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The lawyer bowed, and once more beamed on Mary, but looked stern again.
“Now, have you done, Mr Trevithick?” said Claude.
“Not quite. The deficit.”
“If, as you say, there is a deficit, it must remain. There is enough.”
“But my late client would not have rested till it was put straight.”
“No,” said Claude dreamily; “but my father may have had some project of which we are ignorant. We had better wait. You will stay with us a few days longer?”
“I should say no,” replied Trevithick; “but I cannot conscientiously leave these premises till this money is safe. Till then, my dear madam, I am your guest.”
Claude would have spoken again, but the look she cast round the study brought up such a flood of painful memories that she could only make a sign to Mary to follow, as she hurried from the room.
“A woman any man might love,” said the lawyer, as soon as he was alone. “I hope no money-hunting scoundrel will catch her up. No; she is too strong-minded and firm. Now, what have I done to offend little Mary?” he added, with a sigh. “Bless her, I don’t get along with her as I could wish.”
He was quiet and thoughtful for a few moments, and then began tapping the table.
“Gartram had that forty – one thousand. His books say so, and he was correct as an actuary. Some one knew the secret of this room, and got at that cash.”
“Yes. I should like to find that out. It would please little Mary, too.”
Volume Three – Chapter Four.
Wimble Seizes the Clue
“Love is blind,” said Michael Wimble, with a piteous sigh. “Yes, love is blind.”
He had been a great many times past Mrs Sarson’s cottage, always with a stern determination in his breast to treat her with distance and resentment, as one who shunned him for the sake of her lodger; but so surely as he caught a glimpse of the pleasant lady at door or window, his heart softened, and he knew that if she would only turn to him, there was forgiveness for her and more.
Upon the morning in question he had had his constitutional, and found a splendid specimen of an auk washed up, quite fresh, which he meant to stuff and add to his museum.
An hour later a neat little servant-maid came to the door with a parcel and a letter.
“With missus’s compliments.”
Wimble took the letter and parcel, his hands trembling and a mist coming before his eyes, for it was Mrs Sarson’s little maid.
“We are all wrong,” he said, as he hurried in, his heart beating complete forgiveness, happiness in store, and everything exactly as he wished.
He turned back to the door, slipped the bolt, and then seated himself at the table with his back to the window, and cut the string of the parcel with a razor.
“She has relented, and it is a present,” he said to himself, as he tingled with pleasure; “a present and a letter.”
He stopped, with his fingers twitching nervously and his eyes going from parcel to note and back again.
Which should he open first – note or parcel?
He took the parcel, unfastened the paper, and found a neat cardboard box; and he had only to take off the lid to see its contents, but he held himself back from the fulfilment of his delight by taking up the note, opening it, and reading —
“Mrs Sarson would be greatly obliged by Mr Wimble’s attention to the enclosed at once. To be returned within a week.”
“Attention – returned – a week!” faltered Wimble; and with a sudden snatch he raised the lid, and sat staring dismally at its contents.
“And me to have seen her all these times and not to know that,” he groaned, as he rested his elbows on the table and his brow upon his hands, gazing the while dismally into the box. “Ah! false one – false as false can be. Why, I’ve gazed at her fondly hundreds o’ times, but love is blind, and – yes,” he muttered, as he took the object from the box and rested it upon his closed fist in the position it would have occupied when in use, “there is some excuse. As good a skin parting as I ever saw. One of Ribton’s, I suppose.”
There was a long and dismal silence as Michael Wimble, feeling that he was thoroughly disillusioned, slowly replaced the object in its box.
“How can a woman be so deceitful, and all for the sake of show? And me never to know that she wore a front!”
“All, well!” he sighed, “I can’t touch it to-day,” and rising slowly he replaced it in the box, dropped the note within, roughly secured the packet, and opened a drawer at the side.
As he pulled the drawer sharply out, something rolled from front to back, and then, as the drawer was out to its full extent, rolled down to the front.
He picked it out, dropped the cardboard box within, and shut it up, ignoring the bottle he held in his hand as he walked away to slip the bolt back and throw open the door.
He was just in time to receive a customer in the shape of Doctor Asher, who entered and nodded.
“I want you, Wimble,” he said. “When can you come up? Beginning to show a little grey about the roots, am I not?”
