere—‘attempted murder and suicide’—that is what everyone accepts as a matter of course,” went on the girl quickly. “How do they know that my father tried to kill Frank, or that he killed himself? How can they know, Mr Carrados?”
“Your father, Miss George?”
“Yes. My name is Madeline Whitmarsh. At home everyone looks at me as if I was an object of mingled pity and reproach. I thought that they might know the name here, so I gave the first that came into my head. I think it is a street I was directed along. Besides, I don’t want it to be known that I came to see you in any case.”
“Why?”
Much of the girl’s conscious nervousness had stiffened into an attitude of unconscious hardness. Grief takes many forms, and whatever she had been before, the tragic episode had left Miss Whitmarsh a little hurt and cynical.
“You are a man living in a town and can do as you like. I am a girl living in the country and have therefore to do largely as my neighbours like. For me to set up my opinion against popular feeling would constitute no small offence; to question its justice would be held to be adding outrageous insult to enormous injury.”
“So far I am unable to go beyond the newspaper account. On the face of it, your father—with what provocation of course I do not know—did attempt this Mr Frank Whitmarsh’s life and then take his own. You imply another version. What reason have you?”
“That is the terrible part of it,” exclaimed the girl, with rising distress. “It was that which made me so afraid of coming to you, although I felt that I must, for I dreaded that when you asked me for proofs and I could give you none you would refuse to help me. We were not even in time to hear him speak, and yet I know, know with absolute conviction, that my father would not have done this. There are things that you cannot explain, Mr Carrados, and—well, there is an end of it.”
Her voice sank to an absent-minded whisper.
“Everyone will condemn him now that he cannot defend himself, and yet he could not even have had the revolver that was found at his feet.”
“What is that?” demanded Carrados sharply. “Do you mean that?”
“Mean what?” she asked, with the blankness of one who has lost the thread of her own thoughts.
“What you said about the revolver—that your father could not have had it?”
“The revolver?” she repeated half wearily; “oh yes. It was a heavy, old-fashioned affair. It had been lying in a drawer of his desk for more than ten years because once a dog came into the orchard in broad daylight light and worried half-a-dozen lambs before anyone could do anything.”
“Yes, but why could he not have it on Thursday?”
“I noticed that it was gone. After Frank had left in the afternoon I went into the room where he had been waiting, to finish dusting. The paper says the dining-room, but it was really papa’s business-room and no one else used it. Then when I was dusting the desk I saw that the revolver was no longer there.”
“You had occasion to open the drawer?”
“It is really a very old bureau and none of the drawers fit closely. Dust lies on the ledges and you always have to open them a little to dust properly. They were never kept locked.”
“Possibly your father had taken the revolver with him.”
“No. I had seen it there after he had gone. He rode to Stinbridge immediately after lunch and did not return until nearly eight. After he left I went to dust his room. It was then that I saw it. I was doing the desk when Frank knocked and interrupted me. That is how I came to be there twice.”
“But you said that you had no proof, Miss Whitmarsh,” Carrados reminded her, with deep seriousness. “Do you not recognize the importance—the deadly importance—that this one shred of evidence may assume?”
“Does it?” she replied simply. “I am afraid that I am rather dull just now. All yesterday I was absolutely dazed; I could not do the most ordinary things. I found myself looking at the clock for minutes together, yet absolutely incapable of grasping what time it was. In the same way I know that it struck me as being funny about the revolver but I always had to give it up. It was as though everything was there but things would not fit in.”
“You are sure, absolutely sure, that you saw the revolver there after your father had left, and missed it before he returned?”
“Oh yes,” said the girl quickly; “I remember realizing how curious it was at the time. Besides there is something else. I so often had things to ask papa about when he was out of the house that I got into the way of making little notes to remind me later. This morning I found on my dressing-table one that I had written on Thursday afternoon.”
“About this weapon?”
“Yes; to ask him what could have become of it.”
Carrados made a further inquiry, and this was Madeline Whitmarsh’s account of affairs existing between the two branches of the family:
Until the time of William Whitmarsh, father of the William Whitmarsh just deceased, the properties of Barony and High Barn had formed one estate, descending from a William senior to a William junior down a moderately long line of yeomen Whitmarshes. Through the influence of his second wife this William senior divided the property, leaving Barony with its four hundred acres of good land to William junior, and High Barn, with which went three hundred acres of poor land, to his other son, father of the Frank implicated in the recent tragedy. But though divided, the two farms still had one common link. Beneath their growing corn and varied pasturage lay, it was generally admitted, a seam of coal at a depth and of a thickness that would render its working a paying venture. Even in William the Divider’s time, when the idea was new, money in plenty would have been forthcoming, but he would have none of it, and when he died his will contained a provision restraining either son from mining or exploiting his land for mineral without the consent and co-operation of the other.
