""And after that interview the young lady changed her opinion all of a sudden, and would have it that the banker was innocent?" asked Mr.
Carter.
""Yes; when Margaret returned from Maudesley Abbey she declared her conviction of Henry Dunbar"s innocence."
""And she refused to fulfil her engagement with you?"
""She did."
"The detective left off fingering fugues upon his knees, and began to scratch his head, slowly pushing his hand up and down amongst his iron-grey hair, and staring at me. I saw now that this stony glare was only the fixed expression of Mr. Carter"s face when he was thinking profoundly, and that the relentlessness of his gaze had very little relation to the object at which he gazed.
"I watched his face as he pondered, in the hope of seeing some sudden mental illumination light up his stolid countenance: but I watched in vain. I saw that he was at fault: I saw that Margaret Wilmot"s conduct was quite as inexplicable to him as it had been to me.
""Mr. Dunbar"s a very rich man," he said, at last; "and money generally goes a good way in these cases. There was a political party, Sir Robert somebody--but not Sir Robert Peel--who said, "Every man has his price."
Now, do you think it possible that Miss Wilmot would take a bribe, and hold her tongue?"
""Do I think that she would take money from the man she suspected as the murderer of her father--the man she knew to have been the enemy of her father? No," I answered, resolutely; "I am certain that she is incapable of any such baseness. The idea that she had been bribed flashed across me in the first bitterness of my anger: but even then I dismissed it as incredible. Now that I can think coolly of the business, I know that such an alternative is impossible. If Margaret Wilmot has been influenced by Henry Dunbar, it is upon her terror that he has acted.
Heaven knows how he may have threatened her! The man who could lure his old servant into a lonely wood and there murder him--the man who, neither early nor late, had one touch of pity for the tool and accomplice of his youthful crime--not one lingering spark of compa.s.sion for the humble friend who sacrificed an honest name in order to serve his master--would have little compunction in torturing a friendless girl who dared to come before him in the character of an accuser."
""But you say that Miss Wilmot was resolute and high-spirited. Is she a likely person to be governed by her terror of Mr. Dunbar? What threat could he use to terrify her?"
"I shook my head hopelessly.
""I am as ignorant as you are," I said; "but I have strong reason to believe that Margaret Wilmot was under the influence of some great terror when she returned from Maudesley Abbey."
""What reason?" asked Mr. Carter.
""Her manner was sufficient evidence that she had been frightened. Her face was as white as a sheet of paper when I met her, and she trembled and shrank away from me, as if even my presence was horrible to her."
""Could you manage to repeat what she said that night and the next morning?"
"It was not very pleasant to me to re-open my wounds for the benefit of Mr. Carter the detective; but it would have been absurd to thwart the man when he was working in my interests. I loved Margaret too well to forget anything she ever said to me, even in our happiest and most careless hours: and I had special reason to remember that cruel farewell interview, and the strange scene in the corridor at the Reindeer, on the night of her return from Maudesley Abbey. I went over all this ground again, therefore, for Mr. Carter"s edification, and told him, word for word, all that Margaret had said to me. When I had finished, he relapsed once more into a reverie, during which I sat listening to the ticking of an eight-day clock in the pa.s.sage outside our sitting-room, and the occasional tramp of a pa.s.sing footstep on the pavement below our windows.
""There"s only one thing strikes me very particular in all you"ve told me," the detective said, by-and-by, when I had grown tired of watching him, and had suffered my thoughts to wander back to the happy time in which Margaret and I had loved and trusted each other; "there"s only one thing strikes me in all the young lady said to you, and that is these words--"There is contamination in my touch," Miss Wilmot says to you. "I am unfit to be the a.s.sociate of an honest man," Miss Wilmot says to you.
Now, that looks as if she had been bought over somehow or other by Mr.
Dunbar. I"ve turned it over in my mind every way; and however I reckon it up, that"s about what it comes to. The young woman was bought over, and she was ashamed of herself for being bought over."
