Kitabı oku: «The House 'Round the Corner», sayfa 15
CHAPTER XV
THE LAYING OF THE GHOST
It has been seen that Dalrymple had a short way with the Percy Whittakers of this world. He strode up the garden path and confronted Whittaker, who was standing on one foot and clinging in pain and terror to Dr. Scaife and the nurse.
"You had better remain here," he said sternly. "Miss Ogilvey has only gone to meet her mother at York. Both ladies will probably arrive this evening. Why are you making yourself a nuisance when everyone is doing all that is possible to serve you?"
Whittaker clutched the doctor even more tightly.
"He says that before witnesses," he quavered, "yet less than an hour ago he tried to strangle me."
"Stuff and nonsense! I don't believe it!" protested Scaife emphatically.
"I frightened him, undoubtedly," said Dalrymple. "It was necessary. Sometimes a threatened spanking is as effectual as the real thing, and Mr. Whittaker's nervous system has led him to take an exaggerated view of my intentions. The fact is that he himself was responsible for a show of violence on my part. Meanwhile, Marguérite Ogilvey, whom you have always known as Meg Garth, Dr. Scaife, has promised to become my wife, so Mr. Whittaker and I have no further cause for quarrel. Indeed, by the time he is able to walk downstairs unassisted, his own good sense will come to the rescue, and blot out any unpleasant memories as between him and me… Now, Percy, my boy, let me use my muscles to better purpose than choking the life out of you. I'm going to carry you back to bed again."
His air of quiet domination, no less than the news which sounded the knell of Whittaker's hopes, seemed to mesmerize the neurotic youth into silence and submission. Dalrymple took him in his arms, lifted him off the ground with gentle care, and carried him to the bedroom he had insisted on leaving. The nurse followed, and he left the invalid in her care.
Hastening to the porch, he found Dr. Scaife mopping his forehead; the worthy doctor was more upset by the frenzied statements made by Percy than by the physical effort involved by carrying him downstairs.
"Wait one moment," he said. "I'm bringing in some men whom you know. Then I shall explain everything."
He passed on to the gate.
"I want you, Hutton, and you, Mr. Dobb, to come into the house. Those police officers also had better join us. Who is the other man?"
"Mr. Banks, of the Nuttonby Gazette," said the baronet.
"Very well. Let him come, too. Better tell him what he must not say rather than correct his blunders subsequently in a court of law."
Mr. Dobb, being a lawyer, doubted the wisdom of admitting a representative of the press to their conclave, but Dalrymple's air of authority kept him dumb. During the drive from Nuttonby the delegate of the India Office had discoursed on the important position this stranger occupied in India, and it was not for a country solicitor, who hardly guessed what was coming, to question his decision before he knew its scope.
And therein Dalrymple showed his genius. Banks, already in a flutter because of certain indiscretions in his printed references to the inquest, was at once soothed and gratified by the great man's tact. The police superintendent found the ground cut away from beneath his feet by the full and complete version of recent events which Dalrymple supplied. Sir Berkeley and the doctor listened to the recital with ill-suppressed amazement, but, at the end, they agreed, each and all, with Dalrymple's suggestion that judgment should be suspended until Mrs. Ogilvey was in Elmdale.
He did not attempt to argue that the law should not take its course.
"During the past ten years," he said, "I have held the lives and liberties of two millions of people in my keeping, so I need hardly say that I am a most unlikely person to fly in the face of authority. But there are circumstances connected with this inquiry which call for careful treatment. Some man died here, and was buried, and the law must be satisfied that Mr. Stephen Ogilvey was either ignorant of the occurrence, or had no guilty knowledge of it – which is not quite the same thing – before he can be exonerated from the grave suspicion at present attached to his actions of two years ago. Now, I have not the honor of knowing either Mr. Ogilvey or his wife, but I do hold that they could not have won the respect of their neighbors during twenty years of residence in this house and yet be capable of planning and committing an atrocious murder. I would point out that Mrs. Ogilvey shares some of the blame, or the guilt, of her husband. If he is a criminal, she knows it. The law looks with lenient eyes on a woman who shields a man in such conditions, but that element in human affairs only goes to strengthen my contention that Mrs. Ogilvey can, if she chooses, throw a flood of light on this strange problem. She is now on her way North. Her daughter has gone to York to meet her. In all likelihood, one or both ladies will be in Elmdale to-night. Is it not reasonable to ask that investigation by the police into a singular occurrence now two years old should be postponed till to-morrow? Gentlemen, I promise you this. Come here to-morrow, say, about two o'clock, and you will be placed in possession of every fact then known to me. It is obvious, in my opinion, that the police can hardly adopt any other course, but I am bound to point out to Mr. Banks that the man who writes, and the newspaper which publishes, theories or speculations with regard to this matter before it is fully cleared up through the proper channel, will incur a most serious responsibility."