This restriction became a legacy of hate. The brothers were only half-brothers and William having suffered unforgettably at the hands of his step-mother had old scores to pay off. Quite comfortably prosperous on his own rich farm, and quite satisfied with the excellent shooting and the congenial life, he had not the slightest desire to increase his wealth. He had the old dour, peasant-like instinct to cling to the house and the land of his forefathers. From this position no argument moved him.
In the meanwhile, on the other side of the new boundary fence, Frank senior was growing poorer year by year. To his periodical entreaties that William would agree to shafts being sunk on High Barn he received an emphatic “Never in my time!” The poor man argued, besought, threatened and swore; the prosperous one shook his head and grinned. Carrados did not need to hear the local saying: “Half brothers: whole haters; like the Whitmarshes,” to read the situation.
“Of course I do not really understand the business part of it,” said Madeline, “and many people blamed poor papa, especially when Uncle Frank drank himself to death. But I know that it was not mere obstinacy. He loved the undisturbed, peaceful land just as it was, and his father had wished it to remain the same. Collieries would bring swarms of strange men into the neighbourhood, poachers and trespassers, he said. The smoke and dust would ruin the land for miles round and drive away the game, and in the end, if the work did not turn out profitable, we should all be much worse off than before.”
“Does the restriction lapse now; will Mr Frank junior be able to mine?”
“It will now lie with Frank and my brother William, just as it did before with their fathers. I should expect Willie to be quite favourable. He is more—modern.”
“You have not spoken of your brother.”
“I have two. Bob, the younger, is in Mexico,” she explained; “and Willie in Canada with an engineering firm. They did not get on very well with papa and they went away.”
It did not require preternatural observation to deduce that the late William Whitmarsh had been “a little difficult.”
“When Uncle Frank died, less than six months ago, Frank came back to High Barn from South Africa. He had been away about two years.”
“Possibly he did not get on well with his father?”
Madeline smiled sadly.
“I am afraid that no two Whitmarsh men ever did get on well together,” she admitted.
“Your father and young Frank, for instance?”
“Their lands adjoin; there were always quarrels and disputes,” she replied. “Then Frank had his father’s grievance over again.”
“He wished to mine?”
“Yes. He told me that he had had experience of coal in Natal.”
“There was no absolute ostracism between you then? You were to some extent friends?”
“Scarcely.” She appeared to reflect. “Acquaintances.... We met occasionally, of course, at people’s houses.”
“You did not visit High Barn?”
“Oh no.”
“But there was no particular reason why you should not?”
“Why do you ask me that?” she demanded quickly, and in a tone that was quite incompatible with the simple inquiry. Then, recognizing the fact, she added, with shamefaced penitence: “I beg your pardon, Mr Carrados. I am afraid that my nerves have gone to pieces since Thursday. The most ordinary things affect me inexplicably.”
“That is a common experience in such circumstances,” said Carrados reassuringly. “Where were you at the time of the tragedy?”
“I was in my bedroom, which is rather high up, changing. I had driven down to the village, to give an order, and had just returned. Mrs Lawrence told me that she had been afraid there might be quarrelling, but no one would ever have dreamed of this, and then came a loud shot and then, after a few seconds, another not so loud, and we rushed to the door—she and Mary first—and everything was absolutely still.”
“A loud shot and then another not so loud?”
“Yes; I noticed that even at the time. I happened to speak to Mrs Lawrence of it afterwards and then she also remembered that it had been like that.”
Afterwards Carrados often recalled with grim pleasantry that the two absolutely vital points in the fabric of circumstantial evidence that was to exonerate her father and fasten the guilt upon another had dropped from the girl’s lips utterly by chance. But at the moment the facts themselves monopolized his attention.
“You are not disappointed that I can tell you so little?” she asked timidly.
“Scarcely,” he replied. “A suicide who could not have had the weapon he dies by, a victim who is miraculously preserved by an opportune watch, and two shots from the same pistol that differ materially in volume, all taken together do not admit of disappointment.”
“I am very stupid,” she said. “I do not seem able to follow things. But you will come and clear my father’s name?”
“I will come,” he replied. “Beyond that who shall prophesy?”
