HARD PRESSED
It was on a dreary wet morning, laden with the very spirit of
depression, that I led my little party of three across the fields to
the Lone Farm. We had talked, or slept, out the night at the “Black
Dog” in Market Grazing; and now, in grim fulfilment of the purpose
which had brought us so far, were advancing to the assault of the
inner abode of that mystery, whose final ramification had ended for us
under the waterfall in far-away Piedmont. We numbered, besides myself,
Mr Shapter and the two detectives. Johnny and Geoletti had stopped by
the way in London, to provide us with the necessary correspondents in
that prescriptive centre to all such operations.
We had hardly rested in our flight back from the Continent, since the
finding of the inquest held upon those pitiful remains had supplied us
with the _argumentum ad rem_ for procuring the extradition of Mr Mark
Dalston; but, quick as we had travelled, the news of our presumptive
mission had preceded us. For many reasons we should have preferred for
the present to have throttled all journalistic gossip; but where was
the lethal spot to be found in that myriad-necked Hydra? The story, or
a travesty of it, leaked out and ran faster than we could, and was
threatening us already, on our arrival in London, with a most
undesired fame. The absurdest surmises were rife; the most ingenious
inventions drawn upon to provide them. I have no time nor patience to
stop and retail a fraction of the nonsense talked by the newspapers.
The serious thing to us in it all was that it brought into a full
glare of notoriety a case which, in its first processes, it was of the
utmost importance should be kept secret. Signor Valombroso was, of
course, as cutting as a whip upon the paradox involved. “Why do you
not also publish portrait cards of your London detectives, with their
character parts included?” he asked. “It would give the poor criminal
yet one other chance.” He would have proposed a newspaper censorship
as the remedy. But it was certainly aggravating. If it was true that
Mr Dalston, having got wind somehow--perhaps through Mother Carey--of
the trend of my inquiries, and being baffled in his designs on his
victim, had already slipped into hiding, it was hardly probable that
this public exposure and _esclandre_ would bring him out of it. The
puzzling thing was that he should have left so vexatious a witness
behind him at the Lone Farm; but, as to that, it had to be borne in
mind that he was presumably unaware of her treachery to himself. In
any case, hither had been our obvious direction from the moment of our
landing.
I had written to Ira, while still in Italy, a full account of the
discovery, with all its tragic incidents and consequences. Afterwards,
arriving in London, I filled in the sheet with a brief account of our
subsequent doings and present intentions, and posted it to her where
she was staying with the family at Claridge’s Hotel. It was misery to
be so near and apart; but the peremptoriness of my mission admitted of
no delay; while the nature of our relations precluded any present
thought of a meeting under the Skene ægis.
But how desolate seemed the country, void of the consciousness of that
young darling presence in it. I could almost welcome the dripping
skies, the sodden fields, the deathly soak and stillness, as things
attuned to a mood abandoned of love and shivering under a sort of
creeping paralysis of terror. For how could I forget for a moment the
relations in which I stood towards the unhappy woman of whom it was
the very purpose of our visit to make a traitor and informer? She had
borne children to him. I was not the only fruit of her motherhood. I
could not but feel my part somehow an execrable one; and most in its
self-consciousness of a still-existing repugnance towards the object
of our schemes, which was surely unnatural, but which I could not, for
all my striving, overcome. Was not this, indeed, one of the bitterest
features of a bitter tragedy? At the present moment, even, my
thoughts, for all the filial warmth and graciousness they could
command, turned instinctively to Lady Skene.
The foreboding solemnity of my mood seemed to impart itself to my
companions. We plashed and plodded along the field paths with hardly a
word to exchange amongst us. Inspector Jannaway, it is true, had his
own reasons for reserve. Holding the very tangible fact of a warrant
for Mr Dalston’s arrest in his pocket, he seemed bent on leaving it to
his Italian colleague to justify its production. “Let him have his
head, gentlemen. He knows all about it. He’s agoing to prove the
superiority of his system over ours. Very well; I’m not the man to
interfere--not just yet awhile, anyway.” He did not speak these words,
but his attitude unmistakably expressed them. He was a great English
detective on the high horse, aggrieved by insolent comparisons. Let
Valombroso have our confidence; let all fools have their paradise. We
should find ourselves on the wrong side of ours in due time. When we
wanted him--and we should want him--he was here at our service. In the
meantime, he kept his thoughts--and his theories, if he had any--to
himself, and acquiesced passively and pleasantly in all that was
suggested. But he offered no suggestions of his own.
