Kitabı oku: «The Silent House», sayfa 6

CHAPTER XI
FURTHER DISCOVERIES

The silence which followed Diana's announcement regarding the ribbon and stiletto – for Lucian kept silence out of sheer astonishment – was broken by the hoarse voice of Mrs. Kebby:

"If ye want the ribbon, miss, I'll not say no to a shilling. With what your good gentleman promised, that will be three as I'm ready to take," and Mrs. Kebby held out a dirty claw for the silver.

"You'll sell it, will you!" cried out Diana indignantly, pouncing down on the harridan. "How dare you keep what isn't yours? If you had shown the detective this," shaking the ribbon in Mrs. Kebby's face, "he might have caught the criminal!"

"Pardon me," interposed Lucian, finding his voice, "I hardly think so, Miss Vrain; for no one but yourself could have told that the ribbon adorned the stiletto. Where did you see the weapon last?"

"In the library at Berwin Manor. I hung it up on the wall myself, by this ribbon."

"Are you sure it is the same ribbon?"

"I am certain," replied Diana emphatically. "I cannot be mistaken; the colour and pattern are both peculiar. Where did you find it?" she added, turning to Mrs. Kebby.

"In the kitchen, I tell ye," growled the old woman sullenly. "I only found it this blessed morning. 'Twas in a dark corner, near the door as leads down to the woodshed. How was I to know 'twas any good?"

"Did you find anything else?" asked Lucian mildly.

"No, I didn't, sir."

"Not a stiletto?" demanded Diana, putting the ribbon in her pocket.

"I don't know what's a stiletter, miss; but I didn't find nothing; and I ain't a thief, though some people as sets themselves above others by taking ribbons as doesn't belong to 'em mayn't be much good."

"The ribbon is not yours," said Diana haughtily.

"Yes it are! Findings is keepings with me!" answered Mrs. Kebby.

"Don't anger her," whispered Denzil, touching Miss Vrain's arm. "We may find her useful."

Diana looked from him to the old woman, and opened her purse, at the sight of which Mrs. Kebby's sour face relaxed. When Miss Vrain gave her half a sovereign she quite beamed with joy. "The blessing of heaven on you, my dear," she said, with a curtsey. "Gold! good gold! Ah! this is a brave day's work for me – thirteen blessed shillings!"

"Ten, you mean, Mrs. Kebby!"

"Oh, no, sir," cried Mrs. Kebby obsequiously, "the lady gave me ten, bless her heart, but you've quite forgot your three."

"I said two."

"Ah! so you did, sir. I'm a poor schollard at 'rithmetic."

"You're clever enough to get money out of people," said Diana, who was disgusted at the avarice of the hag. "However, for the present you must be content with what I have given you. If, in cleaning this house, you find any other article, whatever it may be, you shall have another ten shillings, on consideration that you take it at once to Mr. Denzil."

Mrs. Kebby, who was tying up the piece of gold in the corner of her handkerchief, nodded her old head with much complacency. "I'll do it, miss; that is, if the gentleman will pay on delivery. I like cash."

"You shall have cash," said Lucian, laughing; and then, as Diana intimated her intention of leaving the house, he descended the stairs in her company.

Miss Vrain kept silence until they were outside in the sunshine, when she cast an upward glance at the warm blue sky, dappled with light clouds.

"I am glad to be out of that house," she said, with a shudder. "There is something in its dark and freezing atmosphere which chills my spirits."

"It is said to be haunted, you know," said Lucian carelessly; then, after a pause, he spoke on the subject which was uppermost in his mind. "Now that you have this piece of evidence, Miss Vrain, what do you intend to do?"

"Make sure that I have made no mistake, Mr. Denzil. I shall go down to Berwin Manor this afternoon. If the stiletto is still hanging on the library wall by its ribbon, I shall admit my mistake; if it is absent, why then I shall return to town and consult with you as to what is best to be done. You know I rely on you."

"I shall do whatever you wish, Miss Vrain," said Lucian fervently.

"It is very good of you," replied the lady gratefully, "For I have no right to take up your time in this manner."