“Yes, sir, decidedly,” said Wimble, as the doctor took off his hat, and displayed his well-kept dark hair.
“When will you come, then?”
“When you like, sir,” said Wimble, unconsciously rubbing the tip of his nose with the cork of the little bottle he held in his hand.
“To-morrow afternoon, then,” said the doctor sharply; “and you needn’t shake the hair dye in my face.”
“Beg pardon, sir? Oh, I see! That’s not hair dye, sir.”
“What is it, then? New dodge for bringing hair on bald places?”
He held out his hand for the bottle, and the barber passed it at once.
“Oh, no, sir,” he said, “nothing of that kind.”
With the action born of long habit, the doctor took out the cork, sniffed, held the bottle up to the light, shook it, applied a finger to the neck, shook the bottle again, tasted the drug at the end of his finger, and quickly spat it out.
“Why, Wimble, what the dickens are you doing with chloral?”
“Nothing, sir, nothing; only an old bottle.”
“Throw it away, then,” said the doctor hastily. “Don’t take it. Very bad habit. Recollect that’s how poor Mr Gartram came to his end. Good-day. Come round, then, at three.”
“Yes, sir, certainly, sir; but you forgot to – ”
“Oh, I beg pardon. Yes, of course,” said the doctor, handing back the bottle, and then, beating himself with his right-hand glove, he walked hastily out of the place.
Wimble stood looking after his visitor till he was out of sight, and then walked slowly back into his museum to operate upon the dead bird, which lay where he had placed it upon a shelf ready for skinning.
“Ah,” he said mournfully, as he rubbed his nose slowly with the cork of the little bottle, “what a world of deception it is. There is nothing honest. Were all more or less like specimens. A front, and me not to have known it all this time. If she had taken me sooner into her confidence, I wouldn’t have cared. The doctor did. Hah! I wonder who ever suspected him, with his clear dark locks, as I keep so right. Yes, he’s a deceiver, and without me what would he look like in a couple of months? – Deceit, deceit, deceit. – And I trusted her so. It’s taking a mean advantage of a man.
“Well, it was a mark of confidence, and perhaps I have been all wrong. It shows she is waiting to trust me, and ought I to? Well, we shall see.”
Michael Wimble looked a little brighter, and then his eyes fell upon the bottle, which he shook as the doctor had shaken it, took out the cork, applied a finger to it, and tasted in the same way, quickly spitting it out as he became aware of the sharp taste.
“What did he say: chloral? Don’t take any of it. No, I sha’n’t do that.”
Wimble suddenly became thoughtful and dreamy as he replaced the cork, and he seemed to see the bright ray of light once more on the dry patch of sand beyond where the tide had reached.
Then he thought about Gartram’s death by chloral.
“Might have been the same bottle,” he said thoughtfully; “took what he wanted, and then threw it out of the window.”
He looked at the tiny drop in the bottom, turned it over and over, and his thoughts seemed to run riot in his brain, till he grew confused at their number. But after a time he followed the one theme again.
“What a piece of evidence to have brought up at the inquest. How important a witness I should have been. But why should he have thrown the bottle out of the window? He didn’t poison himself. He wasn’t the man to do that. Thousands upon thousands of money. Everything he could wish for. Regular king of the place. He wouldn’t do that – he couldn’t.”
Wimble stood with his brow wrinkled up, and then all at once, as if startled by the suddenness of a thought, he dropped the bottle on the oilcloth and drew back, gazing at it in a horrified way, his eyes dilating, and the white showing all round.
“Somebody must have given it to him.”
“No, no. They wouldn’t do that; it would be murder. No one would try to murder him.”
He passed his hand over his forehead, and drew it away quite wet.
“His money!” he half whispered, as the thought seemed to grow and grow. “They say he kept thousands up there. Or some one who hated him, as lots of people did.”
Wimble dropped into his shaving chair, and sat thinking of the numbers of workpeople who had quarrelled with Gartram and spoken threateningly; but he did not feel that it was possible for any one of these to have done such a deed.
“Some one who hated him – some one who wanted to get rid of him – some one who, who – no, no, no, it’s too horrible to think about. I wouldn’t know if I could.”
He lifted the little bottle between his finger and thumb, and drew back with his arm extended to the utmost to hurl the little vessel across the road, and right out toward the sea.
