The House of the Whispering Pines (8 page)

I struggled with the dilemma for hours, the more so, that I did not stand
alone in the world. I had relatives and I had friends, some of whom had
come to see me and gone away deeply grieved at my reticence. I was
swayed, too, by another consideration. I had deeply loved my mother. She
was dead, but I had her honour to think of. Should it be said she had a
murderer for her son? In the height of my inner conflict, I had almost
cried aloud the fierce denial which would arise at this thought. But ere
the word could leave my lips, such a vision rose before me of a
bewildering young face with wonderful eyes and a smile too innocent for
guile and too loving for hypocrisy, that I forgot my late antagonistic
feelings, forgot the claims of my dear, dead mother, and even those of my
own future. Such passion and such devotion merited consideration from
the man who had called them forth. I would not slight the claims of my
dead mother but I would give this young girl a chance for her life. Let
others ferret out the fact that she had visited the club-house with her
sister; I would not proclaim it. It was enough for me to proclaim my
innocence, and that I would do to the last.

I was in this frame of mind when Charles Clifton called and was allowed
to see me. I had sent for him in one of my discouraged moods. He was my
friend, but he was also my legal adviser, and it was as such I had
summoned him, and it was as such he had now come. Cordial as our
relations had been—though he was hardly one of my ilk—I noted no
instinctive outstretching of his hand, and so did not reach out mine.
Appearances had been too strong against me for any such spontaneous
outburst from even my best friends. I realised that to expect otherwise
from him or from any other man would be to play the fool; and this was no
time for folly. The day for that was passed.

I was the first to speak.

"You see me where you have never thought to see a friend of yours. But we
won't go into that. The police have good reasons for what they have done
and I presume feel justified in my commitment. Notwithstanding, I am an
innocent man so far as the attack made upon Miss Cumberland goes. I had
no hand in her murder, if murder it is found out to be. My story which
you have read in the papers and which I felt forced to give out, possibly
to my own shame and that of another whom I would fain have saved, is an
absolutely true one. I did not arrive at The Whispering Pines until
after Miss Cumberland was dead. To this I am ready to swear and it is
upon this fact you must rely, in any defence you may hereafter be called
upon to make in my regard."

He listened as a lawyer would be apt to listen to such statements from
the man who had summoned him to his aid. But I saw that I had made no
impression on his convictions. He regarded me as a guilty man, and what
was more to the point no doubt, as one for whom no plea could be made or
any rational defence undertaken.

"You don't believe me," I went on, still without any great bitterness. "I
am not surprised at it, after what the man Clarke has said of seeing me
with my hands on her throat. Any man, friend or not, would take me for a
villain after that. But, Charles, to you I will confess what cowardice
kept me from owning to Dr. Perry at the proper, possibly at the only
proper moment, that I did this out of a wild desire to see if those marks
were really the marks of strangling fingers. I could not believe that she
had been so killed and, led away by my doubts, I leaned over her and—You
shall believe me, you must," I insisted, as I perceived his hard gaze
remain unsoftened. "I don't ask it of the rest of the world. I hardly
expect any one to give me credit for good impulses or even for speaking
the plain truth after the discovery which has been made of my treacherous
attitude towards these two virtuous and devoted women. But you—if you
are to act as my counsel—must take this denial from me as gospel truth.
I may disappoint you in other ways. I may try you and often make you
regret that you undertook my case, but on this fact you may safely pin
your faith. She was dead before I touched her. Had the police spy whose
testimony is likely to hang me, climbed the tree a moment sooner than he
did, he would have seen that. Are you ready to take my case?"

Clifton is a fair fellow and I knew if he once accepted the fact I thus
urged upon him, he would work for me with all the skill and ability my
desperate situation demanded. I, therefore, watched him with great
anxiety for the least change in the constrained attitude and fixed,
unpromising gaze with which he had listened to me, and was conscious of a
great leap of heart as the set expression of his features relaxed, and he
responded almost warmly:

"I will take your case, Ranelagh. God help me to make it good against
all odds."

I was conscious of few hopes, but some of the oppression under which I
laboured lifted at those words. I had assured one man of my innocence! It
was like a great rock in the weary desert. My sigh of relief bespoke my
feelings and I longed to take his hand, but the moment had not yet come.
Something was wanting to a perfect confidence between us, and I was in
too sensitive a frame of mind to risk the slightest rebuff.

He was ready to speak before I was. "Then, you had not been long on the
scene of crime when the police arrived?"

"I had been in the room but a few minutes. I do not know how long I was
searching the house."

"The police say that fully twenty minutes elapsed between the time they
received Miss Cumberland's appeal for help and their arrival at the
club-house. If you were there that long—"

"I cannot say. Moments are hours at such a crisis—I—"

My emotions were too much for me, and I confusedly stopped. He was
surveying me with the old distrust. In a moment I saw why.

"You are not open with me," he protested. "Why should moments be hours to
you previous to the instant when you stripped those pillows from the
couch? You are not a fanciful man, nor have you any cowardly instincts.
Why were you in such a turmoil going through a house where you could have
expected to find nothing worse than some miserable sneak thief?"

This was a poser. I had laid myself open to suspicion by one
thoughtless admission, and what was worse, it was but the beginning in
all probability of many other possible mistakes. I had never taken the
trouble to measure my words and the whole truth being impossible, I
necessarily must make a slip now and then. He had better be warned of
this. I did not wish him to undertake my cause blindfolded. He must
understand its difficulties while believing in my innocence. Then, if
he chose to draw back, well and good. I should have to face the
situation alone.

