Chapter 7

HIDDEN SURPRISES

XX

“HE OR YOU! THERE IS NO THIRD”

A heavy summons lies like lead upon me, And yet I would not sleep Merciful powers! Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature Gives way to in repose.

_Macbeth_.

For several days I had been ill. They were merciful days to me since I was far too weak for thought. Then there came a period of conscious rest, then renewed interest in life and my own fate and reputation. What had happened during this interval?

I had a confused memory of having seen Clifton’s face at my bedside, but I was sure that no words had passed between us. When would he come again? When should I hear about Carmel, and whether she were yet alive, or mercifully dead, like her sister? I might read the papers, but they had been carefully kept from me. Not one was in sight. The nurse would undoubtedly give me the information I desired, but, kind as she had been, I dreaded to consult a stranger about matters which involved my very existence and every remaining hope. Yet I must know; for I could not help thinking, now, and I dreaded to think amiss and pile up misery for myself when I needed support and consolation.

I would risk one question, but no more. I would ask about the inquest. Had it been held? If she said yes--ah, if she said yes!--I should know that Carmel was dead; and the news, coming thus, would kill me. So I asked nothing, and was lying in a sufficiently feverish condition when the doctor came in, saw my state, and thinking to cheer me up, remarked blandly:

“You are well enough this morning to hear good news. Do you recognise the room you are in?”

“I’m in the hospital, am I not?”

“Hardly. You are in one of Mr. O’Hagen’s own rooms.” (Mr. O’Hagen was the head keeper.) “You are detained, now, simply as a witness.”

I was struck to the heart; terrified in an instant.

“What? Why? What has happened?” I questioned, rapidly, half starting up, then falling back on my pillow under his astonished eye.

“Nothing,” he parried, seeing his mistake, and resorting to the soothing process. “They simply have had time to think. You’re not the sort of man from which criminals are made.”

“That’s nonsense,” I retorted, reckless of his opinion, and mad to know the truth, yet shrinking horribly from it. “Criminals are made from all kinds of men; neither are the police so philosophical. Something has occurred. But don’t tell me--” I protested inconsistently, as he opened his lips. “Send for Mr. Clifton. He’s my friend; I can better bear--”

“Here he is,” said the doctor, as the door softly opened under the nurse’s careful hand.

I looked up, saw Charles’s faithful face, and stretched out my hand without speaking. Never had I needed a friend more, and never had I been more constrained in my greeting. I feared to show my real heart, my real fears, my real reason for not hailing my release, as every one evidently expected me to!

With a gesture to the nurse, the doctor tiptoed out, muttering to Clifton, as he passed, some word of warning or casual instruction. The nurse followed, and Clifton, coming forward, took a seat at my side. He was cheerful but not too cheerful; and the air of slight constraint which tinged his manner, as much as it did mine, did not escape me.

“Well, old fellow,” he began--

My hand went up in entreaty.

“Tell me why they have withdrawn their suspicions. I’ve heard nothing--read nothing--for days. I don’t understand this move.”

For reply, he laid his hand on mine.

“You’re stanch,” he began. “You have my regard, Elwood. Not many men would have stood the racket and sacrificed themselves as you have done. The fact is recognised, now, and your motive--”

I must have turned very white; for he stopped and sprang to his feet, searching for some restorative.

I felt the need of blinding him to my condition. With an effort, which shook me from head to foot, I lifted myself from the depths into which his words had plunged me, and fighting for self-control, faltered forth, feebly enough:

“Don’t be frightened. I’m all right again; I guess I’m not very strong yet. Sit down; I don’t need anything.”

He turned and surveyed me carefully, and finding my colour restored, reseated himself, and proceeded, more circumspectly:

“Perhaps I had better wait till to-morrow before I satisfy your curiosity,” said he.

“And leave me to imagine all sorts of horrors? No! Tell me at once. Is--is--has anything happened at the Cumberlands’?”

“Yes. What you feared has happened--No, no; Carmel is not dead. Did you think I meant that? Forgive me. I should have remembered that you had other causes for anxiety than the one weighing on our minds. She is holding her own--just holding it--but that is something, in one so young and naturally healthy.”

I could see that I baffled him. It could not be helped. I did not dare to utter the question with which my whole soul was full. I could only look my entreaty. He misunderstood it, as was natural enough.

“She does not know yet what is in store for her,” were his words; and I could only lie still, and look at him helplessly, and try not to show the despair that was sinking me deeper and deeper into semi-unconsciousness. “When she comes to herself, she will have to be told; but you will be on your feet, then, and will be allowed, no doubt, to soften the blow for her by your comfort and counsel. The fact that it must have been you, if not he--”

“_He!_” Did I shout it, or was the shout simply in my own mind? I trembled as I rose on my elbow. I searched his face in terror of my self-betrayal; but his showed only compassion and an eager desire to clear the air between us by telling me the exact facts.

“Yes--Arthur. His guilt has not been proven; he has not even been remanded; the sister’s case is too pitiful and Coroner Perry too soft-hearted, where any of that family is involved. But no one doubts his guilt, and he does not deny it himself. You know--probably no one better--that he cannot very consistently do this, in face of the evidence accumulated against him, evidence stronger in many regards, than that accumulated against yourself. The ungrateful boy! The--the--Pardon me, I don’t often indulge in invectives against unhappy men who have their punishment before them, but I was thinking of you and what you have suffered in this jail, where you have not belonged--no, not for a day.”

“Don’t think of me.” The words came with a gasp. I was never so hard put to it--not when I first realised that I had been seen with my fingers on Adelaide’s throat. Arthur! A booby and a boor, but certainly not the slayer of his sister, unless I had been woefully mistaken in all that had taken place in that club-house previous to my entrance into it on that fatal night. As I caught Clifton’s eye fixed upon me, I repeated--though with more self-control, I hope: “Don’t think of me. I’m not thinking of myself. You speak of evidence. What evidence? Give me details. Don’t you see that I am burning with curiosity? I shan’t be myself till I hear.”

This alarmed him.

“It’s a risk,” said he. “The doctor told me to be careful not to excite you too much. But suspense is always more intolerable than certainty, and you have heard too much to be left in ignorance of the rest.”

“Yes, yes,” I agreed feverishly, pressing his hand.

“It all came about through you,” he blundered on. “You told me of the fellow you saw riding away from The Whispering Pines at the time you entered the grounds. I passed the story on to the coroner, and he to a New York detective they have put on this case. He and Arthur’s own surly nature did the rest.”

I cringed where I lay. This was my work. The person who drove out of the club-house grounds while I stood in the club-house hall was Carmel--and the clew I had given, instead of baffling and confusing them, had led directly to Arthur!

Seeing nothing peculiar--or at all events, giving no evidence of having noted anything peculiar in my movement--Clifton went evenly on, pouring into my astonished ears the whole long story of this detective’s investigations.

I heard of his visit at the mechanic’s cottage and of the identification of the hat marked by Eliza Simmons’s floury thumb, with an old one of Arthur’s, fished out from one of the Cumberland closets; then, as I lay dumb, in my secret dismay and perturbation, of Arthur’s acknowledged visit to the club-house, and his abstraction of the bottles, which to all minds save my own, perhaps, connected him directly and well-nigh unmistakably, with the crime.

“The finger of God! Nothing else. Such coincidences cannot be natural,” was my thought. And I braced myself to meet the further disclosures I saw awaiting me.

