Sir Henry paused a moment, his finger between the pages of the ancient
diary.
“It is the inspirational quality in these cases,” he said, “that
impresses me. It is very nearly absent in our modern methods of criminal
investigation. We depend now on a certain formal routine. I rarely find
a man in the whole of Scotland Yard with a trace of intuitive impulse to
lead him.... Observe how this old justice in Virginia bridged the gaps
between his incidents.”
He paused.
“We call it the inspirational instinct, in criminal investigation ...
genius, is the right word.”
He looked up at the clock.
“We have an hour, yet, before the opera will be worth hearing; listen to
this final case.”
The narrative of the diary follows:
The girl was walking in the road. Her frock was covered with dust. Her
arms hung limp. Her face with the great eyes and the exquisite mouth
was the chalk face of a ghost. She walked with the terrible stiffened
celerity of a human creature when it is trapped and ruined.
Night was coming on. Behind the girl sat the great old house at the end
of a long lane of ancient poplars.
This was a strange scene my father came on. He pulled up his big
red-roan horse at the crossroads, where the long lane entered the
turnpike, and looked at the stiff, tragic figure. He rode home from
a sitting of the county justices, alone, at peace, on this midsummer
night, and God sent this tragic thing to meet him.
He got down and stood under the crossroads signboard beside his horse.
The earth was dry; in dust. The dead grass and the dead leaves made
a sere, yellow world. It looked like a land of unending summer, but a
breath of chill came out of the hollows with the sunset.
The girl would have gone on, oblivious. But my father went down into the
road and took her by the arm. She stopped when she saw who it was, and
spoke in the dead, uninflected voice of a person in extremity.
“Is the thing a lie?” she said.
“What thing, child?” replied my father.
“The thing he told me!”
“Dillworth?” said my father. “Do you mean Hambleton Dillworth?”
The girl put out her free arm in a stiff, circling gesture. “In all the
world,” she said, “is there any other man who would have told me?”
My father's face hardened as if of metal. “What did he tell you?”
The girl spoke plainly, frankly, in her dead voice, without
equivocation, with no choice of words to soften what she said:
“He said that my father was not dead; that I was the daughter of a
thief; that what I believed about my father was all made up to save the
family name; that the truth was my father robbed him, stole his best
horse and left the country when I was a baby. He said I was a burden on
him, a pensioner, a drone; and to go and seek my father.”
And suddenly she broke into a flood of tears. Her face pressed against
my father's shoulder. He took her up in his big arms and got into his
saddle.
“My child,” he said, “let us take Hambleton Dillworth at his word.”
And he turned the horse into the lane toward the ancient house. The
girl in my father's arms made no resistance. There was this dominating
quality in the man that one trusted to him and followed behind him. She
lay in his arms, the tears wetting her white face and the long lashes.
The moon came up, a great golden moon, shouldered over the rim of the
world by the backs of the crooked elves. The horse and the two persons
made a black, distorted shadow that jerked along as though it were a
thing evil and persistent. Far off in the thickets of the hills an owl
cried, eerie and weird like a creature in some bitter sorrow. The lane
was deep with dust. The horse traveled with no sound, and the distorted
black shadow followed, now blotted out by the heavy tree tops, and now
only partly to be seen, but always there.
My father got down at the door and carried the girl up the steps and
between the plaster pillars into the house. There was a hall paneled
in white wood and with mahogany doors. He opened one of these doors and
went in. The room he entered had been splendid in some ancient time.
It was big; the pieces in it were exquisite; great mirrors and old
portraits were on the wall.
A man sitting behind a table got up when my father entered. Four tallow
candles, in ancient silver sticks, were on the table, and some sheets
with figured accounts.
The man who got up was like some strange old child. He wore a number of
little capes to hide his humped back, and his body, one thought, under
his clothes was strapped together. He got on his feet nimbly like a
spider, and they heard the click of a pistol lock as he whipped the
weapon out of an open drawer, as though it were a habit thus always to
keep a weapon at his hand to make him equal in stature with other men.
Then he saw who it was and the double-barreled pistol slipped out of
sight. He was startled and apprehensive, but he was not in fear.
He stood motionless behind the table, his head up, his eyes hard, his
thin mouth closed like a trap and his long, dead black hair hanging on
each side of his lank face over the huge, malformed ears. The man stood
thus, unmoving, silent, with his twisted ironical smile, while my father
put the girl into a chair and stood up behind it.
