Afternoon Tea Mysteries Vol Three

by Anthology

“Throwing it out.”

  “Oh!”

  Sam and I stopped helping ourselves to wine and left the bottle to him.

  “Do you know what time this was?” I asked.

  “No; how should I? It was before ten, for at ten he was dead.”

  “It could not have been poison he threw out or even the remains of it,” I remarked, “for that would imply suicide; and the verdict was one of murder.”

  Mr. Rosenthal was just far enough gone to accept this assertion.

  “That’s so. I wonder I never thought of that before. Then it must have been wine. Now, I wouldn’t have thought so badly of Mr. Gillespie as that. I always considered him a sensible man, and no sensible man pours wine out of a window,” he sapiently remarked, raising his glass.

  It was empty, and he set it down again; then he took up the bottle. That was empty, too. Grumbling some unintelligible words, he glanced at the cabinet.

  We failed to understand him.

  “There are but two excuses for a man who deliberately wastes wine,” he proceeded, in tipsy argument with himself. “Either he has had enough—hard to think that of Mr. Gillespie at so early an hour in the evening—or else the liquor’s bad. Now, only a fool would accuse a man like Mr. Gillespie of having bad liquor in his house, unless—unless—some thing got into it—Oh!” he suddenly exclaimed, with the complacency of one who has unexpectedly made a remarkable discovery, “there was something in it, something which gave it a bad taste. Prussic acid has a bad taste, hasn’t it?—and not liking the taste he flung the wine away. No man would go on drinking wine with prussic acid in it,” he mumbled on. “Now, which of those fellows was it who poured him out that wine?”

  We sat silent; both bound that he should supply his own answer.

  “I ought to know; I’ve read about it enough. It was the slick one; the fellow who goes by me as if I were dirt—Oh, I know; it’s Leighton! Leighton!” And he stumbled to his feet with a sickening leer.

  “I’m going down to the police station,” he cried. “I’m going to inform the authorities—”

  “Not to-night,” I protested, rising and speaking somewhat forcibly in his ear. “If you go there to night they will shut you up till morning—jail you!”

  He laughed boisterously. “That would be a joke. None of that for me. I’ll see them dashed first.” And he looked at us with a sickly smile, the remembrance of which will make me hate him forever. Suddenly he began to search for his hat. “I think I’ll go home,” he observed, with an air of extreme condescension. “Leighton Gillespie, eh? Well, I’m glad the question is settled. Here’s to his health! and yours—and yours—”

  He was gone.

  We were both on our feet ready to assist him in his departure. But he got away in good shape, and when the lower door slammed we congratulated each other with a look. Then Sam seized the bottle and I the glass from which this fellow had drunk, and both fell crashing into the fireplace. Then Sam spoke:

  “I fear Leighton Gillespie will sleep his last sound sleep to-night.”

  “You must consider the drivel we have just listened to as of some importance, then,” I declared.

  “Taken with what Yox told us, I certainly do,” was Sam’s emphatic reply.

  The sigh which escaped me was involuntary. If this was Sam’s opinion, I must prepare myself for an interview with Hope. Alas! it was likely to bring me sorrow in proportion to the joy it brought her.

  XXIII. In My Office

  IT was with strange reluctance I opened the paper next morning. Though I had no reason for apprehending that my adventure of the day be fore had been shared by anyone likely to give information in regard to it, the consciousness of holding an important secret is so akin to the consciousness of guilt, I could not help dreading some reference to the same in the sheet I now unfolded. I wished to be the first to tell Miss Meredith of the new direction in which suspicion was pointing, and experienced great relief when, upon consulting the columns usually devoted to the all-engrossing topic of the Gillespie poisoning case, I came upon a direct intimation of the necessity, now universally felt, of holding Alfred accountable for his father’s death, as the only one of the three who had shown himself unable to explain away the circumstantial evidence raised against him.

  This expression of opinion on the part of the press had been anticipated too long by Miss Meredith for it to prove a shock to her. I therefore did not commit myself to an early interview, but went at once to my office, where important business awaited me.

