CHAPTER VIII.

PHIL TAKES UP THE TRAIL AFRESH.

"My darling Fanny,--That your letter, with its accompanying number of _The Family Cornucopia_, was a great surprise to me I at once admit. After reading it, I turned to the story, which I went through very carefully, some parts of it more than once, and I quite agree with you that the writer of it seems to have been mixed up in some, to me, inexplicable way with the Loudwater Tragedy.

"So much, indeed, was I impressed with several points in the narrative, so startling was the new theory of possibilities which it had the effect of opening up, so minute did the writer's acquaintance seem to be with the details of the crime, that a strong desire to find out some particulars about him, and, if it were possible, to make his acquaintance, took possession of me. All the more strongly did I feel myself urged thereto in that it was impossible for me to forget how thoroughly the case had baffled all my attempts at its elucidation.

"Accordingly, the following forenoon found me at the office of _The Family Cornucopia_, where, after having sent in my card, I was presently asked into the presence of the editor--a pleasant, middle-aged gentleman, Mr. Philpot by name. When I told him that my object in calling on him was to obtain the name and address of the writer of an article in such and such a number of his magazine, he shook his head and said with a smile that I was asking for a kind of information which he was not prepared to give save in very exceptional cases. To this I replied that my case was a very exceptional one indeed, and thereupon I went on to tell him of my connection with the Loudwater affair (leaving him to infer that I was still in the service of Mr. Melray), how struck I had been by the perusal of the story entitled 'How, and Why,' and proceeded to detail some of my reasons for wishing to make the author's acquaintance. After that there was no further difficulty. 'Here is what you ask for,' he said a couple of minutes later, as he handed me a slip of paper.

"'May I ask, Mr. Philpot, whether you have had any previous contributions from Mr. Frank Timmins?' I queried, after a glance at the name on the paper.

"'None that we have seen our way to accept. From time to time he has sent us several little things, none of which, however, have proved to be quite up to our mark; but the story entitled "How, and Why," was so far superior to anything Mr. Timmins had sent us before that we were glad to retain it.'

"There being nothing further to learn from Mr. Philpot, I presently went my way. A hansom took me to the address in Pentonville which the editor had given me. Mr. Timmins, however, proved to be not at home. He was a single man, his landlady told me, and I further elicited from her that he was a reporter for certain newspapers, as also that the most likely time for finding him at home was after seven o'clock in the evening.

"Seven-thirty sharp saw me again at Pentonville. This time, fortunately, Mr. Timmins was at home, and I was at once shown to his sitting-room, which, I may add, was also his bedroom. He had just finished his tea and was in the act of charging his pipe as I was shown in. When his landlady disappeared she took the tea-tray with her.

"Mr. Timmins is a man of four or five and twenty, with a fair but somewhat freckled face, straw-coloured hair, and weak eyes. By the time I had been ten minutes in his company I had discovered him to be one of that numerous class of young men who have a very excellent opinion of themselves and their abilities, without having anything to offer the world in justification thereof.

"The first thing I did was to hand him my card.

"'To what may I attribute the honour of this visit, Mr. Winslade?' he asked, as, after glancing at the card, he laid it on the table.

"'I am given to understand by the editor of _The Family Cornucopia_ that you are the author of a story entitled "How, and Why" which appeared in a recent number of that magazine. May I assume, Mr. Timmins, that such is the fact?'

"He changed colour and hesitated for a second or two before answering. Then he said: 'Really, Mr. Winslade, I am at a loss to imagine how it can possibly matter to you whether I am, or am not, the author of the story in question. Still, if, as you state, Mr. Philpot has seen fit to acknowledge the fact, I am not going to run counter to his statement.'

"'Thank you for your frankness, Mr. Timmins,' I replied, as I drew my chair a little closer to the table which divided us. 'You may take it for granted that the information I am here to seek at your hands has not for its object the satisfaction of an idle curiosity; very far indeed is that from being the case. What I should like you to tell me first of all is, whence and how you obtained the information, in other words, the basis of fact, on which your story is built up.'

"As before, there was the same hesitation prior to answering. Then he said: 'I fail to understand why you should assume that my story has any, even the slightest substratum of fact, or that it is anything more than a specimen of purely imaginative writing.'

"'That is a point as to which I can speedily enlighten you,' was my reply.

"Thereupon I entered into the reasons, one by one, which had sufficed to convince me that, whoever the writer of the story might be, he was someone who had not merely a suspiciously intimate knowledge of all the details of the Loudwater Tragedy, but one who professed to account for the crime after a fashion so startling and original that I, as a person connected to some extent with the case, felt bound to ascertain what amount of truth, if any, underlaid his statements.

