During this monologue the pair had strolled far afield with their cigars, and Langholm was beginning to puff his furiously. At first he had merely marvelled at the other’s coolness; now every feeling in his breast was outraged by the callousness, the flippancy, the cynicism of his companion. There came a moment when Langholm could endure the combination no longer. Steel seemed disposed to discuss every aspect of the subject except that of the investigations upon which his very life might depend. Langholm glanced at him in horror as they walked. The broad brim of his Panama hat threw his face in shadow to the neck; but to Langholm’s heated imagination, it was the shadow of the black cap and of the rope itself that he saw out of the corners of his eyes. It was the shadow that had lit upon the wife the year before, happily to lift forever; now it was settling upon the husband; and it rested with Langholm — if it did rest with him — and how could he be sure? His mind was off at a tangent. He was not listening to Steel; without ceremony he interrupted at last.
“I thought you came out to listen to me?”
“My dear fellow,” cried Steel, “and so, to be sure, I did! Why on earth did you let me rattle on? Let me see — the point was — ah, yes! Of course, my dear Langholm, you haven’t really anything of any account to tell? I considered you a Quixote when you undertook your quest; but I shall begin to suspect a dash of Munchausen if you tell me you have found out anything in the inside of a week!”
“Nevertheless,” said Langholm, grimly, “I have.”
“Anything worth finding out?”
“I think so.”
“You don’t mean to tell me you have struck a clew?”
“I believe I can lay hands upon the criminal,” said Langholm, as quietly as he could. But he was the more nervous man of the two.
The other simply stood still and stared his incredulity. The stare melted into a smile. “My dear fellow!” he murmured, in a mild blend of horror and reproof, as though it were the fourth dimension that Langholm claimed to have discovered. It cost the discoverer no small effort not to cry out that he could lay hands on him then and there. The unspoken words were gulped down, and a simple repetition substituted at the last.
“I could swear to him myself,” added Langholm. “It remains to be seen whether there is evidence enough to convict.”
“Have you communicated with the police?”
“Not yet.”
“They seem to have some absurd bee in their helmet down here, you know.”
“They don’t get it from me.”
It was impossible any longer to doubt the import of Langholm’s earnest and rather agitated manner. He was doing his best to suppress his agitation, but that strengthened the impression that he had indeed discovered something which he himself honestly believed to be the truth. There was an immediate alteration in the tone and bearing of his host.
“My dear fellow,” he said, “forgive my levity. If you have really found out anything, it is a miracle; but miracles do happen now and then. Here’s the pond, and there’s the boathouse behind those rhododendrons. Suppose you tell me the rest in the boat? We needn’t keep looking over our shoulders in the middle of the pond!”
For an instant Langholm dreamt of the readiest and the vilest resource; in another he remembered, not only that he could swim, but the insidious sympathy for this man which a darker scoundrel had sown in his heart. It had grown there like Jonah’s gourd; only his flippancy affected it; and Steel was far from flippant now. Langholm signed to him to lead the way, and in a very few minutes they were scaring the wildfowl in mid-water, Steel sculling from the after thwart, while Langholm faced him from the crimson cushions.
“I thought,” said the latter, “that I would like to tell you what sort of evidence I could get against him before — before going any further. I — I thought it would be fair.”
Steel raised his bushy eyebrows the fraction of an inch. “It would be fairest to yourself, I agree. Two heads are better than one, and — well, I’m open to conviction still, of course.”
But even Langholm was not conscious of the sinister play upon words; he had taken out his pocket-book, and was nervously turning to the leaves that he had filled during his most sleepless night in town.
“Got it all down?” said Steel.
“Yes,” replied Langholm, without raising his eyes; “at least I did make some notes of a possible — if not a really damning — case against the man I mean.”
“And what may the first point be?” inquired Steel, who was gradually drifting back into the tone which Langholm had resented on the shore; he took no notice of it now.
“The first point,” said Langholm, slowly, “is that he was in Chelsea, or at least within a mile of the scene of the murder, on the night that it took place.”
“So were a good many people,” remarked Steel, smiling as he dipped the sculls in and out, and let his supple wrists fall for the feather, as though he were really rowing.
“But he left his — he was out at the time!” declared Langholm, making his amended statement with all the meaning it had for himself.
“Well, you can’t hang him for that.”
“He will have to prove where he was, then.”
“I am afraid it will be for you to prove a little more first.”
Langholm sat very dogged with his notes. There had been a pause on Steel’s part; there was a thin new note in his voice. Langholm was too grimly engrossed to take immediate heed of either detail, or to watch the swift changes in the face which was watching him. And there he lost most of all.
“The next point is that he undoubtedly knew Minchin in Australia—”
“Aha!”
“That he was and is a rich man, whereas Minchin was then on the verge of bankruptcy, and that Minchin only found out that he was in England thirty-six hours before his own death, when he wrote to his old friend for funds.”