But when these disclosures were made, and Arthur’s conduct at the funeral was given its natural explanation by the finding of the tell-tale ring in Adelaide’s casket, I was so affected, both by the extraordinary nature of the facts and the doubtful position in which they seemed to place one whom, even now, I found it difficult to believe guilty of Adelaide’s death, that Clifton, aroused, in spite of his own excitement, to a sudden realisation of my condition, bounded to his feet and impetuously cried out:

“I had to tell you. It was your due and you would not have been satisfied if I had not. But I fear that I rushed my narrative too suddenly upon you; that you needed more preparation, and that the greatest kindness I can show you now, is to leave before I do further mischief.”

I believe I answered. I know that his idea of leaving was insupportable to me. That I wanted him to stay until I had had time to think and adjust myself to these new conditions. Instinctively, I did not feel as certain of Arthur’s guilt as he did. My own case had taught me the insufficiency of circumstantial evidence to settle a mooted fact. Besides, I knew Arthur even better than I did his sisters. He was as full of faults, and as lacking in amiable and reliable traits as any fellow of my acquaintance. But he had not the inherent snap which makes for crime. He lacked the vigour which,--God forgive me the thought!--lay back of Carmers softer characteristics. I could not imagine him guilty; I could, for all my love, imagine his sister so, and did. The conviction would not leave my mind.

“Charles,” said I, at last, struggling for calmness, and succeeding better in my task than either he or I expected; “what motive do they assign for this deed? Why should Arthur follow Adelaide to the club-house and kill her? Now, if he had followed me--”

“You were at dinner with them that night, and know what she did and what she vowed about the wine. He was very angry. Though he dropped his glass, and let it shiver on the board, he himself says that he was desperately put out with her, and could only drown his mad emotions in drink. He knew that she would hear of it if he went to any saloon in town; so he stole the key from your bunch, and went to help himself out of the club-house wine-vault. That’s how he came to be there. What followed, who knows? He won’t tell, and we can only conjecture. The ring, which she certainly wore that night, might give the secret away; but it is not gifted with speech, though as a silent witness it is exceedingly eloquent.”

The episode of the ring confused me. I could make nothing out of it, could not connect it with what I myself knew of the confused experiences of that night. But I could recall the dinner and the sullen aspect, not unmixed with awe, with which this boy contemplated his sister when his own glass fell from his nerveless fingers. My own heart was not in the business; it was on the elopement I had planned; but I could not help seeing what I have just mentioned, and it recurred to me now with fatal distinctness. The awe was as great as the sullenness. Did that offer a good foundation for crime? I disliked Arthur. I had no use for the boy, and I wished with all my heart to detect guilt in his actions, rather than in those of the woman I loved; but I could not forget that tinge of awe on features too heavy to mirror very readily the nicer feelings of the human soul. It would come up, and, under the influence of this impression I said:

“Are you sure that he made no denial of this crime? That does not seem like Arthur, guilty or innocent.”

“He made none in my presence and I was in the coroner’s office when the ring was produced from its secret hiding-place and set down before him. There was no open accusation made, but he must have understood the silence of all present. He acknowledged some days ago, when confronted with the bottle found in Cuthbert Road, that he had taken both it and another from the club-house just before the storm began to rage that night.”

“The hour, the very hour!” I muttered.

“He entered and left by that upper hall window, or so he says; but he is not to be believed in all his statements. Some of his declarations we know to be false.”

“Which ones? Give me a specimen, Charlie. Mention something he has said that you know to be false.”

“Well, it is hard to accuse a man of a direct lie. But he cannot be telling the truth when he says that he crossed the links immediately to Cuthbert Road, thus cutting out the ride home, of which we have such extraordinary proof.”

Under the fear of betraying my thoughts, I hurriedly closed my eyes. I was in an extraordinary position, myself. What seemed falsehood to them, struck me as the absolute truth. Carmel had been the one to go home; he, without doubt, had crossed the links, as he said. As this conviction penetrated deeply and yet more deeply into my mind, I shrank inexpressibly from the renewed mental struggle into which it plunged me. To have suffered, myself,--to have fallen under the ban of suspicion and the disgrace of arrest--had certainly been hard; but it was nothing to beholding another in the same plight through my own rash and ill-advised attempt to better my position and Carmel’s by what I had considered a totally harmless subterfuge.

I shuddered as I anticipated the sleepless hours of silent debate which lay before me. The voice which whispered that Arthur Cumberland was not over-gifted with sensitiveness and would not feel the shame of his position like another, did not carry with it an indisputable message, and could not impose on my conscience for more than a passing moment. The lout was human; and I could not stifle my convictions in his favour.

But Carmel!

I clenched my hands under the clothes. I wished it were not high noon, but dark night; that Clifton would only arise or turn his eyes away; that something or anything might happen to give me an instant of solitary contemplation, without the threatening possibility of beholding my thoughts and feelings reflected in another’s mind.

Was this review instantaneous, or the work of many minutes? Forced by the doubt to open my eyes, I met Clifton’s full look turned watchfully on me. The result was calming; even to my apprehensive gaze it betrayed no new enlightenment. My struggle had been all within; no token of it had reached him.

This he showed still more plainly when he spoke.

“There will be a close sifting of evidence at the inquest. You will not enjoy this; but the situation, hard as it may prove, has certainly improved so far as you are concerned. That should hasten your convalescence.”

“Poor Arthur!” burst from my lips, and the cry was echoed in my heart. Then, because I could no longer endure the pusillanimity which kept me silent, I rose impulsively into a sitting posture, and, summoning all my faculties into full play, endeavoured to put my finger on the one weak point in the evidence thus raised against Carmel’s brother.

“What sort of a man would you make Arthur out to be, when you accuse him of robbing the wine-vault on top of a murderous assault on his sister?”

“I know. It argues a brute, but he--”

“Arthur Cumberland is selfish, unresponsive, and hard, but he is not a brute. I’m disposed to give him the benefit of my good opinion to this extent, Charlie; I cannot believe he first poisoned and then choked that noble woman.”

Clifton drew himself up in his turn, astonishment battling with renewed distrust.

“Either he or you, Ranelagh!” he exclaimed, firmly. “There is no third person. This you must realise.”

XXI

CARMEL AWAKES

One woe doth tread upon another’s heel, So fast they follow.

_Hamlet_.

Later, I asked myself many questions, and wandered into mazes of speculation which only puzzled me and led nowhere. I remembered the bottles; I remembered the ring. I went back, in fancy, to the hour of my own entrance into the club-house, and, recalling each circumstance, endeavoured to fit the facts of Arthur’s story with those of my own experience.

Was he in the building when I first stepped into it? It was just possible. I had been led to prevaricate as to the moment I entered the lower gateway, and he may have done the same as to the hour he left by the upper hall window. Whatever his denials on this or any subject, I was convinced that he knew, as well as I, that Carmel had been in the building with her sister, and was involved more or less personally in the crime committed there. Might it not be simply as his accessory after the fact? If only I could believe this! If my knowledge of him and of her would allow me to hug this forlorn hope, and behold, in this shock to her brain, and in her look and attitude on leaving the club-house, only a sister’s horror at a wilful brother’s crime!

