After dinner, as dusk was setting in, he stepped across to the Crown Hotel, and, strolling into the bar, he called for a whisky-and-soda. Through the glass doors he peered into the smokeroom, and his eyes gleamed with satisfaction as they lighted upon Pegram, sitting there with his paper and his post-prandial cigar. Wirgman was building heavily upon a slender foundation of probabilities. This, the first of the circumstances he had relied upon, proved as he had reckoned. He emptied his glass, and, moving over to the office, he inquired was Miss Drummond in the house. He received an affirmative reply. She was in her sitting room. Truly the gods of chance were fighting on his side, for here was the second circumstance making good the combination he had hoped to find.
He gave his card to a waiter; then, treading closely upon the fellow’s heels, he pushed into the sitting-room after him, and without waiting to be announced, for he had a shrewd suspicion that he might be denied.
As he entered he had a swift vision of Miss Drummond — a tall, fair, showy woman — standing with brows contracted in a frown, regarding his card. Her mother, he was glad to see, was absent.
“Mr. Wirgman!” she exclaimed, catching sight of him. “This is an intrusion!”
He bowed and smiled darkly.
“I confess it. But I was afraid you might hesitate to see me; and as the communication I wish to make to you is of an urgent and most important character, I am confident that you will ultimately absolve me — thank me, perhaps — for having forced my way in.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“Possibly not. It was not with the hope of hearing you say anything that I came. But I have something to say to you that you may come to very bitterly regret not having heard if you deny me. I have come down from town and gone to the discomfort of putting up at that appalling hotel the Swan purposely to render you a service. Surely I deserve a hearing?”
She was only a woman, and curiosity got the better of her.
“What have you to say?” she inquired freezingly.
Wirgman glanced significantly at the interested waiter, whom she at once dismissed. When they were alone he unfolded his mission. He opened with an attempt to refute the slander she had heard against him and followed that up by most virulently maligning Pegram in his turn, dubbing him incidentally, a liar and a low person generally.
Miss Drummond checked his invective in full flow, and desired him to leave the room, whereupon, getting adroitly between her and the bell, he proceeded, with a readiness and elegance of diction that savoured almost of preparation, to tell her with a touching candour and honesty the opinion he had come to concerning herself. Much did he tell her that was scarcely true — but nevertheless fateful to hear — and much that was perfectly true — and therefore more hateful still. He spoke with smiling lips, which added venom to his utterance; and with a master hand he fanned the lady’s spirit — an inflammable one at all times — into a very blaze of passion.
“Mr. Wirgman, you shall very bitterly regret this insolence before you are a day older!” she promised him. “Mr. Pegram shall hear of it at once.”
Still smiling, Wirgman moved towards the door, leaving her a clear way to the bell should she wish to avail herself of it — as he hoped she might.
“He may hear of it, and welcome,” said he, with studied offensiveness; “but if he has the effrontery to address me now or at any time, I shall receive him with the most picturesque thrashing that was ever bestowed.”
She looked him over with quiet scorn. “It is like a brave man to tell a woman what he will do, is it not?” she inquired with withering sarcasm as she crossed to the bell.
“Madam, I do not tell you — I warn you. But send your preux chevalier to me by all means. You will save me the trouble of looking for him.”
“You shall not have long to wait,” she answered, and pressed the button.
Wirgman bowed and withdrew, well satisfied.
On the stairs be met the waiter hastening to answer her bell. “It will take her five minutes to tell Pegram her story,” he reckoned; “five minutes for Pegram to console her and regale her with the promises of all the fine things he will perform. So that in ten minutes I may expect that gentleman to ask for me at the Swan Hotel.”
He smiled quietly as he stepped out into the street.
“I may boast that I have cast my net with singular adroitness, and I am afraid you may find its toils exceedingly difficult to break through, my dear Pegram.”
He stood for a moment on the steps of his hotel — a tall, conspicuous figure in his light drab overcoat and soft hat — and he leisurely lighted a cigarette. At that moment the landlord came out.