“Dillworth,” said my father, “what do you mean by turning this child out
of the house?”
The man looked steadily at the two persons before him.
“Pendleton,” he said, and he spoke precisely, “I do not recognize
the right of you, or any other man, to call my acts into account;
however”--and he made a curious gesture with his extended hands “not at
your command, but at my pleasure, I will tell you.
“This young woman had some estate from her mother at that lady's death.
As her guardian I invested it by permission of the court's decree.” He
paused. “When the Maxwell lands were sold before the courthouse I bid
them in for my ward. The judge confirmed this use of the guardian funds.
It was done upon advice of counsel and within the letter of the law. Now
it appears that Maxwell had only a life interest in these lands; Maxwell
is dead, and one who has purchased the interest of his heirs sues in the
courts for this estate.
“This new claimant will recover; since one who buys at a judicial sale,
I find, buys under the doctrine of caveat emptor--that is to say, at his
peril. He takes his chance upon the title. The court does not insure it.
If it is defective he loses both the money and the lands. And so,” he
added, “my ward will have no income to support her, and I decline to
assume that burden.”
My father looked the hunchback in the face. “Who is the man bringing
this suit at law?”
“A Mr. Henderson, I believe,” replied Dillworth, “from Maryland.”
“Do you know him?” said my father.
“I never heard of him,” replied the hunchback.
The girl, huddled in the chair, interrupted. “I have seen letters,” she
said, “come in here with this man's return address at Baltimore written
on the envelope.”
The hunchback made an irrelevant gesture. “The man wrote--to inquire
if I would buy his title. I declined.” Then he turned to my father.
“Pendleton,” he said, “you know about this matter. You know that every
step I took was legal. And with pains and care how I got an order out
of chancery to make this purchase, and how careful I was to have this
guardianship investment confirmed by the court. No affair was ever done
so exactly within the law.”
“Why were you so extremely careful?” said my father.
“Because I wanted the safeguard of the law about me at every step,”
replied the man.
“But why?”
“You ask me that, Pendleton?”' cried the man. “Is not the wisdom of my
precautions evident? I took them to prevent this very thing; to protect
myself when this thing should happen!”
“Then,” said my father, “you knew it was going to happen.”
The man's eyes slipped about a moment in his head. “I knew it was
going to happen that I would be charged with all sorts of crimes and
misdemeanors if there should be any hooks on which to hang them. Because
a man locks his door is it proof that he knows a robber is on the way?
Human foresight and the experience of men move prudent persons to a
reasonable precaution in the conduct of affairs.”
“And what is it,” said my father, “that moves them to an excessive
caution?”
The hunchback snapped his fingers with an exasperated gesture. “I will
not be annoyed by your big, dominating manner!” he cried.
My father was not concerned by this defiance. “Dillworth,” he said, “you
sent this child out to seek her father. Well, she took the right road to
find him.”
The hunchback stepped back quickly, his face changed. He sat down in
his chair and looked up at my father. There was here suddenly uncovered
something that he had not looked for. And he talked to gain time.
“I have cast up the accounts in proper form,” he said while he studied
my father, his hand moving the figured sheets. “They are correct and
settled before two commissioners in chancery. Taking out my commission
as guardian, the amounts allowed me for the maintenance and education of
the ward, and no dollar of this personal estate remains.”
His long, thin hand with the nimble fingers turned the sheets over on
the table as though to conclude that phase of the affair.
“The real property,” he continued, “will return nothing; the purchase
money was applied on Maxwell's debts and cannot be followed. This new
claimant, Henderson, who has bought up the outstanding title, will take
the land.”
“For some trifling sum,” said my father.
The hunchback nodded slowly, his eyes in a study of my father's face.
“Doubtless,” he said, “it was not known that Maxwell had only a life
estate in the lands, and the remainder to the heirs was likely purchased
for some slight amount. The language of the deeds that Henderson
exhibits in his suit shows a transfer of all claim or title, as though
he bought a thing which the grantees thought lay with the uncertainties
of a decree in chancery.”
“I have seen the deeds,” said my father.
“Then,” said the hunchback, “you know they are valid, and transfer the
title.” He paused. “I have no doubt that Mr. Henderson assembled these
outstanding interests at no great cost, but his conveyances are in form
and legal.”
“Everything connected with this affair,” said my father, “is strangely
legal!”
The hunchback considered my father through his narrow eyelids.
“It is a strange world,” he said.