Sir Berkeley Hutton, of course, had a word to say.
"Mr. Garth, or Mr. Ogilvey as you now call him, is an old and valued friend of mine," he declared, "and it is my fixed and definite belief that if he was stung by a wasp he would find some excuse for a poor insect which was only trying to protect itself from imaginary danger. Stephen Garth kill anybody! Stuff and nonsense!"
Mr. Dobb, too, was incredulous in so far as his friend's criminality was concerned.
"Mr. Garth certainly wrote the letter to the coroner," he said. "I saw it, and recognized his handwriting. Therefore, he knew that a death had taken place, and used a remarkably ingenious method of hoodwinking the authorities. That, in itself, is a legal offense – the magnitude of which alone can be estimated when we know the truth. I agree with Sir Robert Dalrymple. We must await Mrs. Garth's, or, I suppose I must learn to say, Mrs. Ogilvey's, arrival before any other steps are taken. Meanwhile, it is of the utmost importance that no word of this discussion shall travel beyond these four walls."
"Will Sir Robert Dalrymple undertake to notify me of Mrs. Ogilvey's presence?" was the very pertinent inquiry made by the police superintendent.
Dalrymple undertook readily to send a messenger into Nuttonby early next morning, and his diplomacy was rewarded by seeing the conclave break up on that understanding. Nevertheless, he passed a miserable and restless day. He had not stemmed the torrent, but diverted it. If his faith was not justified, if Marguérite's mother either refused to give any explanation of her husband's extraordinary ruse, or denied all knowledge of it, there was no getting away from the fact that the elderly recluse might soon be lodged in a felon's cell.
Marguérite herself would strain every nerve to save her father, if only by flight, but her lover realized how futile that would prove. He had secured a respite – and no more. If Mrs. Ogilvey's admissions led her daughter to journey on through the night to Warleggan, the girl might contrive to hurry her father out of England before the bolt fell. But to what avail? They would be traced with ease. Their flight, the pursuit, the arrest, would only add fuel to the flame lighted by inquisitive newspapers. Better, far better, that the man should face an inquiry at once rather than be put on trial after a vain attempt to escape.
It was almost a relief to visit Percy Whittaker during the afternoon, and endeavor to convert him from active enmity into a sulky acquiescence in things as they were, and not as he hoped they would be. Luckily, Dalrymple had estimated a curious temperament with singular accuracy. After a long conversation, in which the older man cajoled and flattered Percy by turns, the latter declared that he never meant to put his threat into force.
"I'm not such an ass as to want to marry a girl who loathed the sight of me," he said ruefully. "I tried to frighten Meg. I guessed she'd run off to Warleggan. My motive was to separate the pair of you. Then I'd follow, as soon as this confounded ankle of mine would permit, and tell her candidly that I was frantically jealous of you. Dash it all, and not without good cause! All's fair in love an' war, Mr. Armathwaite. I've a notion now that my splutter simply drove her into your arms."
"My name is not Armathwaite – " began Dalrymple, whereupon Whittaker glared at him in a new frenzy.
"I never thought it was!" he vociferated. "Let me tell you you're the biggest puzzle of the lot. I shan't be a bit surprised if you say you are the fellow who hanged somebody here, and persuaded old Garth to stand the racket."
So, to pass the time while the nurse was eating a meal, Dalrymple told him the story of Barapur, and Percy heard, and was subdued, since he knew now that, come what might, Marguérite Ogilvey was lost to him forever.
Then, while Dalrymple was surveying the day's work of Smith and his men, and declaring it was good, there came a messenger from Bellerby on a borrowed bicycle, bearing a telegram. It was from Marguérite, and Dalrymple's heart danced with joy when he read:
"All is well. Father leaves for York to-night. He will join mother and me early to-morrow. Expect us about ten o'clock. Am detaining car. Love, MEG."
All is well! What was well? It was a woman's message, which assumed everything and told nothing, except the one amazing fact that Stephen Ogilvey's wife had evidently decided that the period of concealment was ended, and that her husband should now vindicate himself in the eyes of his world.
