‘BUT HERE IS ONE WHO LOVES YOU AS OF OLD.’
Mr. Secretan is not sorry to get away from that quiet orderly room
in the prison, where never comes any sound of outward things more
human than the creaking of the warder’s boots in the passage, or
the ticking of that inexorable clock in the hall--dismal clock that
checks off hours that are heavier than lead, minutes whose every
moment is a sigh.
Alexis would willingly stay all day with his wife, to lighten the
burden of her solitude, to strengthen the fainting heart with words
of cheerfulness and comfort, if he had not work to do elsewhere. He
has a task to perform, and a difficult one, and he hardly knows how
to set about it. He has been careful to ask no questions of Captain
Heathcote, feeling that the governor’s position must compel him to
caution and reticence. He stands as it were upon the opposite side
in that game of life and death which has to be played out--the
rouge et noir of the criminal court. Not to him can Alexis look for
information or assistance.
Mr. Secretan leaves the prison sorely perplexed as to what his first
step should be. At present he knows nothing, save that Stephen
Trenchard is supposed to have died from prussic acid, and that
Sibyl has confessed to having had a bottle of prussic acid in her
possession at Lancaster Lodge.
‘We must meet law with law, I suppose,’ thinks Alexis. ‘As my wife is
in the grip of the law, I must get a lawyer to fight her battle.’
He thinks of the names he has seen in connection with the criminal
courts--names that have a sound of power,--and there is one that
comes uppermost in his mind, super-eminent and invincible, a shield
and buckler in the fight.
This is the legal firm of Levison and Levison, Parchment Street,
Viaduct Hill.
He goes straight to the telegraph office, and telegraphs to Messrs.
Levison and Levison, solicitors, requesting that one of their firm
may start for Redcastle that afternoon, a most urgent case, money no
object. He feels fortified against danger in some measure when he has
sent this message, and goes from the station to Dr. Faunthorpe’s.
The shabby old house looks a little shabbier and more woebegone
than usual to-day in the vivid sunshine of midsummer. Hester, whose
spirits generally maintain an equable acidity, has drooped and given
way to absolute despair since the revelation of Stephen Trenchard’s
insolvency. It seems to her as if the shattered fortunes of the
house of Faunthorpe had received the final blow that brings them
to the dust. Jerusalem besieged by Titus could hardly have fallen
lower. The idea of Stephen Trenchard’s fortune--to be divided in
some manner among his nieces--had been the faithful servant’s only
day-dream. She had not set her hopes very high. She had languished
for no translation to a loftier sphere, but she had believed that a
little money would find its way through his nieces to the pockets of
Robert Faunthorpe. She had fancied that the dilapidated old house
would be painted and whitewashed, some of the worm-eaten flooring
replaced with sound wood--new deal--which would repay the labour of
her scrubbing-brush. She had pictured her master in a new coat. She
had told herself that a few pounds spent upon the pony carriage would
rehabilitate that vehicle, and that a new set of harness would make
the pony a gentleman. Long arrears of wages due to herself in times
past, a sum that would have doubled itself by this time at compound
interest, might possibly be paid in that flood tide of fortune; but
this last item was one of secondary consideration in the faithful
Hester’s mind. She wanted to see the family raise its head from the
dust. She wanted to feel that the house of Faunthorpe had something
of the phœnix in its nature. The habits of this fabulous bird have
been made familiar to Hester, not in the pages of Herodotus, but by
the fire office which has taken it for its device and emblem.
The disappointment has been very bitter to the doctor’s two younger
nieces, and Marion lies on the sofa and bewails her fate, and
declares rebelliously that she will never more try to deserve well of
Providence.
‘What’s the use of being good?’ she demands, with an injured air.
‘One couldn’t be used worse if one was a forger or a murderer. I
didn’t expect much. Sibyl’s artfulness nipped _my_ expectations in
the bud, but I did build upon getting something, if it was only a
paltry five thousand pounds.’
Jenny is more philosophical, and more easily reconciled to Fate.
‘If he hadn’t any money to leave, he couldn’t leave it to us,’ she
argues, ‘but he must have been a sly old fox to make believe to be a
millionaire, and take in all Redcastle.’
‘A wicked old impostor,’ exclaims Marion, wrathfully.
‘Poor Sibyl’s disappointment will be worse than ours,’ says Jane.
‘Yes, that’s a comfort. She’ll find how she has wasted all her
scheming and artfulness on a Jesuitical old pauper. She’ll feel small
enough, I should think.’
‘Perhaps she knew the truth all along, and was laughing in her sleeve
at our expectations,’ suggests Jenny.
‘She’s deep enough for anything. However, I forgive her all her
baseness now, and pity her with all my heart,’ says Marion, with a
magnanimous air. ‘She’ll find life a very different thing now she has
seen the last of Lancaster Lodge.’