"Mr. Timmins listened with growing wonder, and when I had come to an end he lay back in his chair, and for several seconds could do nothing but stare blankly at me. At length he said: 'It is, perhaps, a fortunate thing for me, Mr. Winslade, that my share in the story, or whatever it may be called, is one that can very readily be explained. To begin with, I am only part author of it. But perhaps I had better, first of all, explain by what a singular conjunction of circumstances the original MS. came into my hands. Possibly you may remember that, some months ago, several people were killed owing to a railway accident about a couple of miles beyond Eastwich?' I nodded. 'I, sir, happened to be in the train when the accident took place, but was fortunate enough to escape with nothing worse than a few bruises and a severe shaking, while the only other passenger in the same compartment with me was killed on the spot. I had been to report the speeches at a great political meeting in the country, and was on my way back to London by the night mail, travelling first-class in order that I might be the better enabled to transcribe my notes _en route_. For a part of the time I was alone, but at some station, I forget which, I was joined by another passenger. I was too immersed in my work to take more than the most casual notice of him, and all I can remember is that he was young and dark-complexioned and had a black moustache. I did notice, however, and I had occasion to remember the fact later on, that after he had been some time in the carriage he took out of his pocket a number of loose sheets of paper covered with writing, and began to read them with what seemed to me the closest attention, making an occasional pencil memorandum in the margin of one or another of them as he went on. We were both at work, each in his own fashion, when, without any other warning than a prolonged shriek of the engine, of which neither of us took any notice, the crash came. All I knew, or felt, of it was a momentary shock, as if all my limbs had been suddenly dislocated, after which came an utter blank.

"'When consciousness returned, and I was able to realise what had happened, I found myself lying on the sloping embankment of the line, where I had been laid by the men who had extricated me from the wrecked carriage. A yard or two away lay stretched the body of my travelling companion, stone dead. A little brandy, administered by I know not whom, revived me wonderfully, and thereupon I woke to the necessity of recovering my missing shorthand notes, which doubtless were somewhere among the _débris_ of the carriage. Feeling still too shaken and bruised to go in search of them myself, I gave a platelayer half-a-crown to find them for me by the aid of his hand-lamp. After a quarter of an hour he returned with a jumble of loose papers, which he said were all that he could find. Without looking at them, I thrust them into my pocket, and it was not I after I reached home, some five or six hours later, and came to examine them, that I found among them the sheets which my dead travelling companion had been reading at the moment of the accident, which the platelayer, in ignorance of their not being my property, had rescued from the wreck together with my own.

"'For the time being I laid them aside, but later in the day, when my own work had been despatched, I sat down to read them; and next day, when I went down by train to attend the inquest to which I had been summoned as a witness, I took the papers with me. And now comes a very singular feature of the affair. The body of my travelling companion was never identified; nor, so far as I am aware, is it known to this day who he was; nor, beyond such information on the point as the railway-ticket found in one of his pockets afforded, whence he had come or for what place other than London--which is a big address--he was bound. He seemed to have been travelling without luggage of any kind; his linen was unmarked, and there was nothing whatever found on him by the aid of which his identity could be established. Under those circumstances, I kept the dead man's papers by me, saying no word about them to anybody. As a matter of course, I took the precaution of looking carefully through them with a view of ascertaining whether they furnished any clue to the personality of the writer, but none such could I find. When I tell you this, Mr. Winslade, you will at once understand in what light I regarded the MS. To me it seemed neither more nor less than a rather clever little magazine story--a piece of pure fiction, in point of fact. As such I read it, and such I should have still believed it to be but for what you have told me this evening.

"'Well, sir, some three or four months after the unknown writer of the MS. had been buried, I said to myself one day, "Why not write it out in my own hand, invent an ending to it, give it a name, and send it to one of the magazines? If it comes back it will only be one failure the more." And failures in that line were things to which I was becoming pretty well used.'

"Here I interrupted Mr. Timmins for the first time.

"'You say "invent an ending to it,"' I remarked. 'Had the MS., then, a different ending from that which it has in the printed story?'

"'I ought, perhaps, to have remarked before that it had no ending of any kind,' replied Timmins, 'but broke off abruptly at the bottom of a page. Whether the writer had never finished it, or whether, if a more thorough search had been made in the carriage, the continuation of it would have been found, I am, of course, unable to say. In any case, as far as I am concerned, unfinished it was; consequently all the latter part of the story, as printed, is from my pen.'

"I at once saw, how important a knowledge of this fact might prove to be, should the Loudwater Case ever come to be reopened. Laying the open periodical before him on the table, I said, 'Will you be good enough, Mr. Timmins, to point out the place where the original MS. left off, and your pen took up the running?'

"After drawing the magazine to him and casting his eye over the columns, he said presently, marking a certain place with his thumb-nail as he did so, 'Here is where the original writer ends and I begin.'

"'May I take it, then, as a fact that up to the point indicated by you the printed story follows exactly on the lines of the MS.?'

"'As nearly so as makes no matter. Here and there a word may have been changed or transposed, or the turn of a sentence altered, but it may be accepted as being to all intents and purposes a faithful copy of the MS.'