"I told Mr. Carter that I could never bring myself to believe this.
""Perhaps not, sir, but it may be gospel truth for all that. There"s no other way I can account for the young woman"s carryings on. If Mr.
Dunbar was innocent, and had contrived, somehow or other, to convince the young woman of his innocence, why, she"d have come to you free and open, and would have said, "My dear, I"ve made a mistake about Mr.
Dunbar, and I"m very sorry for it; but we must look somewhere else for my poor pa"s murderer." But what does the young woman do? She goes and sc.r.a.pes herself along the pa.s.sage-wall, and shudders and shivers, and says, "I"m a wretch; don"t touch me--don"t come near me." It"s just like a woman, to take the bribe, and then be sorry for having taken it."
"I said nothing in answer to this. It was inexpressibly obnoxious to me to hear my poor Margaret spoken of as "a young woman" by my business-like companion. But there was no possibility of keeping any veil over the sacred mysteries of my heart. I wanted Mr. Carter"s help.
For the present Margaret was lost to me; and my only hope of penetrating the hidden cause of her conduct lay in Mr. Carter"s power to solve the dark enigma of Joseph Wilmot"s death.
""Oh, by the bye," exclaimed the detective, "there was a letter, wasn"t there?"
"He held out his hand as I searched for the letter in my pocket-book.
What a greedy, inquisitive-looking palm it seemed! and how I hated Mr.
Henry Carter, detective officer, at that particular moment!
"I gave him the letter; and I did not groan aloud as I handed it to him.
He read it slowly, once, twice, three times--half-a-dozen times, I think, in all--pushing the fingers of his left hand through his hair as he read, and frowning at the paper before him. It was while he was reading the letter for the last time that I saw a sudden glimmer of light in his hard eyes, and a half-smile playing round his thin lips.
""Well?" I said, interrogatively, as he gave me back the letter.
""Well, sir, the young lady,"--Mr. Carter called Margaret a young lady this time, and I could not help thinking that her letter had revealed her to him as something different from the ordinary cla.s.s of female popularly described as a young woman,--"the young lady was in earnest when she wrote that letter, sir," he said; "it wasn"t written under dictation, and she wasn"t bribed to write it. There"s heart in it, sir, if I may be allowed the expression: there"s a woman"s heart in that letter: and when a woman"s heart is once allowed scope, a woman"s brains shrivel up like so much tinder. I put this letter to that speech in the corridor at the Reindeer, Mr. Austin; and out of those two twos I verily believe I can make the queerest four that was ever reckoned up by a first-cla.s.s detective."
"A faint flush, which looked like a glow of pleasure, kindled all over Mr. Carter"s sallow face as he spoke, and he got up and walked about the room; not slowly or thoughtfully, but with a brisk eager tread that was new to me. I could see that his spirits had risen a great many degrees since the reading of the letter.
""You have got some clue," I said; "you see your way----"
"He turned round and checked my eager curiosity by a warning gesture of his uplifted hand.
""Don"t be in a hurry, sir," he said, gravely; "when you lose your way of a dark night, in a swampy country, and see a light ahead, don"t begin to clap your hands and cry hooray till you know what kind of light it is. It may be a Jack-o"-lantern; or it may be the identical lamp over the door of the house you"re bound for. You leave this business to me, Mr. Austin, and don"t you go jumping at conclusions. I"ll work it out quietly: and when I"ve worked it out I"ll tell you what I think of it.
And now suppose we take a stroll through the cathedral-yard, and have a look at the place where the body was found."
""How shall we find out the exact spot?" I asked, while I was putting on my hat and overcoat.
""Any pa.s.ser-by will point it out," Mr. Carter answered; "they don"t have a popular murder in the neighbourhood of Winchester every day; and when they do, I make not the least doubt they know how to appreciate the advantage. You may depend upon it, the place is pretty well known."