“A fine night, Mr. Wirgman,” said he.
“A very fine night,” Wirgman agreed, adding idly: “Hardly a night to waste indoors. I think I’ll take a stroll as far as the Head. See you later.”
He moved away up the steep road that leads to Wimbush Head, with the conviction that he would very shortly be followed. Twice he paused on the way, and drew attention to himself by exchanging a remark upon the night, once with a couple of fishermen, and once with a policeman.
He had conjectured aright concerning Harry Pegram. Within a few minutes of his departure that gentleman was excitedly asking for him at the Swan, to receive from the landlord the information that he was gone toward Wimbush Head. After him, hotfoot and blind with fury, came Pegram now. But for all his haste he did not overtake him until he reached the edge of the cliff, where he saw him outlined against the sky.
“You blackguard!” was the greeting he had for Wirgman, as he rushed at him with stick upraised to strike.
The other caught his wrist as the blow descended, and, holding him for an instant in a crushing grip, he twisted the cane from his hand and flung it over the cliff. They heard it rattle on the shingle below. Then Wirgman spoke.
“Don’t be a fool, Pegram,” he said coldly, in his dominating way. “Suppose for a moment that you had struck me then as you intended? You might have killed me!”
“You would have been rightly served.”
“Quite so, my dear fellow, quite so; but you would have hanged for it. And it can hardly be worth that to you.”
Pegram cursed him and raved in an almost theatrical manner. But Wirgman’s stronger mind gradually quelled his spirit, and soothed his anger into a mere dull, expressionless resentment.
“Now go home, Pegram,” he said in the end; “and if, when you have slept on it, you still feel as you feel now, come to me in the morning. I have always found a deal of common sense blossoming in the morning sun. The night, I think, was made for poets, lovers, and other madmen whose ranting needs the cloak of darkness to disguise its sentimentality.”
Pegram still lingered a little while, but in the end, with a sulky threat to return to the matter on the morrow in cold blood, he turned away and was gone. Wirgman continued to stand where he was until the other had been assimilated in the night and the sound of his steps had died away. Then with a short laugh of satisfaction, he sat down and carefully thought out the situation as it stood.
By comparison with what he had achieved, his next step was simple, for it depended upon his own unaided efforts and nowise upon such fortuitous circumstances as had helped him hitherto.
Satisfied after some few minutes’ deliberation, he rose again, and, flinging down his hat — in which were the initials “R. W.” — he slipped quietly over the edge of the cliff, and cautiously undertook what even in broad daylight was a difficult descent. Carefully groping his way, he reached the little creek below, and stood at last upon the shingle which the receding tide had left moist. He saw something glimmering, and picked up Pegram’s silver-mounted walking-stick. He almost chuckled as he weighed it in his hand.
“Another link,” he muttered.
Very deliberately he drew out his penknife, and inflicted never so slight a cut upon one of the fingers of his left hand. He smeared the blood upon the stick, and threw it down where it would lie beyond the re
ach of the tide. That done, he climbed over the rocks that bounded the creek, and struck out briskly along the shore towards Alwyn Bay, a watering-place some five miles along the coast.
At a quarter to eleven he was in Alwyn Bay railway-station, having rid himself of his conspicuous light overcoat on the way, and wearing a soft, black hat, of a light texture that had rendered it easily portable in the pocket of his discarded garment. He presented at the left-luggage office a ticket for a bag which earlier in the day he had left there in the name of Hodgson, and which bore the initials “C. S. H.”
He caught the eleven o’clock train to Liverpool, secured a carriage to himself, and by means of a safety razor he rid himself of his rather luxurious black beard and moustachios. Such other characteristic changes did he effect that he would have had keen eyes indeed who could have recognised Roger Wirgman in the man who at half-past two in the morning entered the name of Cyril S. Hodgson in the register of the Adelphi Hotel at Liverpool.