"You, my dear Fan, have read the story; so, when I tell you that the point at which the break occurs is where 'Ernestine' and her former lover find themselves together in the old merchant's office, you will not fail to call to mind what a very important share of the narrative proves to be wholly due to the inventive genius of Mr. Timmins. And yet, perhaps, on further consideration, it is not really so important as at first sight it seems. You and I knew, the moment we read it, that the latter half of the narrative was nothing more than a farrago of fiction; but who, in view of the little that is really known of the causes which led to Mr. Melray's death, dare venture to assert that the incidents, as detailed in the early part of it, may not be based on fact? That is just what one would like to be in a position to determine.

"But to return.

"'By the way, Mr. Timmins,' I said, 'I should like very particularly to inspect the original MS.; indeed, I may add that I should like to take possession of it for a little while.'

"'I am sorry to say that it is no longer in existence. I kept it till I heard that my story was accepted; then I burnt it.'

"'Oh, you idiot!' was my mental exclamation; but aloud I only said it was a great pity he had done so.

"'Judging from what you have told me,' I went on presently, 'I suppose I may take it for a fact that there was no hint whatever in the MS. about suspicion fixing itself on "Mr. Day," the head clerk, nor anything about his arrest and subsequent trial and conviction? Neither, I presume, was there any mention made of the writer's intention to commit suicide?'

"'All those portions of the narrative were of my own invention. The thing needed an ending of some kind in order to render it acceptable to a magazine editor, and, to tell you the truth, I rather prided myself on the way in which I got over the difficulty.'

"Evidently there was nothing more to be got out of Mr. Timmins. The truthfulness of what he had told me I did not for a moment doubt. He made no difficulty, before I left him, about pledging me his word not to speak of our interview to anyone.

"The first thing I did next day was to hunt through a file of old newspapers for the particulars of the Eastwich railway accident. What I there read confirmed Timmins's statement in every respect. One of the four victims of the accident was buried without having been identified. Still, it was just possible that someone might have since come forward and, by means of his clothes and the minute personal description of him which would doubtless be taken prior to his interment, have been able to claim him as the missing relative, or friend, of whom they were in search, in which case his name and address when living, with, possibly, other particulars concerning him, would doubtless be now in the possession of the railway authorities.

"But my hope that such might prove to be the case was doomed to disappointment. The next post took a note from me to the railway company, to which they promptly replied. No one, they informed me, had ever come forward to claim, or identify, the unknown victim of the Eastwich accident. My next step was to write to Mr. Robert Melray and ask him to inform me when and where I could have half an hour's talk with him. His reply was to the effect that he should be in town a couple of days later and would call upon me.

"My justification for so doing lay in the fact that in the MS.--supposing that any value was to be attached to its statements--there were certain allegations so seriously affecting the reputation of the widow of the murdered man that it seemed to me absolutely essential that the present head of the family should be made acquainted with them. It would then rest with him to decide whether any further action, and if so, of what kind, should be taken in the affair, or whether it should be allowed to rest where it does and remain an unsolved mystery till the end of time.

"Well, my interview with Mr. Melray came off in due course. As I think I have told you before, he is a man of strong feelings, although he shows little of them on the surface, and his burning desire to bring to justice the unknown person, or persons, who were concerned in his brother's tragic fate remains just as strong as ever it was. I found him more inclined than I confess I am to look upon the MS. (so to term that portion of the narrative found in the railway carriage) as a genuine recital of facts. To him it seems by no means unlikely that the assassin of his brother may, in very truth, have been a former lover of Mrs. Melray. Of course the question did not fail to put itself to him, as it had already put itself to me: Were the murderer and the unknown man who was killed in the railway accident one and the same person? And if so, was he also the writer of the MS.? But those were questions which he was no more able to answer than I had been.

"I had already cause for believing that the feeling with which Mr. Robert Melray regards his brother's widow is not of the most friendly kind. That to a certain extent she is inimical to him I cannot doubt. Consequently I was not much surprised when he avowed his intention of having the case reopened--to the extent, at least, if such a thing should prove possible, of testing the accuracy of the MS. so far as it concerned itself with the relations between 'Ernestine,' otherwise the wife, and her lover. But such a course was far easier to determine on than to carry into effect, and how to set about it was a point which puzzled both of us. Finally Mr. Melray and I parted without having come to an agreement as to any definite course of action. He has promised to call on me again three days hence. Meanwhile, at his request, I am going down to Solchester with the view of making a few cautious inquiries having reference to the existence there of any possible lover of Mrs. Melray prior to her marriage.

"And now to change the subject to something more personal to ourselves.

* * * * * *

"Yours unalterably,

"Philip Winslade.

"P.S.--If any further evidence were needed to prove that the story 'How, and Why' is based on the Loudwater Tragedy, one might find it in several of the thinly-veiled names which the anonymous writer has thought fit to make use of. Thus, in the story Mr. Melray becomes 'Mr. Melville'; the head clerk, Mr. Cray, is changed into 'Mr. Day'; Silston, the chief constable, becomes 'Dilston'; while, in place of Merehampton as the _locale_ of the narrative, we are introduced to the town of 'Hampton Magna.'"