“Oh, not so old as she is now, of course. But— well, getting on, you know. I mean, she seemed old to me, even then. But of course——”
“Mr. Chitterwick!”
Once again it was the flame-coloured girl, and she spoke even more urgently than before. Mr. Chitterwick welcomed these signs of friendliness in one apparently so inhuman. “Yes?” he beamed.
“Did you go to the Chelsea flower show this year?”
As a keen member of the Royal Horticultural Society Mr. Chitterwick most certainly had been to the Chelsea flower show. He said so, with emphasis. The flame-coloured girl had not been, and it seemed that she too was an enthusiastic horticulturist. She was perhaps a little vague as to what branch of the art interested her particularly, but Mr. Chitterwick gathered that she was catholic in her horticultural tastes. Moreover, he found himself required to describe this year’s show to her, not merely tent by tent or stand by stand, but almost flower by flower. The flame-coloured girl without a doubt must be one of the world’s most enthusiastic gardeners. Delighted to have found this common ground on which he could meet this alarming young woman with practically no fear at all, Mr. Chitterwick embarked on a one-man dissertation with all the zest of a hobbyist whose hobbies are his life. Whenever he showed signs of flagging his fellow enthusiast would revive him again with some such remark as “But what about the cinerarias?” or “You haven’t told me about the cobaea scandens yet.” The dissertation, in consequence, was still in progress when Lady Milborne rose at the end of dinner.
For twenty minutes Mr. Chitterwick sipped his port and listened to a desultory conversation between the other two men about how many eggs old Tom had put down last year, and how many brace old Bob had bagged when he went over to old Bill’s, and other such abstruse mysteries. It was good port, very good port (’87, fancied Mr. Chitterwick, who imagined himself able to tell one port from another), but he had remembered that he had completely forgotten to tell the flame-coloured girl about the crapula bulbosa in Messrs. Whatnot’s display, and even the port could not allay his anxiety to retrieve this omission. When at last his host led the way to the drawing-room Mr. Chitterwick followed with an eager alacrity that he had never before experienced at this difficult stage of the evening’s proceedings.
The flame-coloured girl was sitting alone on a settee close to a big open French window leading on to a stone-flagged terrace outside, and it seemed to Mr. Chitterwick that she had been awaiting him. He plumped down beside her and continued the dissertation exactly where it had been broken off.
“Perfectly im-mense blooms,” he twittered happily. “Bright scarlet, with a——”
“Let’s go out in the garden,” remarked the flame-coloured girl abruptly, and promptly rose. Mr. Chitterwick rose too, somewhat surprised. “There are some very fine crapula in one of the hothouses here,” the girl threw back over her shoulders, as if by way of an afterthought. “You’d like to see them.” She led the way with decision out on to the terrace.
Mr. Chitterwick followed her, his alarm, temporarily allayed, sweeping back over him in waves. He felt like a small child being taken out for an airing by his nurse.
Not even bothering to let Mr. Chitterwick get level with her the girl led him down the terrace, across a lawn, through a shrubbery, and finally, not into a hothouse at all, but into a small pseudo-Greek stone temple overlooking a wooded lake. It was a charming scene, with the setting July sun reddening the water to a dull glow, but Mr. Chitterwick was far too perturbed to pay attention to it. Why had this masterful young woman, who had seemed at one moment to despise him as something a little worse than dirt and at another to tolerate him for his interest in a common hobby, brought him to this deserted spot? It was hardly necessary to sit in a pseudo-Greek temple overlooking a lake nearly half a mile from the house to discuss adequately the merits of crapula bulbosa. Why? The obvious suggestion which would have occurred to one less modest than Mr. Chitterwick he had dismissed before he ever even thought of it at all.
His companion proceeded to explain herself. “Mr. Chitterwick,” she said, standing in the entrace to the temple and looking him full in the face, “Lady Milborne never introduced us properly. I don’t think you know my name, do you?”
“Well, no,” mumbled Mr. Chitterwick apologetically. “That is—well, no, I’m afraid . . . But I did fancy, you know, that we had—–”
“It is Sinclair. I am Mrs. Sinclair. The Major Sinclair who was arrested last month for the supposed murder of Miss Sinclair, his aunt, is my husband.”
