Trent's Last Case Part 7

'Then,' said Trent, who had followed this with earnest attention, 'we are forced back on two other possibilities, which I had not thought worth much consideration until this moment. Accepting what you say, he might still conceivably have killed in self-defence; or he might have done so by accident.'

The lady nodded. 'Of course I thought of those two explanations when I read your ma.n.u.script.'

'And I suppose you felt, as I did myself, that in either of those cases the natural thing, and obviously the safest thing, for him to do was to make a public statement of the truth, instead of setting up a series of deceptions which would certainly stamp him as guilty in the eyes of the law, if anything went wrong with them.'

'Yes,' she said wearily, 'I thought over all that until my head ached. And I thought somebody else might have done it, and that he was somehow screening the guilty person. But that seemed wild. I could see no light in the mystery, and after a while I simply let it alone. All I was clear about was that Mr Marlowe was not a murderer, and that if I told what you had found out, the judge and jury would probably think he was. I promised myself that I would speak to you about it if we should meet again; and now I've kept my promise.'

Trent, his chin resting on his hand, was staring at the carpet. The excitement of the hunt for the truth was steadily rising in him. He had not in his own mind accepted Mrs Manderson's account of Marlowe's character as unquestionable. But she had spoken forcibly; he could by no means set it aside, and his theory was much shaken.

'There is only one thing for it,' he said, looking up. 'I must see Marlowe. It worries me too much to have the thing left like this. I will get at the truth. Can you tell me,' he broke off, 'how he behaved after the day I left White Gables?'

'I never saw him after that,' said Mrs Manderson simply. 'For some days after you went away I was ill, and didn't go out of my room. When I got down he had left and was in London, settling things with the lawyers. He did not come down to the funeral. Immediately after that I went abroad. After some weeks a letter from him reached me, saying he had concluded his business and given the solicitors all the a.s.sistance in his power. He thanked me very nicely for what he called all my kindness, and said goodbye. There was nothing in it about his plans for the future, and I thought it particularly strange that he said not a word about my husband's death. I didn't answer. Knowing what I knew, I couldn't. In those days I shuddered whenever I thought of that masquerade in the night. I never wanted to see or hear of him again.'

'Then you don't know what has become of him?'

'No, but I dare say Uncle Burton-Mr Cupples, you know-could tell you. Some time ago he told me that he had met Mr Marlowe in London, and had some talk with him. I changed the conversation.' She paused and smiled with a trace of mischief. 'I rather wonder what you supposed had happened to Mr Marlowe after you withdrew from the scene of the drama that you had put together so much to your satisfaction.'

Trent flushed. 'Do you really want to know?' he said.

'I ask you,' she retorted quietly.

'You ask me to humiliate myself again, Mrs Manderson. Very well. I will tell you what I thought I should most likely find when I returned to London after my travels: that you had married Marlowe to live abroad.'

She heard him with unmoved composure. 'We certainly couldn't have lived very comfortably in England on his money and mine,' she observed thoughtfully. 'He had practically nothing then.'

He stared at her-'gaped', she told him some time afterwards. At the moment she laughed with a little embarra.s.sment.

'Dear me, Mr Trent! Have I said anything dreadful? You surely must know.... I thought everybody understood by now.... I'm sure I've had to explain it often enough... if I marry again I lose everything that my husband left me.'

The effect of this speech upon Trent was curious. For an instant his face was flooded with the emotion of surprise. As this pa.s.sed away he gradually drew himself together, as he sat, into a tense att.i.tude. He looked, she thought as she saw his knuckles grow white on the arms of the chair, like a man prepared for pain under the hand of the surgeon. But all he said, in a voice lower than his usual tone, was, I had no idea of it.'

'It is so,' she said calmly, trifling with a ring on her finger. 'Really, Mr Trent, it is not such a very unusual thing. I think I am glad of it. For one thing, it has secured me-at least since it became generally known-from a good many attentions of a kind that a woman in my position has to put up with as a rule.'

'No doubt,' he said gravely. 'And... the other kind?'