But he checked himself thoughtfully, drew back, and went across his shop to the side. Here he stood, bottle in hand, thinking deeply, before slowly opening the drawer and placing it in a corner.
“It would be very valuable,” he said softly, “if that was the bottle some one used to poison the old man; and if it was, why, I haven’t got a specimen in my museum that would attract people half so much. ‘The Danmouth murder; the bottle that held the poison,’ Why, they’d come in hundreds to see it.”
He took the phial out again, for it seemed to have a strange fascination for him, and after staring at it till his hands grew moist, he took out a piece of white paper, carefully rolled it therein, and placed it in another drawer, which he had to unlock, and fastened afterwards with the greatest care.
“That bottle’s worth at least a hundred pound,” he said huskily, as he put the key in his pocket. “It will be quite a little fortune to me.
“Somebody who hated him – somebody who wanted him out of the way,” he said, as he tapped his teeth with the key. “No, I can’t think, and won’t try any more. I’m not a detective, and I don’t want to know.
“Some one who hated him and had quarrelled with him, and who wanted him out of the way.”
In spite of his determination not to think any more of the subject, it came back persistently, and at last, to clear his brain and drive away the thoughts, he took down his hat, and determined to let the museum take care of itself for an hour, while he walked down along the beach.
He knew, as he came to this determination, that he would go straight down beneath the Fort, and look at the spot where he found the bottle; but, all the same, he felt that he must go, and, putting on his hat, he took the key out from inside of the door, and standing just inside the shop, began to put the key into the outer portion of the lock, as the thought came again more strongly than ever —
“Some one who hated him and had quarrelled with him, and wanted him out of the way.”
He was in the act of closing his door as a quick step came along the path, and as the door closed, a voice said to some one —
“How do, Edward?” and the speaker passed on with creel on back and salmon rod over his shoulder.
Wimble darted back into the museum, shut the door, and stood trembling in the middle of the place.
“Oh!” he said, in a hoarse whisper, as the great drops stood out upon his brow. “What did Brime say?”
He shivered, and his voice dropped into a whisper.
“Mr Chris Lisle! He was there that night!”
Volume Three – Chapter Five.
Mr Wimble is in Doubt
“Want lodgings, sir?” said Reuben Brime taking his short black pipe from his lips, and gazing straight out to sea, as if he thought there was plenty of room for a good long rest out there. Then straightening himself from having a good, thoughtful lean on the cliff rail, where he had been having his evening’s idle after the day’s work done, he turned, and, looking thoughtfully at a youngish man in tweeds, as if he were a plant not growing quite so satisfactorily as could be wished, he said again, in a tone of mild inquiry, – “Lodgings?”
“Yes, lodgings,” said the new-comer shortly.
“Well, I was trying to think of some, sir; and I could have told you of the very thing if something as I had in hand had come up – I mean off.”
“Indeed!”
“Yes, sir,” said the gardener thoughtfully. “I don’t mind who knows it. I’d got as nice a little cottage in my eye as any man would wish to have there, the money to buy all the furniture, as much more as was wanted, theirs being very old; and I could have said to you, ‘There’s a bedroom and a setten’-room, and the best of attendance.’”
“But it is not in hand, eh?”
“In hand, sir? No, sir; nothing like in hand.”
“How’s that?”
“Ah, well, I don’t care who knows it now, sir. Mebbe if she heard how it’s talked about, and the man’s disappointment, she may get better, and alter her mind.”
“She? The lady?”
“Yes, sir; the lady, as I may say I’d engaged myself to; but she’s took bad and strange, and I suppose it’s all off.”
“Ah, well, I’m sorry to hear that,” said the stranger, looking amused, and as if he thought the man he addressed was a little wanting in brains.
“Thank you, sir, kindly. Lodgings? – no. You see this isn’t a seaside place.”
“Then what do you call it?” said the stranger.
“Call it, sir? Well, we calls it Danmouth, or, mostly, Dan’orth, because you see it’s shorter, and more like one word.”
“Oh, yes, I know the name; but what do you call it if it isn’t a seaside place?”
