"I heard you strike him; I heard him fall. Then I saw you running from the thing that you had done."
"You saw me running?"
"I saw you running. The moon was out; I saw you clearly running among the bushes and the trees. I did not know who it was had come until I saw you, then I knew. After you had gone I was afraid to go or stay.
Then I went to see what you had done. I saw your knife lying on the ground. I picked it up and took it home with me."
"I can easily believe you took it home with you."
"I have it now--to be produced, if need be in evidence."
"Of what?"
"Of your guilt! of what else?"
"She asks me such a question! Now let me tell you my story. If it lacks something of the air of verisimilitude which gives yours such a finish, let me remind you that there are those who lie like truth. After we had parted I discovered that I had left my knife behind--the one with which I had cut our initials on the tree. It was a knife I prized--never mind why. When I had allowed sufficient time to enable you to have reached home I returned to look for it. To my surprise, as I approached our trysting-place I heard voices--yours and a man"s. You were neither of you speaking in a whisper. At night in the open air sound travels far.
When I came a little nearer I saw you and a man. So I withdrew till I was out of sight again, and could only hear the faint sound of distant voices. Presently a gun was fired. I rushed forward to see by whom, and at what. When I came near enough there was a man staggering about underneath the tree. I saw you come out from among the bushes and look at him. You picked up a knife from the ground--my knife. I saw you drive it into his chest. As he fell--for ever--you ran off into the forest and I ran after you."
"You ran after me! after me?"
"After you; but you ran so quickly, or you knew your way so well, or I blundered, or something, because, after you had once disappeared in the wood, I never caught sight of you."
"And have you invented this story--which you tell extremely well--to save your neck at the expense of mine?"
"What an odd inquiry! Referring to your own tale, may I ask what motive you would ascribe to me, if you were asked what you suppose induced me, a peaceful, law-abiding citizen, to kill at sight--under circ.u.mstances of peculiar cowardice--an inoffensive stranger?"
"I imagined that you knew he was my husband, and that you killed him to relieve me. You see I credited you with something like chivalry."
"Did you indeed. And you would prost.i.tute the English language by calling conduct of that sort chivalry! However, it is plainly no use our pushing the discussion further. We appear to understand each other now if we never did before. Each proposes to save Jim Baker"s life--at a pinch--by sacrificing the other. Good! I must hold myself prepared. I had dreamt of discovering means of saving you from the consequences of your crime, but I had scarcely intended to go the lengths which you suggest--to offer myself instead of you. But then I did not credit you with the qualifications which you evidently possess. In the future I shall have to realise that, even if I save your life, I cannot save your soul, because, plainly, you intend to perjure that lightheartedly, and to stain it with the blood of two men instead of only one. Let me give you one warning. I see the strength of the case which your ingenious--and tortuous--brain may fabricate against me. Still, I think that it may fail; and that you may yourself fall into the pit which you have digged for me, for this reason. They know me, hereabouts and elsewhere; my record"s open to all the world. They don"t know you, as yet; when they do they"ll open their eyes and yours. Already some unpleasant tales are travelling round the country. I myself have been forced to listen to one or two, and keep still. When my story is told, and yours, I am afraid that your story will prove to be your own destruction; it will hang you, unless there comes a reprieve in time. I saw you kill your husband. You know I saw you; you know that I can prove I saw you. Therefore, take the advice I have already tendered, go back to Lake Como and further. Lest, peradventure, by staying you lose your life to save Jim Baker"s. Henceforward, Mrs Champion, the b.u.t.tons are off our foils; we fight with serious weapons--I against you and you against me. At least we have arrived at that understanding; to have a clear understanding of any sort is always something, and so, good-day."
CHAPTER XX
THE SOLICITOR"S CLERK
Hugh Morice was the first to leave the four crossroads; Miss Arnott stood some time after he had gone, thinking. Life had had for her some queer phases--none queerer than that which confronted her, as she stood thinking by the stile.
That Hugh Morice should have done the thing she knew he had done, was bad enough. That he should have denied it to her face in such explicit terms and coupled with his denial such a monstrous accusation, was inconceivable. He had not gone very far before she told herself that, after all, she had misunderstood him, she must have done. For some minutes she was half disposed to jump into her car, follow him and insist on a clearer explanation. He could not have meant what he had appeared to do, not seriously and in earnest.
But she refrained from putting her idea into execution as she recalled the almost savage fashion in which he had hurled opprobrium at her. He had meant it; he must have meant it, or he would not have spoken to her in such a strain. At the thought she shivered.
Because, if this were the case, if she really had to regard his words as seriously intended, then she would have to rearrange her whole outlook on to life, particularly that portion of it which was pressing so hardly on her now. In her blackest moments she had not credited Hugh Morice with being a scoundrel. He had been guilty of a crime, but she could have forgiven him for that. By what he had done he had separated himself from her for ever and for ever. Still, she could have looked at him across the dividing chasm with something tenderer than pity.