‘I hope she won’t get into trouble about that prussic acid,’ says
Jenny, thoughtfully.
And Marion also grows grave. That question about the prussic acid
is serious. One might wish one’s sister’s unholy pride in temporal
blessings to be chastised by Providence, for her own spiritual
chastening and benefit, but one would shrink appalled from the idea
of that erring sister lying under a suspicion of having poisoned her
uncle. In the first place such an imputation would be too severe
a punishment for the offender, and in the second it would cast
discredit upon all her family.
‘It’s my opinion that uncle Trenchard has spent all his money, and
knew he must be found out if he let things go on any longer, and got
out of the difficulty by poisoning himself,’ says Jenny, sagely. ‘The
only thing that’s hard to account for is how he could have got hold
of the prussic acid that Sibyl took out of the surgery.’
‘It mightn’t have been that very prussic acid that killed him,
stupid,’ exclaims Marion, contemptuously.
‘True,’ says Jenny.
‘If you had only held that blabbing tongue of yours nobody need have
known that Sibyl had ever taken anything out of the surgery,’ says
Marion. ‘If we are all brought to disgrace it will be your doing.’
Whereat Jenny bursts into tears and weeps dismally for the
next half-hour. She has shed many a tear about that fatal
communicativeness of hers within the last few days.
They are sitting in the front parlour when this conversation takes
place, on the morning of Mr. Secretan’s arrival in Redcastle, and
when Jenny has wept till her eyeballs ache, she wanders listlessly
to the window, and stares out at the small square garden, where the
bountiful cabbage roses and a few ancient perennials bloom as well as
the dust will allow them. There is not much in the way of traffic at
this end of the town. A farmer’s cart jolts by once in half an hour,
or a labouring man passes on a plough horse, or a drove of oxen
straggles by, hunted by an abusive driver. Not often do the _élite_
of Redcastle penetrate to this end of the town. There is not much
distraction of mind, therefore, to be obtained from looking out of
the window, and Jenny contemplates external things from listlessness
rather than interest. But on a sudden, to the surprise of her sister,
who has buried herself in a novel, Jenny ejaculates abruptly,--
‘Good gracious! It’s him.’
‘Whatever our family troubles are, you might remember that the verb
to be takes the same case after as before it, Jane,’ remonstrates
Marion with dignity. ‘And pray whom do you mean by him?’
‘The young man,’ cries Jane, incautious in her surprise. ‘My
brother-in-law.’
‘What does the ridiculous child mean?’ exclaims Marion, pulling
herself up from the sofa with a wrench, and looking out at the gate.
Yes, there is a very good-looking and gentlemanlike young man in the
act of entering at that modest green gate.
‘Why, he’s a perfect stranger,’ says Marion.
‘Is he?’ remarks Jenny, who has recovered her self-possession by this
time, ‘ah, to be sure, now I look at him, I see he is a stranger. I
took him for some one else.’
‘It’s my belief you are demented, child,’ cries Marion, crossly. ‘I
suppose he’s a patient for uncle.’
Marion is confirmed in this belief when Mr. Secretan inquires for Dr.
Faunthorpe, and on being told that he is out, asks permission to wait
his return. He looks respectable, nay, even superior to some of the
Redcastle gentry, so Hester shows him into the surgery, and asks him
to take a seat.
‘The doctor always runs home for his bit of dinner when he can,’ she
says, ‘and I don’t think he was going very far to-day, so he’ll be in
by half an hour or so, I dare say.’
Left in the surgery, Alexis thinks of that summer day, nearly a year
ago, when he came here in quest of his truant wife, and allowed
himself to be put on a false scent by a schoolgirl’s deceitfulness.
He is very angry with Jane Faunthorpe to-day, when he thinks that
all the evil that has befallen Sibyl might have been prevented had
that child told the truth.
‘But she had been taught her lesson by Sibyl, no doubt,’ he reflects;
‘I do wrong to blame her.’
He has more than an hour to wait for Dr. Faunthorpe, a weary while,
for he is burning with impatience to know all that can be known about
Stephen Trenchard’s death. It is past two o’clock when the doctor
comes into the surgery looking tired and anxious, and Alexis feels as
if much precious time had been lost.
He hastens to introduce himself to Robert Faunthorpe, and to give
that bewildered practitioner the history of Sibyl’s marriage.
‘Sir, you petrify me,’ exclaims the meek little doctor, wiping
the perspiration from his bald forehead with an ancient silk
handkerchief. ‘Do you mean to tell me that my niece, whom I have
ever considered the incarnation of candour, could be capable of so
deceiving me?’
