The House of the Whispering Pines
- -
- 100%
- +
"Then we won't go in together," decided Hexford. "Find your own place; you won't have any difficulty. A crowd isn't expected. Miss Cumberland's condition forbids it."
Sweetwater nodded and slid in at the side door.
He found himself at once in a narrow hall, from the end of which opened a large room. A few people were to be seen in this latter place, and his first instinct was to join them; but finding that a few minutes yet remained before the hour set for the services, he decided to improve them by a rapid glance about this hall, which, for certain reasons hardly as yet formulated in his own mind, had a peculiar interest for him.
The most important object within view, according to his present judgment, was the staircase which connected it with the floor above; but if you had asked his reason for this conclusion, he would not have told you, as Ranelagh might have done, that it was because it was the most direct and convenient approach to Carmel Cumberland's room. His thoughts were far from this young girl, intimately connected as she was with this crime; which shows through what a blind maze he was insensibly working. With his finger on the thread which had been put in his hand, he was feeling his way along inch by inch. It had brought him to this staircase, and it led him next to a rack upon which hung several coats and a gentleman's hat.
He inspected the former and noted that one was finished with a high collar; but he passed the latter by—it was not a derby. The table stood next the rack, and on its top lay nothing more interesting than a clothes-brush and one or two other insignificant objects; but, with his memory for details, he had recalled the keys which one of the maids had picked up somewhere about this house, and laid on a hall table. If this were the hall and this the table, then was every inch of the latter's simple cloth-covered top of the greatest importance in his eyes.
He had no further time for even these cursory investigations; Hexford's step could be heard on the verandah, and Sweetwater was anxious to locate himself before the officer came in. Entering the room before him, he crossed to the small group clustered in its further doorway. There were several empty chairs in sight; but he passed around them all to a dark and inconspicuous corner, from which, without effort, he could take in every room on that floor—from the large parlour in which the casket stood, to the remotest region of the servants' hall.
The clergyman had not yet descended, and Sweetwater had time to observe the row of little girls sitting in front of the bearers, each with a small cluster of white flowers in her hand. Miss Cumberland's Sunday-school class, he conjectured, and conjectured rightly. He also perceived that some of these children loved her.
Near them sat a few relatives and friends. Among these was a very, very old man, whom he afterwards heard was a great-uncle and a centenarian. Between him and one of the little girls, there apparently existed a strong sympathy; for his hand reached out and drew her to him when the tears began to steal down her cheeks, and the looks which passed between the two had all the appeal and all the protection of a great love.
Sweetwater, who had many a soft spot in his breast, felt his heart warm at this one innocent display of natural feeling in an assemblage otherwise frozen by the horror of the occasion. His eyes dwelt lingeringly on the child, and still more lingeringly on the old, old man, before passing to that heaped-up mound of flowers, under which lay a murdered body and a bruised heart. He could not see the face, but the spectacle was sufficiently awe-compelling without that.
Would it have seemed yet more so, had he known at whose request the huge bunch of lilies had been placed over that silent heart?
The sister sick, the brother invisible, there was little more to hold his attention in this quarter; so he let it roam across the heads of the people about him, to the distant hall communicating with the kitchen.
Several persons were approaching from this direction, among them Zadok. The servants of the house, no doubt, for they came in all together and sat down, side by side, in the chairs Sweetwater had so carefully passed by. There were five persons in all: two men and three women. Only two interested him—Zadok, with whom he had already made a superficial acquaintance and had had one bout; and a smart, bright-eyed girl with a resolute mouth softened by an insistent dimple, who struck him as possessing excellent sense and some natural cleverness. A girl to know and a girl to talk to, was his instantaneous judgment. Then he forgot everything but the solemnity of the occasion, for the clergyman had entered and taken his place, and a great hush had fallen upon the rooms and upon every heart there present.
"I am the resurrection and the life."
