Chapter XIII: ‘but Here Is One Who Loves You as of Old.’

Mr. Secretan is not sorry to get away from that quiet orderly room in the prison, where never comes any sound of outward things more human than the creaking of the warder’s boots in the passage, or the ticking of that inexorable clock in the hall--dismal clock that checks off hours that are heavier than lead, minutes whose every moment is a sigh.

Alexis would willingly stay all day with his wife, to lighten the burden of her solitude, to strengthen the fainting heart with words of cheerfulness and comfort, if he had not work to do elsewhere. He has a task to perform, and a difficult one, and he hardly knows how to set about it. He has been careful to ask no questions of Captain Heathcote, feeling that the governor’s position must compel him to caution and reticence. He stands as it were upon the opposite side in that game of life and death which has to be played out--the rouge et noir of the criminal court. Not to him can Alexis look for information or assistance.

Mr. Secretan leaves the prison sorely perplexed as to what his first step should be. At present he knows nothing, save that Stephen Trenchard is supposed to have died from prussic acid, and that Sibyl has confessed to having had a bottle of prussic acid in her possession at Lancaster Lodge.

‘We must meet law with law, I suppose,’ thinks Alexis. ‘As my wife is in the grip of the law, I must get a lawyer to fight her battle.’

He thinks of the names he has seen in connection with the criminal courts--names that have a sound of power,--and there is one that comes uppermost in his mind, super-eminent and invincible, a shield and buckler in the fight.

This is the legal firm of Levison and Levison, Parchment Street, Viaduct Hill.

He goes straight to the telegraph office, and telegraphs to Messrs. Levison and Levison, solicitors, requesting that one of their firm may start for Redcastle that afternoon, a most urgent case, money no object. He feels fortified against danger in some measure when he has sent this message, and goes from the station to Dr. Faunthorpe’s.

The shabby old house looks a little shabbier and more woebegone than usual to-day in the vivid sunshine of midsummer. Hester, whose spirits generally maintain an equable acidity, has drooped and given way to absolute despair since the revelation of Stephen Trenchard’s insolvency. It seems to her as if the shattered fortunes of the house of Faunthorpe had received the final blow that brings them to the dust. Jerusalem besieged by Titus could hardly have fallen lower. The idea of Stephen Trenchard’s fortune--to be divided in some manner among his nieces--had been the faithful servant’s only day-dream. She had not set her hopes very high. She had languished for no translation to a loftier sphere, but she had believed that a little money would find its way through his nieces to the pockets of Robert Faunthorpe. She had fancied that the dilapidated old house would be painted and whitewashed, some of the worm-eaten flooring replaced with sound wood--new deal--which would repay the labour of her scrubbing-brush. She had pictured her master in a new coat. She had told herself that a few pounds spent upon the pony carriage would rehabilitate that vehicle, and that a new set of harness would make the pony a gentleman. Long arrears of wages due to herself in times past, a sum that would have doubled itself by this time at compound interest, might possibly be paid in that flood tide of fortune; but this last item was one of secondary consideration in the faithful Hester’s mind. She wanted to see the family raise its head from the dust. She wanted to feel that the house of Faunthorpe had something of the phœnix in its nature. The habits of this fabulous bird have been made familiar to Hester, not in the pages of Herodotus, but by the fire office which has taken it for its device and emblem.

The disappointment has been very bitter to the doctor’s two younger nieces, and Marion lies on the sofa and bewails her fate, and declares rebelliously that she will never more try to deserve well of Providence.

‘What’s the use of being good?’ she demands, with an injured air. ‘One couldn’t be used worse if one was a forger or a murderer. I didn’t expect much. Sibyl’s artfulness nipped _my_ expectations in the bud, but I did build upon getting something, if it was only a paltry five thousand pounds.’

Jenny is more philosophical, and more easily reconciled to Fate.

‘If he hadn’t any money to leave, he couldn’t leave it to us,’ she argues, ‘but he must have been a sly old fox to make believe to be a millionaire, and take in all Redcastle.’

‘A wicked old impostor,’ exclaims Marion, wrathfully.

‘Poor Sibyl’s disappointment will be worse than ours,’ says Jane.

‘Yes, that’s a comfort. She’ll find how she has wasted all her scheming and artfulness on a Jesuitical old pauper. She’ll feel small enough, I should think.’

‘Perhaps she knew the truth all along, and was laughing in her sleeve at our expectations,’ suggests Jenny.

‘She’s deep enough for anything. However, I forgive her all her baseness now, and pity her with all my heart,’ says Marion, with a magnanimous air. ‘She’ll find life a very different thing now she has seen the last of Lancaster Lodge.’

