The House of the Whispering Pines (22 page)

"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."

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.