Never had these consoling words sounded more solemn than when they rang above the remains of Adelaide Cumberland, in this home where she had reigned as mistress ever since her seventeenth year. The nature of the tragedy which had robbed the town of one of its most useful young women; the awful fate impending over its supposed author,—a man who had come and gone in these rooms with a spell of fascination to which many of those present had themselves succumbed—the brooding sense of illness, if not of impending death, in the room above; gave to these services a peculiar poignancy which in some breasts of greater susceptibility than the rest, took the form of a vague expectancy bordering on terror.
Sweetwater felt the poignancy, but did not suffer from the terror. His attention had been attracted in a new direction, and he found himself watching, with anxious curiosity, the attitude and absorbed expression of a good-looking young man whom he was far from suspecting to be the secret representative of the present suspect, whom nobody could forget, yet whom nobody wished to remember at this hallowed hour.
Had this attitude and this absorption been directed towards the casket over which the clergyman's words rose and fell with ever increasing impressiveness, he might have noted the man but would scarcely have been held by him. But this interest, sincere and strong as it undoubtedly was, centred not so much in the services, careful as he was to maintain a decorous attitude towards the same, but in the faint murmurs which now and then came down from above where unconsciousness reigned and the stricken brother watched over the delirious sister, with a concentration and abandonment to fear which made him oblivious of all other duties, and almost as unconscious of the rites then being held below over one who had been as a mother to him, as the sick girl herself with her ceaseless and importunate "Lila! Lila!" The detective, watching this preoccupied stranger, shared in some measure his secret emotions, and thus was prepared for the unexpected occurrence of a few minutes later.
No one else had the least forewarning of any break in the services. There had been nothing in the subdued but impressive rendering of the prayers to foreshadow a dramatic episode; yet it came, and in this manner:
The final words had been said, and the friends present invited to look their last on the calm face which, to many there, had never worn so sweet a smile in life. Some had hesitated; but most had obeyed the summons, among them Sweetwater. But he had not much time in which to fix those features in his mind; for the little girls, who had been waiting patiently for this moment, now came forward; and he stepped aside to watch them as they filed by, dropping as they did so, a tribute of fragrant flowers upon the quiet breast. They were followed by the servants, among whom Zadok had divided his roses. As the last cluster fell from the coachman's trembling hand, the undertaker advanced with the lid, and, pausing a moment to be sure that all were satisfied, began to screw it on.
Suddenly there was a cry, and the crowd about the door leading into the main hall started back, as wild steps were heard on the stairs and a young man rushed into the room where the casket stood, and advanced upon the officiating clergyman and the astonished undertaker with a fierceness which was not without its suggestion of authority.
"Take it off!" he cried, pointing at the lid which had just been fastened down. "I have not seen her—I must see her. Take it off!"
It was the brother, awake at last to the significance of the hour!
The clergyman, aghast at the sacrilegious look and tone of the intruder, stepped back, raising one arm in remonstrance, and instinctively shielding the casket with the other. But the undertaker saw in the frenzied eye fixed upon his own, that which warned him to comply with the request thus harshly and peremptorily uttered. Unscrewing the lid, he made way for the intruder, who, drawing near, pushed aside the roses which had fallen on the upturned face, and, laying his hand on the brow, muttered a few low words to himself. Then he withdrew his hand, and without glancing to right or left, staggered back to the door amid a hush as unbroken as that which reigned behind him in that open casket. Another moment and his white, haggard face and disordered figure would be blotted from sight by the door-jamb.
The minister recovered his poise and the bearers their breath; the men stirred in their seats and the women began to cast frightened looks at each other, and then at the children, some of whom had begun to whimper, when in an instant all were struck again into stone. The young man had turned and was facing them all, with his hands held out in a clench which in itself was horrible.
"If they let the man go," he called out in loud and threatening tones, "I will strangle him with these two hands."