‘I hope she won’t get into trouble about that prussic acid,’ says Jenny, thoughtfully.

And Marion also grows grave. That question about the prussic acid is serious. One might wish one’s sister’s unholy pride in temporal blessings to be chastised by Providence, for her own spiritual chastening and benefit, but one would shrink appalled from the idea of that erring sister lying under a suspicion of having poisoned her uncle. In the first place such an imputation would be too severe a punishment for the offender, and in the second it would cast discredit upon all her family.

‘It’s my opinion that uncle Trenchard has spent all his money, and knew he must be found out if he let things go on any longer, and got out of the difficulty by poisoning himself,’ says Jenny, sagely. ‘The only thing that’s hard to account for is how he could have got hold of the prussic acid that Sibyl took out of the surgery.’

‘It mightn’t have been that very prussic acid that killed him, stupid,’ exclaims Marion, contemptuously.

‘True,’ says Jenny.

‘If you had only held that blabbing tongue of yours nobody need have known that Sibyl had ever taken anything out of the surgery,’ says Marion. ‘If we are all brought to disgrace it will be your doing.’

Whereat Jenny bursts into tears and weeps dismally for the next half-hour. She has shed many a tear about that fatal communicativeness of hers within the last few days.

They are sitting in the front parlour when this conversation takes place, on the morning of Mr. Secretan’s arrival in Redcastle, and when Jenny has wept till her eyeballs ache, she wanders listlessly to the window, and stares out at the small square garden, where the bountiful cabbage roses and a few ancient perennials bloom as well as the dust will allow them. There is not much in the way of traffic at this end of the town. A farmer’s cart jolts by once in half an hour, or a labouring man passes on a plough horse, or a drove of oxen straggles by, hunted by an abusive driver. Not often do the _élite_ of Redcastle penetrate to this end of the town. There is not much distraction of mind, therefore, to be obtained from looking out of the window, and Jenny contemplates external things from listlessness rather than interest. But on a sudden, to the surprise of her sister, who has buried herself in a novel, Jenny ejaculates abruptly,--

‘Good gracious! It’s him.’

‘Whatever our family troubles are, you might remember that the verb to be takes the same case after as before it, Jane,’ remonstrates Marion with dignity. ‘And pray whom do you mean by him?’

‘The young man,’ cries Jane, incautious in her surprise. ‘My brother-in-law.’

‘What does the ridiculous child mean?’ exclaims Marion, pulling herself up from the sofa with a wrench, and looking out at the gate.

Yes, there is a very good-looking and gentlemanlike young man in the act of entering at that modest green gate.

‘Why, he’s a perfect stranger,’ says Marion.

‘Is he?’ remarks Jenny, who has recovered her self-possession by this time, ‘ah, to be sure, now I look at him, I see he is a stranger. I took him for some one else.’

‘It’s my belief you are demented, child,’ cries Marion, crossly. ‘I suppose he’s a patient for uncle.’

Marion is confirmed in this belief when Mr. Secretan inquires for Dr. Faunthorpe, and on being told that he is out, asks permission to wait his return. He looks respectable, nay, even superior to some of the Redcastle gentry, so Hester shows him into the surgery, and asks him to take a seat.

‘The doctor always runs home for his bit of dinner when he can,’ she says, ‘and I don’t think he was going very far to-day, so he’ll be in by half an hour or so, I dare say.’

Left in the surgery, Alexis thinks of that summer day, nearly a year ago, when he came here in quest of his truant wife, and allowed himself to be put on a false scent by a schoolgirl’s deceitfulness. He is very angry with Jane Faunthorpe to-day, when he thinks that all the evil that has befallen Sibyl might have been prevented had that child told the truth.

‘But she had been taught her lesson by Sibyl, no doubt,’ he reflects; ‘I do wrong to blame her.’

He has more than an hour to wait for Dr. Faunthorpe, a weary while, for he is burning with impatience to know all that can be known about Stephen Trenchard’s death. It is past two o’clock when the doctor comes into the surgery looking tired and anxious, and Alexis feels as if much precious time had been lost.

He hastens to introduce himself to Robert Faunthorpe, and to give that bewildered practitioner the history of Sibyl’s marriage.

‘Sir, you petrify me,’ exclaims the meek little doctor, wiping the perspiration from his bald forehead with an ancient silk handkerchief. ‘Do you mean to tell me that my niece, whom I have ever considered the incarnation of candour, could be capable of so deceiving me?’