It had been arranged between them that the girl should return at once, while Carrados would travel down to Great Tilling late that same afternoon and put up at the local fishing inn. In the evening he would call at Barony, where Madeline would accept him as a distant connexion of the family. The arrangement was only for the benefit of the domestics and any casual visitor who might be present, for there was no possibility of a near relation being in attendance. Nor was there any appreciable danger of either his name or person being recognized in those parts, a consideration that seemed to have some weight with the girl, for, more than once, she entreated him not to disclose to anyone his real business there until he had arrived at a definite conclusion.
It was nine o’clock, but still just light enough to distinguish the prominent features of the landscape, when Carrados, accompanied by Parkinson, reached Barony. The house, as described by the man-servant, was a substantial grey stone building, very plain, very square, very exposed to the four winds. It had not even a porch to break the flat surface, and here and there in the line of its three solid storeys a window had been built up by some frugal, tax-evading Whitmarsh of a hundred years ago.
“Sombre enough,” commented Carrados, “but the connexion between environment and crime is not yet capable of analysis. We get murders in brand-new suburban villas and the virtues, light-heartedness and good-fellowship, in moated granges. What should you say about it, eh, Parkinson?”
“I should say it was damp, sir,” observed Parkinson, with his wisest air.
Madeline Whitmarsh herself opened the door. She took them down the long flagged hall to the dining-room, a cheerful enough apartment whatever its exterior might forebode.
“I am glad you have come now, Mr Carrados,” she said hurriedly, when the door was closed. “Sergeant Brewster is here from Stinbridge police station to make some arrangements for the inquest. It is to be held at the schools here on Monday. He says that he must take the revolver with him to produce. Do you want to see it before he goes?”
“I should like to,” replied Carrados.
“Will you come into papa’s room then? He is there.”
The sergeant was at the table, making notes in his pocket-book, when they entered. An old-fashioned revolver lay before him.
“This gentleman has come a long way on hearing about poor papa,” said the girl. “He would like to see the revolver before you take it, Mr Brewster.”
“Good-evening, sir,” said Brewster. “It’s a bad business that brings us here.”
Carrados “looked” round the room and returned the policeman’s greeting. Madeline hesitated for a moment, and then, picking up the weapon, put it into the blind man’s hand.
“A bit out of date, sir,” remarked Brewster, with a nod. “But in good order yet, I find.”
“An early French make, I should say; one of Lefaucheux’s probably,” said Carrados. “You have removed the cartridges?”
“Why, yes,” admitted the sergeant, producing a matchbox from his pocket. “They’re pin-fire, you see, and I’m not too fond of carrying a thing like that loaded in my pocket as I’m riding a young horse.”
“Quite so,” agreed Carrados, fingering the cartridges. “I wonder if you happened to mark the order of these in the chambers?”
“That was scarcely necessary, sir. Two, together, had been fired; the other four had not.”
“I once knew a case—possibly I read of it—where a pack of cards lay on the floor. It was a murder case and the guilt or innocence of an accused man depended on the relative positions of the fifty-first and fifty-second cards.”
“I think you must have read of that, sir,” replied Brewster, endeavouring to implicate first Miss Whitmarsh and then Parkinson in his meaning smile. “However, this is straightforward enough.”
“Then, of course, you have not thought it worth while to look for anything else?”
“I have noted all the facts that have any bearing on the case. Were you referring to any particular point, sir?”
“I was only wondering,” suggested Carrados, with apologetic mildness, “whether you, or anyone, had happened to find a wad lying about anywhere.”
The sergeant stroked his well-kept moustache to hide the smile that insisted, however, on escaping through his eyes.
“Scarcely, sir,” he replied, with fine irony. “Bulleted revolver cartridges contain no wad. You are thinking of a shot-gun, sir.”
“Oh,” said Carrados, bending over the spent cartridge he was examining, “that settles it, of course.”
“I think so, sir,” assented the sergeant, courteously but with a quiet enjoyment of the situation. “Well, miss, I’ll be getting back now. I think I have everything I want.”
“You will excuse me a few minutes?” said Miss Whitmarsh, and the two callers were left alone.
“Parkinson,” said Carrados softly, as the door closed, “look round on the floor. There is no wad lying within sight?”
“No, sir.”
“Then take the lamp and look behind things. But if you find one don’t disturb it.”
For a minute strange and gigantic shadows chased one another across the ceiling as Parkinson moved the table-lamp to and fro behind the furniture. The man to whom blazing sunlight and the deepest shade were as one sat with his eyes fixed tranquilly on the unseen wall before him.