VI
IMPROPER TREATMENT OF A WITNESS
The pseudo-Greek temple was a hexagonal affair with a wide entrance overlooking the lake; round the inside ran a deep stone seat. Mr. Chitterwick moved from the entrance to the seat. He was not sure if his knees would hold him up if he tried to stand any longer.
Wild thoughts chased one another through his mind.
No doubt the lake was very deep; Mrs. Sinclair was at least an inch taller than himself; probably, in these days of athletic womanhood, she was considerably stronger; had she brought him here to throw him into the deepest place and so rid her husband of the witness on whom the prosecution’s whole case depended? Forcibly Moresby’s words recurred to him: without his own evidence the man would almost certainly get off. And Moresby had said too that Mrs. Sinclair was a singularly determined woman. Really, if she believed that there was no other way, a singularly determined woman would hardly hesitate . . .
Mr. Chitterwick, meditating panic-stricken flight back to the house and safety, looked at the doorway; but Mrs. Sinclair, who was now gazing abstractedly out over the lake, blocked the path.
Mr. Chitterwick’s alarm deepened. They must all be in the plot! They knew that Mrs. Sinclair was Mrs. Sinclair, and they had inveigled . . . No wonder that woman looked as if she had never been at school with his mother! And if Mrs. Sinclair failed to throw him into the lake, there were those two men . . . And they would all combine to swear he had never been near the place. No doubt even the servants had been bribed. . . .
Mr. Chitterwick forgot his alarm of Mrs. Sinclair individually in his alarm of the whole situation. He jumped to his feet. “This is a conspiracy,” he squeaked. “I have been inveigled . . . This is . . . I am going back to London this minute.”
Mrs. Sinclair looked at him calmly. “Not quite this minute, Mr. Chitterwick, please,” she said in even tones. “I want to have just a little talk with you first.” And she moved, as if unconsciously, into the very centre of the entrance. A tragedy queen.
Mr. Chitterwick could not get out without using physical force, and of the outcome of that he felt decidedly dubious. He hesitated.
“You’re quite right,” the girl took the opportunity to continue, but still speaking in the same unhurried way. “It was a conspiracy. For the sole purpose of providing an opportunity for this talk. As you must have gathered, Agatha Milborne was never at school with your mother at all. But we felt—I felt, that it would be impossible in any other conditions to induce you to listen to what I want to say; so I persuaded her, and the others, to stage this little deception.”
“It was outrageous!” spluttered Mr. Chitterwick, filled now with righteous if nervous anger. “I cannot listen to you. It was unpardonable.”
“Quite,” agreed the lady, unperturbed. “But in a matter of life and death one really can’t bother too much about the niceties. You’re quite justified in being angry, Mr. Chitterwick, but please try to realize the position I’m in and forgive my rather drastic methods.” She smiled faintly.
In Mr. Chitterwick anger was now slowly giving way to uneasiness. Undoubtedly one must forgive some small subterfuge on Mrs. Sinclair’s part considering, as she reminded him, that her husband’s life might, in her opinion, depend on this interview which she had schemed to get. That, now that one was beginning to see things in perspective, was after all a small matter. It was the inte
rview itself that was making Mr. Chitterwick uneasy. She would want to discuss the case with him, and there was nobody with whom Mr. Chitterwick wished to discuss the case less than Major Sinclair’s wife.
He shuffled his feet and rubbed his small, plump hands unhappily together. “Quite so,” he mumbled. “Yes, of course; I quite see that. But really, I am afraid no useful purpose could be served by—–”
“Come and sit down, Mr. Chitterwick,” ordered Mrs. Sinclair calmly, fulfilling that gentleman’s forebodings. “I want to talk things over with you.” As if sure now of her ground she left her post of vantage by the door and seated herself on the stone bench.
Mr. Chitterwick, so far as physical force was concerned, was free to go. But to go was the last thing in the world of which he was capable, much as he longed to do so. Judith Sinclair dominated him, and she knew it.
