on his friend, was struck dumb by Wilton's calm acknowledgment of the
charge. From long habit, he took the cap off the smelling-salts with
which he had been toying when Hastings came in, but his shaking hand
could not lift the bottle to his nose. Wilton guilty of a murder, years
ago! He drew a long, shuddering breath and huddled in his chair.
Wilton rose clumsily and walked heavily to the door opening into the
hall. He put his hand on the knob but did not turn it. He repeated the
performance at the door opening into Sloane's room. In all this he was
unconscionably slow, moving in the manner of a blind man, feeling his
way about and fumbling both knobs.
When he came back to the table, his shoulders were hunched to the front
and downward, crowding his chest. His face looked larger, each separate
feature of it throbbing coarsely to the pumping of his heart. Pink
threads stood out on the white of his eyeballs. When the back of his
neck pressed against his collar, the effect was to give the lower half
of the back of his head an odd appearance of inflation or puffiness.
Hastings had never seen a man struggle so to contain himself.
"Suffering angels!" Sloane sympathized shrilly. "What's the matter,
Tom?"
"All right--it's all right," he assured, his voice still low, but so
resonant and harsh that it sounded like the thrumming of a viol string.
He seated himself, moving his chair several times, adjusting it to a
proper angle to the table. In the end, he sat close to the table rim,
hunched heavily on his elbows, and looked straight at Hastings.
"But, since you've been to Pursuit, what do you imply, or say?" he
asked, the words scraping, as though his throat had been roughened with
a file.
"That you killed Mildred Brace," Hastings answered, also leaning
forward, to give the accusation weight.
"I! I killed her!" Wilton's teeth went together with a sharp click; the
table sagged under his weight. "I deny it. I deny it!" He ripped out an
oath. "This man's crazy, Arthur! He's dragged up a mistake, a tragedy,
of my youth, and now has the effrontery to use it as a reason for
suspecting me of murder!"
"Exactly!" chimed Sloane, in tremulous relief. "Shivering saints! Why
haven't you said so long ago, Tom?"
"I didn't give him credit for the wild insanity he's showing," said
Wilton thickly.
Whatever had been his first impulse, however near he had been to trying
to explain away all blame in the Dalton murder, it was clear to Hastings
now that he intended to rely on flat denial of his connection with the
death of Mildred Brace. He had, perhaps, decided that explanation was
too difficult.
Seeing his indecision, Hastings turned on Sloane.
"You've been exceedingly offensive to me on several occasions, Mr.
Sloane. And I've had enough of it. Now, I've got the facts to show that
you're as foolish in the selection of your friends as in making enemies.
I'm about to charge this man Wilton with murder. He killed Mildred
Brace, and I can prove it. If you want to hear the facts back of this
mystery; if you want the stuff that will enable you to decide whether
you'll stand by him or against him, you can have it!"
Before Sloane could recover from his surprise at the old man's hot
resentment, Wilton said, with an air of careless contempt:
"Oh, we've got to deal with what he says, Arthur. I'd rather answer it
here than with an audience."
"The reading public, for instance?" Hastings retorted, and added: "It
may interest you, Mr. Sloane, to know that you gave me my first
suspicion of him. When you stepped back from the handkerchief I held out
to you--remember, as I was kneeling over the body, and the servant
laughed at you?--I jammed it into Wilton's right-hand coat-pocket.
"Later, when I got it back from him, I saw clinging to it a few cigar
ashes and two small particles of wet tobacco. He had had in that pocket
a cigar stump wet from his saliva.
"When he began then his story of finding the body, he said, 'I'd been
smoking my good-night cigar; this is what's left of it.' As he said
that, he pointed to the unlit--remember that, unlit--cigar stump between
his teeth. He made it a point to emphasize the fact that so little time
had elapsed between his finding the body and his giving the alarm that
he hadn't smoked up the cigar, and also he hadn't taken time to put his
hand to his mouth, take out the cigar and throw it away.
"It was one of the over-fine little touches that a guilty man tries to
pile on his scheme for appearing innocent. But what are the facts?
"Just now, as soon as he got excited, he mechanically fubbed out his
cigar. It's a habit of his--whenever he's in a close corner. He did it
during the interview I had with him and Webster in the music room last
Sunday morning--when, in fact, something dangerous to him came up. He
did it again when I was talking to him in his office, following a visit
from Mrs. Brace.
