The House of the Whispering Pines by Anna Katharine Green (best novels for beginners txt) 📕

the sleigh, the man remained crouching where she had fallen, with his eyes roaming back and forth in a sightless stare from her to myself, muttering and groaning, and totally unheedful of Arthur's commands to mount the box and drive home. Finally some one else stepped from the crowd and mercifully took the reins. I caught one more glimpse of her face, with Arthur's bent tenderly over it; then the sleigh slipped away.

An officer shook Zadok by the arm and he got up and began to move aside. Then I had mind to face my own fate, and, looking up, I met Sweetwater's eye.

It was quietly apologetic.

"I only wished to congratulate you," said he, "on the conclusion of a case in which I know you are highly interested." Lifting his hat, he nodded affably and was gone before I could recover from my stupor.

It was for Clifton to show his indignation. I was past all feeling.
Farce as an after-piece never appealed to me.

Would I have considered it farce if I could have heard the words which this detective was at that moment whispering into the district attorney's ears:

"Do you want to know who throttled Adelaide Cumberland? It was not her brother; it was not her lover; it was her old and trusted coachman."

XXXV "AS IF IT WERE A MECCA"

—I have within my mind
A thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks
Which I will practise.

Merchant of Venice.

"Give me your reasons. They must be excellent ones, Sweetwater, or you would not risk making a second mistake in a case of this magnitude and publicity."

"Mr. Fox, they are excellent. But you shall judge of them. From the moment Miss Carmel Cumberland overthrew the very foundations of our case by her remarkable testimony, I have felt that my work was only half done. It was a strain on credulity to believe Arthur guilty of a crime so prefaced, and the alternative which Mr. Moffat believed in, which you were beginning to believe in, and perhaps are allowing yourself to believe in even now, never appealed to me.

"I allude to the very natural suspicion that the act beheld by your man Clarke was a criminal act, and that Ranelagh is the man really responsible for Miss Cumberland's death. Some instinct held me back from this conclusion, as well as the incontrovertible fact that he could have had no hand in carrying that piece of broken bottle into the Cumberland stable, or of dropping his engagement ring in the suggestive place where it was found. Where, then, should I look for the unknown, the unsuspected third party? Among the ten other persons who dropped something into that casket.

"Most of these were children, but I made the acquaintance of every one. I spent most of my Sunday that way; then, finding no clouded eye among them, I began a study of the Cumberland servants, naturally starting with Zadok. For two hours I sat at his stable fire, talking and turning him inside out, as only we detectives know how. I found him actually overwhelmed with grief; not the grief of a sane man, but of one in whom the very springs of life are poisoned by some dreadful remorse.

"He did not know he revealed this; he expressed himself as full of hope that his young master would be acquitted the next day; but I could see that this prospect could never still the worm working at his heart, and resolved to understand why. I left him ostensibly alone, but in reality shadowed him. The consequence was that, in the evening dusk, he led me to the cemetery, where he took up his watch at Miss Cumberland's grave, as if it were a Mecca and he a passionate devotee. I could hear his groans as he hung to the fence and spoke softly to the dead; and though I was too far away to catch a single word, I felt confident that I had at last struck the right track, and should soon see my way more clearly than at any time since this baffling case opened.

"But before I allowed my fancy to run away with me, I put in an evening of inquiry. If this man had an absolute alibi, what was the use of wasting effort upon him. But I could not find that he had, Mr. Fox. He went with the rest of the servants to the ball—which, you know, was held in Tibbitt's Hall, on Ford Street and he was seen there later, dancing and making merry in a way not usual to him. But there was a space of time dangerously tallying with that of the tragic scene at the club-house, when he was not seen by any one there, so far as I can make out; and this fact gave me courage to consider a certain point which had struck me, and of which I thought something might be made.

"Mr. Fox, after the fiasco I have made of this affair, it costs me something to go into petty details which must suggest my former failures and may not strike you with the force they did me. That broken bottle— or rather, that piece of broken bottle! Where was the rest of it? Sought for almost immediately after the tragedy, it had not been found at the Cumberland place or on the golf-links. It had been looked for carefully when the first thaw came; but, though glass was picked up, it was not the same glass. The task had become hopeless and ere long was abandoned.

"But with this idea of Zadok being the means of its transfer from The Whispering Pines to the house on the Hill, I felt the desire to look once more, and while court was in session this morning, I started a fresh search—this time not on the golf-links. Tibbitt's Hall communicates more quickly with The Whispering Pines by the club-house road than by the market one. So I directed my attention to the ground in front, and on the further side of the driveways. And I found the neck of that bottle!

"Yes, sir, I will show it to you later. I picked it up at some distance from the northern driveway, under a small tree, against the trunk of which it had evidently been struck off. This meant that the lower part had been carried away, broken.