She looked at him questioningly. 'Ah!' she laughed. 'The other kind trouble me even less. I have not yet met a man silly enough to want to marry a widow with a selfish disposition, and luxurious habits and tastes, and nothing but the little my father left me.'

She shook her head, and something in the gesture shattered the last remnants of Trent's self-possession.

'Haven't you, by Heaven!' he exclaimed, rising with a violent movement and advancing a step towards her. 'Then I am going to show you that human pa.s.sion is not always stifled by the smell of money. I am going to end the business-my business. I am going to tell you what I dare say scores of better men have wanted to tell you, but couldn't summon up what I have summoned up-the infernal cheek to do it. They were afraid of making fools of themselves. I am not. You have accustomed me to the feeling this afternoon.' He laughed aloud in his rush of words, and spread out his hands. 'Look at me! It is the sight of the century! It is one who says he loves you, and would ask you to give up very great wealth to stand at his side.'

She was hiding her face in her hands. He heard her say brokenly, 'Please... don't speak in that way.'

He answered: 'It will make a great difference to me if you will allow me to say all I have to say before I leave you. Perhaps it is in bad taste, but I will risk that; I want to relieve my soul; it needs open confession. This is the truth. You have troubled me ever since the first time I saw you-and you did not know it-as you sat under the edge of the cliff at Marlstone, and held out your arms to the sea. It was only your beauty that filled my mind then. As I pa.s.sed by you it seemed as if all the life in the place were crying out a song about you in the wind and the suns.h.i.+ne. And the song stayed in my ears; but even your beauty would be no more than an empty memory to me by now if that had been all. It was when I led you from the hotel there to your house, with your hand on my arm, that-what was it that happened? I only knew that your stronger magic had struck home, and that I never should forget that day, whatever the love of my life should be. Till that day I had admired as I should admire the loveliness of a still lake; but that day I felt the spell of the divinity of the lake. And next morning the waters were troubled, and she rose-the morning when I came to you with my questions, tired out with doubts that were as bitter as pain, and when I saw you without your pale, sweet mask of composure-when I saw you moved and glowing, with your eyes and your hands alive, and when you made me understand that for such a creature as you there had been emptiness and the mere waste of yourself for so long. Madness rose in me then, and my spirit was clamouring to say what I say at last now: that life would never seem a full thing again because you could not love me, that I was taken for ever in the nets of your black hair and by the incantation of your voice-'

'Oh, stop!' she cried, suddenly throwing back her head, her face flaming and her hands clutching the cus.h.i.+ons beside her. She spoke fast and disjointedly, her breath coming quick. 'You shall not talk me into forgetting common sense. What does all this mean? Oh, I do not recognize you at all-you seem another man. We are not children; have you forgotten that? You speak like a boy in love for the first time. It is foolish, unreal-I know that if you do not. I will not hear it. What has happened to you?' She was half sobbing. 'How can these sentimentalities come from a man like you? Where is your self-restraint?'

'Gone!' exclaimed Trent, with an abrupt laugh. 'It has got right away. I am going after it in a minute.' He looked gravely down into her eyes. 'I don't care so much now. I never could declare myself to you under the cloud of your great fortune. It was too heavy. There's nothing creditable in that feeling, as I look at it; as a matter of simple fact it was a form of cowardice-fear of what you would think, and very likely say-fear of the world's comment too, I suppose. But the cloud being rolled away, I have spoken, and I don't care so much. I can face things with a quiet mind now that I have told you the truth in its own terms. You may call it sentimentality or any other nickname you like. It is quite true that it was not intended for a scientific statement. Since it annoys you, let it be extinguished. But please believe that it was serious to me if it was comedy to you. I have said that I love you, and honour you, and would hold you dearest of all the world. Now give me leave to go.'

But she held out her hands to him.

CHAPTER XIV: Writing a Letter

'If you insist,' Trent said, 'I suppose you will have your way. But I had much rather write it when I am not with you. However, if I must, bring me a tablet whiter than a star, or hand of hymning angel; I mean a sheet of note-paper not stamped with your address. Don't underestimate the sacrifice I am making. I never felt less like correspondence in my life.'

She rewarded him.