"There you have the beginning of my suspicion. Why had he gone out of
his way to put a cigar stump into his pocket that night, and to explain
that he had had it in his mouth all the time? When he came into my room,
to wake me up, he had no cigar in his mouth. But, when you and I rounded
the corner of the porch and first saw him kneeling over the body, he had
one hand in his right-hand coat-pocket. And, when we stood beside him,
he had put a half-smoked, unlit cigar into his mouth.
"You see my point, clearly? Instead of having had the cigar in his mouth
and having kept it there while he found the body and reported the
discovery to us, the truth is this: he had fubbed out the cigar when he
met Mildred Brace on the lawn, and it had occurred to his calculating
mind that it would be well, when he chose to give the alarm, to use the
cigar stunt as evidence that he hadn't been engaged in quarrelling with
and murdering a woman.
"He was right in his opinion that the average man doesn't go on calmly
smoking while engaged in such activities. He was wrong in letting us
discover where he'd carried the stump until he needed it.
"He had put it into that pocket, but, after committing the murder, he
wasn't quite as calm as he'd expected to be--something had gone wrong;
Webster had appeared on the scene--and the cigar wasn't restored to his
mouth until you and I first reached the body.
"Here's my handkerchief, showing the ashes and the pieces of cigar
tobacco on it, just as it was when he handed it back to me."
He took from one of his pockets a tissue-paper parcel, and, unwrapping
it, handed it to Sloane.
"Ah-h-h-that's what it shows," Sloane admitted, bending over the
handkerchief.
Wilton welcomed that with a laugh which he meant to be lightly
contemptuous.
"See here, Arthur!" he objected. "I'm perfectly willing to listen to any
sane statement this man may make, but----"
"You said you wanted to hear this!" Hasting stopped him. "I'm fair about
it. I've told you why I began to watch you. I've got more."
"You need it," Sloane complained. "If it's all that thin----"
"Don't shout too soon," Hastings interrupted again. "Mr. Sloane, this
man's been working against me from the start. Think a moment, and you'll
realize it. While he was telling your daughter and a whole lot of other
people that I was the only man to handle the case, he was slipping you
the quiet instruction to avoid me, not to confide in me, not to tell me
a single thing. Isn't that true?"
"We-ell, he did say the best way for me to avoid all possibility of
being involved in the thing was not to talk to anybody."
"I knew it!" Hastings declared, giving his contempt full play. "And he
persuaded you that you might have seen--_might_, mind you--and he gave
you the suggestion skilfully, more by indirection than by flat
statement--that you might have seen Berne Webster out there on the lawn
that night, when you were uncertain, when you feared it yourself--a
little. Isn't that true?"
Sloane looked at him with widening eyes, his lips trembling.
"Come, Mr. Sloane! Let's play fair, didn't he?"
"We-ell, yes."
"And," Hastings continued, thumping the table with a heavy hand to drive
home the points of his statement, "he persuaded you to offer that money
to Mrs. Brace--last Tuesday night.--Didn't he?--And that matches his
slippery cunning in pretending he was saving Webster by hiding the fact
that Webster's hand had gagged him when they found the body. He figured
his willingness to help somebody else would keep suspicion away from
him. I----"
"Rot! All rot!" Wilton broke in. "Where do you think you are, Arthur, on
the witness stand? He'll have you saying white's black in a minute."
"Mr. Sloane," the detective said, getting to his feet, "he induced you
to pay money to Mrs. Brace--while it's the colour of blackmail, it won't
be a matter for prosecution; you gave it to her, in a sense,
unsolicited--but he induced you to do that because he knew she was out
for blackmail. He hoped that, if you bought her off, she wouldn't pursue
him farther."
"Farther!" echoed Sloane. "What do you mean by that?"
"Why, man! Don't you see? Money was back of all that tragedy. He
murdered the girl because she had come here to renew her mother's
attempts at blackmail on him! Not content with duping you, with handling
you as if you'd been a baby, he put you up to buying off the woman who
was after him--and he did it by fooling you into thinking that you were
saving the name, if not the very life, of your daughter's fiance!
He----"
"Lies! Wild lie!" thundered Wilton, pushing back from the table. "I'm
through with----"
"No! No!" shrilled Sloane. "Wait! Prove that, Hastings! Prove it--if you
can! Shuddering saints! Have I----?"
He looked once at Wilton's contorted face, and recoiled, the movement
confessing at last his lack of faith in the man.
