My head turned giddy. I was obliged to wait and let my overpowering
agitation subside, before I could read any more.
Looking at the letter again, after an interval, my eyes fell
accidentally on a sentence near the end, which surprised and startled
me.
I stopped the driver of the carriage, at the entrance to the street
in which our lodgings were situated, and told him to take me to the
beautiful park of Paris--the famous Bois de Boulogne. My object was to
gain time enough, in this way, to read the letter carefully through
by myself, and to ascertain whether I ought or ought not to keep the
receipt of it a secret before I confronted my husband and his mother at
home.
This precaution taken, I read the narrative which my good Benjamin
had so wisely and so thoughtfully written for me. Treating the various
incidents methodically, he began with the Report which had arrived, in
due course of mail, from our agent in America.
Our man had successfully traced the lodgekeeper’s daughter and her
husband to a small town in one of the Western States. Mr. Playmore’s
letter of introduction at once secured him a cordial reception from the
married pair, and a patient hearing when he stated the object of his
voyage across the Atlantic.
His first questions led to no very encouraging results. The woman was
confused and surprised, and was apparently quite unable to exert her
memory to any useful purpose. Fortunately, her husband proved to be a
very intelligent man. He took the agent privately aside, and said to
him, “I understand my wife, and you don’t. Tell me exactly what it is
you want to know, and leave it to me to discover how much she remembers
and how much she forgets.”
This sensible suggestion was readily accepted. The agent waited for
events a day and a night.
Early the next morning the husband said to him, “Talk to my wife now,
and you’ll find she has something to tell you. Only mind this. Don’t
laugh at her when she speaks of trifles. She is half ashamed to speak of
trifles, even to me. Thinks men are above such matters, you know. Listen
quietly, and let her talk--and you will get at it all in that way.”
The agent followed his instructions, and “got at it” as follows:
The woman remembered, perfectly well, being sent to clean the bedrooms
and put them tidy, after the gentlefolks had all left Gleninch. Her
mother had a bad hip at the time, and could not go with her and help
her. She did not much fancy being alone in the great house, after
what had happened in it. On her way to her work she passed two of
the cottagers’ children in the neighborhood at play in the park. Mr.
Macallan was always kind to his poor tenants, and never objected to the
young ones round about having a run on the grass. The two children idly
followed her to the house. She took them inside, along with her--not
liking the place, as already mentioned, and feeling that they would be
company in the solitary rooms.
She began her work in the Guests’ Corridor--leaving the room in the
other corridor, in which the death had happened, to the last.
There was very little to do in the two first rooms. There was not litter
enough, when she had swept the floors and cleaned the grates, to
even half fill the housemaid’s bucket which she carried with her. The
children followed her about; and, all things considered, were “very good
company” in the lonely place.
The third room (that is to say, the bedchamber which had been occupied
by Miserrimus Dexter) was in a much worse state than the other two, and
wanted a great deal of tidying. She did not much notice the children
here, being occupied with her work. The litter was swept up from the
carpet, and the cinders and ashes were taken out of the grate, and the
whole of it was in the bucket, when her attention was recalled to the
children by hearing one of them cry.
She looked about the room without at first discovering them.
A fresh outburst of crying led her in the right direction, and showed
her the children under a table in a corner of the room. The youngest of
the two had got into a waste-paper basket. The eldest had found an old
bottle of gum, with a brush fixed in the cork, and was gravely painting
the face of the smaller child with what little remained of the contents
of the bottle. Some natural struggles, on the part of the little
creature, had ended in the overthrow of the basket, and the usual
outburst of crying had followed as a matter of course.
In this state of things the remedy was soon applied. The woman took the
bottle away from the eldest child, and gave it a “box on the ear.”
The younger one she set on its legs again, and she put the two “in the
corner” to keep them quiet. This done, she swept up such fragments of
the torn paper in the basket as had fallen on the floor; threw them back
again into the basket, along with the gum-bottle; fetched the bucket,
and emptied the basket into it; and then proceeded to the fourth and
last room in the corridor, where she finished her work for that day.
