Chapter XXVII: The Place of Peace

When Lavender knocked away the keystone of the vaulted arch beneath which Ralph Ashley was confined, the fabric fell to pieces easily. Provided with a copy of her depositions, the police sought Mr. Tracy, and next day he was engaged with the Treasury solicitors discussing the Fairbridge murder in the light of the new facts, and gathering together sufficient evidence to corroborate her statement and set the suspect free.

Of this, the most important part was Melville's pencilled note, which reached Mr. Tracy about five o'clock the following evening. In itself his suicide was held to be sufficient; that he had thrown himself overboard was beyond question. It was proved that he had gone on board the packet at Dover and that he was not on board at Calais; his Gladstone bag was there, with the note and the enclosures, and what had happened in the interval was self-evident. He, too, bore witness to his brother's innocence, and although, like Lavender, he did not say who the murderer was, it was a simple matter to name him now. All that was necessary was to prove that it was he who rowed Lavender to Fairbridge the day the murder was committed.

To do this was not very difficult. Lucille and Jervis both could prove that Lavender had been to Jermyn Street the day before the crime. The maid could swear that on the following morning her mistress went out for the day, taking a basket containing luncheon for two people, and that she returned in the evening terribly agitated and wet through. The valet could swear that Mrs. Sinclair took tea with Melville and asked him to take her out next day; he had overheard that much, although he did not overhear the answer, but he swore that next morning his master told him that he was going out and would not require anything during the day; that he was wearing flannels when he spoke, and that those garments were soiled and creased as if they had got wet when on the following Monday they were sent to the laundry. The manager acknowledged his surprise at finding Melville in when he answered the bell in the evening, for it was unusual for him to pass an entire afternoon in his rooms without requiring service of any kind, and his professed ignorance of Jervis's absence was odd, in view of the fact that he had himself given the leave of absence. Careful investigation showed that the time permitted of his going to Fairbridge and returning by the hour he saw the manager. The lock keeper at St. Martin's proved that a lady and gentleman had hired his last boat, and left it outside the lock on their return in order to make a rush to catch a train just due, which they must have missed if they had waited to go through the lock to the boathouse, and which would have got him back to Jermyn Street in time to change and affect to have been at home all day; In Melville's rooms, moreover, the police found ammunition similar to that found in the gun-room at the Manor House, but no trace of the revolver which it fitted. Jervis had often seen it, and swore that Melville generally carried it in his hip pocket. Was it not, therefore, the one that Lavender declared her companion had used and afterwards dropped into the river? Did not Ralph's possession of its fellow prove his own innocence and not his guilt, as Mr. Tracy had always contended?

Nor when it came to the question of motive was there any other difficulty. The perjury Melville had committed in denying all knowledge of Lady Holt's existence, and the inferences to be drawn from Sir Geoffrey's accounts, pointed directly to the motive. The story Ralph had told to Mr. Tracy of the hundred pounds explained the rest. Sir Geoffrey had paid Melville's debts and given him a final two hundred and fifty pounds. That Melville lost at Monte Carlo, where he was when Ralph wrote to him for the loan. He applied to his uncle for further help and got a hundred pounds, as the cheque itself attested. Yet, in spite of the fraud and its penalties, only averted by Ralph's generosity, Melville went back to Fairbridge and got more money from his uncle, as the cheque book again demonstrated. On what plea did he get those further funds? Obviously, under the false pretence that Lady Holt, whom, as her letter showed, he had seen in the brief interval, was in poor circumstances; or else, perhaps, as hush-money from his uncle, who believed that his wife was dead.

Finally, Sir Geoffrey made a will and refused to give Melville another penny for himself or for Lavender, and then Melville shot his uncle, either in a paroxysm of rage at being baffled, or hoping to benefit under some intestacy, for the will was only executed a few days before the tragedy. The whole story was complete, and could no longer be withstood. Within the briefest possible period the Crown dropped the case against Ralph Ashley, and he was free.