"I will," Hastings answered him, and moved toward the door; "I'll prove
it--by the girl's mother."
He threw open the door, and, sure now of holding Sloane's attention,
went in search of Mrs. Brace and the sheriff.
XXI
"AMPLE EVIDENCE"
The two men in the library waited a long time for his return. Wilton,
elbows on the table, stared straight in front of him, giving no sign of
knowledge of the other's presence. Sloane fidgeted with the
smelling-salts, emitting now and then long-drawn, tremulous sighs that
were his own special vocabulary of dissatisfaction. He spoke once.
"Mute and cringing martyrs!" he said, in suspicious remonstrance. "If
he'd say something we could deny! So far, Tom, you're mixed up in----"
"Why can't you wait until he's through?" Wilton objected roughly.
They heard people coming down the hall. Lucille, following Mrs. Brace
into the room, went to her father. They could see, from her look of
grieved wonder, that Hastings had told her of the charge against Wilton.
The sheriff's expression confirmed the supposition. His mouth hung open,
so that the unsteady fingers with which he plucked at his knuckle like
chin appeared also to support his fallen jaw. He made a weak-kneed
progress from the door to a chair near the screened fireplace.
For a full half-minute Hastings was silent, as if to let the doubts and
suspense of each member of the group emphasize his dominance of the
situation. He reviewed swiftly some of the little things he had used to
build up in his own mind the certainty of Wilton's guilt: the man's
agitation in the music room at the discovery, not that a part of the
grey envelope had been found, but that it contained some of the words of
the letter--his obvious alarm when found quarrelling with Mrs. Brace in
his office--his hardly controlled impulses: once, outside Sloane's
bedroom, to accuse Berne Webster without proof, and, on the Sloanehurst
porch last Sunday, to suggest that Sloane was guilty.
The detective observed now that he absolutely ignored Mrs. Brace, not
even looking in her direction. He perceived also how she reacted to that
assumed indifference. The tightening of her lips, the flutter of her
mobile nostrils, left him no longer any doubt that she was in the mood
to give him the cooperation she had so bitterly promised.
"To be dragged down by such a woman!" he thought.
"Mrs. Brace," he said, "I've charged Judge Wilton with the murder of
your daughter. I say now he killed her, with premeditation, having
planned it after receiving a letter from her."
"Yes?" she responded, a certain tenseness in her voice.
She had gone to a chair by the window; and, like the sheriff, she faced
the trio at the table: Wilton, Sloane, and Lucille, who stood behind her
father, a hand on his shoulder.
Hastings slowly paced the floor as he talked, his hands clasped behind
him and now and then moving the tail of his coat up and down. He glanced
at Mrs. Brace over the rims of his spectacles, his eyes shrewd and keen.
He showed an unmistakable self-satisfaction, like the elation Wilton had
detected in his bearing on two former occasions.
"Now," he asked her, "what can you tell us about that letter?"
Wilton, his chest pressed so hard against the edge of the table that his
breathing moved his body, turned his swollen face upon her at last, his
eyes flaming under the thatch of his down-drawn brows.
Mrs. Brace, her high-shouldered, lean frame silhouetted against the
window, began, in a colourless, unemotioned tone:
"As you know, Mr. Hastings, I thought this man Wilton owed me money,
more than money. I'd looked for him for twenty-six years. Less than a
year ago I located him here in Virginia, and I came to Washington. He
refused my requests. Then, he stopped reading my letters--sent them back
unopened at first; later, he destroyed them unread, I suppose."
She cleared her throat lightly, and spoke more rapidly. The intensity of
her hate, in spite of her power of suppression, held them in a
disagreeable fascination.
"I was afraid of him, afraid to confront him alone. I'd seen him kill a
man. But I was in desperate need. I thought, if my daughter could talk
to him, he would be brought to do the right thing. I suppose," she said
with a wintry smile, "you'd call it an attempt to blackmail--if he had
let it go far enough.
"She wrote him a letter, on grey paper, and sent it, in an oblong, grey
envelope, to him here at Sloanehurst last Friday night. He got it
Saturday afternoon. If he hadn't received it, he'd never have been out
on the lawn--with a dagger he'd made for the occasion--at eleven or
eleven-fifteen, which was the time Mildred said in her letter she'd see
him there. She had added that, if he did not keep the appointment, she'd
expose him--his crime in Pursuit."