“It is,” replied my father. “It is profoundly, inconceivably strange.”
There was a moment of silence. The two men regarded each other across
the half-length of the room. The girl sat in the chair. She had got back
her courage. The big, forceful presence of my father, like the shadow
of a great rock, was there behind her. She had the fine courage of her
blood, and, after the first cruel shock of this affair, she faced the
tragedies that might lie within it calmly.
Shadows lay along the walls of the great room, along the gilt frames of
the portraits, the empty fireplace, the rosewood furniture of ancient
make and the oak floor. Only the hunchback was in the light, behind the
four candles on the table.
“It was strange,” continued my father over the long pause, “that your
father's will discovered at his death left his lands to you, and no acre
to your brother David.”
“Not strange,” replied the hunchback, “when you consider what my brother
David proved to be. My father knew him. What was hidden from us, what
the world got no hint of, what the man was in the deep and secret places
of his heart, my father knew. Was it strange, then, that he should leave
the lands to me?”
“It was a will drawn by an old man in his senility, and under your
control.”
“Under my care,” cried the hunchback. “I will plead guilty, if you like,
to that. I honored my father. I was beside his bed with loving-kindness,
while my brother went about the pleasures of his life.”
“But the testament,” said my father, “was in strange terms. It
bequeathed the lands to you, with no mention of the personal property,
as though these lands were all the estate your father had.”
“And so they were,” replied the hunchback calmly. “The lands had been
stripped of horse and steer, and every personal item, and every dollar
in hand or debt owing to my father before his death.” The man paused
and put the tips of his fingers together. “My father had given to my
brother so much money from these sources, from time to time, that he
justly left me the lands to make us even.”
“Your father was senile and for five years in his bed. It was you,
Dillworth, who cleaned the estate of everything but land.”
“I conducted my father's business,” said the hunchback, “for him, since
he was ill. But I put the moneys from these sales into his hand and he
gave them to my brother.”
“I have never heard that your brother David got a dollar of this money.”
The hunchback was undisturbed.
“It was a family matter and not likely to be known.”
“I see it,” said my father. “It was managed in your legal manner and
with cunning foresight. You took the lands only in the will, leaving the
impression to go out that your brother had already received his share
in the personal estate by advancement. It was shrewdly done. But there
remained one peril in it: If any personal property should appear under
the law you would be required to share it equally with your brother
David.”
“Or rather,” replied the hunchback calmly, “to state the thing
correctly, my brother David would be required to share any discovered
personal property with me.” Then he added: “I gave my brother David a
hundred dollars for his share in the folderol about the premises, and
took possession of the house and lands.”
“And after that,” said my father, “what happened?”
The hunchback uttered a queerly inflected expletive, like a bitter
laugh.
“After that,” he answered, “we saw the real man in my brother David, as
my father, old and dying, had so clearly seen it. After that he turned
thief and fugitive.”
At the words the girl in the chair before my father rose. She stood
beside him, her lithe figure firm, her chin up, her hair spun darkness.
The courage, the fine, open, defiant courage of the first women of the
world, coming with the patriarchs out of Asia, was in her lifted face.
My father moved as though he would stop the hunchback's cruel speech.
But she put her fingers firmly on his arm.
“He has gone so far,” she said, “let him go on to the end. Let him omit
no word, let us hear every ugly thing the creature has to say.”
Dillworth sat back in his chair at ease, with a supercilious smile. He
passed the girl and addressed my father.
“You will recall the details of that robbery,” he said in his
complacent, piping voice. “My brother David had married a wife, like the
guest invited in the Scriptures. A child was born. My brother lived
with his wife's people in their house. One night he came to me to borrow
money.”
He paused and pointed his long index finger through the doorway and
across the hall.
“It was in my father's room that I received him. It did not please me to
put money into his hands. But I admonished him with wise counsel. He
did not receive my words with a proper brotherly regard. He flared up in
unmanageable anger. He damned me with reproaches, said I had stolen his
inheritance, poisoned his father's mind against him and slipped into the
house and lands. 'Pretentious and perfidious' is what he called me. I
was firm and gentle. But he grew violent and a thing happened.”
The man put up his hand and moved it along in the air above the table.
“There was a secretary beside the hearth in my father's room. It was an
old piece with drawers below and glass doors above. These doors had not
been opened for many years, for there was nothing on the shelves behind
them--one could see that--except some rows of the little wooden boxes
that indigo used to be sold in at the country stores.”
