THE PLACE OF PEACE.
When Lavender knocked away the keystone of the vaulted arch beneath
which Ralph Ashley was confined, the fabric fell to pieces easily.
Provided with a copy of her depositions, the police sought Mr. Tracy,
and next day he was engaged with the Treasury solicitors discussing
the Fairbridge murder in the light of the new facts, and gathering
together sufficient evidence to corroborate her statement and set the
suspect free.
Of this, the most important part was Melville's pencilled note, which
reached Mr. Tracy about five o'clock the following evening. In
itself his suicide was held to be sufficient; that he had thrown
himself overboard was beyond question. It was proved that he had
gone on board the packet at Dover and that he was not on board at
Calais; his Gladstone bag was there, with the note and the
enclosures, and what had happened in the interval was self-evident.
He, too, bore witness to his brother's innocence, and although, like
Lavender, he did not say who the murderer was, it was a simple matter
to name him now. All that was necessary was to prove that it was he
who rowed Lavender to Fairbridge the day the murder was committed.
To do this was not very difficult. Lucille and Jervis both could
prove that Lavender had been to Jermyn Street the day before the
crime. The maid could swear that on the following morning her
mistress went out for the day, taking a basket containing luncheon
for two people, and that she returned in the evening terribly
agitated and wet through. The valet could swear that Mrs. Sinclair
took tea with Melville and asked him to take her out next day; he had
overheard that much, although he did not overhear the answer, but he
swore that next morning his master told him that he was going out and
would not require anything during the day; that he was wearing
flannels when he spoke, and that those garments were soiled and
creased as if they had got wet when on the following Monday they were
sent to the laundry. The manager acknowledged his surprise at
finding Melville in when he answered the bell in the evening, for it
was unusual for him to pass an entire afternoon in his rooms without
requiring service of any kind, and his professed ignorance of
Jervis's absence was odd, in view of the fact that he had himself
given the leave of absence. Careful investigation showed that the
time permitted of his going to Fairbridge and returning by the hour
he saw the manager. The lock keeper at St. Martin's proved that a
lady and gentleman had hired his last boat, and left it outside the
lock on their return in order to make a rush to catch a train just
due, which they must have missed if they had waited to go through the
lock to the boathouse, and which would have got him back to Jermyn
Street in time to change and affect to have been at home all day; In
Melville's rooms, moreover, the police found ammunition similar to
that found in the gun-room at the Manor House, but no trace of the
revolver which it fitted. Jervis had often seen it, and swore that
Melville generally carried it in his hip pocket. Was it not,
therefore, the one that Lavender declared her companion had used and
afterwards dropped into the river? Did not Ralph's possession of its
fellow prove his own innocence and not his guilt, as Mr. Tracy had
always contended?
Nor when it came to the question of motive was there any other
difficulty. The perjury Melville had committed in denying all
knowledge of Lady Holt's existence, and the inferences to be drawn
from Sir Geoffrey's accounts, pointed directly to the motive. The
story Ralph had told to Mr. Tracy of the hundred pounds explained the
rest. Sir Geoffrey had paid Melville's debts and given him a final
two hundred and fifty pounds. That Melville lost at Monte Carlo,
where he was when Ralph wrote to him for the loan. He applied to his
uncle for further help and got a hundred pounds, as the cheque itself
attested. Yet, in spite of the fraud and its penalties, only averted
by Ralph's generosity, Melville went back to Fairbridge and got more
money from his uncle, as the cheque book again demonstrated. On what
plea did he get those further funds? Obviously, under the false
pretence that Lady Holt, whom, as her letter showed, he had seen in
the brief interval, was in poor circumstances; or else, perhaps, as
hush-money from his uncle, who believed that his wife was dead.
Finally, Sir Geoffrey made a will and refused to give Melville
another penny for himself or for Lavender, and then Melville shot his
uncle, either in a paroxysm of rage at being baffled, or hoping to
benefit under some intestacy, for the will was only executed a few
days before the tragedy. The whole story was complete, and could no
longer be withstood. Within the briefest possible period the Crown
dropped the case against Ralph Ashley, and he was free.