  I was in the midst of a law paper, when I was warned by a certain nervous perturbation fast be coming too common with me, that someone had been admitted to my inner office and now stood before me. Looking up, I saw her.

  She wore a thick veil, and was clad in a long cloak which completely enveloped her. But there was no mistaking the outlines of the figure which had dwelt in my mind and heart ever since the fateful night of our first meeting, or the half-frightened, half-eager attitude with which she awaited my invitation to enter. Agitated by her presence, which was totally unexpected in that place, I rose, and, with all the apparent calmness the situation demanded, I welcomed her in and shut the door behind her.

  When I turned back it was to meet her face to face. She had taken off her veil and loosened her cloak at the neck; and as the latter fell apart I saw that the left hand clutched a newspaper. I no longer doubted the purpose of her visit. She had seen the article I have just quoted, and was more moved by it than I had expected.

  “You must pardon this intrusion,” she began, ignoring the chair I had set for her. “I have seen—learned something which grieves—alarms me. You are my lawyer; more than that, my friend—I have no other—so I have come—” Here she sank into a chair, first drooping her head, then looking up piteously.

  I tried to give her the support she asked for. Concealing the effect of her emotion upon me, I told her that she could find no truer friend or one who comprehended her more intuitively; then with a gesture towards the paper, I remarked:

  “You are frightened at the impatience of the public. You need not be, Miss Meredith; there are always certain hot-headed people who advocate rash methods and demand any bone to gnaw rather than not gnaw at all. The police are more circumspect; they are not going to arrest any one of your cousins without evidence strong enough to warrant such extreme measures. Do not worry about Alfred Gillespie; tomorrow it will not be his name, but—”

  With a leap she was on her feet.

  “Whose?” she cried, meeting my astonished gaze with such an agony of appeal in her great tear-dry eyes, that I drew back appalled.

  It was not Alfred, then, she loved. Was it the handsome George, after all, or could it be—no, it could not be that all this youth, all this beauty, nay, this embodiment of truest passion and self-forgetting devotion, had fixed itself upon the unhappy man whom I had just decided to be unworthy of any woman’s regard.

  Aghast at the prospect, I plunged on wildly, desperately, but with a certain restraint merciful to her, if no relief to me.

  “George, too, seems innocent. Leighton only—”

  Yes, it was he. I saw it as the name passed my lips, saw it even before she gave utterance to the low cry with which she fell at my feet in an attitude of entreaty.

  “Oh!” she murmured, “don’t say it! I cannot bear it yet. No schooling has made me ready. It is unheard of—impossible! He is so good, so kind, so full of lofty thoughts and generous impulses. I would sooner suspect myself, and yet—oh, Mr. Outhwaite, pity me! Every support is gone; every thing in which I trusted or held to. If he is the base, the despicable wretch they say, where shall I seek for goodness, trustworthiness, and truth?”

  I had no heart to answer. So it was upon the plainest, least accomplished, and, to all appearance, least responsive as well as least responsible, of Mr. Gillespie’s three sons she had fixed her affections and lavished the warm emotions of her passionate young life. Why had I not guessed it? Why had I let George’s handsome figure a
nd Alfred’s lazy graces blind me to the fact that woman chooses through her imagination; and that if out of a half-dozen suitors she encounters one she does not thoroughly understand, he is sure to be the one to strike her untutored fancy. Alas! for her when, as in this case, this lack of mutual understanding is founded on the impossibility of a pure mind comprehending the hidden life of one who puts no restriction upon the worst side of his nature.

  These thoughts were instantaneous, but they made a dividing line in my life. Henceforth this woman, in all her alluring beauty, was in a way sacred to me, like a child we find astray. Raising her from the appealing posture into which she had sunk, I assured her with as much gentleness as my own inner rebellion would allow:

  “You have not trusted him yourself, or you would let no newspaper report drive you here for solace.”

  She cringed; the blow had told. But she struggled on, with a feverish desire to convince herself, if not me, of the worth of him she loved so passionately.