Towards noon next day — it was Wednesday — he drove down to the Cunard offices, and booked his passage by the liner sailing that afternoon for New York. This done, he returned to lunch at his hotel well pleased with the general trend of events.
Firstly, his disappearance from the hotel at Port Wimbush would be noticed, and it would be remembered that he had left word that he was going to the Head. The landlord of the Swan would give evidence how Harry Pegram, in an unmistakable state of excitement, had asked for him ten minutes later, and upon being informed whither he was gone, had followed like a man with purpose set. The cliff would no doubt be visited, and his hat would be found. This would arouse the suspicions of the police, and the creek below would be inspected. There they would find Pegram’s stick smeared with blood and this would give their suspicions a definite goal. They would make inquiries, and discover the feud that existed between Pegram and himself. They would also hear of the stormy interview he had had with Miss Drummond that same evening. Thus his disappearance and the evidence of foul play, accompanied by the positive evidence that Pegram had been the last man known to have been in his company, and yet the evidence of motive on the part of Pegram, would draw an uncommonly tight net about his rival.
Miss Drummond — by virtue of what had passed, and knowing the spirit in which Pegram had set out — would be the first to believe in his guilt. So that even were he to escape hanging — which Wirgman doubted in view of the singularly heavy combination of circumstantial evidence — his life must become that of an outcast and a pariah, and Miss Drummond he could never marry.
In all this there was a certain sweet satisfaction. Yet Wirgman reflected with still greater satisfaction upon the fact that he had proven that pet theory of his to be correct. Under very exceptional circumstances, and finding himself heavily handicapped, he had accomplished the destruction of a fellow-creature in a manner that could not possibly implicate him.
In the morning and noon editions of the papers there was no report whatever of any tragedy at Wimbush. As he was going on board at four o’clock that afternoon, he bought a late edition of an evening paper, and with this he stepped briskly toward the gangway. Already he had one foot upon it when suddenly a cheery voice somewhere behind him hailed him with:
“Hallo, Wirgman!”
Utterly taken off his guard, he looked round. Then, suddenly recollecting himself and his changed identity, he sought to assume an air of naturalness, as though his turning as the name was called had been no more than a coincidence. But a burly individual in a serge suit confronted him, and laid a singularly significant and possessive hand upon his shoulder, murmuring into his ear:
“Roger Wirgman, I arrest you!”
He started back, and his thoughts worked with the rapidity of lightning. Had Pegram by any chance suspected his conspiracy, and forestalled the discovery of his disappearance?
“In God’s name, on what charge?” he blurted out.
“On the charge of murdering Henry Stanhope Pegram last night on Wimbush Head.”
A ghastly pallor spread upon his lean face.
“Are you mad?” he choked.
“You had best not make a scene,” murmured the detective, adding the formal reminder that anything he said would be taken as evidence against him.
Like a man in a dream, Wirgman allowed the detective and his companion to lead him away from the gathering crowd, and take him to the waiting-room, where they locked themselves up with him.
“Our train is due out in a quarter of an hour,” he heard one say to the other.
Then he remembered the paper in his grasp, and, thinking that there he might find the solution of this marvel, be opened it with trembling hands, and was confronted by the headlines:
SHOCKING MURDER AT WIMBUSH!
Flight of the Murderer.