It was with a face stern and hard as granite that Ralph listened to Mr. Tracy's disclosure of this horrible betrayal by his brother. He had been looking death in the face, and its visage had almost turned him to stone, although it could not make his high courage quail. It would have been bad enough if the traitor had been any other man, but that it should be his own brother, with whom he had played as a child, dreamed such fair dreams, and thought such long, long thoughts, was the most cruel blow fate had ever dealt him. He marvelled at the cool courage with which Melville had pitted himself against the devil, and played the game right to the end. He shuddered as he tried to picture what the end was like, when, with a certain pagan courage, Melville threw himself into death's cold embrace. The life was incomprehensible to him, but the death he could find it in his heart to commend.

With Mr. Tracy he left the prison, of which the high walls had been suffocating him so long.

"I will telegraph to Gwendolen at once," he said, "saying I will be home to-morrow night and asking her to await me there. I will go up to London with you now; there is a lot that I must do."

His whole occupation that first day of freedom was characteristic of the man. Everything that could be devised to spare his brother's memory he thought of and arranged--everything, that is, that did not detract from the absolute declaration of his own innocence. He provided for the payment of Melville's debts, from the greatest to the least, took possession of his personal effects, so that nothing might fall into the hands of curious strangers, and gave his whole wardrobe and a generous gratuity to Jervis on the understanding that he should preserve silence as to his late master's shortcomings. And Jervis acted loyally in accordance with the understanding, for he had been a good and even affectionate servant to Melville, who had always been kind and generous to him; he was, indeed, Melville's sincerest mourner.

Ralph thought of all who had contributed, in however small a degree, to his acquittal. Lucille was broken-hearted by Lavender's death, and would accept nothing at his hands.

"I don't need it," she said. "Mrs. Sinclair has left me everything she had, and they tell me I shall never need to work again. I'm going home to Geneva as soon as ever I can."

She listened gratefully to Ralph's words of sympathy.

"You've had a lot to put up with," she sobbed, "but don't you believe my mistress was a bad woman. She was frightened into holding her tongue. Your brother frightened her. She was a changed woman from the first unhappy day he crossed her path, and didn't dare stand up to him; but whatever she did, no one shall say to me that she was a wicked woman."

And when Ralph soothed her she looked up at him with eyes that were most pathetic.

"I don't know how you can be so forgiving when you've been so wronged, I can't forgive your brother. But oh! how I wish that it was you instead of him who came into her life! You could have told her, if she had done wrong by Sir Geoffrey Holt, how to put it right, and she would have done it. She never did a wrong thing knowingly in all her life;" and, indeed, until fear came upon her and upset her judgment as to the proportion of things, Lucille's epitaph upon her mistress was truer than many an epitaph graven on stone and lying in cathedrals.

Next day Ralph arrived at Fairbridge. He acknowledged silently the greetings of the knot of people gathered at the station. The situation was not free from embarrassment for them; their joy at his complete acquittal would have found expression in some tumultuous welcome but for the thought of his brother, by the chance exposure of whose treachery that acquittal had been secured.

Martin stood at the gate of the Manor House bareheaded, and Ralph put out both his hands.

"So I have come home safe, Martin,"

"The Lord be praised for it!" the butler said; "the Lord be praised for it! But, oh! poor Master Melville!" and the tears broke out and poured down the old fellow's withered cheeks.

"Poor Melville!" echoed Ralph. "Well, we can't forget it, Martin, but we can forgive him--you and I. Surely if anybody can forgive him it is you and I--because he was----"

He could not finish; the sight of the faithful old servant sobbing as he bent over his hands was too much for him, and the words died away into a groan.

"God bless you, you dear old Martin! Who can doubt of God when such kind hearts as yours are beating round them? Come, you must take me to missy."

So Martin led the way to the library, where Gwendolen stood alone, very pale and nervous, but very sweet. He opened the door and tried to say Ralph's name, but it would not come, and with his hands before his face he ran away and left them alone together.

* * * * *

That that part of the world which had inclined to believe in Ralph's guilt hastened to shower congratulations upon him goes without saying, but the recipient of them displayed something more than his wonted taciturnity in his acknowledgment of them. Almost more than anything else, he resented the fact that anybody who knew him could suppose him capable of such rank ingratitude as to kill his only friend and benefactor. He tried to explain his brother's life by some theory of criminal insanity, some lack of moral sense, which made him not wholly responsible for all his actions; but for the lack of charity displayed by so many of the average men and women of the world he had nothing but savage detestation.