“There is a little pellet of paper here behind the couch, sir,” announced Parkinson.
“Then put the lamp back.”
Together they drew the cumbrous old piece of furniture from the wall and Carrados went behind. On hands and knees, with his face almost to the floor, he appeared to be studying even the dust that lay there. Then with a light, unerring touch he carefully picked up the thing that Parkinson had found. Very gently he unrolled it, using his long, delicate fingers so skilfully that even at the end the particles of dust still clung here and there to the surface of the paper.
“What do you make of it, Parkinson?”
Parkinson submitted it to the judgment of a single sense.
“A cigarette-paper to all appearance, sir. I can’t say it’s a kind that I’ve had experience of. It doesn’t seem to have any distinct watermark but there is a half-inch of glossy paper along one edge.”
“Amber-tipped. Yes?”
“Another edge is a little uneven; it appears to have been cut.”
“This edge opposite the mouthpiece. Yes, yes.”
“Patches are blackened, and little holes—like pinpricks—burned through. In places it is scorched brown.”
“Anything else?”
“I hope there is nothing I have failed to observe, sir,” said Parkinson, after a pause.
Carrados’s reply was a strangely irrelevant question.
“What is the ceiling made of?” he demanded.
“Oak boards, sir, with a heavy cross-beam.”
“Are there any plaster figures about the room?”
“No, sir.”
“Or anything at all that is whitewashed?”
“Nothing, sir.”
Carrados raised the scrap of tissue paper to his nose again, and for the second time he touched it with his tongue.
“Very interesting, Parkinson,” he remarked, and Parkinson’s responsive “Yes, sir” was a model of discreet acquiescence.
“I am sorry that I had to leave you,” said Miss Whitmarsh, returning, “but Mrs Lawrence is out and my father made a practice of offering everyone refreshment.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Carrados. “We have not been idle. I came from London to pick up a scrap of paper, lying on the floor of this room. Well, here it is.” He rolled the tissue into a pellet again and held it before her eyes.
“The wad!” she exclaimed eagerly. “Oh, that proves that I was right?”
“Scarcely ‘proves,’ Miss Whitmarsh.”
“But it shows that one of the shots was a blank charge, as you suggested this morning might have been the case.”
“Hardly even that.”
“What then?” she demanded, with her large dark eyes fixed in a curious fascination on his inscrutable face.
“That behind the couch we have found this scrap of powder-singed paper.”
There was a moment’s silence. The girl turned away her head.
“I am afraid that I am a little disappointed,” she murmured.
“Perhaps better now than later. I wished to warn you that we must prove every inch of ground. Does your cousin Frank smoke cigarettes?”
“I cannot say, Mr Carrados. You see ... I knew so little of him.”
“Quite so; there was just the chance. And your father?”
“He never did. He despised them.”
“That is all I need ask you now. What time to-morrow shall I find you in, Miss Whitmarsh? It is Sunday, you remember.”
“At any time. The curiosity I inspire doesn’t tempt me to encounter my friends, I can assure you,” she replied, her face hardening at the recollection. “But ... Mr Carrados——”
“Yes?”
“The inquest is on Monday afternoon.... I had a sort of desperate faith that you would be able to vindicate papa.”
“By the time of the inquest, you mean?”
“Yes. Otherwise——”
“The verdict of a coroner’s jury means nothing, Miss Whitmarsh. It is the merest formality.”
“It means a very great deal to me. It haunts and oppresses me. If they say—if it goes out—that papa is guilty of the attempt of murder, and of suicide, I shall never raise my head again.”
Carrados had no desire to prolong a futile discussion.
“Good-night,” he said, holding out his hand.
“Good-night, Mr Carrados.” She detained him a moment, her voice vibrant with quiet feeling. “I already owe you more than I can ever hope to express. Your wonderful kindness——”
“A strange case,” moralized Carrados, as they walked out of the quadrangular yard into the silent lane. “Instructive, but I more than half wish I’d never heard of it.”
“The young lady seems grateful, sir,” Parkinson ventured to suggest.
“The young lady is the case, Parkinson,” replied his master rather grimly.
A few score yards farther on a swing gate gave access to a field-path, cutting off the corner that the high road made with the narrow lane. This was their way, but instead of following the brown line of trodden earth Carrados turned to the left and indicated the line of buildings that formed the back of one side of the quadrangle they had passed through.
“We will investigate here,” he said. “Can you see a way in?”