The word, and not the shriek which burst irrepressibly from more than one woman before him, brought him to himself. With a ghastly look on his bloated features, he scanned for one moment the row of deeply shocked faces before him, then tottered back out of sight, and fled towards the staircase. All thought that an end had come to the harrowing scene, and minister and people faced each other once more; when, loud and sharp from above, there rang down the shrill cry of delirium, this time in articulate words which even the children could understand:
"Break it open, I say! break it open, and see if her heart is there!"
It was too awful. Men and women and children leaped to their feet and dashed away into the streets, uttering smothered cries and wild ejaculations. In vain the clergyman raised his voice and bade them respect the dead; the rooms were well-nigh empty before he had finished his appeal. Only the very old uncle and the least of the children remained of all who had come there in memory of their departed kinswoman and friend.
The little one had fled to the old man's arms before he could rise, and was now held close to his aged and shaking knees, while he strove to comfort her and explain.
Soon these, too, were gone, and the casket was refastened and carried out by the shrinking bearers, leaving in those darkened rooms a trail of desolation which was only broken from time to time by the now faint and barely heard reiteration of the name of her who had just been borne away!
"Lila! Lila!"
XIII
"WHAT WE WANT IS HERE"
I'll tell you, by the way,The greatest comfort in the world.You saidThere was a clew to all.Remember, Sweet,He said there was a clew!I hold it.Come!A Blot in the 'Scutcheon.Sweetwater, however affected by this scene, had not lost control of himself or forgotten the claims of duty. He noted at a glance that, while the candid looking stranger, whose lead he had been following, was as much surprised as the rest at the nature of the interruption—which he had possibly anticipated and for which he was in some measure prepared—he was, of all present, the most deeply and peculiarly impressed by it. No element of fear had entered into his emotion; nor had it been heightened by any superstitious sense. Something deeper and more important by far had darkened his thoughtful eye and caused that ebb and flow of colour in a cheek unused, if Sweetwater read the man aright, to such quick and forcible changes.
Sweetwater took occasion, likewise, while the excitement was at its height, to mark what effect had been made on the servants by the action and conduct of young Cumberland. "They know him better than we do," was his inner comment; "what do they think of his words, and what do they think of him?"
It was not so easy to determine as the anxious detective might wish. Only one of them showed a simple emotion, and that one was, without any possibility of doubt, the cook. She was a Roman Catholic, and was simply horrified by the sacrilege of which she had been witness. There was no mistaking her feelings. But those of the other two women were more complex.
So were those of the men. Zadok specially watched each movement of his young master with open mistrust; and very nearly started upright, in his repugnance and dismay, when that intruding hand fell on the peaceful brow of her over whose fate, to his own surprise, he had been able to shed tears. Some personal prejudice lay back of this or some secret knowledge of the man from whose touch even the dead appeared to shrink.
And the women! Might not the same explanation account for that curious droop of the eye with which the two younger clutched at each other's hands, to keep from screaming, and interchanged whispered words which Sweetwater would have given considerable out of his carefully cherished hoard to have heard.
It was impossible to tell, at present; but he was confident that it would not be long before he understood these latter, at least. He had great confidence in his success with women, homely as he was. He was not so sure of himself with men; and he felt that some difficulties and not a few pitfalls lay between him and, for instance, the uncommunicative Zadok. "But I've the whole long evening before me," he added in quiet consolation to himself. "It will be a pity if I can't work some of them in that time."
The last thing he had remarked, before Carmel's unearthly cry had sent the horrified guests in disorder from the house, was the presence of Dr. Perry in a small room which Sweetwater had supposed empty, until the astonishing events I have endeavoured to describe brought its occupant to the door. What the detective then read in the countenance of the family's best friend, he kept to himself; but his own lost a trace of its former anxiety, as the official slipped back out of sight and remained so, even after the funeral cortege had started on its course.
Plans had been made for carrying the servants to the cemetery, and, despite the universal disturbance consequent upon these events, these plans were adhered to. Sweetwater watched them all ride away in the last two carriages.
This gave him the opportunity he wanted. Leaving his corner, he looked up
Hexford, and asked who was left in the house.