'What shall I say?' he enquired, his pen hovering over the paper. 'Shall I compare him to a summer's day? What shall I say?'

'Say what you want to say,' she suggested helpfully.

He shook his head. 'What I want to say-what I have been wanting for the past twenty-four hours to say to every man, woman, and child I met-is "Mabel and I are betrothed, and all is gas and gaiters." But that wouldn't be a very good opening for a letter of strictly formal, not to say sinister, character. I have got as far as "Dear Mr Marlowe." What comes next?'

'I am sending you a ma.n.u.script,' she prompted, 'which I thought you might like to see.'

'Do you realize,' he said, 'that in that sentence there are only two words of more than one syllable? This letter is meant to impress, not to put him at his ease. We must have long words.'

'I don't see why,' she answered. 'I know it is usual, but why is it? I have had a great many letters from lawyers and business people, and they always begin, "with reference to our communication", or some such mouthful, and go on like that all the way through. Yet when I see them they don't talk like that. It seems ridiculous to me.'

'It is not at all ridiculous to them.' Trent laid aside the pen with an appearance of relief and rose to his feet. 'Let me explain. A people like our own, not very fond of using its mind, gets on in the ordinary way with a very small and simple vocabulary. Long words are abnormal, and like everything else that is abnormal, they are either very funny or tremendously solemn. Take the phrase "intelligent antic.i.p.ation", for instance. If such a phrase had been used in any other country in Europe, it would not have attracted the slightest attention. With us it has become a proverb; we all grin when we hear it in a speech or read it in a leading article; it is considered to be one of the best things ever said. Why? Just because it consists of two long words. The idea expressed is as commonplace as cold mutton. Then there's "terminological inexact.i.tude". How we all roared, and are still roaring, at that! And the whole of the joke is that the words are long. It's just the same when we want to be very serious; we mark it by turning to long words. When a solicitor can begin a sentence with, "pursuant to the instructions communicated to our representative," or some such gibberish, he feels that he is earning his six-and-eightpence. Don't laugh! It is perfectly true. Now Continentals haven't got that feeling. They are always bothering about ideas, and the result is that every shopkeeper or peasant has a vocabulary in daily use that is simply Greek to the vast majority of Britons. I remember some time ago I was dining with a friend of mine who is a Paris cabman. We had dinner at a dirty little restaurant opposite the central post office, a place where all the clients were cabmen or porters. Conversation was general, and it struck me that a London cabman would have felt a little out of his depth. Words like "functionary" and "unforgettable" and "exterminate" and "independence" hurtled across the table every instant. And these were just ordinary, vulgar, jolly, red-faced cabmen. Mind you,' he went on hurriedly, as the lady crossed the room and took up his pen, 'I merely mention this to ill.u.s.trate my point. I'm not saying that cab-men ought to be intellectuals. I don't think so; I agree with Keats-happy is England, sweet her artless cabmen, enough their simple loveliness for me. But when you come to the people who make up the collective industrial brain-power of the country.... Why, do you know-'

'Oh no, no, no!' cried Mrs Manderson. 'I don't know anything at the moment, except that your talking must be stopped somehow, if we are to get any further with that letter to Mr Marlowe. You shall not get out of it. Come!' She put the pen into his hand.

Trent looked at it with distaste. 'I warn you not to discourage my talking,' he said dejectedly. 'Believe me, men who don't talk are even worse to live with than men who do. O have a care of natures that are mute. I confess I'm s.h.i.+rking writing this thing. It is almost an indecency. It's mixing two moods to write the sort of letter I mean to write, and at the same time to be sitting in the same room with you.'

She led him to his abandoned chair before the escritoire and pushed him gently into it. 'Well, but please try. I want to see what you write, and I want it to go to him at once. You see, I would be contented enough to leave things as they are; but you say you must get at the truth, and if you must, I want it to be as soon as possible. Do it now-you know you can if you will-and I'll send it off the moment it's ready. Don't you ever feel that-the longing to get the worrying letter into the post and off your hands, so that you can't recall it if you would, and it's no use fussing any more about it?'