"I see," Hastings said, on the end of her cold, metallic utterance, and
took from his pocket the flap of grey envelope. "Is this the flap of
that envelope; or, better still, are these fragments of words and the
word 'Pursuit' in your daughter's handwriting?"
"I've examined them already," she said. "They are my daughter's
writing."
Her lips were suddenly thick, taking on that appearance of abnormal
wetness which had so revolted him before.
"And I say what you've just said!" she supplemented, her eyebrows high
upon her forehead. "Tom Wilton killed my daughter. And, when I went to
his office--I was sure then that he'd be afraid to harm me so soon after
Mildred's death--I accused him of the murder. He took it with a laugh.
He said I could look at it as a warning that----"
"Wait!"
The interruption came from Wilton.
"I'm going to make a statement about this thing!" he ground out, his
voice coarse and rasping.
Hastings hung upon him with relentless gaze.
"What have you got to say?"
"Much!" returned Wilton. "I'm not going to let myself be ruined on this
charge because of a mistake of my youth--mistake, I say! I'm about to
tell you the story of such suffering, such misfortune, as no man has
ever had to endure. It explains that tragedy in Pursuit; it explains my
life; it explains everything. I didn't murder that boy Dalton. I struck
in self-defence. But the twenty-nine wounds on his body----"
He paused, preoccupied; he was thinking less of his hearers than of
himself. It was at that point, Hastings thought afterwards, that he
began to lose himself in the ugly enjoyment of describing his cruelty.
It was as if the horrors to which he gave voice subjected him to a
specious and irresistible charm, equipped him with a spurious courage, a
sincere indifference to common opinion.
"There is," he said, "a shadow on my soul. My greatest enemy is hidden
in my own mind.
"But I've fought it, fought it all my life. You may say the makeshifts
I've adopted, the strategy of my resistance, my tactics to outwit this
thing, do me little credit. I shall leave it to you to decide. Results
speak for themselves. I have broken no law; there is against me nothing
that would bring upon me the penalty of man's laws."
He wedged himself more closely against the edge of the table, and struck
his left palm with his clenched right hand.
"I tell you, Hastings, to have fought this thing, in whatever way, has
been a task that called for every ounce of strength I had. I've lived in
hell and walked with devils, against my will. Not a day, not a night,
have I been free of this curse, or my fear of it. There have been times
when, every night for months, my slumbers were broken or impossible! The
devilish thing reached down into the depths of sleep and with its foul
and muddy grasp poisoned even those clear, white pools--clear and white
for other men! But no matter----
"You've heard of obsessions--of men seized every six months with an
irresistible desire to drink--of kleptomaniacs who, having all they need
or wish, must steal or go mad--of others driven by inexplicable impulse,
mania, to set fire to buildings, for the thrill they get out of seeing
the flames burst forth. Well, from my earliest childhood until that
moment when Roy Dalton attacked me, I had fought an impulse even more
terrible than those. God, what a tyranny! It drove me, drove me, that
obsession, at times amounting to mental compulsion, to strike, to stab,
to make the blood flow!"
He rose, getting to his feet slowly, so that his burly bulk gained in
size, like the slow upheaval of a hillside. Swollen as his face had
been, it expanded now a trifle more. His nostrils coarsened more
perceptibly. The puffiness that had been in the back of his neck
extended entirely around his throat. He hung forward over the table,
giving all his attention to Hastings, who was unmoved, incredulous.
"The Brace woman will tell you I had to kill him," he proceeded more
swiftly, displaying a questionable ardour, like a man foreseeing defeat.
"The mistake I made was in running away--a bitter mistake! But those
unnecessary wounds, twenty-eight that need not have been made! The
obsession to see the blood flow drove me to acts which a jury, I
thought, would not understand. And, if you don't see the force of my
explanation, Hastings, if you don't understand, I shall be in little
better plight--after all these years!"
He put, there, a sorrowful appeal into his voice; but a sly
contradiction of it showed faintly in his face, a hint that he took a
crafty pleasure in dragging into the light the depravity he had kept in
darkness for a lifetime.
"I got away. I drifted to Virginia, working hard, studying much. I
became a lawyer. But always I had that affliction to combat; all my
life, man!--always! There were periods months long when devils came up
from the ugly corners of my soul to torture and tempt me.