"Dr. Perry, Mr. Clifton, the lawyer, Mr. Cumberland, his sick sister, and the nurse."
"Mr. Cumberland! Didn't he go to the grave?"
"Did you expect him to, after that?"
Sweetwater's shoulders rose, and his voice took on a tone of indifference.
"There's no telling. Where is he now, do you think? Upstairs?"
"Yes. It seems he spends all his time in a little alcove opposite his sister's door. They won't let him inside, for fear of disturbing the patient; so he just sits where I've told you, doing nothing but listening to every sound that comes through the door."
"Is he there now?"
"Yes, and shaking just like a leaf. I walked by him a moment ago and noticed particularly."
"Where's his room? In sight of the alcove you mention?"
"No; there's a partition or two between. If you go up by the side staircase, you can slip into it without any one seeing you. Coroner Perry and Mr. Clifton are in front."
"Is the side door locked?"
"No."
"Lock it. The back door, of course, is."
"Yes, the cook attended to that."
"I want a few minutes all by myself. Help me, Hexford. If Dr. Perry has given you no orders, take your stand upstairs where you can give me warning if Mr. Cumberland makes a move to leave his post, or the nurse her patient."
"I'm ready; but I've been in that room and I've found nothing."
"I don't know that I shall. You say that it is near the head of the stairs running up from the side door?"
"Just a few feet away."
"I would have sworn to that fact, even if you hadn't told me," muttered
Sweetwater.
Five minutes later, he had slipped from sight; and for some time not even
Hexford knew where he was.
"Dr. Perry, may I have a few words with you?"
The coroner turned quickly. Sweetwater was before him; but not the same Sweetwater he had interviewed some few hours before in his office. This was quite a different looking personage. Though nothing could change his features, the moment had come when their inharmonious lines no longer obtruded themselves upon the eye; and the anxious, nay, deeply troubled official whom he addressed, saw nothing but the ardour and quiet self-confidence they expressed.
"It'll not take long," he added, with a short significant glance in the direction of Mr. Clifton.
Dr. Perry nodded, excused himself to the lawyer and followed the detective into the small writing-room which he had occupied during the funeral. In the decision with which Sweetwater closed the door behind them there was something which caused the blood to mount to the coroner's brow.
"You have made some discovery?" said he.
"A very important one," was the quick, emphatic reply. And in a few brief words the detective related his interview with the master mechanic's wife on the highroad. Then with an eager, "Now let me show you something," he led the coroner through the dining-room into the side hall, where he paused before the staircase.
"Up?" queried the coroner, with an obvious shrinking from what he might encounter above.
"No," was the whispered reply. "What we want is here." And, pushing open a small door let into the under part of the stairway (if Ranelagh in his prison cell could have seen and understood this movement!), he disclosed a closet and in that closet a coat or two, and one derby hat. He took down the latter and, holding it out to the light, pointed to a spot on the under side of its brim.
The coroner staggered as he saw it, and glanced helplessly about him. He had known this family all their lives and the father had been his dearest friend. But he could say nothing in face of this evidence. The spot was a flour-mark, in which could almost be discerned the outline of a woman's thumb.
XIV
THE MOTIONLESS FIGURE
'S blood, there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.Hamlet."The coat is here, too," whispered Sweetwater, after a moment of considerate silence. "I had searched the hall-rack for them; I had searched his closets; and was about owning myself to be on a false trail, when I spied this little door. We had better lock it, now, had we not, till you make up your mind what to do with this conclusive bit of evidence."
"Yes, lock it. I'm not quite myself, Sweetwater. I'm no stranger to this house, or to the unfortunate young people in it. I wish I had not been re-elected last year. I shall never survive the strain if—" He turned away.
Sweetwater carefully returned the hat to its peg, turned the key in the door, and softly followed his superior back into the dining-room, and thence to their former retreat.
"I can see that it's likely to be a dreadful business," he ventured to remark, as the two stood face to face again. "But we've no choice. Facts are facts, and we've got to make the best of them. You mean me to go on?"