'I will do as you wish,' he said, and turned to the paper, which he dated as from his hotel. Mrs Manderson looked down at his bent head with a gentle light in her eyes, and made as if to place a smoothing hand upon his rather untidy crop of hair. But she did not touch it. Going in silence to the piano, she began to play very softly. It was ten minutes before Trent spoke.

'If he chooses to reply that he will say nothing?'

Mrs Manderson looked over her shoulder. 'Of course he dare not take that line. He will speak to prevent you from denouncing him.'

'But I'm not going to do that anyhow. You wouldn't allow it-you said so; besides, I won't if you would. The thing's too doubtful now.'

'But,' she laughed, 'poor Mr Marlowe doesn't know you won't, does he?'

Trent sighed. 'What extraordinary things codes of honour are!' he remarked abstractedly. 'I know that there are things I should do, and never think twice about, which would make you feel disgraced if you did them-such as giving any one who grossly insulted me a black eye, or swearing violently when I barked my s.h.i.+n in a dark room. And now you are calmly recommending me to bluff Marlowe by means of a tacit threat which I don't mean; a thing which hews most abandoned fiend did never, in the drunkenness of guilt-well, anyhow, I won't do it.' He resumed his writing, and the lady, with an indulgent smile, returned to playing very softly.

In a few minutes more, Trent said: 'At last I am his faithfully. Do you want to see it?' She ran across the twilight room, and turned on a reading lamp beside the escritoire. Then, leaning on his shoulder, she read what follows: Dear Mr Marlowe,-You will perhaps remember that we met, under unhappy circ.u.mstances, in June of last year at Marlstone.

On that occasion it was my duty, as representing a newspaper, to make an independent investigation of the circ.u.mstances of the death of the late Sigsbee Manderson. I did so, and I arrived at certain conclusions. You may learn from the enclosed ma.n.u.script, which was originally written as a dispatch for my newspaper, what those conclusions were. For reasons which it is not necessary to state I decided at the last moment not to make them public, or to communicate them to you, and they are known to only two persons beside myself.

At this point Mrs Manderson raised her eyes quickly from the letter. Her dark brows were drawn together. 'Two persons?' she said with a note of enquiry.

'Your uncle is the other. I sought him out last night and told him the whole story. Have you anything against it? I always felt uneasy at keeping it from him as I did, because I had led him to expect I should tell him all I discovered, and my silence looked like mystery-making. Now it is to be cleared up finally, and there is no question of s.h.i.+elding you, I wanted him to know everything. He is a very shrewd adviser, too, in a way of his own; and I should like to have him with me when I see Marlowe. I have a feeling that two heads will be better than one on my side of the interview.'

She sighed. 'Yes, of course, uncle ought to know the truth. I hope there is n.o.body else at all.' She pressed his hand. 'I so much want all that horror buried-buried deep. I am very happy now, dear, but I shall be happier still when you have satisfied that curious mind of yours and found out everything, and stamped down the earth upon it all.' She continued her reading.

Quite recently, however [the letter went on], facts have come to my knowledge which have led me to change my decision. I do not mean that I shall publish what I discovered, but that I have determined to approach you and ask you for a private statement. If you have anything to say which would place the matter in another light, I can imagine no reason why you should withhold it.

I expect, then, to hear from you when and where I may call upon you; unless you prefer the interview to take place at my hotel. In either case I desire that mr cupples, whom you will remember, and who has read the enclosed doc.u.ment, should be present also.-Faithfully yours, Philip Trent.

What a very stiff letter!' she said. 'Now I am sure you couldn't have made it any stiffer in your own rooms.'

Trent slipped the letter and enclosure into a long envelope. 'Yes,' he said, 'I think it will make him sit up suddenly. Now this thing mustn't run any risk of going wrong. It would be best to send a special messenger with orders to deliver it into his own hands. If he's away it oughtn't to be left.'

She nodded. 'I can arrange that. Wait here for a little.'

When Mrs Manderson returned, he was hunting through the music cabinet. She sank on the carpet beside him in a wave of dark brown skirts. 'Tell me something, Philip,' she said.

'If it is among the few things that I know.'

'When you saw uncle last night, did you tell him about-about us?'