A dive through a dripping copse, a final flounder along a little muddy
lane, brought us into view of the house. It was certainly entitled to
its name--a lonely haunted tenement, flung away into the fields to rot
and perish of its own reputation. The fabric of it dated from the
Tudors, but it had been patched and shored with a number of unseemly
anachronisms, until it looked like a crippled house on crutches. Old
barns, old byres, an old dove-cot, toppled hard by to their fall. The
only modern feature about it was the filth, which discharged in one
place its moister particles into a little green duck pond with no
ducks in it. The house itself was half buried in trees, through which
one caught a glimpse of a considerable garden to the rear, full of
vegetables, but neglected. Tradition pointed to the farm as a refuge,
during the Marian persecutions, of a number of non-juring ministers,
who had nevertheless come to be routed out and despatched to the
flames for their obduracy. It was certainly quarried with vaults, and
priests’ holes, and other such sanctuaries of the desperate.
“H’m!” muttered Mr Shapter, with his hand on the bell. “A very warren
this, I shouldn’t be surprised. What do you think, Jannaway?”
“I think as you think, sir,” answered the detective serenely.
Shapter turned away impatiently. The clang of the bell answering from
those bowels of silence made us all start. And, almost with the
cessation of its deep voice, she stood in the opening of the door
before us.
The same mean sapless figure; the same unmoving face, worn and
unwholesome, and scored with its grey lines of suffering or endurance.
Only the eyes in it lived--the eyes of the “_petite_ demoiselle, so
white and pink.” I could not picture it--I could not. Age has no past
for youth--no memory of joys like its own. I shrank before the fire of
those eyes; but their vision had no direction--not even for me. They
looked beyond us all.
Valombroso swept off his hat, and returned it to his head, being
careful of the tilt.
“Good-morning, madama,” he said. “Is your husband at home? We desire
the honour of a word with him.”
“You have come to arrest him?”
The voice was as lifeless as the face.
“Madama is too precipitate,” answered the detective. “A word is not
necessarily a warrant.”
“I have always been waiting for it to come,” she went on, in the same
cold low tone, and with the same hot vision always challenging
something beyond us that we could not see. “I have always expected and
lived for this moment. Now, is it not in the eternal curse of things
that it has come too late? Too precipitate. O, yes! too precipitate.”
She gave a frozen little laugh--horrible, because the muscles of her
mouth, the breath of her bosom did not seem to stir to it.
“He killed my husband, my dear first love, did he not?” she asked.
Not one of us could find words to answer her.
“O, I know it!” she said. “I have always known it. Voices and visions
used to come to me--they were for ever coming. One was of a little
child I bore; but it went, and I knew then that it was not of the
dead. Only the dead speak to me. The others are like murmurs behind a
wall. I hear them as the dead hear the steps and laughter overhead. He
killed him out of love of me--he struck him through my heart and
killed my heart. The rest was his to take. He could not gain back what
he had killed. His will was strong, but that was beyond it. And he
made a passionate wooer, too. But it wanted more than his warmth to
melt that dead stone of my heart. The children of his passion--they
were born with the chill of it on them, and they too died, one by
one.”
Not once did her voice rise above that lifeless current of sound. She
stood like one speaking in an hypnotic trance, compelled to say the
things she said. Now, in a pause, Valombroso spoke again:
“Will madama explain what she means by its being too late?”
Her eyes came down to him, with the strangest challenge.
“Did you know him, and think to take him so easily? Look where you
will; you will not find him here.”
“We shall avail ourselves very fully of your permission, madam,” said
Mr Shapter civilly. “It obviates for us the unpleasant necessity to
fall back upon our search warrant. Mr Dalston is gone, then, you say.
Will you perhaps acquaint us where?”
“He is gone abroad--a long journey. I have a letter from him. You can
see it if you like.”