Most of the buildings opened on to the yard, but at one end of the range Parkinson discovered a door, secured only by a wooden latch. The place beyond was impenetrably dark, but the sweet, dusty smell of hay, and, from beyond, the occasional click of a horse’s shoe on stone and the rattle of a head-stall chain through the manger ring told them that they were in the chaff-pen at the back of the stable.
Carrados stretched out his hand and touched the wall with a single finger.
“We need go no farther,” he remarked, and as they resumed their way across the field he took out a handkerchief to wipe the taste of whitewash off his tongue.
Madeline had spoken of the gradual decay of High Barn, but Carrados was hardly prepared for the poverty-stricken desolation which Parkinson described as they approached the homestead on the following afternoon. He had purposely selected a way that took them across many of young Whitmarsh’s ill-stocked fields, fields in which sedge and charlock wrote an indictment of neglected drains and half-hearted tillage. On the land, the gates and hedges had been broken and unkempt; the buildings, as they passed through the farmyard, were empty and showed here and there a skeletonry of bare rafters to the sky.
“Starved,” commented the blind man, as he read the signs. “The thirsty owner and the hungry land: they couldn’t both be fed.”
Although it was afternoon the bolts and locks of the front door had to be unfastened in answer to their knock. When at last the door was opened a shrivelled little old woman, rather wicked-looking in a comic way, and rather begrimed, stood there.
“Mr Frank Whitmarsh?” she replied to Carrados’s polite inquiry; “oh yes, he lives here. Frank,” she called down the passage, “you’re wanted.”
“What is it, mother?” responded a man’s full, strong voice rather lazily.
“Come and see!” and the old creature ogled Carrados with her beady eyes as though the situation constituted an excellent joke between them.
There was the sound of a chair being moved and at the end of the passage a tall man appeared in his shirt sleeves.
“I am a stranger to you,” explained Carrados, “but I am staying at the Bridge Inn and I heard of your wonderful escape on Thursday. I was so interested that I have taken the liberty of coming across to congratulate you on it.”
“Oh, come in, come in,” said Whitmarsh. “Yes ... it was a sort of miracle, wasn’t it?”
He led the way back into the room he had come from, half kitchen, half parlour. It at least had the virtue of an air of rude comfort, and some of the pewter and china that ornamented its mantelpiece and dresser would have rejoiced a collector’s heart.
“You find us a bit rough,” apologized the young man, with something of contempt towards his surroundings. “We weren’t expecting visitors.”
“And I was hesitating to come because I thought that you would be surrounded by your friends.”
This very ordinary remark seemed to afford Mrs Whitmarsh unbounded entertainment and for quite a number of seconds she was convulsed with silent amusement at the idea.
“Shut up, mother,” said her dutiful son. “Don’t take any notice of her,” he remarked to his visitors, “she often goes on like that. The fact is,” he added, “we Whitmarshes aren’t popular in these parts. Of course that doesn’t trouble me; I’ve seen too much of things. And, taken as a boiling, the Whitmarshes deserve it.”
“Ah, wait till you touch the coal, my boy, then you’ll see,” put in the old lady, with malicious triumph.
“I reckon we’ll show them then, eh, mother?” he responded bumptiously. “Perhaps you’ve heard of that, Mr——?”
“Carrados—Wynn Carrados. This is my man, Parkinson. I have to be attended because my sight has failed me. Yes, I had heard something about coal. Providence seems to be on your side just now, Mr Whitmarsh. May I offer you a cigarette?”
“Thanks, I don’t mind for once in a way.”
“They’re Turkish; quite innocuous, I believe.”
“Oh, it isn’t that. I can smoke cutty with any man, I reckon, but the paper affects my lips. I make my own and use a sort of paper with an end that doesn’t stick.”
“The paper is certainly a drawback sometimes,” agreed Carrados. “I’ve found that. Might I try one of yours?”
They exchanged cigarettes and Whitmarsh returned to the subject of the tragedy.
“This has made a bit of a stir, I can tell you,” he remarked, with complacency.
“I am sure it would. Well, it was the chief topic of conversation when I was in London.”
“Is that a fact?” Avowedly indifferent to the opinion of his neighbours, even Whitmarsh was not proof against the pronouncement of the metropolis. “What do they say about it up there?”
“I should be inclined to think that the interest centres round the explanation you will give at the inquest of the cause of the quarrel.”
“There! What did I tell you?” exclaimed Mrs Whitmarsh.