At any rate, a youth returned to Bellerby with two bicycles and the richer by two sovereigns, so it is tolerably certain that Dalrymple's few words of congratulation were not delayed on the way.
The new tenant smoked and mused in the garden for another hour, until Betty came to summon him to dinner. He was entering the house when he saw the ghost again, a phantom divested now of eeriness, because a round blob of sunshine shone on the wall instead of the white sockets of eyes which lent such a ghoulish aspect to the shadowy face. Then he did a queer thing. Lifting the grandfather's clock, and disregarding the protest of weights and pendulum thumping against its wooden ribs, he placed it exactly where the reflection of the window fell. Instantly, the ghost vanished. The dark mahogany case absorbed the outlines of the figure. The old Spanish wood glowed richly here and there where the lights were strongest, and a disk of gold illumined the dull brass of the clock's face. And that was the end of the Elmdale ghost! Never again would it be seen until someone moved the clock, and Sir Robert Dalrymple vowed that such alteration should not occur in his time.
Luckily, Dr. Scaife came just as Dalrymple was sitting down to a solitary meal, and he was promptly bidden to the feast. Dalrymple showed him Marguérite's telegram, and they discussed it for an hour, or longer, though with no result, for they could only theorize, and, since truth is stranger than fiction, even two such acute minds failed to arrive at the actual solution of the mystery.
Dalrymple went late to bed, and awoke early, to find that the much-maligned British climate had produced another fine day. It was joyous to see the sun shining into his bedroom; it was still more joyous to descend the stairs, and glimpse the blue sky through the Black Prince's visor. A current of pure, sweet-scented air came through the orifice, and seemed to presage a new span of life to the old house; Dalrymple decided, then and there, that when the turmoil had subsided, he would commission the best obtainable artist in stained glass to restore the Black Prince's features in guise befitting his character as a warrior, statesman, and true lover.
A few minutes before ten Tom Bland came with a cartload of plants from a nursery. Smith and the laborers carried the boxes of flowers into the garden, and set them on both sides of the path, so that happy chance contrived that Marguérite should lead her parents to their old home through a blaze of color when the automobile brought them to the gate at ten o'clock.
It is not often that any collection of mortals is privileged to see a ghost in broad daylight, and in the rays of a powerful sun at that, but such was the lot of carrier Bland, gardener Smith, and four gaping yokels of Elmdale, not to mention a quite respectable number of other inhabitants, when Stephen Garth alighted from the car and walked jauntily up the garden to the porch of his own house. To save Mrs. Jackson and Betty from spasms, Dalrymple had warned them previously of Mr. Garth's coming, but the men, and Elmdale generally, were not thus enlightened, and some of them would certainly have bolted had they not seen "the new guv'nor" shaking hands with "the old guv'nor," and had not the latter stopped to greet Begonia Smith with the exceedingly trite remark:
"Well, Smith, I'm not so dead as you thought me!"
"No, sir," said Smith, who did not find his tongue again until the newcomers had gone into the Grange.
Then he turned to one of the men.
"All I can say, Henery, is this," he murmured huskily. "I've heerd of people lookin' as though they'd bin dead an' dug up, but I'll take my oath no one has dug Mr. Garth out o' Bellerby Churchyard."
"It must be all right, though," was the philosophic answer. "Miss Meg wouldn't look so happy if there was goin' to be trouble."
"Ay! But hurry up with those begonias. In with 'em!"
It would serve no good purpose to set forth in detail the manner in which Mr. and Mrs. Ogilvey cleared up the mystery on the one hand, and became mystified themselves on the other. Few parents can rear a charming daughter to womanhood without experiencing the surprise, almost the dismay, of finding that she has given her heart to a man of whom they know little. In this instance, a devoted father and an equally devoted mother could only listen in bewilderment when the girl, who was still a child in their eyes, introduced "Robert Armathwaite" as her promised husband, while their astonished eyes were only paralleled by Meg's own when the tall, grave-looking stranger proceeded to explain that he was not Robert Armathwaite, but Sir Robert Dalrymple, K.C.S.I.
Marguérite, at first, believed he was joking. When he assured her he was even more serious than usual, she relieved the situation by making an elaborate curtsey to her own reflection in an old-fashioned mirror in the drawing-room.
"Lady Dalrymple!" she cried. "Presented at court by her humble self! Sir Robert Dalrymple, K.C.S.I.! Lady Dalrymple, K.I.S.S.!"
Whereupon, she proceeded to invest each of them with her own order.