“And you have really established all that!”
Steel had abandoned all pretence of rowing; his tone was one of admiration, in both senses of the word, and his dark eyes seemed to penetrate to the back of Langholm’s brain.
“I can establish it,” was the reply.
“Well! I think you have done wonders; but you will have to do something more before they will listen to you at Scotland Yard. What about a motive?”
“I was coming to that; it is the last point with which I shall trouble you for the present.” Langholm took a final glance at his notes, then shut the pocket-book and put it away. “The motive,” he continued, meeting Steel’s eyes at last, with a new boldness in his own— “the motive is self-defence! There can be no doubt about it; there cannot be the slightest doubt that Minchin intended blackmailing this man, at least to the extent of his own indebtedness in the City of London.”
“Blackmailing him?”
There was a further change of voice and manner; and this time nothing was lost upon Charles Langholm.
“There cannot be the slightest doubt,” he reiterated, “that Minchin was in possession of a secret concerning the man in my mind, which secret he was determined to use for his own ends.”
Steel sat motionless, his eyes upon the bottom of the boat. It was absolutely impossible to read the lowered face; even when at length he raised it, and looked Langholm in the eyes once more, the natural inscrutability of the man was only more complete than ever.
“So that is your case!” said he.
And even his tone might have been inspired either by awe or by contempt, so truly rang the note between the two.
“I should be sorry to have to meet it,” observed Langholm, “if I were he.”
“I should find out a little more,” was the retort, “if I were you!”
“And then?”
“Oh, then I should do my duty like a man — and take all the emoluments I could.”
The sneer was intolerable. Langholm turned the color of brick.
“I shall!” said he through his mustache. “I have consulted you; there will be no need to do
so again. I shall make a point of taking you at your word. And now do you mind putting me ashore?”
A few raindrops were falling when they reached the landing-stage; they hurried to the house, to find that Langholm’s bicycle had been removed from the place where he had left it by the front entrance.
“Don’t let anybody trouble,” he said, ungraciously enough, for he was still smarting from the other’s sneer. “I can soon find it for myself.”
Steel stood on the steps, his midnight eyes upon Langholm, the glint of a smile in those eyes, but not the vestige of one upon his lips.
“Oh, very well,” said he. “You know the side-door near the billiard-room? They have probably put it in the first room on the left; that is where we keep ours — for we have gone in for them at last. Good-by, Langholm; remember my advice.”
And, that no ceremony should be lost between them, the host turned on his heel and disappeared through his own front door, leaving Langholm very angry in the rain.
But anger was the last emotion for such an hour; the judge might as well feel exasperated with the prisoner at the bar, the common hangman with the felon on the drop. Langholm only wished that, on even one moment’s reflection, he could rest content in so primitive and so single a state of mind. He knew well that he could not, and that every subtle sort of contest lay before him, his own soul the arena. In the meantime let him find his bicycle and get away from this dear and accursed spot; for dear it had been to him, all that too memorable summer; but now of a surety the curse of Cain brooded over its cold, white walls and deep-set windows like sunken eyes in a dead face.
Langholm found the room to which he had been directed; in fact, he knew it of old. And there were the two new Beeston Humbers; but their lustrous plating and immaculate enamel did not shame his own old disreputable roadster, for the missing machine certainly was not there. Langholm was turning away when the glazed gun-rack caught his eye. Yes, this was the room in which the guns were kept. He had often seen them there. They had never interested him before. Langholm was no shot. Yet now he peered through the glass — gasped — and opened one of the sliding panels with trembling hand.
There on a nail hung an old revolver, out of place, rusty, most conspicuous; and at a glance as like the relic in the Black Museum as one pea to another. But Langholm took it down to make sure. And the maker’s name upon the barrel was the name that he had noted down at the Black Museum; the point gained, the last of the cardinal points postulated by the official who had shown him round.
The fortuitous discoverer of them all was leaving like a thief — more and more did Langholm feel himself the criminal — when the inner door opened and Steel himself stood beaming sardonically upon him.
“Sorry, Langholm, but I find I misled you about the bicycle. They had taken it to the stables. I have told them to bring it round to the front.”
“Thank you.”
“Sure you won’t wait till the rain is over?”
“No, thank you.”
“Well, won’t you come through this way?”
“No, thank you.”
“Oh, all right! Good-by, Langholm; remember my advice.”
It was an inglorious exit that Langholm made; but he was thinking to himself, was there ever so inglorious a triumph? He knew not what he had said; there was only one thing that he did know. But was the law itself capable of coping with such a man?
CHAPTER XXVII
THE WHOLE TRUTH
“Have the ladies gone?”
Langholm had ridden a long way round, through the rain, in order to avoid them; nor was there any sign of the phaeton in the lane; yet these were his first whispered words across the wicket, and he would not venture to set foot upon the noisy wet gravel without Mrs. Brunton’s assurance that the ladies had been gone some time.