“Be quiet, mother. That’s easily answered, Mr Carrados. There was a bit of duck shooting that lay between our two places. But perhaps you saw that in the papers?”
“Yes,” admitted Carrados, “I saw that. Frankly, the reason seemed inadequate to so deadly a climax.”
“What did I say?” demanded the irrepressible dame. “They won’t believe it.”
The young man cast a wrathful look in his mother’s direction and turned again to the visitor.
“That’s because you don’t know Uncle William. Any reason was good enough for him to quarrel over. Here, let me give you an instance. When I went in on Thursday he was smoking a pipe. Well, after a bit I took out a cigarette and lit it. I’m damned if he didn’t turn round and start on me for that. How does that strike you for one of your own family, Mr Carrados?”
“Unreasonable, I am bound to admit. I am afraid that I should have been inclined to argue the point. What did you do, Mr Whitmarsh?”
“I hadn’t gone there to quarrel,” replied the young man, half sulky at the recollection. “It was his house. I threw it into the fireplace.”
“Very obliging,” said Carrados. “But, if I may say so, it isn’t so much a matter of speculation why he should shoot you as why he should shoot himself.”
“The gentleman seems friendly. Better ask his advice, Frank,” put in the old woman in a penetrating whisper.
“Stow it, mother!” said Whitmarsh sharply. “Are you crazy? Her idea of a coroner’s inquest,” he explained to Carrados, with easy contempt, “is that I am being tried for murder. As a matter of fact, Uncle William was a very passionate man, and, like many of that kind, he frequently went beyond himself. I don’t doubt that he was sure he’d killed me, for he was a good shot and the force of the blow sent me backwards. He was a very proud man too, in a way—wouldn’t stand correction or any kind of authority, and when he realized what he’d done and saw in a flash that he would be tried and hanged for it, suicide seemed the easiest way out of his difficulties, I suppose.”
“Yes; that sounds reasonable enough,” admitted Carrados.
“Then you don’t think there will be any trouble, sir?” insinuated Mrs Whitmarsh anxiously.
Frank had already professed his indifference to local opinion, but Carrados was conscious that both of them hung rather breathlessly on to his reply.
“Why, no,” he declared weightily. “I should see no reason for anticipating any. Unless,” he added thoughtfully, “some clever lawyer was instructed to insist that there must be more in the dispute than appears on the surface.”
“Oh, them lawyers, them lawyers!” moaned the old lady in a panic. “They can make you say anything.”
“They can’t make me say anything.” A cunning look came into his complacent face. “And, besides, who’s going to engage a lawyer?”
“The family of the deceased gentleman might wish to do so.”
“Both of the sons are abroad and could not be back in time.”
“But is there not a daughter here? I understood so.”
Whitmarsh gave a short, unpleasant laugh and turned to look at his mother.
“Madeline won’t. You may bet your bottom tikkie it’s the last thing she would want.”
The little old creature gazed admiringly at her big showy son and responded with an appreciative grimace that made her look more humorously rat-like than ever.
“He! he! Missie won’t,” she tittered. “That would never do. He! he!” Wink succeeded nod and meaning smile until she relapsed into a state of quietness; and Parkinson, who had been fascinated by her contortions, was unable to decide whether she was still laughing or had gone to sleep.
Carrados stayed a few more minutes and before they left he asked to see the watch.
“A unique memento, Mr Whitmarsh,” he remarked, examining it. “I should think this would become a family heirloom.”
“It’s no good for anything else,” said Whitmarsh practically. “A famous time-keeper it was, too.”
“The fingers are both gone.”
“Yes; the glass was broken, of course, and they must have caught in the cloth of my pocket and ripped off.”
“They naturally would; it was ten minutes past nine when the shot was fired.”
The young man thought and then nodded.
“About that,” he agreed.
“Nearer than ‘about,’ if your watch was correct. Very interesting, Mr Whitmarsh. I am glad to have seen the watch that saved your life.”
Instead of returning to the inn Carrados directed Parkinson to take the road to Barony. Madeline was at home, and from the sound of voices it appeared that she had other visitors, but she came out to Carrados at once, and at his request took him into the empty dining-room while Parkinson stayed in the hall.
“Yes?” she said eagerly.
“I have come to tell you that I must throw up my brief,” he said. “There is nothing more to be done and I return to town to-night.”