But one fact stood in the way of this--a fact which nothing but some predetermined, underhanded purpose on her part could explain. She had gone in disguise to The Whispering Pines, and she had returned home in the same suspicious fashion. The wearing of her brother’s hat and coat over her own womanly garments was no freak. There had been purpose in it--a purpose which demanded secrecy. That Adelaide should have accompanied her under these circumstances was a mystery. But then the whole affair was a mystery, totally out of keeping, in all its details, with the characters of these women, save--and what a fearful exception I here make--the awful end, which, alas! bespoke the fiery rush and impulse to destroy which marked Carmel’s unbridled rages.

Of a less emotional attack she would be as incapable as any other good woman. Poison she would never use. Its presence there was due to another’s forethought, another’s determination. But the poison had not killed. Both glasses had been emptied, but--Ah! those glasses. What explanation had the police, now, for those two emptied glasses? They had hitherto supposed me to be the second person who had joined Adelaide in this totally uncharacteristic drinking.

To whom did they now attribute this act? To Arthur, the brother whose love for liquor in every form she had always decried, and had publicly rebuked only a few hours before? Knowing nothing of Carmel having been on the scene, they must ascribe this act either to him or to me; and when they came to dwell upon this point more particularly--when they came to study the exact character of the relations which had always subsisted between Adelaide and her brother--they must see the improbability of her drinking with him under any circumstances. Then their thoughts would recur to me, and I should find myself again a suspect. The monstrous suggestion that Arthur had brought the liquor there himself, had poured it out and forced her to drink it, poison and all, out of revenge for her action at the dinner-table a short time before, did not occur to me then, but if it had, there were the three glasses--he would not bring _three_; nor would Adelaide; nor, as I saw it, would Carmel.

Chaos! However one looked at it, chaos! Only one fact was clear--that Carmel knew the whole story and might communicate the same, if ever her brain cleared and she could be brought to reveal the mysteries of that hour. Did I desire such a consummation? Only God, who penetrates more deeply than ourselves into the hidden regions of the human heart, could tell. I only know that the fear and expectation of such an outcome made my anguish for the next two weeks.

Would she live? Would she die? The question was on every tongue. The crisis of her disease was approaching, and the next twenty-four hours would decide her fate, and in consequence, my own, if not her brother Arthur’s. As I contemplated the suspense of these twenty-four hours, I revolted madly for the first time against the restrictions of my prison. I wanted air, movement, the rush into danger, which my horse or my automobile might afford. Anything which would drag my thoughts from that sick room, and the anticipated stir of that lovely form into conscious life and suffering. Her eyes--I could see her eyes wakening upon the world again, after her long wandering in the unknown and unimaginable intricacies of ungoverned thought and delirious suggestion. Eyes of violet colour and infinite expression; eyes which would make a man’s joy if they smiled on him in innocence; but which, as I well knew, had burned more than once, in her short but strenuous life, with fiery passions; and might, at the instant of waking, betray this same unholy gleam under the curious gaze of the unsympathetic ones set in watch over her.

What would her first word be? Whither would her first thought fly? To Adelaide or to me; to Arthur or to her own frightened and appalled self? I maddened as I dwelt upon the possibilities of this moment. I envied Arthur; I envied the attendants; I envied even the servants in the house. They would all know sooner than I. Carmel! Carmel!

Sending for Clifton, I begged him to keep himself in communication with the house, or with the authorities. He promised to do what he could; then, perceiving the state I was in, he related all he knew of present conditions. No one was allowed in the sick room but the nurse and the doctor. Even Arthur was denied admission, and was wearing himself out in his own room as I was wearing myself out here, in restless inactivity. He expected her to sink and never to recover consciousness, and was loud in his expressions of rebellion against the men who dared to keep him from her bedside when her life was trembling in the balance. But the nurse had hopes and so had the doctor. As for Carmel’s looks, they were greatly changed, but beautiful still in spite of the cruel scar left by her fall against the burning bars of her sister’s grate. No delirium disturbed the rigid immobility in which she now lay. I could await her awakening with quiet confidence in the justice of God.

Thus Clifton, in his ignorance.

The day was a bleak one, dispiriting in itself even to those who could go about the streets and lose themselves in their tasks and round of duties. To me it was a dead blank, marked by such interruptions as necessarily took place under the prison routine. The evening hours which followed them were no better. The hands on my watch crawled. When the door finally opened, it came as a shock. I seemed to be prepared for anything but the termination of my suspense. I knew that it was Clifton who entered, but I could not meet his eye. I dug my nails into my palms, and waited for his first word. When it came, I felt my spirits go down, down--I had thought them at their lowest ebb before. He hesitated, and I started up:

“Tell me,” I cried. “Carmel is dead!”

“Not dead,” said he, “but silly. Her testimony is no more to be relied upon than that of any other wandering mind.”

XXII

“BREAK IN THE GLASS!”

This inundation of mistempered humour Rests by you only to be qualified.

_King John_.

It was some time before I learned the particulars of this awakening.

It had occurred at sunset. A level beam of light had shot across the bed, and the nurse had moved to close the blind, when a low exclamation from the doctor drew her back, to mark the first faint fluttering of the snowy lids over the long-closed eyes. Afterwards she remembered what a picture her youthful patient made, with the hue of renewed life creeping into her cheeks, in faint reflection of the nest of roseate colour in which she lay.

Carmel’s hair was dark; so were her exquisitely pencilled eye-brows, and the long lashes which curled upward from her cheek. In her surroundings of pink--warm pink, such as lives in the heart of the sea-shell--their duskiness took on an added beauty; and nothing, not even the long, dark scar running from eye to chin could rob the face of its individuality and suggestion of charm. She was lovely; but it was the loveliness of line and tint, just as a child is lovely. Soul and mind were still asleep, but momentarily rousing, as all thought, to conscious being--and, if to conscious being, then to conscious suffering as well.

It was a solemn moment. If the man who loved her had been present--or even her brother, who, sullen as he was, must have felt the tie of close relationship rise superior even to his fears at an instant so critical,--it would have been more solemn yet. But with the exception of the doctor and possibly the nurse, only those interested in her as a witness in the most perplexing case on the police annals, were grouped in silent watchfulness about the room, waiting for the word or look which might cut the Gordian knot which none of them, as yet, had been able to untangle.

It came suddenly, as all great changes come. One moment her lids were down, her face calm, her whole figure quiet in its statue-like repose; the next, her big violet eyes had flashed open upon the world, and lips and limbs were moving feebly, but certainly, in their suddenly recovered freedom. It was then--and not at a later moment when consciousness had fully regained its seat--that her face, to those who stood nearest wore the aspect of an angel’s. What she saw, or what vision remained to her from the mysterious world of which she had so long been a part, none ever knew--nor could she, perhaps, have told. But the rapture which informed her features and elevated her whole expression but poorly prepared them for the change which followed her first glance around on nurse and doctor. The beam which lay across the bed had been no brighter than her eye during that first tremulous instant of renewed life. But the clouds fell speedily and very human feelings peered from between those lids as she murmured, half petulantly:

“Why do you look at me so? Oh, I remember, I remember!”

And a flush, of which they little thought her weakened heart capable, spread over her features, hiding the scar and shaming her white lips. “What’s the matter?” she complained again, as she tried to raise her hands, possibly to hide her face. “I cannot move as I used to do, and I feel--I feel--”

“You have been ill,” came soothingly from the doctor. “You have been in bed many days; now you are better and will soon be well. This is your nurse.” He said nothing of the others, who were so placed behind screens as to be invisible to her.