Swiftly his eyes devoured the bald, newspaper narrative that told how Harry Pegram’s body had been discovered the night before on Wimbush Head, death being due to fracture of the skull. The dead man had been rifled of all money and valuables, and theft had at first been thought the motive of the crime. But the lady to whom Mr. Pegram was engaged had told the police a story — since corroborated — which gave rise to the theory that the theft was a blind rather than a motive. It was known that a deadly enmity existed between the deceased and Mr. Roger Wirgman, of Copmore Gardens, W. This latter gentleman had come down from town that day; and it was known that he and Pegram had been together on Wimbush Head that evening. A hat containing the initials “R. W.,” and which was identified as belonging to Wirgman, was discovered a few hundred yards from the spot where the body had been found, and, on the beach below, Pegram’s stick, smeared with blood which the murderer had no doubt wrenched from his hand and used against him. He read how the police — by means beyond his understanding — had succeeded in tracking him to the left-luggage office at Alwyn Bay, and how they were on the spoor at the time of going to press. That powerful imagination which he had taken such pride in showed him now, as in a flash, how each item of evidence he had manufactured so sedulously to serve against Pegram would weigh a hundredfold more heavily against himself under the existing circumstances. In addition, there was his flight — that most damning incrimination — under an assumed name and in altered personality, to say nothing of the threats he had uttered against Pegram, and the purpose which he had announced was taking him to Port Wimbush.
He realised that he was indeed hoist with his own petard, doomed irrevocably, and for a crime that was none of his committing.
But even in that hour of supreme defeat and bitter agony he contended that his theory was still right. Here was a fortuitous circumstance which he could not have foreseen. The whole of his elaborate scheme had crumbled and collapsed because it had occurred to some vulgar thief to hit Harry Pegram over the head that he might rob him.
THE WEDDING GIFT
Sir George Jeffreys, Lord Chief Justice of England, looked up from the papers before him, and fixed his melancholy eyes upon his visitor, the Lady Mary Ormington.
“You have done the State a great service, ma’am,” said he, his voice gentle, his utterance slow. “Of that there is no more doubt than that you’ll be setting a price on’t.”
And his red lips — startling red in so pale a face — were twisted never so faintly in a sneer.
He was arrayed in his scarlet, ermine-bordered robes, for he was fresh from the court-house of Dorchester, where, pursuing the instructions of his Royal master, and venting a savage humour, sprung, perhaps, from the awful disease that ravaged him, he had horribly dealt out the dread, unsparing justice that was to make his name a by-word of blood-lust.
Yet you had looked in vain for a trace of the man’s ferocious nature in that pale face, its oval outline sharpened by the heavy periwig that framed it. It was a countenance mild and comely; the eyes were large and liquid, and haunted by a look of suffering.
“My lord,” said the Lady Mary, wisely. “I have not come to bargain, but to do my duty by my King. Were
it otherwise, I would have begun by naming the price of my disclosures.”
“Instead of ending by it?” he questioned drily.
She flushed under the humourously scornful glance, and fidgeted an instant with her riding-switch.
“In no case can there be a question of price,” said she, “though there may be a question of rewarding a service, which your lordship has acknowledged to be great.”
Sire George’s smile broadened.
“I have no doubt that you will find His Majesty graciously generous. What is the reward you seek?”
Her increasing pallor was dissembled by the shadows of her wide, plumed hat; but the strained tones betrayed her anxiety.
“I seek a small thing — a small thing to His Majesty, though to me a great one — I seek the pardon of a misguided gentleman who has borne arms against His Majesty in the late rising — Stephen Vallancey is his name.
Having uttered the name, she watched him breathlessly.
“Stephen Vallancey!” he croaked, and then fell silent, frowning at the papers on the table.
Presently, he began to smile, and her fears grew, for the smile’s significance eluded her swimming senses.
“Stephen Vallancey,” he repeated. “Hum! His arrest is expected by tomorrow. We are informed that he is in hiding in the neighborhood of St. Mary Ottery; and a troop of dragoons set out to find him an hour ago. A very desperate and dangerous man.”
He looked up to find her leaning for support against the table; her face was grey, her eyes wide with fear. He was moved to a pity that was unusual in him, and to a liking for the foolish young rebel whose life she begged.
It was her good fortune to have come to him in such an hour as this. The pain by which all day he had been tormented had receded half-an-hour ago, when the Court adjourned, and the reaction brought now a mood of kindliness. Besides, his petitioner was a woman of handsome shape and face, and to the appeal of beauty the libertine Chief Justice was oddly, weakly susceptible.
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