“Oh!” she stammered helplessly. “I thought—I thought——”
“Your cousin did not abstract the revolver when he was here on Thursday, Miss Whitmarsh. He did not at his leisure fire a bullet into his own watch to make it appear, later in the day, as if he had been attacked. He did not reload the cartridge with a blank charge. He did not deliberately shoot your father and then fire off the blank cartridge. He was attacked and the newspaper version is substantially correct. The whole fabric so delicately suggested by inference and innuendo falls to pieces.”
“Then you desert me, Mr Carrados?” she said, in a low, bitter voice.
“I have seen the watch—the watch that saved Whitmarsh’s life,” he continued, unmoved. “It would save it again if necessary. It indicates ten minutes past nine—the time to a minute at which it is agreed the shot was fired. By what prescience was he to know at what exact minute his opportunity would occur?”
“When I saw the watch on Thursday night the fingers were not there.”
“They are not, but the shaft remains. It is of an old-fashioned pattern and it will only take the fingers in one position. That position indicates ten minutes past nine.”
“Surely it would have been an easy matter to have altered that afterwards?”
“In this case fate has been curiously systematic, Miss Whitmarsh. The bullet that shattered the works has so locked the action that it will not move a fraction this way or that.”
“There is something more than this—something that I do not understand,” she persisted. “I think I have a right to know.”
“Since you insist, there is. There is the wad of the blank cartridge that you fired in the outbuilding.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, in the moment of startled undefence, “how do you—how can you——”
“You must leave the conjurer his few tricks for effect. Of course you naturally would fire it where the precious pellet could not get lost—the paper you steamed off the cigarette that Whitmarsh threw into the empty fire-grate; and of course the place must be some distance from the house or even that slight report might occasion remark.”
“Yes,” she confessed, in a sudden abandonment to weary indifference, “it has been useless. I was a fool to set my cleverness against yours. Now, I suppose, Mr Carrados, you will have to hand me over to justice?
“Well; why don’t you say something?” she demanded impatiently, as he offered no comment.
“People frequently put me in this embarrassing position,” he explained diffidently, “and throw the responsibility on me. Now a number of years ago a large and stately building was set up in London and it was beautifully called ‘The Royal Palace of Justice.’ That was its official name and that was what it was to be; but very soon people got into the way of calling it the Law Courts, and to-day, if you asked a Londoner to direct you to the Palace of Justice he would undoubtedly set you down as a religious maniac. You see my difficulty?”
“It is very strange,” she said, intent upon her own reflections, “but I do not feel a bit ashamed to you of what I have done. I do not even feel afraid to tell you all about it, although of some of that I must certainly be ashamed. Why is it?”
“Because I am blind?”
“Oh no,” she replied very positively.
Carrados smiled at her decision but he did not seek to explain that when he could no longer see the faces of men the power was gradually given to him of looking into their hearts, to which some in their turn—strong, free spirits—instinctively responded.
“There is such a thing as friendship at first sight,” he suggested.
“Why, yes; like quite old friends,” she agreed. “It is a pity that I had no very trusty friend, since my mother died when I was quite little. Even my father has been—it is queer to think of it now—well, almost a stranger to me really.”
She looked at Carrados’s serene and kindly face and smiled.
“It is a great relief to be able to talk like this, without the necessity for lying,” she remarked. “Did you know that I was engaged?”
“No; you had not told me that.”
“Oh no, but you might have heard of it. He is a clergyman whom I met last summer. But, of course, that is all over now.”
“You have broken it off?”
“Circumstances have broken it off. The daughter of a man who had the misfortune to be murdered might just possibly be tolerated as a vicar’s wife, but the daughter of a murderer and suicide—it is unthinkable! You see, the requirements for the office are largely social, Mr Carrados.”
“Possibly your vicar may have other views.”
“Oh, he isn’t a vicar yet, but he is rather well-connected, so it is quite assured. And he would be dreadfully torn if the choice lay with him. As it is, he will perhaps rather soon get over my absence. But, you see, if we married he could never get over my presence; it would always stand in the way of his preferment. I worked very hard to make it possible, but it could not be.”
“You were even prepared to send an innocent man to the gallows?”
“I think so, at one time,” she admitted frankly. “But I scarcely thought it would come to that. There are so many well-meaning people who always get up petitions.... No, as I stand here looking at myself over there, I feel that I couldn’t quite have hanged Frank, no matter how much he deserved it.... You are very shocked, Mr Carrados?”
“Well,” admitted Carrados, with pleasant impartiality, “I have seen the young man, but the penalty, even with a reprieve, still seems to me a little severe.”
“Yet how do you know, even now, that he is, as you say, an innocent man?”