She continued to gaze, first at one, then at the other; confidently at the doctor, doubtfully at the nurse. As she did so, the flush faded and gave way to an anxious, troubled expression. Not just the expression anticipated by those who believed that, with returning consciousness, would come returning memory of the mysterious scene which had taken place between herself and sister, or between her sister and her brother, prior to Adelaide’s departure for The Whispering Pines. Had they shared my knowledge--had they even so much as dreamed that their patient had been the companion of one or both of the others in this tragic escapade--how much greater would have been their wonder at the character of this awakening.

“You have the same kind look for me as always,” were her next words, as her glance finally settled on the doctor. “But hers--Bring me the mirror,” she cried. “Let me see with my own eyes what I have now to expect from every one who looks at me. I want to know before Lila comes in. Why isn’t she here? Is she with--with--” She was breaking down, but caught herself back with surprising courage, and almost smiled, I was told. Then in the shrill tones which will not be denied, she demanded again, “The mirror!”

Nurse Unwin brought it. Her patient evidently remembered the fall she had had in her sister’s room, and possibly the smart to her cheek when it touched the hot iron.

“I see only my forehead,” she complained, as the nurse held the mirror before her. “Move it a little. Lower--lower,” she commanded. Then suddenly “Oh!”

She was still for a long time, during which the nurse carried off the glass.

“I--I don’t like it,” she acknowledged quaintly to the doctor, as he leaned over her with compassionate words. “I shall have to get acquainted with myself all over again. And so I have been ill! I shouldn’t have thought a little burn like that would make me ill. How Adelaide must have worried.”

“Adelaide is--is not well herself. It distressed her to have been out when you fell. Don’t you remember that she went out that night?”

“Did she? She was right. Adelaide must have every pleasure. She had earned her good times. I must be the one to stay home now, and look after things, and learn to be useful. I don’t expect anything different. Call Adelaide, and let me tell her how--how satisfied I am.”

“But she’s ill. She cannot come. Wait till tomorrow, dear child. Rest is what you need now. Take these few drops and go to sleep again, and you’ll not know yourself to-morrow.”

“I don’t know myself now,” she repeated, glancing with slowly dilating eyes at the medicine glass he proffered. “I can’t take it,” she protested. “I forget now why, but I can’t take anything more from a glass. I’ve promised not to, I think. Take it away; it makes me feel queer. Where is Adelaide?”

Her memory was defective. She could not seem to take in what the doctor told her. But he tried her again. Once more he spoke of illness as the cause of Adelaide’s absence. Her attention wandered while he spoke of it.

“How it did hurt!” she cried. “But I didn’t think much about it. I thought only of--” Next moment her voice rose in a shriek, thin but impetuous, and imbued with a note of excited feeling which made every person there start. “There should be _two_,” she cried. “_Two_! Why is there only one?”

This sounded like raving. The doctor’s face took on a look of concern, and the nurse stirred uneasily.

“One is not enough! That is why Adelaide is not satisfied; why she does not come and love and comfort me, as I expected her to. Tell her it is not too late yet, not too late yet, not too late--”

The doctor’s hand was on her forehead. This “not too late,” whatever she meant by it, was indescribably painful to the listeners, oppressed as they were by the knowledge that Adelaide lay in her grave, and that all fancies, all hopes, all meditated actions between these two were now, so far as this world goes, forever at an end.

“Rest,” came in Dr. Carpenter’s most soothing tones. “Rest, my little Carmel; forget everything and rest.” He thought he knew the significance of her revolt from the glass he had offered her. She remembered the scene at the Cumberland dinner-table on that fatal night and shrank from anything that reminded her of it. Ordering the medicine put in a cup, he offered it to her again, and she drank it without question. As she quieted under its influence, the disappointed listeners, now tip-toeing carefully from the room, heard her murmur in final appeal:

“Cannot Adelaide spare one minute from--from her company downstairs, to wish me health and kiss me good night?”

Was it weakness, or a settled inability to remember anything but that which filled her own mind?

It proved to be a settled inability to take in any new ideas or even to remember much beyond the completion of that dinner. As the days passed and news of her condition came to me from time to time, I found that she had not only forgotten what had passed between herself and the rest of the family previous to their departure for the club-house, but all that had afterwards occurred at The Whispering Pines, even to her own presence there and the ride home. She could not even retain in her mind for any appreciable length of time the idea of Adelaide’s death. Even after Dr. Carpenter, with infinite precautions, revealed to her the truth--not that Adelaide had been murdered, but that Adelaide had passed away during the period of her own illness, Carmel gave but one cry of grief, then immediately burst forth in her old complaint that Adelaide neglected her. She had lost her happiness and hope, and Adelaide would not spare her an hour.

This expression, when I heard of it, convinced me, as I believe it did some others, that her act of self-denial in not humouring my whim and flying from home and duty that night, had made a stronger impression on her mind than all that came after.

She never asked for Arthur. This may have grieved him; but, according to my faithful friend and attorney, it appeared to have the contrary effect, and to bring him positive relief. When it was borne in on him, as it was soon to be borne in on all, that her mind was not what it was, and that the beautiful Carmel had lost something besides her physical perfection in the awful calamity which had made shipwreck of the whole family, he grew noticeably more cheerful and less suspicious in his manner. Was it because the impending inquiry must go on without her, and proceedings, which had halted till now, be pushed with all possible speed to a finish? So those who watched him interpreted his changed mood, with a result not favourable to him.

With this new shock of Carmel’s inability to explain her own part in this tragedy and thus release my testimony and make me a man again in my own eyes, I lost the sustaining power which had previously held me up. I became apathetic; no longer counting the hours, and thankful when they passed. Arthur had not been arrested; but he understood--or allowed others to see that he understood, the reason for the surveillance under which he was now strictly kept; and, though he showed less patience than myself under the shameful suspicion which this betokened, he did not break out into open conflict with the authorities, nor did he protest his innocence, or take any other stand than the one he had assumed from the first.

All this gave me much food for thought, but I declined to think. I had made up my mind from the moment I realised Carmel’s condition, that there was nothing for me to do till after the inquest. The public investigation which this would involve, would show the trend of popular opinion, and thus enlighten me as to my duty. Meanwhile, I would keep to the old lines and do the best I could for myself without revealing the fact of Carmel’s near interest in a matter she was in no better condition to discuss now than when in a state of complete unconsciousness.

Of that inquest, which was held in due course, I shall not say much. Only one new fact was elicited by its means, and that of interest solely as making clear how there came to be evidences of poison in Adelaide’s stomach, without the quantity being great enough for more than a temporary disturbance.

Maggie, the second girl, had something to say about this when the phial which had held the poison was handed about for inspection. She had handled that phial many times on the shelf where it was kept. Once she had dropped it, and the cork coming out, some of the contents had escaped. Frightened at the mishap, she had filled the phial up with water, and put it, thus diluted, back on the shelf. No one had noticed the difference, and she had forgotten all about the matter until now. From her description, there must have been very little of the dangerous drug left in the phial; and the conclusions of Dr. Perry’s autopsy received a confirmation which ended, after a mass of testimony tending rather to confuse than enlighten, the jury, in the non-committal verdict:

Death by strangulation at the hands of some person unknown.

I had expected this. The evidence, pointing as it did in two opposing directions, presented a problem which a coroner’s jury could hardly be expected to solve. What followed, showed that not only they but the police authorities as well, acknowledged the dilemma. I was allowed one sweet half hour of freedom, then I was detained to await the action of the grand jury, and so was Arthur.