‘It was not your resentment she feared, Dr. Faunthorpe, but her uncle Trenchard’s antipathy to my name. You are no doubt acquainted with the family history.’

‘Yes, yes, my poor sister-in-law told me the story.’

‘That family quarrel of the past was Sibyl’s motive for concealing her marriage with me. And now that you know who I am I have to speak of something much more serious. Your niece has been arrested on suspicion of being concerned in her uncle’s murder, and is now in Redcastle gaol.’

Dr. Faunthorpe sinks into a chair, speechless with horror. For the last three days and nights he has lived in the apprehension of something like this, but the reality seems more dreadful than his fears.

‘Don’t tell me so,’ he cries.

‘It is unhappily the truth. I was with my wife at the time of her arrest. I am here to protect and defend her. And now tell me all you know about Stephen Trenchard’s death.’

Dr. Faunthorpe tells all that is to be told--disjointedly at first, but on being closely questioned by Alexis, plainly enough at the last. He tells Alexis the unlucky facts connected with that blue bottle of prussic acid; he tells Alexis the various opinions, conjectures, and rumours which obtain in Redcastle.

‘Why should he not have poisoned himself?’ asks Alexis.

‘Ah, we might have supposed that; but then comes the question of the bottle, or vessel from which he took the poison. With so powerful a dose death would have been instantaneous; he would not have had time to throw the bottle from him; he must have died clutching it. And the empty bottle was found in Sibyl’s work-basket.’

‘Where it might have been easily placed by any one who wished to fix the guilt upon her.’

‘Yes, of course. If we could only prove that.’

‘We must prove that, Dr. Faunthorpe. We must find the poisoner, or show that Stephen Trenchard took the poison of his own free will. He may have felt that his game was played out, and may have adopted suicide as a happy escape out of his difficulties.’

‘That might be.’

Alexis has made notes of Dr. Faunthorpe’s answers to his questions. He has made a list of the people in the house at the time of Stephen Trenchard’s death.

‘How about this Joel Pilgrim? Why should he not be suspected rather than Sibyl?’

‘There is that unfortunate circumstance of Sibyl’s flight, and the prussic acid taken from this surgery.’

‘Both facts tell against her. Yet, if she had been guilty she would have been too wise to excite suspicion by that secret departure; and if she had wanted to commit murder she would hardly have chosen a poison which she must have known is of all poisons the most easily detected.’

Dr. Faunthorpe’s only answer is a hopeless sigh. He is borne down, nay, crushed, by calamity. Whatever elasticity of spirit Nature may have endowed him with at the outset of life has been worn out of him by a long career of self-abnegation and endurance. He is so accustomed to trouble, sorrow is such a common flavour in his cup, that he cannot easily look beyond the darkness of the hour. To-day he sees himself enclosed in an impenetrable cloud of misery. Freely, gladly would he give his life--such feeble remnant of life as he holds--to save his niece, but he cannot devise any mode of being helpful to her.

‘This Pilgrim must be the man,’ says Alexis, after reading over his notes meditatively.

‘I cannot see any motive----’

‘Can you not? He may have believed in Trenchard’s wealth, and expected to inherit some of it. He may have wanted money badly, and determined on hastening his inheritance.’

‘There is one little circumstance that I ought, perhaps, to have told you,’ begins the doctor, falteringly.

‘For God’s sake tell me everything.’

‘It was after the post-mortem. Dr. Mitsand, who has taken up this matter in a very energetic spirit, asked a few questions of the butler at Lancaster Lodge.’

‘Well?’

‘The questions themselves were of no particular importance--touching the position of a table beside the bed, the bottles and glasses, and so on. But there was something in the man’s manner which struck Dr. Mitsand and myself as remarkable. He had been drinking, I believe, and may have been muddled by drink. But he had, to my mind, and Dr. Mitsand’s, the manner of a person labouring under some kind of apprehension. He had a shifty look, and answered the simplest questions reluctantly, as if afraid to commit himself. At the coroner’s inquest he appeared in the same muddled state--worse indeed, and drew upon himself a severe reprimand from the coroner.’

‘Is the man still at Lancaster Lodge?’

‘Yes. I saw him go in at the lodge gate to-day as I came past on my way home.’

‘Then I’ll see him without delay, and see what is to be made of him,’ says Alexis.

‘In a case of such importance would it not be better to employ a detective?’ suggests the doctor, humbly.

‘Dr. Faunthorpe, in a case that affects my wife’s honour and her life there is no detective living whose wits would be keener than mine,’ replies Alexis. ‘I will trust no one with this work while I have power to do it myself.’

And thus they part.