This new att.i.tude he had taken up altered the position altogether. If it meant anything it meant that he had killed Robert Champion for some recondite reason of his own--one with which she had no sort of connection. Obviously, if he had done it for her sake, he would not be so strenuous in denial; still less would he charge her with his crime.
Thus the whole business a.s.sumed a different complexion. The inference seemed to be that Hugh Morice and Robert Champion had not been strangers to each other. There had been that between them which induced the one to make away with the other when opportunity offered. The whole thing had been the action of a coward. In imagination the girl could see it all. Hugh Morice coming suddenly on the man he least expected--or desired--to meet; the great rush of his astonishment; the instant consciousness that his enemy was helpless; the sight of the knife; the irresistible, wild temptation; the yielding to it; the immediate after-pangs of conscience-stricken terror; the frantic flight through the moon-lit forest from the place of the shedding of blood.
And this was the man whom, almost without herself being aware of it, she had been making a hero of. This sordid wretch, who, not content with having slain a helpless man for some, probably wholly unworthy, purpose of his own, in his hideous anxiety to save his own miserable skin was willing, nay, eager, to sacrifice her. Possibly his desire to do so was all the greater because he was haunted by the voice of conscience crying out to him that this girl would not only be a continual danger, but that he would never be able to come into her presence without being racked by the knowledge that she knew him--no matter how gallantly he bore himself--to be the thing he really was.
So it was plain to her that here was a new danger sprung up all at once out of the ground, threatening more serious ills than any she had known. If Jim Baker was found guilty of this man"s crime, and she moved a finger to save him from his unmerited fate, then it might be that she would find herself in imminent peril of the gallows. For it needed but momentary consideration to enable her to perceive that what he had suggested was true enough, that if they began to accuse each other it would be easier, if he were set on playing the perjurer, to prove her guilt than his. And so quite possibly it might come about that, in order to save Jim Baker, it would be necessary she should hang. And life was yet young in her veins, and, though she had in it such sorry usage, still the world was very fair, and, consciously, in all her life she had never done an evil thing.
And then it was not strange that, there in the sunshine by the roadside, at the bare thought that it was even remotely possible that such a fate might be in store for her, she sat down on the stile, clinging to the rail, trembling from head to foot.
She would have sat there longer had she not been roused by a familiar, unescapable sound--the panting of a motor. Along the road was approaching a motor bicyclist. At sight of her, and of the waiting car, he stopped, raising his cap.
"I beg your pardon, but is there anything wrong with the car?"
She stood up, still feeling that, at anyrate, there was something wrong with the world, or with her.
"No, thank you, the car"s all right; I was only resting."
"I beg your pardon once more, but aren"t you Miss Arnott of Exham Park?"
She looked at the speaker, which hitherto she had avoided doing. He was a young man of four or five and twenty, with a not unpleasing countenance; so far as she knew, a stranger to her.
"I am, but I don"t know you."
"That is very possible--I am a person of no importance. My name is Adams--Charles Adams. I am clerk to Mr Parsloe, solicitor, of Winchester. We had a communication from a man who is in Winchester Gaol, waiting his trial for murder, a man named Baker. Possibly you have heard of him."
"Oh yes, I have heard of Jim Baker; he is a gamekeeper on my own estate."
"So he gave me to understand. Mr Parsloe sent me to see him. I did see him, in private. He gave me a note, which he was extremely anxious that I should give into your own hands. I was just coming on to Exham Park on the off-chance of finding you in. Perhaps you won"t mind my giving it to you now?"
"By all means. Why not?"
He had taken out of a leather case a piece of folded paper.
"You see it is rather a rough-and-ready affair, but I should like to give you my a.s.surance that I have no idea what it contains."
"I don"t suppose it would matter much if you did. Jim Baker is hardly likely to have a communication of a private nature to make to me."
"As to that I know nothing. I can only say that Baker was not satisfied till I had sworn that I would not attempt to even so much as peep at the contents of his note, or let it go out of my hands until it reached yours."
"Really?"
"Really! I never saw a man more desperately in earnest on a point of the kind."
"Jim Baker is a character."
"He certainly is. You will see that the note is written on a piece of rough paper. Where he got it from I don"t know, and was careful not to ask; but it looks suspiciously like a fly-leaf which had been torn out of a book. You are possibly aware that in prison, in the ordinary way, they are allowed neither paper, pen nor ink. I fancy you"ll find that this is written with a pencil. When I first saw it it had been simply folded, and one end slipped into the other. I happened to have some sealing-wax in my pocket. Baker insisted on my sealing it, in his presence, in three places, as you perceive, so that it was impossible to get at the contents without breaking the seals. I say all this because Baker himself was emphatically of opinion that this note contained matter of an extremely confidential nature, to which I should like you clearly to understand that I have had no sort of access. I may add another fact, of which you are also possibly aware, and that is that the whole transaction was irregular. He had no right to give me the note, and I had no right to convey it out of the prison; but he did the one, and I did the other, and here it is."
Mr Adams handed the lady the sc.r.a.p of paper, she asking him a question as he did so,--
"To whom did you say that you were clerk?"
"To Mr Parsloe, a well-known and highly-esteemed Winchester solicitor."