“And they’ve left him a different man,” she added. “But what have you been doing to get wet like that? Dear, dear, dear! I do call it foolish of yer! Well, sir, get out o’ them nasty wet things, or I shall have you to nurse an’ all!”
The kind, blunt soul bustled to bring him a large can of scalding water, and Langholm bathed and changed before going near the invalid. He also felt another man. The thorough wetting had cooled his spirit and calmed his nerves. His head still ached for sleep, but now it was clear enough. If only his duty were half as plain as the mystery that was one no more! Yet it was something to have solved the prime problem; nay, everything, since it freed his mind for concentration upon his own immediate course. But Langholm reckoned without his stricken guest next door; and went up presently, intending to stay five or ten minutes at the most.
Severino lay smiling, like a happy and excited child. Langholm was sorry to detect the excitement, but determined to cut his own visit shorter than ever. It was more pleasing to him to note how neat and comfortable the room was now, for that was his own handiwork, and the ladies had been there to see it. The good Bruntons had moved most of their things into the room to which they had themselves migrated. In their stead were other things which Langholm had unearthed from the lumber in his upper story, dusted, and carried down and up with his own hands. Thus at the bedside stood a real Chippendale table, with a real Delft vase upon it, filled with such roses as had survived the rain. A drop of water had been spilt upon the table from the vase, and there was something almost fussy in the way that Langholm removed it with his handkerchief.
“Oh,” said Severino, “she quite fell in love with the table you found for me, and Mrs. Woodgate wanted the vase. They were wondering if Mrs. Brunton would accept a price.”
“They don’t belong to Mrs. Brunton,” said Langholm, shortly.
“No? Mrs. Woodgate said she had never noticed them in your room. Where did you pick them up?”
Langholm looked at the things, lamps of remembrance alight beneath his lowered eyelids. “The table came from a little shop on Bushey Heath, in Hertfordshire, you know. We — I was spending the day there once ... you had to stoop to get in at the door, I remember. The vase is only from Great Portland Street.” The prices were upon his lips; both had been bargains, a passing happiness and pride.
“I must remember to tell them when they come to-morrow,” said Severino. “They are the sort of thing a woman likes.”
“They are,” agreed Langholm, his lowered eyes still lingering on the table and the vase “the sort of thing a woman likes ... So these women are coming again to-morrow, are they?”
The question was quite brisk, when it came.
“Yes, they promised.”
“Both of them, eh?”
“Yes, I hope so!” The sick man broke into eager explanations. “I only want to see her, Langholm! That’s all I want. I don’t want her to myself. What is the good? To see her and be with her is all I want — ever. It has made me so happy. It is really better than if she came alone. You see, as it is, I can’t say anything — that matters. Do you see?”
“Perfectly,” said Langholm, gently.
The lad lay gazing up at him with great eyes. Langholm fancied their expression was one of incredulity. Twilight was falling early with the rain; the casement was small, and further contracted by an overgrowth of creeper; those two great eyes seemed to shine the brighter through the dusk. Langholm could not make his visit a very short one, after all. He felt it would be cruel.
“What did you talk about, then?” he asked.
A small smile came with the answer, “You!”
“Me! What on earth had you to say about me?”
“I heard all you had been doing.”
“Oh, that.”
“You know you didn’t tell me, that evening in town.”
“No, I was only beginning, then.”
It seemed some months ago — more months since that very afternoon.
“Have you found out anything?”
Langholm hesitated.
“Yes.”
Why should he lie?
“Do you mean to say that you have any suspicion who it is?”
Severino was on his elbow.
“More than a suspicion. I am certain. There can be no doubt about it. A pure fluke gave me the clew, but every mortal thing fits it.”
Severino dropped back upon his pillow. Langholm seemed glad to talk to him, to loosen his tongue, to unburden his heart ever so little. And, indeed, he was glad.
“And what are you going to do about it?”
“That’s my difficulty. She must be cleared before the world. That is the first duty — if it could be done without — making bad almost worse!”
“Bad — worse? How could it, Langholm?”
No answer.
“Who do you say it is?”
No answer again. Langholm had not bargained to say anything to anybody just yet.
Severino raised himself once more upon an elbow.
“I must know!” he said.
Langholm rose, laughing.
“I’ll tell you who I thought it was at first,” said he, heartily. “I don’t mind telling you that, because it was so absurd; and I think you’ll be the first to laugh at it. I was idiot enough to think it might be you, my poor, dear chap!”
“And you don’t think so still?” asked Severino, harshly. He had not been the first to laugh.
“Of course I don’t, my dear fellow.”
“I wish you would sit down again. That’s better. So you know it is some one else?”
“So far as one can know anything.”
“And you are going to try to bring it home to this man?”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 260