She turned and led the way into the house, and we all followed her
into a low dark inky-panelled sitting-room. Melancholy green light
flowed in here through a wide lozenge-paned window at the back. A
round-headed bush was stooped to the glass outside, as if listening
with its ear to it. It was an unchancy creepy place, and shudderingly
cold.
We exchanged some significant glances while the unhappy woman was
searching a bureau for the letter. Crazed--that was their common
implication; and perhaps by reason of her madness spared much. It was
very pitiful.
Presently she found what she sought, and brought it to us. Our heads
crowded together to read it. It was indisputably his, couched in
affectionate terms, and dated from some port in Spain, a week back. It
related the writer’s sudden inducement to seize a business chance
which had offered, talked of a short absence, and gave some directions
for his wife’s abandonment of the farm and withdrawal to a certain
address in London, which was mentioned. Valombroso, finishing with it,
shrugged his shoulders and handed the sheet on to Jannaway, who put it
in his pocket.
“It is very well, then. And now, with your permission, madama, we will
get to work,” said the Italian.
She answered not a word, but stood leaning on the desk, and looking
strangely after us as we trooped out of the room. Mr Shapter, leading
us across the passage, halted in a little dull study which had
presumably been the master’s, and faced the detectives with a
question--“Well?”
Valombroso shrugged his shoulders again; Inspector Jannaway did and
said nothing.
“Come,” said the lawyer impatiently to the former. “Is the letter in
your opinion genuine?”
“In-con-test-abilmente, signore.”
“Then it is no good our searching here?”
“Very like, but we must search nevertheless. He may have gone and come
back. I say only this: Show me once my man, and I go for him.”
Jannaway uttered a curious sound. If his face had not been so
immovable. I should have taken it for a laugh. Mr Shapter glanced at
him sharply.
“You seem amused, Inspector Jannaway,” he said.
“Do I, sir?” answered the detective. “I have to seem a lot of things
in the course of my duty.”
Shapter flounced his shoulders slightly, and turned away.
“The sooner we get to business the sooner we shall satisfy ourselves,”
he said. “Come.”
We left the room together, but outside, by the lawyer’s advice,
separated, and took each his independent direction--as one the living
rooms, one the offices and cellars, and a third the attics. Inspector
Jannaway decided, on his own initiative, for the grounds and ruined
outbuildings.
Our search, as might have been expected, yielded us no human
quarry--not so much as a scullery-maid. Mrs Dalston, it appeared,
existed, for whatever reason, the sole tenant of this remote and
dismal homestead.
But, if the place was void of any sign or shadow of what we sought,
the voices of a hundred unseen demons seemed to people it. They rang
in peals of laughter up the stairs; they answered mockingly to one’s
tap on hollow panels; they rose in reverberant boomings from the
cellars, and echoed away down dark passages to a scampering of tiny
feet. When, by-and-by, we reassembled in the hall, Valombroso’s
instant utterance spoke, I think, the common feeling:
“God of mercy, signore! there is only one way to penetrate the secrets
of this house--and that is to pull it down.”
He wiped his white face with a ball of handkerchief. Inspector
Jannaway’s appeared the only composed countenance amongst us. But even
his answered with a momentary pallor to the shock of a sudden screech
of laughter uttered hard by. It came, or seemed to come, from the room
where we had left Mrs Dalston. Mr Shapter, after a second’s paralysis,
turned the handle of the door resolutely, and we all looked in. She
was standing still where we had left her. A handkerchief was in her
hand. Her bosom was rising and falling in hard pants.
“Great God, madam!” said the lawyer. “Was it you made that noise?”
She gave no answer--she seemed fighting for breath--but presently she
spoke:
“You have not found him, then?”
“Not yet; but we shall come again; we have not finished.”
“It is open to you, now and always,” she said, still with difficulty.
“I am at your service; we are all here at your service.”
_We?_
I shivered in the thought of those viewless colleagues of hers. A
vision of the cheery inn where we had quartered ourselves suddenly
rose before me, before us all, I think, irresistibly attractive. It
would be possible only in some such healthy commonplace to resolve
upon reason and a course of action. Without another word, we turned
and left the house.
We must have walked half-a-mile, I believe, before any one of us
spoke; and then it was Inspector Jannaway, answering a mute appeal of
the lawyer’s eyes.
“Mad, sir,” he said. “As mad as a hatter.”