'I did not,' he answered. 'I remembered you had said nothing about telling any one. It is for you-isn't it?-to decide whether we take the world into our confidence at once or later on.'

'Then will you tell him?' She looked down at her clasped hands. 'I wish you to tell him. Perhaps if you think you will guess why.... There! that is settled.' She lifted her eyes again to his, and for a time there was silence between them.

He leaned back at length in the deep chair. 'What a world!' he said. 'Mabel, will you play something on the piano that expresses mere joy, the genuine article, nothing feverish or like thorns under a pot, but joy that has decided in favour of the universe? It's a mood that can't last altogether, so we had better get all we can out of it.'

She went to the instrument and struck a few chords while she thought. Then she began to work with all her soul at the theme in the last movement of the Ninth Symphony which is like the sound of the opening of the gates of Paradise.

CHAPTER XV: Double Cunning

An old oaken desk with a deep body stood by the window in a room that overlooked St. James's Park from a height. The room was large, furnished and decorated by some one who had brought taste to the work; but the hand of the bachelor lay heavy upon it. John Marlowe unlocked the desk and drew a long, stout envelope the back of the well.

'I understand,' he said to Mr Cupples, 'that you have read this.'

'I read it for the first time two days ago,' replied Mr Cupples, who, seated on a sofa, was peering about the room with a benignant face. 'We have discussed it fully.'

Marlowe turned to Trent. 'There is your ma.n.u.script,' he said, laying the envelope on the table. 'I have gone over it three times. I do not believe there is another man who could have got at as much of the truth as you have set down there.'

Trent ignored the compliment. He sat by the table gazing stonily at the fire, his long legs twisted beneath his chair. 'You mean, of course, he said, drawing the envelope towards him, 'that there is more of the truth to be disclosed now. We are ready to hear you as soon as you like. I expect it will be a long story, and the longer the better, so far as I am concerned; I want to understand thoroughly. What we should both like, I think, is some preliminary account of Manderson and your relations with him. It seemed to me from the first that the character of the dead man must be somehow an element in the business.'

'You were right, Marlowe answered grimly. He crossed the room and seated himself on a corner of the tall cus.h.i.+on-topped fender. 'I will begin as you suggest.'

'I ought to tell you beforehand, said Trent, looking him in the eyes, 'that although I am here to listen to you, I have not as yet any reason to doubt the conclusions I have stated here.' He tapped the envelope. 'It is a defence that you will be putting forward-you understand that?'

'Perfectly.' Marlowe was cool and in complete possession of himself, a man different indeed from the worn-out, nervous being Trent remembered at Marlstone a year and a half ago. His tall, lithe figure was held with the perfection of muscular tone. His brow was candid, his blue eyes were clear, though they still had, as he paused collecting his ideas, the look that had troubled Trent at their first meeting. Only the lines of his mouth showed that he knew himself in a position of difficulty, and meant to face it.

'Sigsbee Manderson was not a man of normal mind,' Marlowe began in his quiet voice. 'Most of the very rich men I met with in America had become so by virtue of abnormal greed, or abnormal industry, or abnormal personal force, or abnormal luck. None of them had remarkable intellects. Manderson delighted too in heaping up wealth; he worked incessantly at it; he was a man of dominant will; he had quite his share of luck; but what made him singular was his brainpower. In his own country they would perhaps tell you that it was his ruthlessness in pursuit of his aims that was his most striking characteristic; but there are hundreds of them who would have carried out his plans with just as little consideration for others if they could have formed the plans.

'I'm not saying Americans aren't clever; they are ten times cleverer than we are, as a nation; but I never met another who showed such a degree of sagacity and foresight, such gifts of memory and mental tenacity, such sheer force of intelligence, as there was behind everything Manderson did in his money-making career. They called him the "Napoleon of Wall Street" often enough in the papers; but few people knew so well as I did how much truth there was in the phrase. He seemed never to forget a fact that might be of use to him, in the first place; and he did systematically with the business facts that concerned him what Napoleon did, as I have read, with military facts. He studied them in special digests which were prepared for him at short intervals, and which he always had at hand, so that he could take up his report on coal or wheat or railways, or whatever it might be, in any unoccupied moment. Then he could make a bolder and cleverer plan than any man of them all. People got to know that Manderson would never do the obvious thing, but they got no further; the thing he did do was almost always a surprise, and much of his success flowed from that. The Street got rattled, as they used to put it, when known that the old man was out with his gun, and often his opponents seemed to surrender as easily as Colonel Crockett's c.o.o.n in the story. The scheme I am going to describe to you would have occupied most men long enough. Manderson could have plotted the thing, down to the last detail, while he shaved himself.

