Another thing Vera clearly took for granted was, that I must have known why the man hidden in the wood had fired those shots at me. I had guessed, of course, from the first, that the bullet that had killed the driver had been meant for me; though why anybody should wish to do me harm I had not the remotest idea.
Of some points, of course, my love was ignorant as myself.
On the subject of the flask with the gelsiminum – a very potent poison distilled from the root of the yellow jasmine – that had been picked up on the drive at Houghton, just outside the front door, Vera said nothing. Indeed, though I referred to it more than once, she each time turned the conversation into a different channel, as though by accident.
“By the way, darling,” I said, as our lips met again in a long, lingering caress, when we had been talking a long time, “why did you ring me up to tell me you were in trouble and needed my help, and why did you call with Davies at my chambers?”
Several times during the evening I had been on the point of asking her these questions, but on each occasion she had diverted my intention. It seemed odd, too, that though I had more than once asked her to tell me Davies’ true name, she had each time turned the conversation without satisfying me. And at last she had point-blank refused to tell me.
Why? I wondered.
She looked at me steadily for some moments.
“It seems almost incredible, Dick,” she said at last, speaking very slowly, and drawing herself away, “that knowing my father’s secret, you should ask those questions. Tell me, how did you come to make the terrible discovery about my father? How long have you known everything? Who told you about it?”
Chapter Ten
Relates a Strange Incident
Vera’s very direct questions took me aback, though I had expected them sooner or later. “Who told me?” I said, echoing the words in order to gain time for thought, my arms still about her. “Oh, I’m sure I can’t remember. I seem to have known it a long time.”
“It can’t have been such a very long time,” she answered, still looking at me in that queer way that made me feel uncomfortable. “Surely you must remember who told you. It is hardly the sort of thing one would be told every day – or even twice in one’s life, is it?”
“Honestly,” I said with quick decision, “I can’t tell you how I came to know it.”
“Your ‘cannot’ means ‘will not,’” she said, and her lip twitched in the curious way that I knew meant she was nettled.
However, after that she dropped the subject, and I felt relieved. I hated deceiving her, yet I was compelled. I am not an adept in the art of what Lamb calls “walking round about a truth,” at least, not for more than a minute or two at a time, and my love had such quick intelligence that it is no easy matter – as I had several times discovered, to my discomfiture – to mislead her.
For the first time since we had met in the house in Belgrave Street, our conversation became purely personal.
I had almost feared the events of the past weeks might have altered her regard for me, and it afforded me intense relief to find I was mistaken. For I was desperately in love with her, more so than I cared to admit even to myself. And now I found to my joy that my love for her was apparently fully reciprocated.
And yet why should she care for me? This puzzled me, I confess, though I know as a thoroughgoing man of the world and as a cosmopolitan that women do take most curious likes and dislikes. I am neither clever, good-looking nor amusing, nor, I believe, even particularly “good company” as it is called. There are scores upon scores of men just like myself. You meet them everywhere, in town and in the country. Society teems with them, and our clubs are full of them. Men, young and middle aged, who have been educated at the public schools and Universities, who have comfortable incomes, are fond of sport, who travel up and down Europe, who have never in their lives done a stroke of work – and don’t intend ever to do one if they can help it – who live solely for amusement and for the pleasure of living.
What do women see in such men, women who have plenty of money and therefore do not need to marry in order to secure a home or to better themselves? What did – what could Vera Thorold see in me to attract her, least of all to tempt her to wish to marry me?
“Vera, my dearest,” I said, when we had talked of each other’s affairs for a considerable time, “why not marry me now? I can get a special licence! Then you will be free of all trouble, and nobody will be able to molest you. I shall have a right to protect you in every way possible.”
“Free of all trouble if I marry you, Richard?” she answered, reflectively, evading my question, and looking at me queerly.
“And why not?” I asked. I felt rather hurt, for her words seemed to imply some hidden meaning. “Don’t you think I shall be good to you and treat you properly?”
“Oh, that would be all right,” she answered, apparently amused at my misconstruing her meaning. “I am sure, Dick, that you would be good to any girl. I have already heard of your spoiling two or three girls, and giving them presents they had no right to accept from you – eh?” she asked mischievously.