"It was nearly five o"clock by this time. We went down the slippery oak-staircase, and out into the quiet street. A bleak wind was blowing down from the hills, and the rooks" nests high up in the branches of the old trees about the cathedral were rocking like that legendary cradle in the tree-top. I had never been in Winchester before, and I was pleased with the quaint old houses, the towering cathedral, the flat meadows, and winding streams of water rippled by the wind. I was soothed, somehow or other, by the peculiar quiet of the scene; and I could not help thinking that, if a man"s life was destined to be miserable, Winchester would be a nice place for him to be miserable in. A dreamy, drowsy, forgotten city, where the only changes of the slow day would be the varying chimes of the cathedral clock, the different tones of the cathedral bells.
"Mr. Carter had studied every sc.r.a.p of evidence connected with the murder of Joseph Wilmot. He pointed out the door at which Henry Dunbar had gone into the cathedral, the pathway which the two men had taken as they went towards the grove. We followed this pathway, and walked to the very place in which the murdered man had been found.
"A lad who was fishing in one of the meadows near the grove went with us to show us the exact spot. It was between an elm and a beech.
""There"s not many beeches in the grove," the lad said, "and this is the biggest of them. So that it"s easy enough for any one to pick out the spot. It was very dry weather last August at the time of the murder, and the water wasn"t above half as deep as it is now."
""Is it the same depth every where?" Mr. Carter asked.
""Oh, dear no," the boy said; "that"s what makes these streams so dangerous for bathing: they"re shallow enough in some places; but there"s all manner of holes about; and unless you"re a good swimmer, you"d better not try it on."
"Mr. Carter gave the boy sixpence and dismissed him. We strolled a little farther on, and then turned and went back towards the cathedral.
My companion was very silent, and I could see that he was still thinking. The change that had taken place in his manner after he had read Margaret"s letter had inspired me with new confidence in him, and I was better able to await the working out of events. Little by little the solemn nature of the business in which I was engaged grew and gathered force in my mind, and I felt that I had something more to do than to solve the mystery of Margaret"s conduct to myself: I had to perform a duty to society, by giving my uttermost help towards the discovery of Joseph Wilmot"s murderer.
"If the heartless a.s.sa.s.sin of this wretched man was suffered to live and prosper, to hold up his head as the master of Maudesley Abbey, the chief partner in a great City firm that had borne an honourable name for a century and a half, a kind of premium was offered to crime in high places. If Henry Dunbar had been some miserable starving creature, who, in a fit of mad fury against the inequalities of life, had lifted his gaunt arm to slay his prosperous brother for the sake of bread--detectives would have dogged his sneaking steps, and watched his guilty face, and hovered round and about him till they tracked him to his doom. But because in this case the man to whom suspicion pointed had the supreme virtues comprised in a million of money, Justice wore her thickest bandage, and the officials, who are so clever in tracking a low-born wretch to the gallows, held aloof, and said respectfully, "Henry Dunbar is too great a man to be guilty of a diabolical crime."
"These thoughts filled my mind as I walked back to the George Hotel with Mr. Carter.
"It was half-past six when we entered the house, and we had kept dinner waiting half an hour, much to the regret of the most courteous of waiters, who expressed intense anxiety about the condition of the fish.
"As the man hovered about us at dinner, I expected every moment that Mr.
Carter would lead up to the only topic which had any interest either for himself or me. But he was slow to do this; he talked of the town, the last a.s.sizes, the state of the country, the weather, the prosperity of the trout-fishing season--everything except the murder of Joseph Wilmot.
It was only after dinner, when some petrified specimens of dessert, in the shape of almonds and raisins, figs and biscuits, had been arranged on the table, that any serious business began. The preliminary skirmishing had not been without its purpose, however; for the waiter had been warmed into a communicative and confidential mood, and was now ready to tell us anything he knew.
"I delegated all our arrangements to my companion; and it was something wonderful to see Mr. Carter lolling in his arm-chair with what he called the "wine-cart" in his hand, deliberating between a forty-two port, "light and elegant," and a forty-five port, "tawny and rich bouquet."