"You have every right – that is, I mean – I mean," stammered Denzil, thinking from the surprised look of Miss Vrain that he had gone too far at so early a stage of their acquaintance. "I mean that as a briefless barrister I have ample time at my command, and I shall only be too happy to place it and myself at your service. And moreover," he added in a lighter tone, "I have some selfish interest in the matter, also, for it is not every one who finds so difficult a riddle as this to solve. I shall never rest easy in my mind until I unravel the whole of this tangled skein."

"How good you are!" cried Diana, impulsively extending her hand. "It is as impossible for me to thank you sufficiently now for your kindness as it will be to reward you hereafter, should we succeed."

"As to my reward," said Lucian, retaining her hand longer than was necessary, "we can decide what I merit when your father's death is avenged."

Diana coloured and turned away her eyes, withdrawing her hand in the meantime from the too warm clasp of the young man. A sense of his meaning was suddenly borne in upon her by look and clasp, and she felt a maidenly confusion at the momentary boldness of this undeclared lover. However, with feminine tact she laughed off the hint, and shortly afterwards took her leave, promising to communicate as speedily as possible with Lucian regarding the circumstances of her visit to Bath.

The barrister wished to escort her back to the Royal John Hotel in Kensington, but Miss Vrain, guessing his feelings, would not permit this; so Lucian, hat in hand, was left standing in Geneva Square, while his divinity drove off in a prosaic hansom. With her went the glory of the sunlight, the sweetness of the spring; and Denzil, more in love than ever, sighed hugely as he walked slowly back to his lodgings.

For doleful moods, hard work and other interests are the sole cure; therefore, that same afternoon Lucian returned to explore the Silent House on his own account. It had struck him as suggestive that the parti-coloured ribbon to which Diana attached such importance should have been found in so out-of-the-way a corner as the threshold of the door which conducted to what Mrs. Kebby, with characteristic misrepresentation, called the woodshed. In reality the place in question was a cellar, which extended under the soil of the back yard, and was lighted from the top by a skylight placed on a level with the ground.

On being admitted again by Mrs. Kebby, and sending that ancient female to her Augean task of cleansing the house, Lucian descended to the basement in order to examine kitchen and cellar more particularly. If, as Diana stated, the ribbon had been knotted loosely about the hilt of the stiletto, it must have fallen off unnoticed by the assassin when, weapon in hand, he was retreating from the scene of crime.

"He must have come down here from the sitting-room," mused Denzil, as he stood in the cool, damp kitchen. "And – as the ribbon was found by Mrs. Kebby near yonder door – it is most probable that he left the kitchen by that passage for the cellar. Now it remains for me to find out how he made his exit from the cellar; and also I must look for the stiletto, which he possibly dropped in his flight, as he did the ribbon."

While thus soliloquising, Denzil lighted a candle which he had taken the precaution to bring with him for the purpose of making his underground explorations. Having thus provided himself with means to dispel the darkness, he stepped into the door and descended the stone stairs which led to the cellars.

At the foot of the steps he found himself in a passage running from the front to the back of the house, and forthwith turned to the right in order to reach the particular cellar, which was dug out in the manner of a cave under the back yard.

This, as Lucian ascertained by walking round, was faced with stone and had bins on all four sides for the storage of wine. Overhead there was a glass skylight, of which the glass was so dusty and dirty that only a few rays of light could struggle into the murky depths below. But what particularly attracted the attention of Denzil was a short wooden ladder lying on the stone pavement, and which probably was used to reach the wine in the upper bins.

"And I should not be surprised if it had been used for another purpose," murmured Lucian, glancing upward at the square aperture of the skylight.

It struck him as possible that a stranger could enter thereby and descend by the ladder. To test the truth of this he reared the ladder in the middle of the cellar so that its top rung rested against the lower edge of the square overhead. Ascending carefully – for the ladder was by no means stout – he pushed the glass frame upward and found that it yielded easily to a moderate amount of strength. Climbing up, step after step, Lucian arose through the aperture like a genie out of the earth, and soon found that he could jump easily out of the cellar into the yard.