"It wasn't the ordinary temptation, not a weak, pale idea of 'I'd like
to kill and see the blood!'--but an uproar, an imperial voice, an
endless command: 'Kill! Draw blood! Kill!'--What it did to me----
"But to this day I've beaten it! I've been a good citizen. I've observed
the law. I've refused to let that involuntary lust for blood ruin me or
cast me out.
"Let me tell you how. I decided that, if I had a hand in awarding just
punishments, my affliction would be abated enough for me to live in some
measure of security. There you have the explanation of my being on the
bench. I cheated the obsession to murder by helping to imprison or
execute those who did murder!
"That's why I can tell you of my innocence of the Brace murder. Do you
think I'd tell it unless I knew there could be not even an excuse for
suspecting me? On the other hand, if I had kept silent as to the true
motive that drove my hand to those unnecessary mutilations of young
Dalton--the only time, remember, that my weakness ever got the better,
or the worse, of me!--if I had kept silent on that, you would have had
ground for suspecting me of a barbarous murder then, and, arguing from
that, of the Brace murder now.
"Do I make myself clear?--Do you want me to go into further detail?"
He sank slowly back to his chair, spent by the strain of supreme effort.
His breathing was laboured, stertorous.
"That, Crown," Hastings denounced, "is a confession! Knowing he's
caught, he's got the insolence to whine for mercy because of his
'sufferings'! Think of it! The thing of which he boasts is the thing for
which he deserves death--since death is supposed to be the supreme
punishment. He tells us, in self-congratulatory terms, that he curbed
his inhuman longings, satisfied his lust for blood, by going on the
bench and helping to 'punish those who did murder!'
"Too cowardly to strike a blow, he skulked behind the protection of his
position. He made of the judicial robe an assassin's disguise. On the
bench, he was free to sate his thirst for others' sufferings--adding to
a sentence five undeserved years here, ten there; slipping into his
instructions to juries a phrase that would mean the death penalty!
"He revelled in judicial murders. He gloated over the helpless people
who, looking to him for justice, were merely the victims of his
abhorrent cruelty. He loved the look of sick surprise in their starting
eyes. He got a filthy joy out of seeing a man turn pale. He rubbed his
hands in glee when a woman swooned. He----"
"I can't stand that--can't stand it!" Sloane protested, hands over his
eyes.
"What more do you want, to prove his guilt, his abominable guilt?"
Hastings swept on. "You have the motive, hatred of this woman here and
her daughter--you have the proof of the letter sent to him making the
compulsory appointment--you have his own crazy explanation of his
homicidal impulse, from which, by the way, he never sought relief, a
queer 'impulse' since it gave him time, hours, to plan the crime and
manufacture the weapon with which he killed!"
"I said at the start," Wilton put in hoarsely, "this man Hastings was
only theorizing. If he had anything to connect me with----"
"I have!" Hastings told him, and came to a standstill in front of the
sheriff, bending over him, as if to drive each statement into Crown's
reluctant mind.
"He got that letter a little after five in the afternoon. He left me
here, in this room, with Sloane and Webster, and was gone three-quarters
of an hour. That was just before dinner. He had the second floor, on
that side of the house, entirely to himself. He took a nail-file from
Webster's dressing case, and in Webster's room put a sharper point on it
by filing it roughly with the file-blade of his own pen knife.
"That's doubly proved: first, my magnet, with which I went over the
floor in Webster's room, picked up small particles of steel. Here they
are."
He produced a small packet and, without unwrapping it, handed it to
Crown.
"Again: you'll find that the file-blade of his knife retained particles
of the steel in the little furrows of its corrugated surface. I know,
because last Sunday, as your car came up the driveway, I borrowed his
knife, on the pretext of tightening a screw in the blade of mine. And I
examined it."
He put up a silencing hand as Wilton forced a jeering laugh.
"But there's more to prove his manufacture and ownership of the weapon
that killed the woman. He made the handle from the end of a slat on the
bed in the room which I occupied that night. The inference is obvious:
he didn't care to risk going outside the house to hunt for the wood he
needed; he wouldn't take it from an easily visible place; and, having
stolen something from one room, he paid his attention to mine. All this
is the supercaution of the so-called 'smart criminal.' It matches the
risk he took in returning to the body to hunt for the weapon. That was
why he was there when Webster found the body.
"The handle of the dagger matches the wood of the slat I've just
mentioned. You won't find that particular slat upstairs now. It was
taken out of the house the next day, broken into sections and packed in
his bag of golf-sticks. But there is proof in this room of the fact that
he and he only made the dagger.