With lingering reluctance he sat down a little way away from her and stared out toward the lake. His instincts of alarm on first viewing this young woman had not been misplaced. In spite of himself he felt like clay for her to mould as she would. If he had been a dog he would have lain abjectly on his back and offered his tummy to her foot, not through affection (not by any means), but in token of sheer submission. Not being a dog, he continued to sit on the stone seat and feign an intense interest in the sunset.
Mrs. Sinclair began to address him with an easy assurance that showed, not only that she knew herself quite well to be mistress of the situation, but that she was thoroughly accustomed to that position. Mr. Chitterwick gathered that there were few situations encountered by Judith Sinclair which did not at once acknowledge her mastery.
“Mr. Chitterwick, you have been making a very terrible mistake.”
Have I? thought Mr. Chitterwick mutinously. Rats!
“You don’t know my husband, of course, but I do, and I can assure you that he could not possibly be guilty of this awful crime.”
My good madam, thought Mr. Chitterwick to the sunset, your husband is a thorough-paced scoundrel, and the sooner you realize the fact the better.
“I know you were quite honest in your identification of him as the man you saw with Miss Sinclair in the Piccadilly Palace—–”
Thank you very much, thought Mr. Chitterwick without gratitude.
“—but you must believe me that, somehow or other, you were wrong. Terribly wrong!”
Indeed, observed Mr. Chitterwick silently to the lake, I shall do nothing of the sort.
“I’m not trying to influence you in any way—–”
Ho!
“—or induce you to act against your conscience—–”
Ha!
“—but you really must examine the possibility that you have, as I say, been making this dreadful mistake (quite unwittingly, of course) and take some steps to remedy it before it’s too late.”
Had the lady been not quite what she was, had she been rather more pathetic than confident, more appealing than alarming, had she even been the pink-frocked little Lady Milborne herself, it is probable that Mr. Chitterwick would have recognised that however reprehensible her methods she was at any rate fighting, according to her lights, for her husband’s life and deserved at least that amount of consideration. But decidedly she was not pathetic, nor appealing, nor anything remotely resembling Lady Milborne, and the assumption Mr. Chitterwick sensed in her that he, Ambrose Chitterwick, was not merely a worm but an idiotic worm, a fatuous worm, an almost completely imbecile worm, and it is an uphill task trying to make a demented worm see plain reason . . . well, the truth was that Mr. Chitterwick was suffering from a bad attack of inferiority complex, and the result was to make him uncomfortable, suspicious and sullen.
“I’m afraid there is no use in continuing this discussion,” observed Mr. Chitterwick sullenly to the doorway.
Mrs. Sinclair sighed, almost inaudibly but not quite. Evidently it was proving to be a worse job than she had expected, to make an idiot worm understand simple justice. “We all make mistakes,” she said kindly, and went on to say a good many more things, all couched in terms to suit a puerile intelligence.
Mr. Chitterwick stared with hot eyes over the darkening landscape as the one-sided argument went on. He was embarrassed, he was sulky, he longed for the interview to terminate. Deliberately he shut his ears to what she was saying. It would do no good to listen, it might do harm. If this woman thought that she could argue him out of his bare duty, frighten him with the bogey of responsibility into letting a heartless murderer escape his just deserts—well, she had picked on the wrong man. It was an abominable situation, and though Mr. Chitterwick was constrained to lend his bodily presence to it, at any rate, he would lend nothing else.
“There must be a likeness, of course, between my husband and this other man, because I know you’re not the only witness to the identification, but with your evidence about this man actually in the act of poisoning Miss Sinclair it’s evidently on you that the prosecution will rely. Now, I see you wear glasses, Mr. Chitterwick, and you must admit that at a distance of nearly thirty feet it is quite possible that . . .”
It is not easy deliberately to shut one’s ears to an earnest voice. Mr. Chitterwick had recourse to his old friend.
“It was the schooner Hesperus, that sailed . . .”
Slowly Mr. Chitterwick’s sullenness subsided; slowly his alarm was stilled beneath the soporific beauty of the lines; slowly the skipper’s little daughter turned him into his own man again.