The hunchback paused as though to get the details of his story precisely
in relation.
“I sat at my father's table in the middle of the room. My brother David
was a great, tall man, like Saul. In his anger, as he gesticulated by
the hearth, his elbow crashed through the glass door of this secretary;
the indigo boxes fell, burst open on the floor, and a hidden store of my
father's money was revealed. The wooden boxes were full of gold pieces!”
He stopped and passed his fingers over his projecting chin.
“I was in fear, for I was alone in the house. Every negro was at a
distant frolic. And I was justified in that fear. My brother leaped on
me, struck me a stunning blow on the chest over the heart, gathered up
the gold, took my horse and fled. At daybreak the negroes found me on
the floor, unconscious. Then you came, Pendleton. The negroes had washed
up the litter from the hearth where the indigo about the coins in the
boxes had been shaken out.”
My father interrupted:
“The negroes said the floor had been scrubbed when they found you.”
“They were drunk,” continued the hunchback with no concern. “And, does
one hold a drunken negro to his fact? But you saw for yourself the
wooden boxes, round, three inches high, with tin lids, and of a diameter
to hold a stack of golden eagles, and you saw the indigo still sticking
about the sides of these boxes where the coins had lain.”
“I did,” replied my father. “I observed it carefully, for I thought the
gold pieces might turn up sometime, and the blue indigo stain might be
on them when they first appeared.”
Dillworth leaned far back in his chair, his legs tangled under him, his
eyes on my father, in reflection. Finally he spoke.
“You are far-sighted,” he said.
“Or God is,” replied my father, and, stepping over to the table, he spun
a gold piece on the polished surface of the mahogany board.
The hunchback watched the yellow disk turn and flit and wabble on its
base and flutter down with its tingling reverberations.
“To-day, when I rode into the county seat to a sitting of the justices,”
continued my father, “the sheriff showed me some gold eagles that your
man from Maryland, Mr. Henderson, had paid in on court costs. Look,
Dillworth, there is one of them, and with your thumb nail on the milled
edge you can scrape off the indigo!”
The hunchback looked at the spinning coin, but he did not touch it. His
head, with its long, straight hair, swung a moment uncertain between his
shoulders. Then, swiftly and with a firm grip, he took his resolution.
“The coins appear,” he said. “My brother David must be in Baltimore
behind this suit.”
“He is not in Baltimore,” said my father.
“Perhaps you know where he is,” cried the hunchback, “since you speak
with such authority.”
“I do know where he is,” said my father in his deep, level voice.
The hunchback got on his feet slowly beside his chair. And the girl came
into the protection of my father's arm, her features white like plaster;
but the fiber in her blood was good and she stood up to face the thing
that might be coming. After the one long abandonment to tears in my
father's saddle she had got herself in hand. She had gone, like the
princes of the blood, through the fire, and the dross of weakness was
burned out.
The hunchback got on his feet, in position like a duelist, his hard,
bitter face turned slantwise toward my father.
“Then,” he said, “if you know where David is you will take his daughter
to him, if you please, and rid my house of the burden of her.”
“We shall go to him,” said my father slowly, “but he shall not return to
us.”
The hunchback's eyes blinked and bated in the candlelight.
“You quote the Scriptures,” he said. “Is David in a grave?”
“He is not,” replied my father.
The hunchback seemed to advance like a duelist who parries the first
thrust of his opponent. But my father met him with an even voice.
“Dillworth,” he said, “it was strange that no man ever saw your brother
or the horse after the night he visited you in this house.”
“It was dark,” replied the man. “He rode from this door through the gap
in the mountains into Maryland.”
“He rode from this door,” said my father slowly, “but not through the
gap in the mountains into Maryland.”
The hunchback began to twist his fingers.
“Where did he ride then? A man and a horse could not vanish.”
“They did vanish,” said my father.
“Now you utter fool talk!” cried Dillworth.
“I speak the living truth,” replied my father. “Your brother David and
your horse disappeared out of sound and hearing--disappeared out of the
sight and knowledge of men--after he rode away from your door on that
fatal night.”
“Well,” said the hunchback, “since my brother David rode away from my
door--and you know that--I am free of obligation for him.”
“It is Cain's speech!” replied my father.
The hunchback put back his long hair with a swift brush of the fingers
across his forehead.
“Dillworth,” cried my father, and his voice filled the empty places of
the room, “is the mark there?”