When the bench, the bar, the police, and the press were duly represented that afternoon, Mr. Stephen Ogilvey spoke fully and frankly. His wife and daughter were present, and, if Mrs. Ogilvey wept a little during the recital, it was only natural.
For she alone knew what this gentle-voiced, white-haired man had endured during those June days two years ago.
Even the tender-hearted Marguérite could never realize the exquisite torture which her father had suffered voluntarily. Perhaps the presence of her lover, combined with the reaction of the discovery that her father had committed no actual crime, rendered her temporarily incapable of appreciating the motives which accounted for his actions.
Be that as it may, this is his story:
"To make clear the reason which led me to deceive my friends in Elmdale in such an extraordinary way, I must go back twenty-four years in my life. I was then thirty-five years of age, and Professor of Philology in a recently-formed University in the Midlands. I was married, but, as some of you know, my first and only child was not born until the events happened which drove me into retirement, and led my dear wife and myself to seek the peace and seclusion of Elmdale."
It is not to be wondered at if Dalrymple and Marguérite exchanged smiling glances at those words; but the Professor's strange narrative should not be interrupted by lovers' confidences.
"I am a man of highly sensitive nature," he went on, "and my mind almost gave way under the shock when my brother James, somewhat older than myself, who occupied a prominent position in Birmingham as manager of an important private bank, was reported missing from his office under circumstances which pointed to a serious and systematic embezzlement of the bank's funds. Day by day the scandal enlarged its bounds. The bank closed its doors; hundreds of people were ruined; there were several cases of suicide among the robbed depositors; and, at last, my brother, James Ogilvey, was arrested in France, owing to a chance meeting with a man who knew him. He was brought to trial, sentenced to a long term of penal servitude, and passed into seeming oblivion accompanied by the curses of thousands. My wife and I literally could not hold up our heads among our friends in the Midlands, and, as we were not wholly dependent on my earnings, we resolved to change our name and start life anew. At that crisis, my mother died. Undoubtedly her death was hastened by my brother's wrong-doing, and it is probable that she destroyed a will already in existence, meaning to make another, but was stricken down by apoplexy before she could carry out her intention. At any rate, no will was found, so her property became intestate. This house and ground belonged to her, but she was unknown locally, as she left Elmdale more than half a century ago, so, after settling some legal matters, my wife and I determined to live here, and adopt my wife's maiden name. There was no great difficulty. I still continued to do my work, which was mainly of a specialist nature, under my own name, but in Elmdale I was always 'Stephen Garth,' and the catastrophe in the Midlands soon passed into the mists when our child was born.
"We reasoned that by the time she grew to womanhood, the memory of James Ogilvey's crime would have died away. At any rate, there was nothing to be gained by letting her know that such a person had ever existed, and you can take it from me that she was ignorant of the fact until a late hour yesterday. Some eight years ago, my unfortunate brother was released. I met him in London, supplied him with ample funds, and sent him to the Colonies, taking good care that he should know neither my altered name nor my address. I heard no more of him until the beginning of June, two years since, when he wrote to me as 'Stephen Garth,' said he was coming to live in my house, being tired of a roving life, and threatened to take lodgings in the village if I did not receive him. Now, my wife and I were determined that he should never cross our daughter's path if we could help it, so a journey to France was resolved on hastily and the two took their departure. For my own part, I decided to await my brother's coming, and try to reason with him. If he proved obdurate, I meant to join my wife and daughter abroad, and, to that end, as Mr. Dobb is aware, I made over all my property to my wife in trust for my daughter. This step was necessary, I believe, to save them from persecution at my brother's hands, because he had hinted at some grievance with regard to the disposition of my mother's estate, a grievance quite unfounded, since I had dealt with him most generously on his release from prison. In order to conceal his presence from the villagers until I had tried every argument to prevail on him to leave me and my family in peace, I arranged to meet him at Leyburn, and drive to the edge of the moor. I brought him to the house without anyone being the wiser, but I soon found I was a child in his hands. He played on my fear of publicity by agreeing to lie perdu if I would supply him with drink. I bore with the infliction for some days until, driven to despair, I refused to purchase any more alcohol. There was a furious scene between us, and he threatened not merely exposure, but legal proceedings to force me to 'disgorge,' as he put it, his share of the property left by our mother, whose maiden name, by the way, Faulkner, is well known here. I realize now that James was in a state verging on dementia, but I may sum up a distressing period of four days and nights of suffering by saying that, in a final paroxysm of rage, he was seized with apoplexy, and died almost instantaneously.