"Now, who would do this but Zadok, who saw in it, he has said, a receptacle for some varnish which he had; and if Zadok, how had he carried it, if not in some pocket of his greatcoat. But glass edges make quick work with pockets; and if this piece of bottle had gone from The Whispering Pines to Tibbitt's Hall, and from there to the Hill, there should be some token of its work in Zadok's overcoat pocket.

"This led me to look for those tokens; and as I had by this time insinuated my way into his confidence by a free and cheerful manner which gave him a rest from his gloomy thoughts, I soon had a chance to see for myself the condition of those pockets. The result was quite satisfactory. In one of them I found a frayed lining, easily explainable on the theory I had advanced. That pocket can be seen by you.

"But Mr. Fox, I wanted some real proof. I wasn't willing to embarrass another man, or to risk my own reputation on a hazard so blind as this, without something really definite. A confession was what I wanted, or such a breakdown of the man as would warrant police action. How could I get this?

"I am a pupil of Mr. Gryce, and I remembered some of his methods.

"This man, guilty though he might be, loved this family, and was broken-hearted over the trouble in which he saw it plunged. Excused to-day from attendance at court, he was in constant telephonic communication with some friend of his, who kept him posted as to the conduct of the trial and the probabilities of a favourable verdict.

"If the case had gone against Arthur, we should have heard from his coachman—that I verily believe, but when we all saw that he was likely to be acquitted, I realised that some other course must be taken to shake Zadok from his new won complacency, and I chose the most obvious one.

"Just when everything looked most favourable to their restored peace and happiness, I shocked Miss Carmel and, through her, this Zadok, into the belief that the whole agony was to be gone over again, in the rearrest and consequent trial of the man she still loves, in spite of all that has happened to separate them.

"He was not proof against this new responsibility. As she fainted, he leaped from the box; and, could I have heard the words he muttered in her ear, I am sure that I should have that to give you which would settle this matter for all time. As it is, I can only say that my own convictions are absolute; the rest remains with you."

"We will go see the man," said District Attorney Fox.

XXXVI THE SURCHARGED MOMENT

For Justice, when triumphant, will weep down
Pity, not punishment, on her own wrongs,
Too much avenged by those who err. I wait,
Enduring thus, the retributive hour
Which since we spake is even nearer now.

Prometheus Unbound.

The moment I felt Sweetwater's hand lifted from my shoulder I sprang into the first hack I could find, and bade the driver follow the Cumberland sleigh post-haste. I was determined to see Carmel and have Carmel see me. Whatever cold judgment might say against the meeting, I could not live in my present anxiety. If the thunderbolt which had struck her had spared her life and reason she must know from my own lips that I was not only a free man, but as innocent of the awful charge conveyed in Sweetwater's action as was the brother, who had just been acquitted of it by the verdict of his peers.

I must declare this, and she must believe me. Nothing else mattered—nothing else in all the world. That Arthur might stop me, that anything could stop me, did not disturb my mind for a minute. All that I dreaded was that I might find myself too late; that this second blow might have proved to be too much for her, and that I should find my darling dead or passed from me into that living death which were the harder punishment of the two. But I was spared this killing grief. When our two conveyances stopped, it was in the driveway of her old home; and as I bounded upon the walk, it was to see her again in Arthur's arms, but this time with open eyes and horror-drawn features.

"Carmel!" rushed in a cry from my lips. "Don't believe what they say. I cannot bear it—I cannot bear it!"

She roused; she looked my way, and struggling to her feet, held back Arthur with one hand while she searched my face—and possibly searched her own soul—for answer to my plea. Never was moment more surcharged. Further word I could not speak; I could only meet her eyes with the steady, demanding look of a despairing heart, while Arthur moved in every fibre of his awakened manhood, waited—thinking, perhaps, how few minutes had passed since he hung upon the words of a fellow being for his condemnation to death, or release to the freedom which he now enjoyed.

A moment! But what an eternity before I saw the rigid lines of her white, set face relax—before I marked the play of human, if not womanly, emotion break up the misery of her look and soften her youthful lips into some semblance of their old expression. Love might be dead—friendship, even, be a thing of the far past—but consideration was still alive and in another instant it spoke in these trembling sentences, uttered across a threshold made sacred by a tragedy involving our three lives:

"Come in and explain yourself. No man should go unheard. I know you will not come where Adelaide's spirit yet lingers, if you cannot bring hands clean from all actual violence."

I motioned my driver away, and as Carmel drew back out of sight, I caught at Arthur's arm and faced him with the query:

"Are you willing that I should enter? I only wish to declare to her, and to you, an innocence I have no means of proving, but which you cannot disbelieve if I swear it, here and now, by your sister Carmel's sacred disfigurement. Such depravity could