I am afraid I turned rather red, for, to be candid, I am something of a fool where women are concerned. At the same time I was surprised at her knowing the truth, and I suppose she guessed this, for, before I had time to speak again, she went on —
“You must not forget that I am a modern girl, my dear old Dick. I know a great deal that I suppose I have no business to know, and when I hear things I remember them. Don’t for a moment flatter yourself that I think you perfect. I don’t. My frank opinion of you is that you really are an awfully good sort, kind, sympathetic, unselfish – singularly unselfish for a man – generous to a fault, and extravagant. In short, I like you far, far better than any man I have ever met, and I love you very much, you dear old boy – but there it ends.”
“I should rather say it did!” I answered. “If you really think all that of me, I am more than satisfied.”
“On the other hand,” she continued quickly, “I don’t pretend to think – and you needn’t think I do – that you are not just like most other men in some respects, in one respect in particular.”
“What is the one respect?”
“You are dreadfully susceptible – oh, yes, Dick, you are! There is no need for any one to tell me that. I can see it in your face. Your eyes betray you. You have what I once heard a girl friend of mine call, ‘affectionate eyes.’ She said to me: ‘Never trust a man who has “affectionate eyes,” and I never have trusted one – except you.’”
“I am flattered dear. Then why not do what I suggest?” I asked, raising her soft hand to my lips.
“It wouldn’t be safe, Dick, it really wouldn’t. We must wait until – until Paulton is dead.”
“Until Paulton – is – until he – is dead!” I gasped. “Good Heavens! that may not be for years!”
She smiled oddly.
“He may live for years, of course,” she answered drily.
“What do you mean?” I asked, staring at her in amazement.
“I mean,” she said, looking straight at me, and her voice suddenly grew hard, “that when he is dead, the world will be rid of a creature who ought never to have been born.”
Her eyes blazed.
“Ah! Dick – Ah! Dick!” she went on with extraordinary force, sighing heavily, “if you only knew the life that man has led – the misery he has caused, the horrors that are traceable to his vile diabolical plots. My father and mother are only two of his many victims. He is a man I dread. I am not a coward, no one can call me that, but – but I fear Dago Paulton – I fear him terribly.” She was trembling in my arms, though whether through fear, or only from emotion, I could not say. Nor could I think of any apt words which might soothe her, except to say —
“Leave him to me, dearest. Yet from what you tell me,” I said after a pause, “I can only suppose that some one is – how shall I put it? – going to encompass Paulton’s death.”
“Who knows?” she asked vaguely, looking up into my eyes.
I shrugged my shoulders, but said nothing. There was nothing I could say. This much I had suspected at any rate – Paulton had been responsible for the chauffeur’s death – or Vera believed him to have been.
When I left my beloved late that night, and returned to King Street, I was not satisfied with my discoveries. So many mysteries still remained unsolved. What was the danger that had threatened her when she had rung me up at my flat, and begged me to help her? Where had she been staying? What danger threatened her now? What hold had the man Paulton over her, and why did she fear to disobey him? Most perplexing of all – what was her father’s secret, and why had he fled from Houghton?
There were many minor problems, too, which still needed solution. Who was Davies; what was his true name, and why was he so intimate with Sir Charles?
Again I seemed to see that curious stain on the ceiling of the room in Belgrave Street, and once more I wondered what had caused it. It might be, of course, merely a stain caused by some leaking pipe, and yet —
I thought of that remarkable conversation I had heard in the hall of the unoccupied house. What had they meant when they said they must “bring Vera to her senses”? Also, why had they seemed averse from calling in a doctor to see the old man Taylor, and to —
Taylor! I had been so much engrossed with Vera and her bondage of terror for the past few hours that I had forgotten all about him. Taylor. Had he recovered consciousness, I wondered, or had he —
A cold shiver ran through me as this last thought occurred to me.
It must have been quite two o’clock in the morning before I fell asleep. I am not an early riser, and my first feeling when I was awakened by John shaking me rather roughly, was one of annoyance. With difficulty I roused myself thoroughly. My servant was standing by the bedside, looking very pale.
“There are two police-officers downstairs,” he said huskily. “They have come – they say they have come, sir – ”
“Well, out with it,” I exclaimed wrathfully, as he checked himself abruptly. “What have they come for? Do they want to see me?”
He braced himself with an effort —
“They say, sir,” he answered, “that – that they’ve come to arrest you! It is something to do, I think, with some old man who’s been found dead in an unoccupied ’ouse.”