As soon as practicable after his release he married Gwendolen, and spent the winter and spring with her abroad, only returning when early summer was painting the Manor House garden in its fairest colours of leaf and flower.

Mrs. Austen welcomed them with delight, gladly abdicating her position as regent of the Manor House in favour of its new mistress, and returning with unfeigned relief to the familiar surroundings of her own home at The Grange.

"No, I won't stay to-night," she said, after giving them the sort of welcome one can only get in English homes. "You don't really want me, and I must go and sacrifice to my own household gods. I've deserted them much too long as it is."

So the night of their return they dined alone, and after dinner walked down to the houseboat. It was inevitable that their doing so should recall sharply all the story in which they had played so important a part, and for the first time for months they spoke of it by mutual accord.

"This houseboat will always be associated in my mind with some of the supreme moments in my life," Gwendolen said softly. "It was here that you proposed to me, here that Mr. Anstruther arrested you, and here that we are spending our first evening together at home--all three times when one's heart seems full to bursting."

Ralph looked at her gravely.

"Last time was a bad one, Gwen," he said, in his deep voice. "It was an awful business!"

She stroked his hand, and the hard lines in his face were softened.

"Let it make the present good time seem all the better by contrast," she rejoined. "After all, God's in His heaven, Ralph."

"Yes," he said slowly, "I suppose so; but that wasn't the thought that kept my pluck up during those weeks of suspense."

"What did?" she asked.

"The thought of you," he answered, "and your belief in me. The knowledge that you loved me and had faith in me made me swear to keep the flag flying, don't you know. It wasn't the thought that God was in His heaven and all that. As a matter of fact, all seemed very wrong with the world."

Gwendolen checked him.

"You ought to have remembered that He gave you the love, if it meant so much," she said. "Sometimes I've thought that if Melville had really loved somebody it would have made all the difference and helped to make a good man of him."

"Possibly," Ralph answered. "The only thing Melville ever loved was money--that was at the bottom of it all."

"And so he had nothing to take him away from himself," Gwendolen said. "Even if he hadn't been loved in return, the affection would have made him unselfish, or at any rate less selfish."

She spoke with obvious ignorance of the fact that if there was one individual for whom Melville felt anything like affection it was herself, and Ralph looked at her in some surprise, for on more than one occasion he had been very much aware of it. Melville deserved some credit for not having told the girl of it, for to love and not to be loved in return by Gwendolen was enough to make any man incline to go to the bad, and it looked as if Melville had acted better than usual in refraining from revealing his affection and trying to cut his brother out. But the whole thing was unutterably painful still, and his heart ached when his thoughts turned, as they often did, to his last sight of Melville standing in the witness box, so handsome, so calm and self-possessed, apparently so eager in his desire to help Ralph out of danger, and all the while betraying him with a kiss. His wife heard his sigh and stopped it with a caress, and the touch of her lips brought back happiness. So they remained in silent content, thanking God that the trouble was overpast and that they were together and at home.

The faint notes of distant music were borne to them upon the breeze and died away again, but the sound suggested something else to Gwendolen.

"Ralph, I meant to ask you before. Will you give me Melville's violin?"

"Of course," he answered, "if you want it. But you can't play it, can you?"

"No," she replied. "I shall not even try, but I should like to have it. He was a great musician. I will keep his violin in memory of the one great talent God gave him, of which he never made anything but a perfectly good use."

"You are a good woman, Gwendolen!" Ralph said, with admiration. "It's just like you to have a pretty idea of that kind. It will help me a bit, too," he added reflectively. "I find it none too easy to forget about--all that, and I should like to remember only what was good about him. His music was exquisite."

And so in the old Manor House at Fairbridge the Amati, from whose strings Melville drew harmonies that thrilled the soul of all who heard them, remains as a perpetual reminder of the one thing he did supremely well. The magic spell it wove when it spoke in response to his command was as nothing to the spell it weaves by its silence now, helping them to forget all his sinfulness, and reminding them only of the one great talent God gave him of which he never made aught but a perfectly good use.

WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED, LONDON, NEW YORK, AND MELBOURNE.