"Good!" he exclaimed, much gratified by this discovery. "I now see how the assassin entered. No wonder the kitchen door was bolted and barred, and that no one was seen to visit Vrain by the front door. Any one who knew the position of that skylight could obtain admission easily, at any hour, by descending the ladder and passing through cellar and kitchen to the upper part of the house. So much is clear, but I must next discover how those who entered got into this yard."

And, indeed, there seemed no outlet, for the yard was enclosed on three sides by a fence of palings the height of a man, and rendered impervious to damp by a coating of tar; on the fourth side by the house itself. Only over the fence – which was no insuperable obstacle – could a stranger have gained access to the yard; and towards the fence opposite to the house Lucian walked. In it there was no gate, or opening of any kind, so it would appear that to come into the yard a stranger would need to climb over, a feat easily achieved by a moderately active man.

As Denzil examined this frail barrier his eye was caught by a fluttering object on the left – that is, the side in a line with the skylight. This he found was the scrap of a woman's veil of thin black gauze spotted with velvet. At once his thoughts reverted to the shadow of the woman on the blind, and the suspicions of Diana Vrain.

"Great heavens!" he thought, "can that doll of a Lydia be guilty, after all?"

CHAPTER XII
THE VEIL AND ITS OWNER

As may be surmised, Lucian was considerably startled by the discovery of this important evidence so confirmative of Diana's suspicions. Yet the knowledge which Link had gained relative to Mrs. Vrain's remaining at Berwin Manor to keep Christmas seemed to contradict the fact; and he could by no means reconcile her absence with the presence on the fence of the fragment of gauze; still less with the supposition that she must have climbed over a tolerably difficult obstacle to enter the yard, let alone the necessity – by no means easy to a woman – of descending into the disused cellar by means of a shaky and fragile ladder.

"After all," thought Lucian, when he was seated that same evening at his dinner, "I am no more certain that the veil is the property of Mrs. Vrain than I am that she was the woman whose shadow I saw on the blind. Whosoever it was that gained entrance by passing over fence and through cellar, must have come across the yard belonging to the house facing the other road. Therefore, the person must be known to the owner of that house, and I must discover who the owner is. Miss Greeb will know."

Lucian made this last remark with the greatest confidence, as he was satisfied, from a long acquaintance with his landlady, that there was very little concerning her own neighbourhood of which she was ignorant. The result verified his belief, for when Miss Greeb came in to clear the table – a duty she invariably undertook so as to have a chance of conversing with her admired lodger – she was able to afford him the fullest information on the subject. The position of the house in question; the name of its owner; the character of its tenants; she was thoroughly well posted up in every item, and willingly imparted her knowledge with much detail and comment.

"No. 9 Jersey Street," said she, unhesitatingly; "that is the number of the house at the back of the haunted mansion, Mr. Denzil. I know it as well as I know my ten fingers."

"To whom does it belong?" asked Lucian.

"Mr. Peacock; he owns most of the property round about here, having bought up the land when the place was first built on. He's seventy years of age, you know, Mr. Denzil," continued Miss Greeb conversationally, "and rich! – Lord! I don't know how rich he is! Building houses cheap and letting them dear; he has made more out of that than in sanding his sugar and chicorying his coffee. He – "

"What is the name of the tenant?" interrupted Lucian, cutting short this rapid sketch of Peacock's life.

"Mrs. Bensusan, one of the largest women hereabouts."

"I don't quite understand."

"Fat, Mr. Denzil. She turns the scale at eighteen stone, and has pretty well broke every weighing machine in the place."

"What reputation has she, Miss Greeb?"

"Oh, pretty good," said the little woman, shrugging her shoulders, "though they do say she overcharges and underfeeds her lodgers."

"She keeps a boarding-house, then?"

"Well, she lets rooms," explained Miss Greeb in a very definite manner, "and those who live in them supply their own food, and pay for service and kitchen fire."

"Who is with her now?"

"No one," replied the landlady promptly. "She's had her bill up these three months. Her last lodger left about Christmas."

"What is his name – or her name?"

"Oh, it was a 'he,'" said Miss Greeb, smiling.