Leaving the house, with the children after her, she took the filled
bucket to the dust-heap, and emptied it in a hollow place among the
rubbish, about half-way up the mound. Then she took the children home;
and there was an end of it for the day.
Such was the result of the appeal made to the woman’s memory of domestic
events at Gleninch.
The conclusion at which Mr. Playmore arrived, from the facts submitted
to him, was that the chances were now decidedly in favor of the recovery
of the letter. Thrown in, nearly midway between the contents of the
housemaid’s bucket, the torn morsels would be protected above as well as
below, when they were emptied on the dust-heap.
Succeeding weeks and months would add to that protection, by adding to
the accumulated refuse. In the neglected condition of the grounds,
the dust-heap had not been disturbed in search of manure. There it had
stood, untouched, from the time when the family left Gleninch to
the present day. And there, hidden deep somewhere in the mound, the
fragments of the letter must be.
Such were the lawyer’s conclusions. He had written immediately to
communicate them to Benjamin. And, thereupon, what had Benjamin done?
After having tried his powers of reconstruction on his own
correspondence, the prospect of experimenting on the mysterious letter
itself had proved to be a temptation too powerful for the old man to
resist. “I almost fancy, my dear, this business of yours has bewitched
me,” he wrote. “You see I have the misfortune to be an idle man. I have
time to spare and money to spare. And the end of it is that I am here
at Gleninch, engaged on my own sole responsibility (with good Mr.
Playmore’s permission) in searching the dust-heap!”
Benjamin’s description of his first view of the field of action at
Gleninch followed these characteristic lines of apology.
I passed over the description without ceremony. My remembrance of the
scene was too vivid to require any prompting of that sort. I saw again,
in the dim evening light, the unsightly mound which had so strangely
attracted my attention at Gleninch. I heard again the words in which
Mr. Playmore had explained to me the custom of the dust-heap in Scotch
country-houses. What had Benjamin and Mr. Playmore done? What had
Benjamin and Mr. Playmore found? For me, the true interest of the
narrative was there--and to that portion of it I eagerly turned next.
They had proceeded methodically, of course, with one eye on the pounds,
shillings, and pence, and the other on the object in view. In Benjamin,
the lawyer had found what he had not met with in me--a sympathetic mind,
alive to the value of “an abstract of the expenses,” and conscious of
that most remunerative of human virtues, the virtue of economy.
At so much a week, they had engaged men to dig into the mound and to
sift the ashes. At so much a week, they had hired a tent to shelter
the open dust-heap from wind and weather. At so much a week, they had
engaged the services of a young man (personally known to Benjamin), who
was employed in a laboratory under a professor of chemistry, and who had
distinguished himself by his skillful manipulation of paper in a
recent case of forgery on a well-known London firm. Armed with these
preparations, they had begun the work; Benjamin and the young
chemist living at Gleninch, and taking it in turns to superintend the
proceedings.
Three days of labor with the spade and the sieve produced no results of
the slightest importance. However, the matter was in the hands of two
quietly determined men. They declined to be discouraged. They went on.
On the fourth day the first morsels of paper were found.
Upon examination, they proved to be the fragments of a tradesman’s
prospectus. Nothing dismayed, Benjamin and the young chemist still
persevered. At the end of the day’s work more pieces of paper were
turned up. These proved to be covered with written characters.
Mr. Playmore (arriving at Gleninch, as usual, every evening on
the conclusion of his labors in the law) was consulted as to the
handwriting. After careful examination, he declared that the mutilated
portions of sentences submitted to him had been written, beyond all
doubt, by Eustace Macallan’s first wife!
This discovery aroused the enthusiasm of the searchers to fever height.
Spades and sieves were from that moment forbidden utensils. However
unpleasant the task might be, hands alone were used in the further
examination of the mound. The first and foremost necessity was to place
the morsels of paper (in flat cardboard boxes prepared for the purpose)
in their order as they were found. Night came; the laborers were
dismissed; Benjamin and his two colleagues worked on by lamplight. The
morsels of paper were now turned up by dozens, instead of by ones and
twos. For a while the search prospered in this way; and then the
morsels appeared no more. Had they all been recovered? or would renewed
hand-digging yield more yet? The next light layers of rubbish were
carefully removed--and the grand discovery of the day followed. There
(upside down) was the gum-bottle which the lodge-keeper’s daughter
had spoken of. And, more precious still, there, under it, were more
fragments of written paper, all stuck together in a little lump, by the
last drippings from the gum-bottle dropping upon them as they lay on the
dust-heap!