“I calls it a port, sir, and as good a little port as there is anywheres about this coast. Dinton and Bartoe and Minxton’s seaside places, with lots of visitors and bathing machines, and bands and Punch and Judies. Lodgings, eh? Let me see. Lodgings for a gentleman? What do you say to the Harbour Inn? They’ve got as good a drop of beer there as a man could wish to drink.”
“No, no, I don’t want to be at a public house. I’m here for a fortnight’s fishing, and I want nice, comfortable apartments.”
“And you want comfortable apartments?” said Brime respectfully, as he rubbed his sunburned face with the stem of his pipe. “Fishing, eh? You mean pottering about with a rod and line; not going with a boat and nets?”
“Quite right.”
“I’ve got it,” said the gardener. “Mrs Sarson; she lets lodgings. Stop a moment. I’ll take you on to the museum.”
“Museum! Hang it all, man, I’m not a specimen.”
Brime laughed for the first time for a month.
“No, sir, you don’t look as if you was stuffed. I was going to take you to our barber’s. He knows everything; and he’ll tell us whether Mrs Sarson can take you in.”
“Is it far – the museum?”
“Only yonder. Just where you see that man looking out of the door.”
“Ah, yes,” said the stranger sharply. “Yours seems a busy place.”
“Tidy, sir, tidy.”
“Whose castle’s that?”
“Mr Gartram’s, sir. Leastwise it was. He’s gone.”
“Oh! Dead?”
“Yes, sir. The hardest and the best master as ever was. Some on us’ll miss him, I expect.”
“Curious kind of master, my lad, and likely to be missed. Gartram? Oh, yes, I know; the stone quarry man. Mr Trevithick, in our town, has to do with his affairs.”
“If you talked all night, sir, you couldn’t say a truer word than that. Mr Trevithick, sir, very big man, lawyer.”
“Yes; they call him Jumbo our way.”
Kck!
Brime burst out into a monosyllabic half laugh, and then stopped short as Wimble was drawing back into his den to let them pass.
“Here, Mr Wimble, sir, this gent wants to ask something about Mrs Sarson.”
“Eh! Yes!” said the barber sharply; and the suspicious look which had been gathering of late in his face grew more intense. “Step in, sir, pray,” he added eagerly.
“Oh, that’s not worth while now,” said the stranger, passing his hand over his chin. “Give you a look in to-morrow. My friend here thought you could tell me about Mrs Sarson’s lodgings.”
“Yes,” said Brime; “and – of course, this gent wants to go fishing, and Mr Lisle’s always fishing.”
“Mr Lisle?” said the stranger. “Christopher Lisle?”
“That’s the man, sir,” said the barber sharply. “You know anything about him, sir?”
“Only that he has a good heavy account with our bank.”
Wimble looked sharply at the stranger, with his head on one side, and more than one eager question upon his lips. But the new-comer felt that he had made a slip by talking too freely, and prevented him by asking a question himself.
“Do you think Mrs Sarson could accommodate me?”
“No, sir,” said Wimble, looking at him searchingly. “No: she has no room, I am sure. Take the gentleman up to Mrs Lampton’s at the top of the cliff road. I daresay she could accommodate him.”
“Why, of course,” said Brime; “the very place. I never thought of that.”
“No, Mr Brime,” said Wimble patronisingly, as he looked longingly at the visitor with cross-examination in his breast. “Say I recommended the gentleman.”
“All right. Come along, sir, I’ll show you; and if you want a few worms for fishing, I’m your man.”
“Worms?” said the visitor, laughing. “I always use flies.”
“Most gents do, sir. Mr Chris Lisle does. But the way to get hold of a good fish in a river is with a whacking great worm.”
“Do you know Mr Lisle?”
“Know him? Poor young man, yes.”
“Poor? I don’t call a gentleman who lately came in for a big fortune poor.”
“Big fortune, sir? Mr Chris Lisle come in for a big fortune, sir? Hurrah! Our young lady will be glad.”
The visitor was ready to pull himself up again sharp, for this was another mistake.
Brime stopped, smiling, at a pretty cottage, where fuchsias and hydrangeas were blooming side by side with myrtles, and was going off, when the visitor offered him a shilling for his trouble.