‘It was not your resentment she feared, Dr. Faunthorpe, but her uncle
Trenchard’s antipathy to my name. You are no doubt acquainted with
the family history.’
‘Yes, yes, my poor sister-in-law told me the story.’
‘That family quarrel of the past was Sibyl’s motive for concealing
her marriage with me. And now that you know who I am I have to speak
of something much more serious. Your niece has been arrested on
suspicion of being concerned in her uncle’s murder, and is now in
Redcastle gaol.’
Dr. Faunthorpe sinks into a chair, speechless with horror. For the
last three days and nights he has lived in the apprehension of
something like this, but the reality seems more dreadful than his
fears.
‘Don’t tell me so,’ he cries.
‘It is unhappily the truth. I was with my wife at the time of her
arrest. I am here to protect and defend her. And now tell me all you
know about Stephen Trenchard’s death.’
Dr. Faunthorpe tells all that is to be told--disjointedly at first,
but on being closely questioned by Alexis, plainly enough at the
last. He tells Alexis the unlucky facts connected with that blue
bottle of prussic acid; he tells Alexis the various opinions,
conjectures, and rumours which obtain in Redcastle.
‘Why should he not have poisoned himself?’ asks Alexis.
‘Ah, we might have supposed that; but then comes the question of the
bottle, or vessel from which he took the poison. With so powerful a
dose death would have been instantaneous; he would not have had time
to throw the bottle from him; he must have died clutching it. And the
empty bottle was found in Sibyl’s work-basket.’
‘Where it might have been easily placed by any one who wished to fix
the guilt upon her.’
‘Yes, of course. If we could only prove that.’
‘We must prove that, Dr. Faunthorpe. We must find the poisoner, or
show that Stephen Trenchard took the poison of his own free will.
He may have felt that his game was played out, and may have adopted
suicide as a happy escape out of his difficulties.’
‘That might be.’
Alexis has made notes of Dr. Faunthorpe’s answers to his questions.
He has made a list of the people in the house at the time of Stephen
Trenchard’s death.
‘How about this Joel Pilgrim? Why should he not be suspected rather
than Sibyl?’
‘There is that unfortunate circumstance of Sibyl’s flight, and the
prussic acid taken from this surgery.’
‘Both facts tell against her. Yet, if she had been guilty she would
have been too wise to excite suspicion by that secret departure; and
if she had wanted to commit murder she would hardly have chosen a
poison which she must have known is of all poisons the most easily
detected.’
Dr. Faunthorpe’s only answer is a hopeless sigh. He is borne down,
nay, crushed, by calamity. Whatever elasticity of spirit Nature
may have endowed him with at the outset of life has been worn out
of him by a long career of self-abnegation and endurance. He is so
accustomed to trouble, sorrow is such a common flavour in his cup,
that he cannot easily look beyond the darkness of the hour. To-day
he sees himself enclosed in an impenetrable cloud of misery. Freely,
gladly would he give his life--such feeble remnant of life as he
holds--to save his niece, but he cannot devise any mode of being
helpful to her.
‘This Pilgrim must be the man,’ says Alexis, after reading over his
notes meditatively.
‘I cannot see any motive----’
‘Can you not? He may have believed in Trenchard’s wealth, and
expected to inherit some of it. He may have wanted money badly, and
determined on hastening his inheritance.’
‘There is one little circumstance that I ought, perhaps, to have told
you,’ begins the doctor, falteringly.
‘For God’s sake tell me everything.’
‘It was after the post-mortem. Dr. Mitsand, who has taken up this
matter in a very energetic spirit, asked a few questions of the
butler at Lancaster Lodge.’
‘Well?’
‘The questions themselves were of no particular importance--touching
the position of a table beside the bed, the bottles and glasses,
and so on. But there was something in the man’s manner which struck
Dr. Mitsand and myself as remarkable. He had been drinking, I
believe, and may have been muddled by drink. But he had, to my
mind, and Dr. Mitsand’s, the manner of a person labouring under
some kind of apprehension. He had a shifty look, and answered the
simplest questions reluctantly, as if afraid to commit himself. At
the coroner’s inquest he appeared in the same muddled state--worse
indeed, and drew upon himself a severe reprimand from the coroner.’
‘Is the man still at Lancaster Lodge?’
‘Yes. I saw him go in at the lodge gate to-day as I came past on my
way home.’
‘Then I’ll see him without delay, and see what is to be made of him,’
says Alexis.
‘In a case of such importance would it not be better to employ a
detective?’ suggests the doctor, humbly.
‘Dr. Faunthorpe, in a case that affects my wife’s honour and her life
there is no detective living whose wits would be keener than mine,’
replies Alexis. ‘I will trust no one with this work while I have
power to do it myself.’
And thus they part.