"Mrs. Bensusan prefers gentlemen, who are out of doors all day, to ladies muddling and meddling all day about the house. I must say I do, too, Mr. Denzil," ended the lady, with a fascinating glance.

"What is his name, Miss Greeb?" repeated Lucian, quite impervious to the hint.

"Let me see," said Miss Greeb, discomfited at the result of her failure. "A queer name that had to do with payments. Bill as the short for William. No, it wasn't that, although it does suggest an account. Quarterday? No. But it had something to do with quarter-days. Rent!" finished Miss Greeb triumphantly. "Rent, with a 'W' before it."

"W-r-e-n-t!" spelled Lucian.

"Yes. Wrent! Mr. Wrent. A strange name, Mr. Denzil – a kind of charade, as I may say. He was with Mrs. Bensusan six months; came to her house about the time Mr. Berwin hired No. 13."

"Very strange!" assented Lucian, to stop further comment. "What kind of a man was this Mr. Wrent?"

"I don't know. I never heard much about him," replied Miss Greeb regretfully. "May I ask why you want to know all this, Mr. Denzil?"

Lucian hesitated, as he rather dreaded the chattering tongue of his landlady, and did not wish his connection with the Vrain case to become public property in Geneva Square. Still, Miss Greeb was a valuable ally, if only for her wide acquaintance with the neighbourhood, its inhabitants, and their doings. Therefore, after a moment's reflection, he resolved to secure Miss Greeb as a coadjutor, and risk her excessive garrulity.

"Can you keep a secret, Miss Greeb?" he asked, with impressive solemnity.

Struck by his serious air, and at once on fire with curiosity to learn its reason, Miss Greeb loudly protested that she should sooner die than breathe a word of what her lodger was about to divulge. She hinted, with many a mysterious look and nod, that secrets endangering the domestic happiness of every family in the square were known to her, and appealed to the fact that such families still lived in harmony as a proof that she was to be trusted.

"Wild horses wouldn't drag out of me what I know!" cried Miss Greeb earnestly. "You can confide in me as you would in a" – she was about to say mother, but recollecting her juvenile looks, substituted the word "sister."

"Very good," said Lucian, explaining just as much as would serve his purpose. "Then I may tell you, Miss Greeb, that I suspect the assassin of Mr. Vrain entered through Mrs. Bensusan's house, and so got into the yard of No. 13."

"Lord!" cried Miss Greeb, taken by surprise. "You don't say, sir, that Mr. Wrent is a murdering villain, steeped in gore?"

"No! No!" replied Lucian, smiling at this highly-coloured description. "Do not jump to conclusions, Miss Greeb. So far as I am aware, this Mr. Wrent you speak of is innocent. Do you know Mrs. Bensusan and her house well?"

"I've visited both several times, Mr. Denzil."

"Well, then, tell me," continued the barrister, "is the house built with a full frontage like those in this square? I mean, to gain Mrs. Bensusan's back yard is it necessary to go through Mrs. Bensusan's house?"

"No," replied Miss Greeb, shutting her eyes to conjure up the image of her friend's premises. "You can go round the back through the side passage which leads in from Jersey Road."

"H'm!" said Lucian in a dissatisfied tone. "That complicates matters."

"How so, sir?" demanded the curious landlady.

"Never mind just now, Miss Greeb. Do you think you could draw me a plan of this passage of Mrs. Bensusan's house, and of No. 13, with the yards between?"

"I never could sketch," said Miss Greeb regretfully, "and I am no artist, Mr. Denzil, but I think I can do what you want."

"Here is a sheet of paper and a pencil. Will you sketch me the houses as clearly as you can?"

With much reflection and nibbling of the pencil, and casting of her eyes up to the ceiling to aid her memory, Miss Greeb in ten minutes produced the required sketch.

"There you are, Mr. Denzil," said Miss Greeb, placing this work of art before the barrister, "that's as good as I can draw."

"It is excellent, Miss Greeb," replied Lucian, examining the plan. "I see that anyone can get into Mrs. Bensusan's yard through the side passage."

"Oh, yes; but I don't think a person could without being seen by Mrs. Bensusan or Rhoda."

"Who is Rhoda?"