“The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow on his fixed and glassy eyes . . .”
And when he had come to the end he would rise firmly to his feet, terminate the interview, and escort his companion back to the house. He would!
“Christ save us all from a death like this . . .” recited Mr. Chitterwick appropriately, and promptly did rise to his feet.
“I’m afraid I cannot listen any longer,” he said, with the utmost firmness. “It is quite impossible. Shall we go back to the house?”
Mrs. Sinclair rose also, somewhat dubiously. “Well, will you at any rate do that, Mr. Chitterwick?”
“I’m sorry,” responded Mr. Chitterwick, “but I regret that I can do nothing at all.”
It was dark now, and Mr. Chitterwick was glad of it. The walk back to the house was performed in complete silence, and with every step Mr. Chitterwick found the soothing calm induced by Mr. Longfellow growing more and more faint. Somehow Judith Sinclair contrived to be far more alarming in her dignified silence of disappointment than in argument. Although Mr. Chitterwick was not in the least anxious to renew acquaintance with the other members of the plot, it was with immense relief that he followed his companion in at the drawing-room window.
Only Lady Milborne and the elderly black-and-silver lady were in evidence, and if any sign passed between the former and Judith Mr. Chitterwick did not notice it. No reference was made to the thing which must have been uppermost in the minds of all four, and only a few general remarks passed about the beauty of the evening and the charm of the lake by moonlight. Mrs. Sinclair dropped into a chair and picked up a magazine; her aunt continued to sit placidly, Mr. Chitterwick hovered in uncertainty.
Lady Milborne jumped up. “The men are in the library, I think, Mr. Chitterwick. You’d like to join them, of course. I’ll show you the way.”
Mr. Chitterwick gathered that he was being got rid of so that the other two could learn what had happened at the interview, but he was not sorry; the atmosphere in the drawing-room, to his sensitive perceptions, was distinctly tense. He hurried to open the door for Lady Milborne, and followed her out of the room.
She led him down a stone passage, across the big hall, down another passage, and into a small room which, whatever it might be, was certainly not the library. As certainly it was a feminine room.
“This is a little den of mine,” she smiled, “where I do the flowers and make as much mess
as I like. You don’t mind my bringing you here, do you? I wanted to have a word with you before we went to the library.”
“Oh, yes?” said Mr. Chitterwick uncomfortably.
“I wanted to apologize for the way I deceived you, pretending I was at school with your mother. But I was simply desperately anxious to get you down here, and I knew you wouldn’t come if you guessed anything. You see, Judy is one of my very closest friends. You do forgive me, don’t you?” And she smiled at Mr. Chitterwick with her head a little on one side and an air of charming penitence that no male being could possibly have resisted.
“Of course, of course. Quite understandable,” beamed Mr. Chitterwick.
“And of course we know Lynn, her husband, simply terribly well. Mr. Chitterwick, you can’t really think it was him you saw with Miss Sinclair in the Piccadilly Palace? I mean, not really?”
“I’m afraid there can be no doubt of it,” said Mr. Chitterwick soberly.
“But Lynn couldn’t do a thing like that, not even if he wanted to. He’s the dearest thing, really. Mr. Chitterwick, there’s a terrible muddle somewhere in this business. There must be!” And Lady Milborne went on to enlarge on this theme very earnestly indeed, pleading for her friend as wholeheartedly as if for herself.
Mr. Chitterwick was touched, but, as he asked her, what could he do?
“You must take back that evidence about the identification,” replied Lady Milborne promptly. “It couldn’t have been Lynn you saw, so it must have been someone else, mustn’t it? You must see that it would be too awful if Lynn were hanged when really he’s as innocent as you or I.”
It was not an easy task to assure her that there could be no mistake, that undoubtedly Lynn was guilty, and that Mr. Chitterwick could not retract or alter his evidence by one jot. It was not easy, but Mr. Chitterwick got through it somehow, feeling this time every kind of inhuman brute there is; and it was a subdued Lady Milborne who led him a few minutes later down another stone passage to the library, where she left him with a muttered word to her husband.
The Piccadilly Murder Page 9