“Thankye, sir, and I hope you’ll be comfortable,” said the gardener, descending the chief path. – “Well, I am glad. Come in for a large fortune. Now, if I were him, I’d just send Mr Glyddyr to the right about, and get the business settled as soon as it seemed decent after master’s death. He is a good sort, is Mr Lisle, and he’s fond enough of her. Why, they’ll be married now, and keep up the old place just as it is; and if I speak when we want more help, he isn’t the gent to tell a hard-working man to get up a bit earlier and work a bit later. Not he. He made a friend of me when he gave me that half-sov’rin, and I made a friend of him when I caught him. My, what a lark it was when I dropped on to him, and he thought it was the governor! I know he did.”
Reuben Brime smiled as he had not smiled for days, and a minute or two later he grinned outright. From his point of vantage, high up the cliff side, he could see to the mouth of the glen, and there, to his intense delight, he could just make out two figures in deep mourning, one tall and graceful, and the other short, and her head low down between her shoulders, walking away from him in the distance, and, not far behind, a sturdy-looking man in light brown tweeds, with a fishing creel slung at his back, and a rod over his shoulder, trying hard to overtake the pair in front.
“Wouldn’t give much for Mr Glyddyr’s chance,” thought Brime, as he watched the trio out of sight. “Been an awfully cloudy time, but the sun’s coming strong now, and things’ll grow. What a fellow I am to give up because she was a bit off. Friends with the new guv’nor means friends with the new missus, and as Sarah about worships her, and’ll do what she tells her, why, it’ll come right in the end.”
He walked on, building castles as he went, and in the height of his elation he said, half aloud —
“It’s only six pounds a year, and I could let it till she said yes. Hang me if I don’t take the cottage after all.”
“Well, Mr Brime,” said a voice at his elbow, “did Mrs Lampton take the gentleman in?”
“Eh? Oh, I don’t know, as I didn’t stop. But she’d be sure to.”
“Oh, yes, it will be all right,” said Wimble. “But you’ll come in, Mr Brime?”
“No. I think I’ll get back now, and finish my pipe by the cliff.”
“With a beard like that, sir? Better have it off.”
“Eh? No, it isn’t shaving day.”
“Your beard grows wonderfully fast, Mr Brime, believe me, sir. I wonder at a young man like you being so careless of his personal appearance. You’ll be wanting to marry some day, sir, and there’s nothing goes further with the ladies than seeing a man clean-shaved.”
It was not quite a random shot, for Wimble had wheedled out a little respecting the gardener’s future, and he had only to draw back with a smile for the man to follow him in, passing his hand thoughtfully over his chin, wondering whether it had anything to do with the very severe rebuff he had more than once received.
Once more in the chair, tied up in the cloth, and with his face lathered, he was at Wimble’s mercy; and as the razor played about his nose and chin, giving a scrape here and a scrape there, the barber cross-examined the gardener in a quiet, unconcerned way, that would have been the envy of an Old Bailey counsel. In very few minutes he had drawn out everything that the gardener had learned, and so insidiously soft were the operator’s words, that Brime found himself unconsciously inventing and supplying particulars that the barber stowed up in his brain cell, ready for future use.
“There, Mr Brime,” he said, after delivering the final upper strokes with a dexterity that was perfect, though thrilling, from the danger they suggested, “I think you will say, sir, that a good shave is not dear at the price.”
These last words were accompanied by little dabs with a wet sponge, to remove soapy patches among the thick whiskers, and then the towel was handed, and the victim walked to the glass.
“Yes, it does make a difference in a man,” he said, as he dabbed and dried.
“Difference, sir? It’s a duty to be clean-shaved. To a man, sir, speaking from years of experience, a beard is hair, natural hair. To a woman, sir, it is nothing of the kind. A woman cannot help it, sir; it is born in her, but to her, sir, a beard is simply dirt.”
“Hah!” ejaculated the gardener, and he thought deeply.
“Yes, sir; I’ve often heard them call it so. Even on the properest man, it is, in their eyes – dirt.”
Brime paid and took his departure, while Wimble plunged at once among his own dark thoughts.
“That man is blind as a mole,” he said, “and can see nothing which is not just before his eyes. He can dig a garden, but he cannot dig down into his own brain. How horrible! how strange! And how the slackest deeds will come out in a way nobody who is guilty suspects. Yesterday, quite a poor man – to-day, very rich – a heavy banking account – come in for a fortune. Yes, it’s all plain enough now. Now, ought I to do anything – and if so, what?”