"Go on?"
"Following up the clews which you have yourself given me? I've only finished with one; there's another—"
"The bottles?"
"Yes, the bottles. I believe that I shall not fail there if you'll give me a little time. I'm a stranger in town, you remember, and cannot be expected to move as fast as a local detective."
"Sweetwater, you have but one duty—to follow both clews as far as they will take you. As for my duty, that is equally plain, to uphold you in all reasonable efforts and to shrink at nothing which will save the innocent and bring penalty to the guilty. Only be careful. Remember the evidence against Ranelagh. You will have to forge an exceedingly strong chain to hold your own against the facts which have brought this recreant lover to book. You see—O, I wish that poor girl could get ease!" he impetuously cried, as "Lila! Lila!" rang again through the house.
"There can never be any ease for her," murmured Sweetwater. "Whatever the truth, she's bound to suffer if ever she awakens to reality again. Do you agree with the reporters that she knew why and for what her unhappy sister left this house that night?"
"If not, why this fever?"
"That's sound."
"She—" the coroner was emphatic, "she is the only one who is wholly innocent in this whole business. Consider her at every point. Her life is invaluable to every one concerned. But she must not be roused to the fact; not yet. Nor must he be startled either; you know whom I mean. Quiet does it, Sweetwater. Quiet and a seeming deference to his wishes as the present head of the house."
"Is the place his? Has Miss Cumberland made a will?"
"Her will will be read to-morrow. For to-night, Arthur Cumberland's position here is the position of a master."
"I will respect it, sir, up to all reasonable bounds. I don't think he meditates giving any trouble. He's not at all impressed by our presence. All he seems to care about is what his sister may be led to say in her delirium."
"That's how you look at it?" The coroner's tone was one of gloom. Then, after a moment of silence: "You may call my carriage, Sweetwater. I can do nothing further here to-day. The atmosphere of this house stifles me. Dead flowers, dead hopes, and something worse than death lowering in the prospect. I remember my old friend—this was his desk. Let us go, I say."
Sweetwater threw open the door, but his wistful look did not escape the older man's eye.
"You're not ready to go? Wish to search the house, perhaps."
"Naturally."
"It has already been done in a general way."
"I wish to do it thoroughly."
The coroner sighed.
"I should be wrong to stand in your way. Get your warrant and the house is yours. But remember the sick girl."
"That's why I wish to do the job my self."
"You're a good fellow, Sweetwater." Then as he was passing out, "I'm going to rely on you to see this thing through, quietly if you can, openly and in the public eye if you must. The keys tell the tale—the keys and the hat. If the former had been left in the club-house and the latter found without the mark set on it by the mechanic's wife, Ranelagh's chances would look as slim to-day as they did immediately after the event. But with things as they are, he may well rest easily to-night; the clouds are lifting for him."
Which shows how little we poor mortals realise what makes for the peace even of those who are the nearest to us and whose lives and hearts we think we can read like an open book.
The coroner gone, Sweetwater made his way to the room where he had last seen Mr. Clifton. He found it empty and was soon told by Hexford that the lawyer had left. This was welcome news to him; he felt that he had a fair field before him now; and learning that it would be some fifteen minutes yet before he could hope to see the carriages back, he followed Hexford upstairs.
"I wish I had your advantages," he remarked as they reached the upper floor.
"What would you do?"
"I'd wander down that hall and take a long look at things."
"You would?"
"I'd like to see the girl and I'd like to see the brother when he thought no one was watching him."
"Why see the girl?"
"I don't know. I'm afraid that's just curiosity. I've heard she was a wonder for beauty."
"She was, once."
"And not now?"
"You cannot tell; they have bound up her cheeks with cloths. She fell on the grate and got burned."
"But I say that's dreadful, if she was so beautiful."
"Yes, it's bad, but there are worse things than that. I wonder what she meant by that wild cry of 'Tear it open! See if her heart is there?' Tear what open? the coffin?"