“Yes,” I said at last, “I do. But I don’t know why I suspect, and I
don’t know what I suspect. That’s the honest truth and vague enough.
But I can’t help it.”
He looked me straight in the eyes for a full minute, I should think.
Then he said—
“I want you to be less vague, Luttrell; and I think you can. A man
doesn’t say such a thing as you’ve said without more meaning than
you’ve acknowledged.”
“I assure you⸺” I began.
But he stopped me.
“Now look here,” he said. “One often has a thought behind one’s
thought, like a body behind its shadow. You’ve found the shadow; now
look for the body, and I’ll bet you’ll find that too.”
His words seemed to clear away some mystery from my mind, but I shrank
from what was now revealed—the body behind the shadow.
“I see you know now what you suspect,” he said, still looking into my
eyes with intensity. “What is it?”
“I do know now,” I answered. “But it’s monstrous, and upon my word I’m
ashamed to say it. For you must know that I’ve a great regard for
Vernon.”
“And so have—or had—I. His tenderness for the suffering of the animal
world drew me to him. I can’t forget that even now, after this beastly
affair of the dog.”
“His tenderness for the animal world,” I repeated. “It’s just that—just
my knowledge of that, which makes my suspicion so monstrous.”
“Let’s have it, I must have it!” he said. “You’re no backbiter, you’re
an honest fellow. I can see that. Go ahead. I shan’t mistake your
motives.”
There was a compelling frankness about him. I yielded to it.
“My suspicion is that perhaps Vernon is being cruel to that dog,” I
said.
Gernham sat quite still. I saw that my words had deeply astonished him.
But he did not burst forth, as many another man would have done, in
a denial of the possibility of my suspicion being roused by a horrid
fact, being well founded. He was a very quick man, and full of finesse
despite his bluntness.
“What are your reasons?” he said slowly.
“I can scarcely say I have any. Let me think, though.”
After a minute I described to him minutely how Vernon had regarded the
spaniel in the Park, the dog’s fear there, its much greater terror
on being brought into the house in Wimpole Street, Vernon’s strange
excitement on its arrival, and excitement in which there seemed to be
an admixture of triumph, his laughter as he opened the door of the
room in which the spaniel was confined; the dog’s rush for safety to
Lord Elyn, and shrinking away when Vernon approached it. When I had
finished, I added—
“There’s one thing more.”
“What is it?”
Then I related to him my meeting with Cragg on the previous night, and
what the man had told me about Vernon’s keeping the spaniel perpetually
shut up.
“That’s all,” I ended. “Not much, is it?”
“D’you know,” he said, “what’s far the most striking fact in all that
you’ve told me?”
“What?” I asked.
“The dog’s horror of Kersteven. The rest may be nothing—fancy of yours
or oddity of manner on Kersteven’s part. But the dog’s horror of
Kersteven is very strange, and—unless your suspicion is correct, which
God forbid—very unnatural.”
“Unnatural—that’s just what Lord Elyn called it.”
“Ah!”
“And his trying to keep the fact of the dog being in the house from
you. Isn’t that very strange?”
“Certainly it is. But—by Jove!—the strangest thing of all would be
that Kersteven should be cruel to an animal.”
“Yes, that’s true. I can’t—no, I can’t believe it possible.”
“What could be his motive?”
“I can’t conceive.”
“I know the man. He has a passion of pity in him for the sufferings of
the animals, a real passion. Only one thing could account for his being
cruel, deliberately and persistently cruel, to a dog.”
“What?”
“If he were mad.”
“Oh, that—impossible!”
“It would be the only thing,” he repeated. “I know something of
insanity. A chief feature of it is this, that it often creates in a man
the reverse of what he was before it took possession of him. Thus the
kind, sane man becomes the cruel madman; the lively, mercurial sane man
the bitter, melancholy madman—and so on. You take me?”
“Vernon isn’t mad,” I said with conviction.
“Then he isn’t being cruel to his dog,” he said with equal conviction.
“I can’t understand it,” I said dubiously. “The whole thing’s a
mystery. Why should he buy the dog after swearing he would never have
another? A whim, he said it was, a caprice. But I don’t believe that.
No, there was some deeper, stranger reason. What could it be?”