'I used to think that his strain of Indian blood, remote as it was, might have something to do with the cunning and ruthlessness of the man. Strangely enough, its existence was unknown to any one but himself and me. It was when he asked me to apply my taste for genealogical work to his own obscure family history that I made the discovery that he had in him a share of the blood of the Iroquois chief Montour and his French wife, a terrible woman who ruled the savage politics of the tribes of the Wilderness two hundred years ago. The Mandersons were active in the fur trade on the Pennsylvanian border in those days, and more than one of them married Indian women. Other Indian blood than Montour's may have descended to Manderson, for all I can say, through previous and subsequent unions; some of the wives' antecedents were quite untraceable, and there were so many generations of pioneering before the whole country was brought under civilization. My researches left me with the idea that there is a very great deal of the aboriginal blood present in the genealogical make-up of the people of America, and that it is very widely spread. The newer families have constantly intermarried with the older, and so many of them had a strain of the native in them-and were often rather proud of it, too, in those days. But Manderson had the idea about the disgracefulness of mixed blood, which grew much stronger, I fancy, with the rise of the negro question after the war. He was thunderstruck at what I told him, and was anxious to conceal it from every soul. Of course I never gave it away while he lived, and I don't think he supposed I would; but I have thought since that his mind took a turn against me from that time onward. It happened about a year before his death.'

'Had Manderson,' asked Mr Cupples, so unexpectedly that the others started, 'any definable religious att.i.tude?'

Marlowe considered a moment. 'None that ever I heard of,' he said. 'Wors.h.i.+p and prayer were quite unknown to him, so far as I could see, and I never heard him mention religion. I should doubt if he had any real sense of G.o.d at all, or if he was capable of knowing G.o.d through the emotions. But I understood that as a child he had had a religious upbringing with a strong moral side to it. His private life was, in the usual limited sense, blameless. He was almost ascetic in his habits, except as to smoking. I lived with him four years without ever knowing him to tell a direct verbal falsehood, constantly as he used to practise deceit in other forms. Can you understand the soul of a man who never hesitated to take steps that would have the effect of hoodwinking people, who would use every trick of the markets to mislead, and who was at the same time scrupulous never to utter a direct lie on the most insignificant matter? Manderson was like that, and he was not the only one. I suppose you might compare the state of mind to that of a soldier who is personally a truthful man, but who will stick at nothing to deceive the enemy. The rules of the game allow it; and the same may be said of business as many business men regard it. Only with them it is always wartime.'

'It is a sad world,' observed Mr Cupples.

'As you say,' Marlowe agreed. 'Now I was saying that one could always take Manderson's word if he gave it in a definite form. The first time I ever heard him utter a downright lie was on the night he died; and hearing it, I believe, saved me from being hanged as his murderer.'

Marlowe stared at the light above his head and Trent moved impatiently in his chair. 'Before we come to that,' he said, 'will you tell us exactly on what footing you were with Manderson during the years you were with him?'

'We were on very good terms from beginning to end,' answered Marlowe. 'Nothing like friends.h.i.+p-he was not a man for making friends--but the best of terms as between a trusted employee and his chief. I went to him as private secretary just after getting my degree at Oxford. I was to have gone into my father's business, where I am now, but my father suggested that I should see the world for a year or two. So I took this secretarys.h.i.+p, which seemed to promise a good deal of varied experience, and I had let the year or two run on to four years before the end came. The offer came to me through the last thing in the world I should have put forward as a qualification for a salaried post, and that was chess.'