  “I know—it was my weakness—or his misfortune. He had given me no cause—no real cause—his eccentricities—my uncle’s impatience with them—my own difficulty in understanding them—little things, Mr. Outhwaite, nothing deep, nothing convincing—I can not explain—shadows—memories so slight they vanish while I seek them—I would have given worlds not to have been shaken in my faith, not to have included him for a minute in the accusation of that phrase, ‘one of my sons’; but I am over-conscientious, and because the one I trusted—lived by, had not been exonerated by his father, I did not dare to separate him from the rest, in the doubts his father’s accusation had raised. It would have been unjust to them, to the two who cared most for me—the two—” Here her voice trailed off into silence, only to rise in the sudden demand: “What has occasioned this change in public opinion? What have the police discovered, what have you discovered, that he should now be singled out he against whom nothing was found at the inquest—who has a child—”

  “Yet who allows himself to lead a double life.”

  I said this with a purpose. I knew what its effect must be upon so pure a soul, and I was not surprised at the emotion she displayed. Yet there was some thing in her manner as she pressed her two hands together which suggested the presence of a different feeling from the one I had expected to rouse in launching this poisoned arrow; and, hesitating with new doubt, I went falteringly on:

  “Some men show a very different face in their homes and before their friends than in haunts where your pure imagination cannot follow them. The life lived under your eye is not the one really led by the melancholy being you have watched with such sym pathetic interest.”

  She did not seem to follow me.

  “What do you mean?” Her indignation was so strong that she leaped to her feet and eyed me with a manifest sense of outrage. “You speak as if you meant something I should not hear. He! Claire’s father—”

  It was a difficult task. Surely my lines had fallen in untoward places. But there was no doubt about my duty. If her fresh, unspoiled heart had made its home in a nest of serpents, it was well she should know her mistake before the shame of the discovery should overwhelm her.

  Turning aside, so that I should not seem to spy upon her agitation, I answered her as such questions should be answered, with the truth.

  “Miss Meredith,” said I, “when I undertook to sift this matter, and if possible bring to light some fact capable of settling the doubt that is wearing away your life, I hoped to relieve your heart and restore your faith in the one cousin most congenial to you. That I have failed in this and find myself called upon to inflict suffering rather than to bring peace to your agitated heart is a source of regret to myself which you can never measure. But it cannot be helped. I dare not keep back the truth. Leighton Gillespie is unworthy your regard, Miss Meredith, not only because he lies under suspicion of having committed the worst sin in the calendar, but because he has deceived you as to the state of his own affections. He—”

  “Wait!” Her voice was peremptory; her manner noble. “I wish to say right here, Mr. Outhwaite, that Leighton Gillespie has never deceived me in this regard. I have cared for him because—because I could not help it. But he has never led me into doing so by any show of peculiar interest in myself. George has courted me and Alfred nearly has, but not Leighton; yet to him my whole heart went out, and if it is a shame to own it I must endure that shame rather than injure his cause by leaving you under the influence of a prejudice which has no foundation in fact.”

  Before the generosity of this self-betrayal I bowed my head. Her beauty, warm and glowing as it was at this moment of self-abandonment, did not impress me so much as the mingled candour and pride with which she exonerated this man from the one fault of which she knew him to be innocent. It gave me a new respect for her and a shade more of forbearance for him, so that my voice softened as I replied:

  “Well, well, we will not charge him with deliberate falsehood towards you, only with the madness which leads a man to sacrifice honour and reputation to the fancied charms of an irresponsible woman. He is under a spell, Miss Meredith, which I will not attempt to name. The object of it I have myself seen, and it was from her hand (possibly without her under standing the purpose for which he wanted it, as she has no appearance of being a really wicked woman) that he obtained the poison which did such deadly work in your uncle’s house.”

  The worst was said; and the silence that followed was one never to be forgotten by her or by me. When it was broken, it was by Hope, and in words which came in such starts and with such pauses, I could only guess their meaning through my own identification with her shame and grief.