The hunchback began to curse. He walked around my father and the girl,
the hair about his lank jaws, his fingers working, his face evil. In
his front and menace he was like a weasel that would attack some larger
creature. And while he made the great turn of his circle my father, with
his arm about the girl, stepped before the drawer of the table where the
pistol lay.
“Dillworth,” he said calmly, “I know where he is. And the mark you felt
for just now ought to be there.”
“Fool!” cried the hunchback. “If I killed him how could he ride away
from the door?”
“It was a thing that puzzled me,” replied my father, “when I stood in
this house on the morning of your pretended robbery. I knew what had
happened. But I thought it wiser to let the evil thing remain a mystery,
rather than unearth it to foul your family name and connect this child
in gossip for all her days with a crime.”
“With a thief,” snarled the man.
“With a greater criminal than a thief,” replied My father. “I was not
certain about this gold on that morning when you showed me the empty
boxes. They were too few to hold gold enough for such a motive. I
thought a quarrel and violent hot blood were behind the thing; and for
that reason I have been silent. But now, when the coins turn up, I see
that the thing was all ruthless, cold-blooded love of money.
“I know what happened in that room. When your brother David struck the
old secretary with his elbow, and the dozen indigo boxes fell and burst
open on the hearth, you thought a great hidden treasure was uncovered.
You thought swiftly. You had got the land by undue influence on your
senile father, and you did not have to share that with your brother
David. But here was a treasure you must share; you saw it in a flash.
You sat at your father's table in the room. Your brother stood by the
wall looking at the hearth. And you acted then, on the moment, with the
quickness of the Evil One. It was cunning in you to select the body over
the heart as the place to receive the imagined blow--the head or face
would require some evidential mark to affirm your word. And it was
cunning to think of the unconscious, for in that part one could get up
and scrub the hearth and lie down again to play it.”
He paused.
“But the other thing you did in that room was not so clever. A picture
was newly hung on the wall--I saw the white square on the opposite wall
from which it had been taken. It hung at the height of a man's shoulders
directly behind the spot where your brother must have stood after he
struck the secretary, and it hung in this new spot to cover the crash of
a bullet into the mahogany panel!”
My father stopped and caught up the hunchback's double-barreled pistol
out of the empty drawer.
The room was now illumined; the moon had got above the tree tops and its
light slanted in through the long windows. The hunchback saw the thing
and he paused; his face worked in the fantastic light.
“Yes,” continued my father, in his deep, quiet voice, “this is your
mistake to-night--to let me get your weapon. Your mistake that other
night was to shoot before you counted the money. It was only a few
hundred dollars. The dozen wooden boxes would hold no great sum. But the
thing was done, and you must cover it.”
He paused.
“And you did cover it--with fiendish cunning. It would not do for your
brother to vanish from your house, alone and with no motive. But if
he disappeared, with the gold to take him and a horse to ride, the
explanation would have solid feet to go on. I give you credit here for
the ingenuity of Satan. You managed the thing. You caused your brother
David and the horse to vanish. I saw, on that morning, the tracks of
the horse where you led him from the stable to the door, and his tracks
where you led him, holding the dead man in the saddle, from the door to
the ancient orchard where the grass grows over the fallen-down chimney
of your grandsire's house. And there, at your cunning, they wholly
vanished.”
The mad courage in the hunchback got control, and he began to advance on
my father with no weapon and with no hope to win. His fingers crooked,
his body in a bow, his wizen, cruel face pallid in the ghostly light.
“Dillworth,” cried my father, in a great voice, like one who would
startle a creature out of mania, “you will write a deed in your
legal manner granting these lands to your brother's child. And after
that”--his words were like the blows of a hammer on an anvil--“I will
give you until daybreak to vanish out of our sight and hearing--through
the gap in the mountains into Maryland on your horse, as you say your
brother David went, or into the abandoned cistern in the ancient orchard
where he lies under the horse that you shot and tumbled in on his
murdered body!”
The moon was now above the gable of the house. The candles were burned
down. They guttered around the sheet of foolscap wet with the scrawls
and splashes of Dillworth's quill. My father stood at a window looking
out, the girl in a flood of tears, relaxed and helpless, in the
protection of his arm.
And far down the long turnpike, white like an expanded ribbon, the
hunchback rode his great horse in a gallop, perched like a monkey,
his knees doubled, his head bobbing, his loose body rolling in the
saddle--while the black, distorted shadow that had followed my father
into this tragic house went on before him like some infernal messenger
convoying the rider to the Pit.