At the word Trent struck his hands together with a muttered exclamation. The others looked at him in surprise.

'Chess!' repeated Trent. 'Do you know,' he said, rising and approaching Marlowe, 'what was the first thing I noted about you at our first meeting? It was your eye, Mr Marlowe. I couldn't place it then, but I know now where I had seen your eyes before. They were in the head of no less a man than the great Nikolay Korchagin, with whom I once sat in the same railway carriage for two days. I thought I should never forget the chess eye after that, but I could not put a name to it when I saw it in you. I beg your pardon,' he ended suddenly, resuming marmoreal att.i.tude in his chair.

'I have played the game from my childhood, and with good players,' said Marlowe simply. 'It is an hereditary gift, if you can call it a gift. At the University I was nearly as good as anybody there, and I gave most of my brains to that and the OUDS and playing about generally. At Oxford, as I dare say you know, inducements to amuse oneself at the expense of one's education are endless, and encouraged by the authorities. Well, one day toward the end of my last term, Dr Munro of Queen's, whom I had never defeated, sent for me. He told me that I played a fairish game of chess. I said it was very good of him to say so. Then he said, "They tell me you hunt, too." I said, "Now and then." He asked, "Is there anything else you can do?" "No," I said, not much liking the tone of the conversation-the old man generally succeeded in putting people's backs up. He grunted fiercely, and then told me that enquiries were being made on behalf of a wealthy American man of business who wanted an English secretary. Manderson was the name, he said. He seemed never to have heard it before, which was quite possible, as he never opened a newspaper and had not slept a night outside the college for thirty years. If I could rub up my spelling-as the old gentleman put it-I might have a good chance for the post, as chess and riding and an Oxford education were the only indispensable points.

'Well, I became Manderson's secretary. For a long time I liked the position greatly. When one is attached to an active American plutocrat in the prime of life one need not have many dull moments. Besides, it made me independent. My father had some serious business reverses about that time, and I was glad to be able to do without an allowance from him. At the end of the first year Manderson doubled my salary. "It's big money," he said, "but I guess I don't lose." You see, by that time I was doing a great deal more than accompany him on horseback in the morning and play chess in the evening, which was mainly what he had required. I was attending to his houses, his farm in Ohio, his shooting in Maine, his horses, his cars, and his yacht. I had become a walking railway-guide and an expert cigar-buyer. I was always learning something.

'Well, now you understand what my position was in regard to Manderson during the last two or three years of my connection with him. It was a happy life for me on the whole. I was busy, my work was varied and interesting; I had time to amuse myself too, and money to spend. At one time I made a fool of myself about a girl, and that was not a happy time; but it taught me to understand the great goodness of Mrs Manderson.' Marlowe inclined his head to Mr Cupples as he said this. 'She may choose to tell you about it. As for her husband, he had never varied in his att.i.tude towards me, in spite of the change that came over him in the last months of his life, as you know. He treated me well and generously in his unsympathetic way, and I never had a feeling that he was less than satisfied with his bargain-that was the sort of footing we lived upon. And it was that continuance of his att.i.tude right up to the end that made the revelation so shocking when I was suddenly shown, on the night on which he met his end, the depth of crazy hatred of myself that was in Manderson's soul.'

The eyes of Trent and Mr Cupples met for an instant.

'You never suspected that he hated you before that time?' asked Trent; and Mr Cupples asked at the same moment, 'To what did you attribute it?'

'I never guessed until that night,' answered Marlowe, 'that he had the smallest ill-feeling toward me. How long it had existed I do not know. I cannot imagine why it was there. I was forced to think, when I considered the thing in those awful days after his death, that it was a case of a madman's delusion, that he believed me to be plotting against him, as they so often do. Some such insane conviction must have been at the root of it. But who can sound the abysses of a lunatic's fancy? Can you imagine the state of mind in which a man dooms himself to death with the object of delivering some one he hates to the hangman?'

Mr Cupples moved sharply in his chair. 'You say Manderson was responsible for his own death?' he asked.

Trent glanced at him with an eye of impatience, and resumed his intent watch upon the face of Marlowe. In the relief of speech it was now less pale and drawn.