“I don’t,” was the prompt admission. “I only know, in this astonishing case, that so far as my investigation goes, he did not murder your father by the act of his hand.”
“Not according to your Law Courts?” she suggested. “But in the great Palace of Justice?... Well, you shall judge.”
She left his side, crossed the room, and stood by the square, ugly window, looking out, but as blind as Carrados to the details of the somnolent landscape.
“I met Frank for the first time after I was at all grown-up about three years ago, when I returned from boarding-school. I had not seen him since I was a child, and I thought him very tall and manly. It seemed a frightfully romantic thing in the circumstances to meet him secretly—of course my thoughts flew to Romeo and Juliet. We put impassioned letters for one another in a hollow tree that stood on the boundary hedge. But presently I found out—gradually and incredulously at first and then one night with a sudden terrible certainty—that my ideas of romance were not his.... I had what is called, I believe, a narrow escape. I was glad when he went abroad, for it was only my self-conceit that had suffered. I was never in love with him: only in love with the idea of being in love with him.
“A few months ago Frank came back to High Barn. I tried never to meet him anywhere, but one day he overtook me in the lanes. He said that he had thought a lot about me while he was away, and would I marry him. I told him that it was impossible in any case, and, besides, I was engaged. He coolly replied that he knew. I was dumbfounded and asked him what he meant.
“Then he took out a packet of my letters that he had kept somewhere all the time. He insisted on reading parts of them up and telling me what this and that meant and what everyone would say it proved. I was horrified at the construction that seemed capable of being put on my foolish but innocent gush. I called him a coward and a blackguard and a mean cur and a sneaking cad and everything I could think of in one long breath, until I found myself faint and sick with excitement and the nameless growing terror of it.
“He only laughed and told me to think it over, and then walked on, throwing the letters up into the air and catching them.
“It isn’t worth while going into all the times he met and threatened me. I was to marry him or he would expose me. He would never allow me to marry anyone else. And then finally he turned round and said that he didn’t really want to marry me at all; he only wanted to force father’s consent to start mining and this had seemed the easiest way.”
“That is what is called blackmail, Miss Whitmarsh; a word you don’t seem to have applied to him. The punishment ranges up to penal servitude for life in extreme cases.”
“Yes, that is what it really was. He came on Thursday with the letters in his pocket. That was his last threat when he could not move me. I can guess what happened. He read the letters and proposed a bargain. And my father, who was a very passionate man, and very proud in certain ways, shot him as he thought, and then, in shame and in the madness of despair, took his own life.... Now, Mr Carrados, you were to be my judge.”
“I think,” said the blind man, with a great pity in his voice, “that it will be sufficient for you to come up for Judgment when called upon.”
*****
Three weeks later a registered letter bearing the Liverpool postmark was delivered at The Turrets. After he had read it Carrados put it away in a special drawer of his desk, and once or twice in after years, when his work seemed rather barren, he took it out and read it. This is what it contained:
“Dear Mr Carrados,—Some time after you had left me that Sunday afternoon, a man came in the dark to the door and asked for me. I did not see his face for he kept in the shade, but his figure was not very unlike that of your servant Parkinson. A packet was put into my hands and he was gone without a word. From this I imagine that perhaps you did not leave quite as soon as you had intended.
“Thank you very much indeed for the letters. I was glad to have the miserable things, to drop them into the fire, and to see them pass utterly out of my own and everybody else’s life. I wonder who else in the world would have done so much for a forlorn creature who just flashed across a few days of his busy life? and then I wonder who else could.
“But there is something else for which I thank you now far, far more, and that is for saving me from the blindness of my own passionate folly. When I look back on the abyss of meanness, treachery and guilt into which I would have wilfully cast myself, and been condemned to live in all my life, I can scarcely trust myself to write.
“I will not say that I do not suffer now. I think I shall for many years to come, but all the bitterness and I think all the hardness have been drawn out.
“You will see that I am writing from Liverpool. I have taken a second-class passage to Canada and we sail to-night. Willie, who returned to Barony last week, has lent me all the money I shall need until I find work. Do not be apprehensive. It is not with the vague uncertainty of an indifferent typist or a downtrodden governess that I go, but as an efficient domestic servant—a capable cook, housemaid or ‘general,’ as need be. It sounds rather incredible at first, does it not, but such things happen, and I shall get on very well.
“Good-bye, Mr Carrados; I shall remember you very often and very gratefully.
“P.S.—Yes, there is friendship at first sight.”