When I was informed of this latter fact, I made a solemn vow to myself. It was this: If it falls to my lot to be indicted for this murderous offence, I will continue to keep my own counsel, as I have already done, in face of lesser provocation and at less dangerous risk. But, if I escape and a true bill should be found against Arthur, then will I follow my better instinct, and reveal what I have hitherto kept concealed, even if the torment of the betrayal drive me to self-destruction afterwards. For I no longer cherished the smallest doubt, that to Carmel’s sudden rage and to that alone, the death of Adelaide was due.

My reason for this change from troubled to absolute conviction can be easily explained. It dated from the inquest, and will best appear in the relation of an interview I held with my attorney, Charles Clifton, very soon after my second incarceration.

We had discussed the situation till there seemed to be nothing left to discuss. I understood him, and he thought he understood me. He believed Arthur guilty, and credited me with the same convictions. Thus only could he explain my inconceivable reticence on certain points he was very well assured I could make clear if I would. That he was not the only man who had drawn these same conclusions from my attitude both before and during the inquest, troubled me greatly and deeply disturbed my conscience, but I could indulge in no protests--or, rather would indulge in no protests--as yet. There was an unsolved doubt connected with some facts which had come out at the inquest--or perhaps, I should call it a circumstance not as yet fully explained--which disturbed me more than did my conscience, and upon this circumstance I must have light before I let my counsel leave me.

I introduced the topic thus:

“You remember the detached sentences taken down by the nurse during the period of Carmel’s unconsciousness. They were regarded as senseless ravings, and such they doubtless were; but there was one of them which attracted my attention, and of which I should like an explanation. I wish I had that woman’s little book here; I should like to read for myself those wandering utterances.”

“You can,” was the unexpected and welcome reply. “I took them all down in shorthand as they fell from Dr. Perry’s lips. I have not had time since to transcribe them, but I can read some of them to you, if you will give me an idea as to which ones you want.”

“Read the first--what she said on the day of the funeral. I do not think the rest matter very much.”

Clifton took a paper from his pocket, and, after only a short delay, read out these words:

“_December the fifth_: Her sister’s name, uttered many times and with greatly varied expression--now in reproach, now in terror, now in what seemed to me in tones of wild pleading and even despair. This continued at intervals all through the day.

“At three P.M., just as people were gathering for the funeral, the quick, glad cry: ‘I smell flowers, sweet, sweet flowers!’”

Alas! she did.

“At three-forty P.M., as the services neared their close, a violent change took place in her appearance, and she uttered in shrill tones those astonishing words which horrified all below and made us feel that she had a clairvoyant knowledge of the closing of the casket, then taking place:

“‘Break it open! Break it open! and see if her heart is there!’”

“Pause there,” I said; “that is what I mean. It was not the only time she uttered that cry. If you will glance further down, you will come across a second exclamation of the like character.”

“Yes; here it is. It was while the ubiquitous Sweetwater was mousing about the room.”

“Read the very words he heard. I have a reason, Clifton. Humour me for this once.”

“Certainly--no trouble. She cried, this time: ‘Break it open! Break the glass and look in. Her heart should be there--her heart--her heart! Horrible! but you insisted, Ranelagh.”

“I thought I heard that word glass,” I muttered, more to myself than to him. Then, with a choking fear of giving away my thought, but unable to resist the opportunity of settling my own fears, I asked: “Was there glass in the casket lid?”

“No; there never is.”

“But she may have thought there was,” I suggested hastily. “I’m much obliged to you, Clifton. I had to hear those sentences again. Morbidness, no doubt; the experience of the last three weeks would affect a stronger-minded man than myself.” Then before he could reply: “What do you think the nurse meant by a violent change in her patient?”

“Why, she roused up, I suppose--moved, or made some wild or feverish gesture.”

“That is what I should like to know. I may seem foolish and unnecessarily exacting about trifles; but I would give a great deal to learn precisely where she looked, and what she did at the moment she uttered those wild words. Is the detective Sweetwater still in town?”

“I believe so. Came up for the inquest but goes back to-night.”

“See him, Clifton. Ask him to relate this scene. He was present, you know. Get him to talk about it. You can, and without rousing his suspicion, keen as they all say he is. And when he talks, listen and remember what he says. But don’t ask questions. Do this for me, Clifton. Some day I may be able to explain my request, but not now.”

“I’m at your service,” he replied; but he looked hurt at being thus set to work in the dark, and I dared say nothing to ease the situation. I did not dare even to prolong the conversation on this subject, or on any other subject. In consequence, he departed speedily, and I spent the afternoon wondering whether he would return before the day ended, or leave me to the endurance of a night of suspense. I was spared this final distress. He came in again towards evening, and this was what he told me:

“I have seen Sweetwater, and was more fortunate in my interview than I expected. He talked freely, and in the course of the conversation, described the very occurrence in which you are so interested. Carmel had been lying quietly previous to this outbreak, but suddenly started into feverish life and, raising herself up in her bed, pointed straight before her and uttered the words we have so often repeated. That’s all there was to it, and I don’t see for my part, what you have gained by a repetition of the same, or why you lay so much stress upon her gesture. What she said was the thing, though even that is immaterial from a legal point of view--which is the only view of any importance to you or to me, at this juncture.”

“You’re a true friend to me,” I answered, “and never more so than in this instance. Forgive me that I cannot show my appreciation of your goodness, or thank you properly for your performance of an uncongenial task. I am sunk deep in trouble. I’m not myself and cannot be till I know what action will be taken by the grand jury.”

If he replied, I have no remembrance of it; neither do I recall his leave-taking. But I was presently aware that I was alone and could think out my hideous thought, undisturbed.

Carmel had pointed straight before her, shouting out: “Break in the glass!”

I knew her room; I had been taken in there once by Adelaide, as a sequence to a long conversation about Carmel, shortly after her first return from school. Adelaide wished to show me the cabinet in the wall, the cabinet at which Carmel undoubtedly pointed, if her bed stood as it had stood then. It was not quite full, at that time. It did not contain Adelaide’s heart among the other broken toys which Carmel had destroyed with her own hand or foot, in her moments of frenzied passion--the canary, that would not pick from her hand, the hat she hated, the bowl which held only bread and milk when she wanted meat or cake. Adelaide had kept them all, locked behind glass and in full view of the child’s eyes night and day, that the shame of those past destructive moments might guard her from their repetition and help her to understand her temper and herself. I had always thought it cruel of Adelaide, one of the evidences of the flint-like streak which ran through her otherwise generous and upright nature. But its awful prophecy was what affected me most now; for destruction had fallen on something more tender than aught that cabinet held.

Adelaide’s heart! And Carmel acknowledged it--acknowledged that it should be there, with what else she had trampled upon and crushed in her white heat of rage. I could not doubt her guilt, after this. Whatever peace her forgetfulness had brought--whatever innocent longing after Adelaide--the wild cry of those first few hours, ere yet the impressions of her awful experience had succumbed to disease, revealed her secret and showed the workings of her conscience. It had not been understood; it had passed as an awesome episode. But for me, since hearing of it, she stood evermore convicted out of her own mouth--that lovely mouth which angels might kiss in her hours of joyous serenity; but from whose caress friends would fly, when the passion reigned in her heart and she must break, crush, kill, or go mad.