Chapter Eleven
Contains some Strange News
My heart seemed to stop beating. Old Taylor, then, was dead, and I sat up in bed, staring straight before me.
For nearly a minute I did not speak. All the time I felt John’s calm gaze, puzzled, inquisitive, fixed upon me. I had gone through enough unhappiness during these past weeks to last me a lifetime, but all that I had endured would be as nothing by comparison with this. I could not blind myself to one fact – I had poisoned old Taylor deliberately. Had I, by some hideous miscalculation, the result of ignorance, overdosed him, and brought his poor old life to a premature end? I might be charged with manslaughter. Or worse!
Why! I might be convicted of murder. I might even be hanged! The grim thought held me breathless.
And Vera – my thoughts fled to her at once – what would become of Vera? Even if I were only imprisoned, and only for a short spell, Vera would have none to look to for help, none to defend her. She would be at the mercy of her persecutors! I think that thought appalled me even more than the thought that I might be tried for manslaughter or murder.
“Oh,” I said at last to John, “it’s some mistake. The police have made some grotesque blunder. You had better show them up, and I will talk to them.”
No blunder had been made, and I knew it.
I must say that I was surprised at the officers’ extreme courtesy. Seeing they were about to arrest me on suspicion of having caused a man’s death, their politeness, their consideration for my feelings, had a touch of irony.
They waited while I had my bath and dressed. Then we all drove together to the police-station, chatting quite pleasantly on topics of passing interest. At the police-station my name and address and many other particulars, were taken down in writing. With the utmost gravity a pompous inspector asked me “what birthmarks I possessed, if any,” and various other questions ending with “if any.” I wondered whether, before he had done, he would ask me my sex – if any.
Nearly a month dragged on – days of anxiety, which seemed years, and I had had no word from Vera!
I shall never forget that trial – never.
My opinion of legal procedure, never high, sank to zero before the trial at the London Sessions ended. The absurdity of some of the questions asked by counsel; the impossible inferences drawn from quite ordinary occurrences; the endless repetitions of the same questions, but in different sets of words; the verbal quibbling and juggling; the transposing of statements made in evidence and conveying a meaning obvious to the lowest intelligence; the pathos indulged in when the old man’s end came to be described; the judge’s weak attempts at being witty; the red-tapeism; the unpardonable waste of time – and of public money. No, I shall never forget those days.
It lasted from Monday till Thursday, and during those four days I spent eleven hours in the witness-box. Ah! what a tragic farce. I received anonymous letters of encouragement, and, of course, some offensive letters. I even received a proposal of marriage from a forward minx, who admitted that though still at school, in Blackheath, she had “read every word of the trial,” that she “kept a dear portrait” of me, cut out of the Daily Mirror, under her pillow at night. I felt I must indeed have reached the depths of ignominy when my hand was sought in matrimony by an emotional Blackheath flapper. A pretty flapper, I admit. She sent me five cabinet portraits of herself, in addition to a miniature of herself as a baby. Phew! What are our young people coming to?
Well, in the end I was acquitted, and told that I might leave the Court without a stain upon my character.
Certainly that was in a sense gratifying. In the face of acrobatic verbal feats Counsel representing the Director of Public Prosecutions had indulged in during the trial, I felt that anything might have happened, and was fully prepared to be branded a felon for life. The drug, the jury decided, had been administered without any intention whatever to do more than send the old man to sleep for an hour or so, and an analysis of the tea left in the cup proved beyond a doubt, that this tea could not possibly have caused death, which had been due to heart-failure. I had been traced, it seemed, by my gloves and umbrella left in the old man’s room. Other details – long-winded ones – I need not describe.
The problem now was, what to do next. My name, Richard Ashton, had become a sort of butt. Everybody knew it, had seen it in print twenty times during the past week. Mentioned by the comedian in a music-hall, it at once created laughter. I laughed myself – not uproariously, I admit – when a comedian at the Alhambra compared me to an albatross, thereby causing the entire audience to shake with merriment, and a stranger to turn to me with the remark —
“Richard Ashton! What a Nut, eh?”
Now the vulgar term “Nut” was in its infancy then, and new to me. I pawed the air in a vain endeavour to grasp the point of comparing me first to an albatross, and then to a nut. Nuts don’t grow on ash trees, or I might have thought the “ash” of “Ashton” bore some kind of relationship to a nut. Finally I gave it up, convinced that I must be deficient in a sense of humour.