It was with a face stern and hard as granite that Ralph listened to
Mr. Tracy's disclosure of this horrible betrayal by his brother. He
had been looking death in the face, and its visage had almost turned
him to stone, although it could not make his high courage quail. It
would have been bad enough if the traitor had been any other man, but
that it should be his own brother, with whom he had played as a
child, dreamed such fair dreams, and thought such long, long
thoughts, was the most cruel blow fate had ever dealt him. He
marvelled at the cool courage with which Melville had pitted himself
against the devil, and played the game right to the end. He
shuddered as he tried to picture what the end was like, when, with a
certain pagan courage, Melville threw himself into death's cold
embrace. The life was incomprehensible to him, but the death he
could find it in his heart to commend.
With Mr. Tracy he left the prison, of which the high walls had been
suffocating him so long.
"I will telegraph to Gwendolen at once," he said, "saying I will be
home to-morrow night and asking her to await me there. I will go up
to London with you now; there is a lot that I must do."
His whole occupation that first day of freedom was characteristic of
the man. Everything that could be devised to spare his brother's
memory he thought of and arranged--everything, that is, that did not
detract from the absolute declaration of his own innocence. He
provided for the payment of Melville's debts, from the greatest to
the least, took possession of his personal effects, so that nothing
might fall into the hands of curious strangers, and gave his whole
wardrobe and a generous gratuity to Jervis on the understanding that
he should preserve silence as to his late master's shortcomings. And
Jervis acted loyally in accordance with the understanding, for he had
been a good and even affectionate servant to Melville, who had always
been kind and generous to him; he was, indeed, Melville's sincerest
mourner.
Ralph thought of all who had contributed, in however small a degree,
to his acquittal. Lucille was broken-hearted by Lavender's death,
and would accept nothing at his hands.
"I don't need it," she said. "Mrs. Sinclair has left me everything
she had, and they tell me I shall never need to work again. I'm
going home to Geneva as soon as ever I can."
She listened gratefully to Ralph's words of sympathy.
"You've had a lot to put up with," she sobbed, "but don't you believe
my mistress was a bad woman. She was frightened into holding her
tongue. Your brother frightened her. She was a changed woman from
the first unhappy day he crossed her path, and didn't dare stand up
to him; but whatever she did, no one shall say to me that she was a
wicked woman."
And when Ralph soothed her she looked up at him with eyes that were
most pathetic.
"I don't know how you can be so forgiving when you've been so
wronged, I can't forgive your brother. But oh! how I wish that it
was you instead of him who came into her life! You could have told
her, if she had done wrong by Sir Geoffrey Holt, how to put it right,
and she would have done it. She never did a wrong thing knowingly in
all her life;" and, indeed, until fear came upon her and upset her
judgment as to the proportion of things, Lucille's epitaph upon her
mistress was truer than many an epitaph graven on stone and lying in
cathedrals.
Next day Ralph arrived at Fairbridge. He acknowledged silently the
greetings of the knot of people gathered at the station. The
situation was not free from embarrassment for them; their joy at his
complete acquittal would have found expression in some tumultuous
welcome but for the thought of his brother, by the chance exposure of
whose treachery that acquittal had been secured.
Martin stood at the gate of the Manor House bareheaded, and Ralph put
out both his hands.
"So I have come home safe, Martin,"
"The Lord be praised for it!" the butler said; "the Lord be praised
for it! But, oh! poor Master Melville!" and the tears broke out and
poured down the old fellow's withered cheeks.
"Poor Melville!" echoed Ralph. "Well, we can't forget it, Martin,
but we can forgive him--you and I. Surely if anybody can forgive him
it is you and I--because he was----"
He could not finish; the sight of the faithful old servant sobbing as
he bent over his hands was too much for him, and the words died away
into a groan.
"God bless you, you dear old Martin! Who can doubt of God when such
kind hearts as yours are beating round them? Come, you must take me
to missy."
So Martin led the way to the library, where Gwendolen stood alone,
very pale and nervous, but very sweet. He opened the door and tried
to say Ralph's name, but it would not come, and with his hands before
his face he ran away and left them alone together.
* * * * *
That that part of the world which had inclined to believe in Ralph's
guilt hastened to shower congratulations upon him goes without
saying, but the recipient of them displayed something more than his
wonted taciturnity in his acknowledgment of them. Almost more than
anything else, he resented the fact that anybody who knew him could
suppose him capable of such rank ingratitude as to kill his only
friend and benefactor. He tried to explain his brother's life by
some theory of criminal insanity, some lack of moral sense, which
made him not wholly responsible for all his actions; but for the lack
of charity displayed by so many of the average men and women of the
world he had nothing but savage detestation.