XXIII

AT TEN INSTEAD OF TWELVE

Forget the world around you. Meantime friendship Shall keep strict vigils for you, anxious, active, Only be manageable when that friendship Points you the road to full accomplishment.

_Coleridge_.

“I don’t care a rush what you do to me. If you are so besotted by your prejudices that you refuse to see the nose before your face; if you don’t believe your own officer who swore he saw Ranelagh’s hands upon my sister’s throat, then this world is all a jumble and it makes very little difference to me whether I’m alive or dead.”

When these words of Arthur Cumberland were repeated to me, I echoed them in my inmost soul. I, too, cared very little whether I lived or died.

The grand jury reeled off its cases and finally took up ours. To the last I hoped--sincerely I think--that I should be the man to suffer indictment. But I hoped in vain. A true bill was brought against Arthur, and his trial was set for the eighteenth of January.

The first use I made of my liberty was to visit Adelaide’s grave. In that sacred place I could best review my past and gather strength for the future. The future! Was it under my control? Did Arthur’s fate hang upon my word? I believed so. But had I strength to speak that word? I had expected to; I had seen my duty clearly enough before the sitting of the grand jury. But now that Arthur was indicted--now that it was an accepted fact that he would have to stand trial instead of myself, I was conscious of such a recoil from my contemplated action that I lost all confidence in myself and my stoical adherence to what I considered the claims of justice.

Standing in the cemetery grounds with my eyes upon the snow-covered mound beneath which lay the doubly injured Adelaide, I had it out with myself, for good and all.

I trusted Arthur; I distrusted Carmel. But she had claims to consideration, which he lacked. She was a woman. Her fall would mean infinitely more to her than any disgrace to him. Even he had seemed to recognise this. Miserable and half-hearted as his life had been, he had shown himself man enough not to implicate his young sister in the crime laid to his charge. What then was I that I should presume to disregard his lead in the difficult maze in which we were both lost. Yet, because of the self-restraint he manifested, he had my sympathy and when I left the cemetery and took my mournful way back into town, it was with the secret resolution to stand his friend if I saw the case really going against him. Till then, I would consider the helpless girl, tongue-tied by her condition, and injured enough already by my misplaced love and its direful consequences.

The only change I now allowed myself was an occasional midnight stroll up Huested Street. This was as near as I dared approach Carmel’s windows. I feared some watchful police spy. Perhaps I feared my own hardly-to-be-restrained longings.

Mr. Fulton’s house and extensive grounds lay between this street and the dismal walls beyond the huge sycamore which lifted itself like a beacon above the Cumberland estate. But I allowed myself the doubtful pleasure of traversing this course, and this course only, and if I obtained one glimpse through bush and tree of the spot whither all my thoughts ran continuously, I went home satisfied.

This was before Carmel left with her nurse for Lakewood. After that event, I turned my head no more, in taking my midnight stroll. I was not told the day or hour of her departure. Happily, perhaps, for us both, for I could never have kept away from the station. I should have risked everything for one glimpse of her face, if only to satisfy my own judgment as to whether she would ever recognise me again, or remember what had occurred on that doleful night when the light of her intellect set in the darkness of sin and trouble.

The police had the same idea, I think, for I heard later that she was deliberately driven past The Whispering Pines, though the other road was more direct and less free, if anything, from possible spectators. They thought, no doubt, that a sight of the place might reawaken whatever memories remained of the last desperate scene preceding her brother and sister’s departure for this out-of-the-way spot. They little knew how cruel was the test, or what a storm of realisation might have overwhelmed her mind as her eye fell on those accursed walls, peering from their bower of snow-laden, pines. But I did, and I never rested till I learned how she had borne herself in her slow drive by the two guarded gateways: merrily, it seems, and with no sign of the remembrances I feared. The test, if it were meant for such, availed them nothing; no more, indeed, than an encounter with her on the road, or at the station would have availed me. For the veil she begged for had shrouded her features completely, and it was only from her manner that those who accompanied her, perceived her light-heartedness and delight in this change.

One sentence, and one only, reached my ears of all she said before she disappeared from town.

“If Adelaide were only going, too! But I suppose I shall meet her and Mr. Ranelagh somewhere before my return. She must be very happy. But not so peaceful as I am. She will see that when we meet. I can hardly wait for the day.”

Words which set me thinking; but which I was bound to acknowledge could be only the idle maunderings of a diseased mind from which all impressions had fled, save those of innocence and futile hope.

One incident more before I enter upon the serious business of the trial. I had no purpose in what I did. I merely followed the impulse of the moment, as I had so often done before in my selfish and thoughtless life, when I started one night for my walk at ten o’clock instead of twelve. I went the old way; and the old longing recurring at the one charmed spot on the road, I cast a quick look at the towering sycamore and the desolated house beneath, which, short as it was, roused feelings which kept my head lowered for the remainder of my walk north and to the very moment, when, on my return, the same chimneys and overhanging roofs came again into view through the wintry branches. Then habit lifted my head, and I paused to look again, when the low sound of a human voice, suppressed into a moan or sob, caused me to glance about for the woman or child who had uttered this note of sorrow. No one was in sight; but as I started to move on, I heard my name uttered in choked tones from behind the hedge separating the Fulton grounds from the city sidewalk.

I halted instantly. A lamp from the opposite side of the street threw a broad illumination across the walk where I stood, but the gate-posts behind threw a shadow. Had the voice issued from this isolated point of darkness? I went back to see. A pitiful figure was crouching there, a frail, agitated little being, whom I had no sooner recognised than my manner instantly assumed an air of friendly interest, called out by her timid and appealing attitude.

“Ella Fulton!” I exclaimed. “You wish to speak to me?”

“Hush!” she prayed, with a frightened gesture towards the house. “No one knows I am here. Mamma thinks me in bed, and papa, who is out, may come home any minute. Oh, Mr. Ranelagh, I’m in such misery and no one but you can give me any help. I have watched you go by night after night, and I have wanted to call out and beg you to come in and see me, or let me go and meet you somewhere, and I have not dared, it was so late. To-night you have come earlier, and I have slipped out and--O, Elwood, you won’t think badly of me? It’s all about Arthur, and I shall die if some one does not help me and tell me how I can reach him with a message.”

As she spoke the last words, she caught at the gatepost which was too broad and ponderous to offer her any hold. Gravely I held out my arm, which she took; we were old friends and felt no necessity of standing on any sort of ceremony.

“You don’t wish to bother,” was her sensitive cry. “You had rather not stop; rather not listen to my troubles.”

Had I shown my feelings so plainly as that? I felt mortified. She was a girl of puny physique and nervous manner--the last sort of person you would expect Arthur Cumberland to admire or even to have patience with, and the very last sort who could be expected to endure his rough ways, or find anything congenial to herself in his dissipated and purposeless life. But the freaks of youthful passion are endless, and it was evident that they loved each other sincerely.

Her tremulous condition and meek complaint went to my heart, notwithstanding my growing dread of any conversation between us on this all-absorbing but equally peace-destroying topic. Reassuringly pressing her hand, I was startled to find a small piece of paper clutched convulsively within it.

“For Arthur,” she explained under her breath. “I thought you might find some way of getting it to him. Father and mother are so prejudiced. They have never liked him, and now they believe the very worst. They would lock me up if they knew I was speaking to you about him. Mother is very stern and says that all this nonsense between Arthur and myself must stop. That we must never--no matter whether he is cleared or--or--” Silence, then a little gasp, after which she added with an emphasis which bespoke the death of every hope: “She is very decided about it, Elwood.”