The scene now shifted to the interior of the house. When the searchers
next assembled they met at the great table in the library at Gleninch.
Benjamin’s experience with the “Puzzles” which he had put together in
the days of his boyhood proved to be of some use to his companions.
The fragments accidentally stuck together would, in all probability,
be found to fit each other, and would certainly (in any case) be the
easiest fragments to reconstruct as a center to start from.
The delicate business of separating these pieces of paper, and of
preserving them in the order in which they had adhered to each
other, was assigned to the practiced fingers of the chemist. But the
difficulties of his task did not end here. The writing was (as usual
in letters) traced on both sides of the paper, and it could only be
preserved for the purpose of reconstruction by splitting each morsel
into two--so as artificially to make a blank side, on which could
be spread the fine cement used for reuniting the fragments in their
original form.
To Mr. Playmore and Benjamin the prospect of successfully putting
the letter together, under these disadvantages, seemed to be almost
hopeless. Their skilled colleague soon satisfied them that they were
wrong.
He drew their attention to the thickness of the paper--note-paper of the
strongest and best quality--on which the writing was traced. It was
of more than twice the substance of the last paper on which he had
operated, when he was engaged in the forgery ease; and it was, on that
account, comparatively easy for him (aided by the mechanical appliances
which he had brought from London) to split the morsels of the torn
paper, within a given space of time which might permit them to begin the
reconstruction of the letter that night.
With these explanations, he quietly devoted himself to his work. While
Benjamin and the lawyer were still poring over the scattered morsels
of the letter which had been first discovered, and trying to piece
them together again, the chemist had divided the greater part of the
fragments specially confided to him into two halves each; and had
correctly put together some five or six sentences of the letter on the
smooth sheet of cardboard prepared for that purpose.
They looked eagerly at the reconstructed writing so far.
It was correctly done: the sense was perfect. The first result gained
by examination was remarkable enough to reward them for all their
exertions. The language used plainly identified the person to whom the
late Mrs. Eustace had addressed her letter.
That person was--my husband.
And the letter thus addressed--if the plainest circumstantial evidence
could be trusted--was identical with the letter which Miserrimus Dexter
had suppressed until the Trial was over, and had then destroyed by
tearing it up.
These were the discoveries that had been made at the time when Benjamin
wrote to me. He had been on the point of posting his letter, when Mr.
Playmore had suggested that he should keep it by him for a few days
longer, on the chance of having more still to tell me.
“We are indebted to her for these results,” the lawyer had said. “But
for her resolution; and her influence over Miserrimus Dexter, we should
never have discovered what the dust-heap was hiding from us--we should
never have seen so much as a glimmering of the truth. She has the first
claim to the fullest information. Let her have it.”
The letter had been accordingly kept back for three days. That interval
being at an end, it was hurriedly resumed and concluded in terms which
indescribably alarmed me.
“The chemist is advancing rapidly with his part of the work” (Benjamin
wrote); “and I have succeeded in putting together a separate portion
of the torn writing which makes sense. Comparison of what he has
accomplished with what I have accomplished has led to startling
conclusions. Unless Mr. Playmore and I are entirely wrong (and God
grant we may be so!), there is a serious necessity for your keeping the
reconstruction of the letter strictly secret from everybody about you.
The disclosures suggested by what has come to light are so heartrending
and so dreadful that I cannot bring myself to write about them until
I am absolutely obliged to do so. Please forgive me for disturbing you
with this news. We are bound, sooner or later, to consult with you in
the matter; and we think it right to prepare your mind for what may be
to come.”
To this there was added a postscript in Mr. Playmore’s handwriting:
“Pray observe strictly the caution which Mr. Benjamin impresses on
you. And bear this in mind, as a warning from _me:_ If we succeed in
reconstructing the entire letter, the last person living who ought (in
my opinion) to be allowed to see it is--your husband.”