Meanwhile, my beloved had disappeared. To my chagrin I ascertained at the hotel at Hampstead that a man had called on the day following my arrest, and that she had gone away with him, taking all her luggage.
A description of the man failed to help me to identify him. From it I decided, however, that it was not Sir Charles who had called for Vera, nor yet the mysterious Smithson. My natural inference, therefore, was that the fellow Paulton had discovered her hiding-place, and compelled her to go away with him.
I tried hard to put into practice my theory that it is useless to worry about anything, and for some days I remained passive, watching, however, the advertisement columns in the principal daily newspapers, for during our evening at the hotel, Vera had incidentally remarked that she had, while at Brighton, advertised for a bracelet she had lost, and by that means recovered it. I advertised for news of her. But there was no response.
On the Sunday, having nothing particular to do, I looked in during the afternoon at one of my usual haunts, Tattersall’s sale yard. I thought it probable I should there run across somebody or other I knew, and I was not mistaken. At the entrance I overtook a little man whose figure I could not mistake. The little sporting parson from a village outside Oakham was a great friend of mine, and he had told me that, whenever in town for a week-end he invariably went to Tattersall’s on the Sunday afternoon to see what horses were to be sold there next day.
“Not that I can afford to buy a horse, oh dear no!” I remembered him saying to me in the drawing-room at Houghton. “You know what parson’s families are. Mine is no exception to the rule!”
I had upbraided him for his lack of forethought, and he had chuckled, adding seriously that in his opinion the falling birth rate spelt the downfall of the Nation, a point upon which I had differed from him more than once.
“Hullo, Rowan!” I exclaimed, as I overtook him, and quietly slipped my arm into his from behind, making him start. “I see you spoke the truth that day.”
He was frankly delighted to see me. I knew he would be, for he is one of the few Rutlanders I have met who are wholly devoid of what some Americans term “frills.” I believe that if I were in rags and carrying a sandwich-board and I met little Rowan in the streets of London to-morrow, he would come up to me and grasp me by the hand. There are not many men of whom one can say that. I don’t suppose more than ten per cent, of my acquaintances, if as many, would look at me again if next week I became a pauper.
“What truth, and when?” he asked, in answer to my remark.
“Don’t you remember telling me,” I said, “I believe it was the last time we hunted together, that when in London you always do two things? You said: ‘I always attend service on Sunday morning, and Tattersall’s on Sunday afternoon.’ How is the old cob?”
“Getting old, Dick, getting old, like his master,” Rowan said with a touch of pathos. “I hear the Hunt talk of buying me another mount. It is good of them; very good. I am not supposed to know, of course.”
“And so you have come to find something up to your weight, eh?” I went on. He does not, I suppose, ride more than eight stone twelve in his hunting kit. He is the wiriest little man I have ever seen.
“No,” he answered. “I have come to have a last look at Sir Charles Thorold’s stud. It comes under the hammer to-morrow, as, of course, you know.”
“Thorold’s horses to be sold!” I exclaimed. “I had no idea. Then he has said good-bye to Rutland for good and all. I am sorry.”
“So am I, very. He is a man I have always liked. Naturally his name is in rather bad odour in the county just at present, but that does not in the least affect my own regard for him.”
“It wouldn’t,” I said to him. “You are not that sort, Rowan. It is a pity there are not more like you about.”
He changed the subject by asking if I had seen Sir Charles and Lady Thorold lately.
“I have not seen Lady Thorold since the Houghton affair,” I answered. “I have seen Sir Charles, but not to speak to.”
I recollected how I had caught a glimpse of him in that house in Belgrave Street.
“You have heard the latest about Miss Thorold, of course?” he said, as we passed into the Yard, which at this hour – about four o’clock – was crowded with well-dressed men and women.
“The latest? What do you mean?”
“Dear me,” he exclaimed, smiling. “Why, we country cousins know more than you men about town after all, sometimes. She’s at Monte Carlo.”
“At Monte? Vera Thorold!”
“Yes.”
“What is she doing there? Who is with her?”
“I don’t know who’s with her, or if any one is with her. She is pretty independent, as you know, and well able to take care of herself – a typical twentieth century girl.”
“But who told you she was at Monte?”
“Several people. Ah! there’s Lord Logan! He’ll tell us. He was speaking of her yesterday. He returned from the Riviera only a couple of days ago.”