I hardly blamed the mother.

“I--I love Arthur. I don’t think him guilty and I would gladly stand by him if they would let me. I want him to know this. I want him to get such comfort as he can out of my belief and my desire to serve him. I want to sacrifice myself. But I can’t, I can’t,” she moaned. “You don’t know how mother frightens me. When she looks at me, the words falter on my tongue and I feel as if it would be easier to die than to acknowledge what is in my heart.”

I could believe her. Mrs. Fulton was a notable woman, whom many men shrank from encountering needlessly. It was not her tongue, though that could be bitter enough, but a certain way she had of infusing her displeasure into attitude, tone, and manner, which insensibly sapped your self-confidence and forced you to accept her bad opinion of you as your rightful due. This, whether your judgment coincided with hers or not.

“Yet your mother is your very best friend,” I ventured gently, with a realisation of my responsibility which did not add much to my self-possession.

She seemed startled.

“Not in this, not in this,” she objected, with a renewal of her anxious glances, this time up and down the street. “I must get a word to Arthur. I _must_.”

I saw that she had some deeper reason than appeared, for desiring communication with him. I was debating how best to meet the situation and set her right as to my ability to serve her, without breaking down her spirit too seriously, when I felt her feverish hand pressing her little note into my unwilling palm.

“Don’t read it,” she whispered, innocent of all offence and only anxious to secure my good offices. “It’s for Arthur. I’ve used the thinnest paper, so that you can secrete it in something he will be sure to get. Don’t disappoint me. I was sorry for you, too, and glad when they let you out. Both of you are old playmates of mine, but Arthur--”

I had to tell her; I had to dash her small hopes to the ground.

“Forgive me, Ella,” I said, “but I cannot carry him this message or even get it to him secretly. I am watched myself; I know it, though I have never really detected the man doing it.”

“Oh!” she ejaculated, terror-stricken at once. “Is there any one here, behind these trees or in the street on the other side of the hedge-row?”

I hastened to reassure her.

“No, no. If I’ve been followed, it was not so near as that. I cannot do what you ask for several reasons. Arthur will credit you with the best of impulses without your incurring any such risk.”

“Yes, yes, but that’s not enough. What shall I do? What shall I do?”

I strove to help her.

“There is a man,” said I, “who sees him constantly and may be induced to assure Arthur of your belief and continued interest in him. That man is his lawyer, Mr. Moffat. Any one will tell you how to reach him.”

“No, no,” she disclaimed, hurriedly, breathlessly. “My last hope was in you. You wouldn’t think the worse of me for--for what I’ve done; or let mother know. I couldn’t tell a stranger even if he went right to Arthur with it. I’m not made that way. I couldn’t stand the shame.” Drawing back a step she wrung her small hands together, exclaiming, “What an unhappy girl I am!” Then stepping up to my side, she whispered in my ear: “There is something I could say which might--”

I stopped her. Right or wrong, I stopped her. I hadn’t the courage just then to face the possibilities of what lay at the end of this simple sentence. She possessed evidence, or thought she did, which might help to clear Arthur. Evidence of what? Evidence which would implicate Carmel? The very thought unnerved me.

“I had rather not be the recipient of this confidence if it is at all important or at all in the line of testimony. Remember the man I mentioned. He will be glad to hear of anything helpful to his client.”

Her distress mounted to passion.

“It’s--it’s something that will destroy my mother’s confidence in me. I disobeyed her. I did what she would never have let me do if she had known. I--I used to meet Arthur in the driveway back by the barns. I had a key made to the little side door so that I could do it. I used to meet him late. I would get up out of bed when mother was asleep, and dress myself and sit at the window until I heard him come up the street. Then I would steal down and catch him on his way to the stables. I--I had a good reason for this, Elwood. He knew I would be there, and it brought him home earlier and not quite so--so full of liquor. If he was very bad, he would come up the other way and I would sit waiting and crying till three o’clock struck, then creep into my bed and try to sleep. Nights and nights I have done this. Nothing else in life seemed so important, for it did hold him back a little. But not so much as if he had loved me more. He loved me some, but he couldn’t have loved me very much, or he would have sent me some word, or seen me, if but for a minute, since Adelaide’s death. And he hasn’t, he hasn’t! and that makes it harder for me to acknowledge the watch I kept on him, and how I know he never went through our grounds for the second time that night. He went once, about nine, but not later. I am certain of this, for I was looking out for him till three in the morning. If he came back and then returned afterwards to town, it was through his own street, and that takes so long, he would never have been able to get to the place they said he did at the time they have agreed upon. Oh! I have studied every word of the case, to see if what I had to tell would help him any. Father cannot bear to see me with a newspaper in my hand, and mother comes and takes them out of my room; but I have managed to read every word since they accused him of being at the club-house that night, and I know that he needs some one to come out boldly in his cause, and I want to be that some one, and I will be, too, whatever happens to me, if--if I must,” she faintly added.

I was dumb, but not from lack of interest, God knows, or from unsympathetic feeling for this brave-hearted girl. The significance of the situation was what held me speechless. Here was help for Arthur without my braving all the horrors of Carmel’s downfall by any impulsive act of my own. For a moment, hope in one burning and renewing flame soared high in my breast. I was willing to accept my release in this way. I was willing to shift the load from my own back to the delicate shoulders of this shrinking but ardent girl. Then reason returned, if consideration halted, and I asked myself: “But is the help she offers of any practical worth? Would her timid declarations, trembling as she was between her awe of her parents and her desire to serve the man she loved, weigh in the balance against the evidence accumulated by the district attorney?”

It seemed doubtful. She would not be believed, and I should have to back up her statement with my own hitherto suppressed testimony. It was a hard case, any way I looked at it. A woman to be sacrificed whichever course I took. Contemplating the tremulous, half-fainting figure drooping in the shadows before me, such native chivalry as remained to me, urged me to spare this little friend of mine, so ungifted by nature, so innocent in intention, so sensitive and so shrinking in temperament and habit. Then Carmel’s image rose before me, glorious, impassioned, driven by the fierce onrush of some mighty inherent force into violent deeds undreamed of by most women; but when thus undriven, gentle in manner, elevated in thought, refined as only a few rare characters are refined; and my heart stood still again with doubt, and I could not say: “It is your duty to save him at all hazards. Brave your father, brave your mother, brave public opinion and possibly the wrecking of your whole future, but tell the truth, and rid your days of doubt, your nights of remorse.” I could not say this. So many things might happen to save Arthur, to save Carmel, to save the little woman before me. I would trust that future, temporise a bit and give such advice as would relieve us both from immediate fear without compromising Arthur’s undoubted rights to justice.