As soon as practicable after his release he married Gwendolen, and
spent the winter and spring with her abroad, only returning when
early summer was painting the Manor House garden in its fairest
colours of leaf and flower.
Mrs. Austen welcomed them with delight, gladly abdicating her
position as regent of the Manor House in favour of its new mistress,
and returning with unfeigned relief to the familiar surroundings of
her own home at The Grange.
"No, I won't stay to-night," she said, after giving them the sort of
welcome one can only get in English homes. "You don't really want
me, and I must go and sacrifice to my own household gods. I've
deserted them much too long as it is."
So the night of their return they dined alone, and after dinner
walked down to the houseboat. It was inevitable that their doing so
should recall sharply all the story in which they had played so
important a part, and for the first time for months they spoke of it
by mutual accord.
"This houseboat will always be associated in my mind with some of the
supreme moments in my life," Gwendolen said softly. "It was here
that you proposed to me, here that Mr. Anstruther arrested you, and
here that we are spending our first evening together at home--all
three times when one's heart seems full to bursting."
Ralph looked at her gravely.
"Last time was a bad one, Gwen," he said, in his deep voice. "It was
an awful business!"
She stroked his hand, and the hard lines in his face were softened.
"Let it make the present good time seem all the better by contrast,"
she rejoined. "After all, God's in His heaven, Ralph."
"Yes," he said slowly, "I suppose so; but that wasn't the thought
that kept my pluck up during those weeks of suspense."
"What did?" she asked.
"The thought of you," he answered, "and your belief in me. The
knowledge that you loved me and had faith in me made me swear to keep
the flag flying, don't you know. It wasn't the thought that God was
in His heaven and all that. As a matter of fact, all seemed very
wrong with the world."
Gwendolen checked him.
"You ought to have remembered that He gave you the love, if it meant
so much," she said. "Sometimes I've thought that if Melville had
really loved somebody it would have made all the difference and
helped to make a good man of him."
"Possibly," Ralph answered. "The only thing Melville ever loved was
money--that was at the bottom of it all."
"And so he had nothing to take him away from himself," Gwendolen
said. "Even if he hadn't been loved in return, the affection would
have made him unselfish, or at any rate less selfish."
She spoke with obvious ignorance of the fact that if there was one
individual for whom Melville felt anything like affection it was
herself, and Ralph looked at her in some surprise, for on more than
one occasion he had been very much aware of it. Melville deserved
some credit for not having told the girl of it, for to love and not
to be loved in return by Gwendolen was enough to make any man incline
to go to the bad, and it looked as if Melville had acted better than
usual in refraining from revealing his affection and trying to cut
his brother out. But the whole thing was unutterably painful still,
and his heart ached when his thoughts turned, as they often did, to
his last sight of Melville standing in the witness box, so handsome,
so calm and self-possessed, apparently so eager in his desire to help
Ralph out of danger, and all the while betraying him with a kiss.
His wife heard his sigh and stopped it with a caress, and the touch
of her lips brought back happiness. So they remained in silent
content, thanking God that the trouble was overpast and that they
were together and at home.
The faint notes of distant music were borne to them upon the breeze
and died away again, but the sound suggested something else to
Gwendolen.
"Ralph, I meant to ask you before. Will you give me Melville's
violin?"
"Of course," he answered, "if you want it. But you can't play it,
can you?"
"No," she replied. "I shall not even try, but I should like to have
it. He was a great musician. I will keep his violin in memory of
the one great talent God gave him, of which he never made anything
but a perfectly good use."
"You are a good woman, Gwendolen!" Ralph said, with admiration.
"It's just like you to have a pretty idea of that kind. It will help
me a bit, too," he added reflectively. "I find it none too easy to
forget about--all that, and I should like to remember only what was
good about him. His music was exquisite."
And so in the old Manor House at Fairbridge the Amati, from whose
strings Melville drew harmonies that thrilled the soul of all who
heard them, remains as a perpetual reminder of the one thing he did
supremely well. The magic spell it wove when it spoke in response to
his command was as nothing to the spell it weaves by its silence now,
helping them to forget all his sinfulness, and reminding them only of
the one great talent God gave him of which he never made aught but a
perfectly good use.
WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED, LONDON, NEW YORK, AND MELBOURNE.