"Charles," said I, as soon as I could perfectly control my speech, "you
are quite just in your remark. I am not and can not be perfectly open
with you. I shall tell you no lies, but beyond that I cannot promise. I
am caught in a net not altogether of my own weaving. So far I will be
frank with you. A common question may trip me up, others find me free and
ready with my defence. You have chanced upon one of the former. I was in
a turmoil of mind from the moment of my entrance into that fatal house,
but I can give no reason for it unless I am, as you hinted, a coward."

He settled that supposition with a gesture I had rather not have seen. It
would be better for him to consider me a poltroon than to suspect my real
reasons for the agitation which I had acknowledged.

"You say you cannot be open with me. That means you have certain memories
connected with that night which you cannot divulge."

"Right, Charles; but not memories of guilt—of active guilt, I mean. This
I have previously insisted on, and this is what you must believe. I am
not even an accessory before the fact. I am perfectly innocent so far as
Adelaide's death is concerned. You may proceed on that basis without
fear. That is, if you continue to take an interest in my case. If not, I
shall be the last to blame you. Little honour is likely to accrue to you
from defending me."

"I have accepted the case and I shall continue to interest myself in it,"
he assured me, with a dogged rather than genial persistence. "But I
should like to know what I am to work upon, if it cannot be shown that
her call for help came before you entered the building."

"That would be the best defence possible, of course," I replied; "but
neither from your standpoint nor mine is it a feasible one. I have no
proof of my assertion, I never looked at my watch from the time I left
the station till I found it run down this very morning. The club-house
clock has been out of order for some time and was not running. All I know
and can swear to about the length of time I was in that building prior
to the arrival of the police, is that it could not have been very long,
since she was not only dead and buried under those accumulated cushions,
but in a room some little distance from the telephone."

"That will do for me," said he, "but scarcely for those who are
prejudiced against you. Everything points so indisputably to your guilt.
The note which you say you wrote to Carmel to meet you at the station
looks very much more like one to Miss Cumberland to meet you at the
club-house."

It was thus I first learned which part of this letter had been
burned off.
[1]

"Otherwise," he pursued, "what could have taken her there? Everybody who
knew her will ask that. Such a night! so soon after seeing you! It is a
mystery any way, but one entirely inconceivable without some such excuse
for her. These lines said 'Come!' and she went, for reasons which may be
clear to you who were acquainted with her weak as well as strong points.
Went how? No one knows. By chance or by intention on her part or yours,
every servant was out of the house by nine o'clock, and her brother, too.
Only the sister remained, the sister whom you profess to have urged to
leave the town with you that very evening; and she can tell us
nothing,—may die without ever being able to do so. Some shock to her
feelings—you may know its character and you may not—drove her from a
state of apparent health into the wildest delirium in a few hours. It was
not your letter—if your story is true about that letter—or she would
have shown its effect immediately upon receiving it; that is, in the
early evening. And she did not. Helen, one of the maids, declares that
she saw her some time after you left the house, and that she wore
anything but a troubled look; that, in fact, her countenance was beaming
and so beautiful that, accustomed as the girl was to her young mistress's
good looks, she was more than struck by her appearance and spoke of it
afterwards at the ball. A telling circumstance against you, Ranelagh, not
only contradicting your own story but showing that her after condition
sprang from some sudden and extreme apprehension in connection with her
sister. Did you speak?"

No, I had not spoken. I had nothing to say. I was too deeply shaken by
what he had just told me, to experience anything but the utmost confusion
of ideas. Carmel beaming and beautiful at an hour I had supposed her
suffering and full of struggle! I could not reconcile it with the letter
she had written me, or with that understanding with her sister which
ended so hideously in The Whispering Pines.

The lawyer, seeing my helpless state, proceeded with his presentation of
my case as it looked to unprejudiced eyes.

"Miss Cumberland comes to the club-house; so do you. You have not the
keys and so go searching about the building till you find an unlocked
window by which you both enter. There are those who say you purposely
left this window unfastened when you went about the house the day
before; that you dropped the keys in her house where they would be sure
to be found, and drove down to the station and stood about there for a
good half hour, in order to divert suspicion from yourself afterwards and
create an alibi in case it should be wanted. I do not believe any of this
myself, not since accepting your assurance of innocence, but there are
those who do believe it firmly and discern in the whole affair a cool and
premeditated murder. Your passion for Carmel, while not generally known,
has not passed unsuspected by your or her intimates; and this in itself
is enough to give colour to these suspicions, even if you had not gone so
far as to admit its power over you and the extremes to which you were
willing to go to secure the wife you wished. So much for the situation as
it appears to outsiders. Of the circumstantial evidence which links you
personally to this crime, we have already spoken. It is very strong and
apparently unassailable. But truth is truth, and if you only felt free to
bare your whole soul to me as you now decline to do, I should not despair
of finding some weak link in the chain which seems so satisfactory to the
police and, I am forced to add, to the general public."

"Charles—"

I was very near unbosoming myself to him at that moment. But I caught
myself back in time. While Carmel lay ill and unconscious, I would not
clear my name at her expense by so much as a suggestion.

"Charles," I repeated, but in a different tone and with a different
purpose, "how do they account for the cordial that was drunk—the two
emptied glasses and the flask which were found in the adjacent closet?"

"It's one of the affair's conceded incongruities. Miss Cumberland is a
well-known temperance woman. Had the flask and glasses not come from her
house, you would get no one to believe that she had had anything to do
with them. Have you any hint to give on this point? It would be a welcome
addition to our case."

Alas! I was as much puzzled by those emptied cordial glasses as he was,
and told him so; also by the presence of the third unused one. As I dwelt
in thought on the latter circumstance, I remembered the observation which
Coroner Perry had made concerning it.