  “Calumny!—it cannot be!—so good—so thoughtful in his bringing up of Claire—that day he pulled her aside lest she should stumble against the little boy with the broken arm. It is a dream! a horrible dream! He depraved? he a buyer of poison?—no, no, no, not he, but the evil spirit that sometimes possesses him. Leighton Gillespie in his true hours is a man to confide in, to regard with honour, to—to—to—”

  I no longer made an effort at listening. She was not addressing me, but her own soul, with which for the moment she stood apart in the great loneliness which an overwhelming catastrophe creates. She did not even remember my presence, and I did not dare recall it to her. I simply let her lose herself in her own grief, while I fought my own battle, and, as I hope, won my own victory. But this could not last; she suddenly awoke to the nearness of listening ears, and, flushing deeply, ceased the broken flow of words which had so worn upon my heart, and, regaining some of her lost composure, forcibly declared:

  “You are an honest man, Mr. Outhwaite, and, I am told, a reliable lawyer. You have too much feeling and judgment to malign a man already labouring under the accusation which unites this whole family in one cloud of suspicion. Tell me, then, do you positively know Leighton to have done what you say?”

  “Alas!” was my short but suggestive reply.

  Instantly she ceased to struggle, and with a calmness hardly to be expected from her after such a display of feeling, she surveyed me earnestly for a moment, then said:

  “Tell me the whole story. I have a reason for hearing it, a reason which you would approve. Let me hear what you learned, what you saw. It is not to be found in the papers. I have only found there a general allusion to him calculated to prepare the mind for some great disclosure tomorrow—” And her hand tightened upon the sheet which I now discovered to be the one morning journal I had failed to see. You will pay no attention to my feelings—I have none—we are sitting in court—let me hear.”

  Respecting her emotion, respecting the attitude in which she had placed me, I did as she requested. With all the succinctness possible, I told her how I had been led to go to Mother Merry’s and what I had discovered there. Then I related what we had learned from Rosenthal. The narrative was long, and gave me ample opportunity for studying its effect upon her.

  But she made no betrayal of her feelings; perhaps, as she had sa
id, she had none at this moment. With her hand clenched on her knee, she sat listening so intently that all her other faculties seemed to have been suspended for this purpose; only, as I approached the end, I noticed that the grey shadow which had hung over her from the first had deepened to a pall beneath which the last vestige of her abounding youth had vanished.

  My own heart grew heavy as the gladness left hers, and I was nearly as desolate as she when I made this final remark:

  “That is all, Miss Meredith. I as truly believe that Leighton Gillespie bought the bottle of poison from the girl he called Mille-fleurs as if I had seen him laying the money down before her. But Rosenthal’s admissions you must take at your own valuation. He says he saw your uncle, with backward looks and signs of secret fear and disturbance, pour out something from a glass on to the grass-plot underneath his open window. Was it the wine which had been given him by Leighton, and did he do this be cause of the drug he had detected in it?—a drug, alas! so fatal, it was not necessary for him to drink the full glass in order to succumb to it? That is a question you must answer in your mind from the knowledge you have of your uncle and his family.”

  There was a hope held out in this last phrase which I expected to see her embrace. But she did not; on the contrary, her depression remained unchanged and she said:

  “I knew my uncle well. He was a just man, and, in times of great danger, a cool one. He would never have written for my eyes those four words—‘one of my sons’—unless some new fact had added certainty to his former conviction. The drug was in the wine handed him by Leighton; we must accept that fact whatever it may cost us.”

  Her calmness amazed me. For the last few minutes she seemed upborne by some secret thought I could neither fathom nor understand.

  But suddenly her old horror returned with the recurrence of some old memory. “Then it was his hand that stole towards my uncle’s glass in the dark!” she cried; “that murderous, creeping hand, the vision of which has haunted me night and day since I heard of it. Oh, horrible! horrible! What a curse to fall upon a man! It is the work of the arch-fiend. Poor Leighton! poor Leighton!” she cried in her agony.