"The servant. She's as sharp as a needle, but an idle slut, for all that, Mr. Denzil. They say she's a gypsy of some kind."

"Is the gate of this passage locked at night?"

"Not that I know of."

"Then what is to prevent any one coming in under cover of darkness and climbing the fence? He would escape then being seen by the landlady and her servant."

"I daresay; but he'd be seen climbing over the fence from the back windows of the houses on each side of No. 13."

"Not if he chose a dark night for the climbing."

"Well, even if he did, how could he get into No. 13?" argued Miss Greeb. "You know I've read the report of the case, Mr. Denzil, and it couldn't be found out (as the kitchen door was locked, and no stranger entered the square) how the murdering assassin got in."

"I may discover even that," replied Lucian, not choosing to tell Miss Greeb that he had already discovered the entrance. "With time and inquiry and observation we can do much. Thank you, Miss Greeb," he continued, slipping the drawing of the plan into his breast coat pocket. "I am much obliged for your information. Of course you'll repeat our conversation to no one?"

"I swear to breathe no word," said Miss Greeb dramatically, and left the room greatly pleased with this secret understanding, which had quite the air of an innocent intrigue such as was detailed in journals designed for the use of the family circle.

For the next day or two Lucian mused over the information he had obtained, and made a fresh drawing of the plan for his own satisfaction; but he took no steps on this new evidence, as he was anxious to submit his discoveries to Miss Vrain before doing so. At the present time Diana was at Bath, taking possession of her ancestral acres, and consulting the family lawyer on various matters connected with the property.

Once she wrote to Lucian, advising him that she had heard several pieces of news likely to be useful in clearing up the mystery; but these she refused to communicate save at a personal interview. Denzil was thus kept in suspense, and unable to rest until he knew precisely the value of Miss Vrain's newly acquired information; therefore it was with a feeling of relief that he received a note from her asking him to call at three o'clock on Sunday at the Royal John Hotel.

Since her going and coming a week had elapsed.

Now that his divinity had returned, and he was about to see her again, the sun shone once more in the heavens for Lucian, and he arrayed himself for his visit with the utmost care. His heart beat violently and his colour rose as he was ushered into the little sitting-room, and he thought less of the case at the moment than of the joy in seeing Miss Vrain once more, in hearing her speak, and watching her lovely face.

On her part, Diana, recollecting their last meeting, or more particularly their parting, blushed in her turn, and gave her hand to the barrister with a new-born timidity. She also was inclined to like Lucian more than was reasonable for the peace of her heart; so these two people, each drawn to the other, should have come together as lovers even at this second meeting.

But, alas! for the prosaicness of this workaday world, they had to assume the attitudes of lawyer and client; and discourse of crime instead of love. The situation was a trifle ironical, and must have provoked the laughter of the gods.

"Well?" asked Miss Vrain, getting to business as soon as Lucian was seated, "and what have you found out?"

"A great deal likely to be of service to us. And you?"

"I!" replied Miss Vrain in a satisfied tone. "I have discovered that the stiletto with the ribbon is gone from the library."

"Who took it away?"

"No one knows. I can't find out, although I asked all the servants; but it has been missing from its place for some months."

"Do you think Mrs. Vrain took it?"

"I can't say," replied Diana, "but I have made one discovery about Mrs. Vrain which implicates her still more in the crime. She was not in Berwin Manor on Christmas Eve, but in town."

"Really!" said Lucian much amazed. "But Link was told that she spent Christmas in the Manor at Bath."

"So she did. Link asked generally, and was answered generally. Mrs. Vrain went up to town on Christmas Eve and returned on Christmas Day; but," said Diana, with emphasis, "she spent the night in town, and on that night the murder was committed."

Lucian produced his pocketbook and took therefrom the fragment of gauze, which he handed to Diana.

"I found this on the fence at the back of No. 13," he said. "It is a veil – a portion of a velvet-spotted veil."

"A velvet-spotted veil!" cried Diana, looking at it. "Then it belongs to Lydia Vrain. She usually wears velvet-spotted veils. Mr. Denzil, the evidence is complete – that woman is guilty!"