"Though convinced that he was dead, I hoped against hope for some hours. Then rigor mortis set in, and I knew that the only man who had ever inflicted an injury on my good name had struck his last and shrewdest blow by dying in my house. I want you to consider the position I was in. A man, a stranger, was lying there dead, in circumstances that demanded an inquest. I had not called for a doctor, or obtained any assistance locally. I had sent my wife and daughter to a foreign country, obviously to get them out of the way. A post-mortem examination would show that death had taken place nearly a day before I made any stir. If I destroyed certain documents in my brother's possession – such, for instance, as a ticket of leave, which he had retained long after its expiry for the mere purpose, I firmly believe, of bringing pressure to bear on me – there would be nothing to show his identity. In a word, there was a prima facie case of murder ready to be established against me. Of course, the medical evidence would go to prove my innocence, but all the world – all of my small world, at any rate – would gape and gossip because of the scandal which my wife and I had given more than twenty years of our life to escape. For the sake of my wife and daughter I resolved upon a daring expedient. The 'Ogilvey fraud' of a previous generation was forgotten. Why should I not resume my own name, and let my brother die and be buried as Stephen Garth? I saw that my own behavior during the past week would help the assumption that I had committed suicide, while a rather marked resemblance between my brother and myself, together with the fact that he had died from apoplexy, would complete the illusion. Moreover, there exists, in connection with this very house, a curious legend which condemned seven generations of its owners to die by violence, either self-inflicted, or caused by others. James Ogilvey's death was the seventh, and I trusted to this alleged prophecy of a Spanish priest put to death by a sea-rover named Faulkner in the seventeenth century being sufficiently well known in connection with a shadow, or manifestation, cast on the wall by a stained-glass window in the staircase.
"At any rate, I steeled my heart to a dreadful undertaking, dressed my brother in my own clothes, tied his body to a hook in the hall where the shadow I have spoken of is seen at this time of the year, and stole away across the moor after writing a letter to the coroner.
"Gentlemen, I believe I have broken the law in some respects, and I am prepared to suffer for my misdeeds. Perhaps, a long and blameless and not wholly useless life may plead for me now. I acted as I did because of a certain pride in my work, and because of my love for a dear wife and daughter. I dreamed that the dead past had indeed buried its dead but, by a most unusual combination of simple circumstances, the whole strange story has been brought to light. I have nothing more to say. Now that a long ordeal of silence is ended, I am happier to-day than I ever thought to be again in my existence. I can produce a certain number of documents to prove what I may term the historical part of my confession. The really vital part of it – the manner of my brother's death – can receive no other testimony than my own, eked out by such statement as my friend, Dr. Scaife, may find himself able to make after hearing my version of the tragedy."
Marguérite ran to her father and threw her arms around his neck.
"If they take you before a judge, dad," she cried, "let me go into court and tell them that I was the cause of all the trouble. Then he will warn me not to be such a bad little girl, and sympathize with you so greatly that he will say you leave the court without a stain on your character."
As a matter of fact, owing to the attitude of the authorities and with the active assistance of Banks in the columns of the Nuttonby Gazette, the official inquiry into the affair attracted very little notice. A ten-line paragraph explained that it was Mr. James Ogilvey who died, and not Mr. Stephen Garth, and a special faculty was obtained to correct the announcement on the stone in Bellerby churchyard. Naturally, the people in Elmdale and the neighborhood had a pretty fair knowledge of the truth, but everyone was so pleased to see the "professor" and his wife again that the thing was hushed up with remarkable ease. Even Percy Whittaker held his tongue.
Village gossip has it that Storr, the chauffeur, is badly smitten by Betty Jackson's charms. The girl's mother clinched matters by grumbling that "sen Betty's gotten a young man there's no doin' owt wi' her." And Begonia Smith turned the garden into a fairy-land that summer.
The Black Prince received his new and most impressive set of features before a certain noteworthy marriage took place, and beamed a courtly approval on the bride when she descended the stairs in her wedding dress. In fact, the Elmdale tragedy received its quietus when James Walker, senior, and James Walker, junior, watched Sir Robert and Lady Dalrymple drive past their office en route to Paris and the Continent.
Said the father:
"Little things often lead to the most surprising events. Who'd ha' thought, Jimmie, when we let the 'House 'Round the Corner' to a stranger named Robert Armathwaite, that we were indirectly bringing about the marriage of Meg Garth to Sir Robert Dalrymple?"
"Well, I didn't, for one!" said the son gloomily.