Meanwhile, Ella Fulton had become distracted by new fears. The sound of sleigh-bells could be heard on the hill. It might be her father. Should she try to reach the house, or hide her small body, like a trapped animal’s, on the dark side of the hedge? I was conscious of her thoughts, shared her uncertainties, notwithstanding the struggle then going on in my own mind. But I remained quiet and so did she, and the sleigh ultimately flew past us up the road. The sigh which broke from her lips as this terror subsided, brought my disordered thoughts to a focus. I must not keep her longer. Something must be said at once. As soon as she looked my way again, I spoke:

“Ella, this is no easy problem you have offered me. You are right in thinking that this testimony of yours might be of benefit to Arthur, and that you ought to give it in case of extremity. But I cannot advise you to obtrude it yet. I understand what it would cost you, and the sacrifice you would make is too great for the doubtful good which might follow. Neither must you trust me to act for you in this matter. My own position is too unstable for me to be of assistance to any one. I can sympathise with you, possibly as no one else can; but I cannot reach Arthur, either by word or by message. Your father is the man to appeal to in case interference becomes necessary and you must speak. You have not quite the same fear of him that you have of your mother. Take him into your confidence--not now but later when things press and you must have a friend. He’s a just man. You may shock his fatherly susceptibilities, you may even lose some of his regard, but he will do the right thing by you and Arthur. Have confidence that this is so, and rest, little friend, in the hope and help it gives you. Will you?”

“I will try. I could only tell father on my knees, but I will do it if--if I must,” she faltered out, unconsciously repeating her former phrase. “Now, I must go. You have been good; only I asked too much.” And with no other farewell she left me and disappeared up the walk.

I lingered till I heard the faint click of her key in the door she had secretly made her own; then I moved on. As I did so, I heard a rustle somewhere about me on street or lawn. I never knew whence it came, but I felt assured that neither her fears nor mine had been quite unfounded; that a listener had been posted somewhere near us and that a part, if not all, we had said had been overheard. I was furious for an instant, then the soothing thought came that possibly Providence had ordained that the Gordian knot should be cut in just this way.

But the event bore no ostensible fruit. The week ended, and the case of the People _against_ Arthur Cumberland was moved for trial.

XXIV

ALL THIS STOOD

It’s fit this royal session do proceed; And that, without delay, their arguments Be now produc’d and heard

_King Henry VIII_.

There was difficulty, as you will conceive, in selecting an unprejudiced jury. But this once having been accomplished, the case went quickly and smoothly on under the able guidance of the prosecuting attorney.

I shall spare you the opening details, also much of the preliminary testimony. Enough that at the close of the sixth day, the outlook was a serious one for Arthur Cumberland. The prosecution appeared to be making good its claims. The quiet and unexpectedly dignified way in which, at the beginning, the defendant had faced the whole antagonistic court-room, with the simple plea of “Not Guilty,” was being slowly but surely forgotten in the accumulated proofs of his discontented life under his sister’s dominating influence, his desire for independence and a free use of the money held in trust for him by this sister under their father’s will, the quarrels which such a situation would naturally evoke between characters cast in such different moulds and actuated by such opposing tastes and principles, and the final culmination of the same at the dinner-table when Adelaide forced him, as it were, to subscribe to her prohibition of all further use of liquor in their house. Following this evidence of motive, came the still more damaging one of opportunity. He was shown to have been in the club-house at or near the time of Adelaide’s death. The matter of the bottles was gone into and the event in Cuthbert Road. Then I was called to the stand, and my testimony asked for.

I had prepared myself for the ordeal and faced it unflinchingly. That I might keep intact the one point necessary to Carmel’s safety, I met my inquisitors, now as before, with the utmost candour in all other respects. Indeed, in one particular I was even more exact in my details than at any previous examination. Anxious to explain my agitated and hesitating advance through the club-house, prior to my discovery of the crime which had been committed there, I acknowledged what I had hitherto concealed, that in my first entrance into the building, I had come upon a man’s derby hat and coat hanging in the lower hall, and when questioned more minutely on the subject, allowed it to appear that it was owing to the disappearance of these articles during my stay upstairs, that I had been led into saying that some one had driven away from The Whispering Pines before the coming of the police.

This, as you will see, was in open contradiction of my former statements that I had _seen_ an unknown party, thus attired, driving away through the upper gateway just as I entered by the lower. But it was a contradiction which while noted by Mr. Moffat, failed to injure me with the jury, and much less with the spectators. The impression had become so firmly fixed in the public mind and in that of certain officials as well, that my early hesitations and misstatements were owing to a brotherly anxiety to distract attention from Arthur whose clothing they believed me to have recognised in these articles I have mentioned--that I rather gained than lost by what, under other circumstances would have seriously damaged my testimony. That I should prevaricate even to my own detriment, at a preliminary examination, only to tell the truth openly and like a man when in court and under the sanctity of an oath was, in the popular estimation, something to my credit; and Mr. Moffat, whose chief recommendation as counsel lay in his quick appreciation of the exigencies of the moment, did not press me too sharply on this point when he came to his cross-examination.

But in other respects he drove me hard. An effort was made by him, first of all, to discredit me as a witness. My lack of appreciation for Adelaide and my secret but absorbing love for Carmel were inexorably brought out: also the easy, happy-go-lucky tenor of my life, and my dogged persistence in any course I thought consistent with my happiness. My character was well known in this town of my birth, and it would have been folly for me to attempt to gloss it over. I had not even the desire to do so. If my sins exacted penance, I would pay it here and now and to the full. Only Carmel should not suffer. I refused to admit that she had given any evidences of returning my reckless passion. My tongue would not speak the necessary words, and it was not made to. It was not her character but mine which Mr. Moffat was endeavouring to assail.

But though I was thus shown up for what I was, in a manner most public and undesirable, neither the rulings of the court, nor the attitude of the jury betrayed any loss of confidence in me as a credible witness, and seeing this, the wily lawyer shifted his ground and confined himself to an endeavour to shake me on certain definite and important points. How were the pillows heaped upon the couch? What ones at top, what ones at bottom? Which did I remove first, and why did I remove any of them? What had I expected to find? These questions answered, the still more-to-be-dreaded ones followed of just how my betrothed looked at the moment I uncovered her face. Were the marks very plain upon her throat? How plain; and what did I mean by saying that I felt forced to lay my thumbs upon them? Was that a natural thing to do? Where was the candle at that moment? How many feet away? A candle does not give much light at that distance, was I sure that I saw those marks immediately; that they were dark enough and visible enough to draw my eyes from her face which would naturally attract my gaze first? It was horrible, devilish, but I won through, only to meet the still more disturbing question as to whether I saw any other evidences of strangulation besides the marks. I could only mention the appearance of the eyes; and when Mr. Moffat found that he could not shake me on this point, he branched off into a less harrowing topic and cross-examined me in regard to the ring. I had said that it was on her hand when I bade good-bye to her in her own house, and that it was not there when I came upon her dead. Had the fact made me curious to examine her hand? No. Then I could not tell whether the finger on which she wore it gave any evidence of this ring having been pulled off with violence? No. I could not swear that in my opinion it was? I could not.

The small flask of cordial and the three glasses, one clean and the others showing signs of having been used, were next taken up, but with no result for the defence. I had told all I knew about these in my direct examination; also about such matters as the bottles found on the kitchen table, the leaving of my keys at the Cumberland house, and the fact, well known, that the two bottles of wine left in the wine-vault and tabulated by the steward as so left in the list found in my apartments, were of an exclusive brand unlikely to be found anywhere else in town. I could add nothing more, and, having spoken the exact truth concerning them, from the very first, I ran no chance of contradicting myself even under the close fire of the opposing counsel.

But there was a matter I dreaded to see him approach, and, which, I was equally sure, with an insight unshared I believe by any one else in the whole courtroom, was equally dreaded by the prisoner.

This was the presence in the club-house chimney of the half-burned