Xavier then proffered his visitor more sherry, which was nervously declined: for Thérèse could not think she was really wanted: and, to spare Xavier the strain of her company, must take her leave. Yet when she rose hesitantly to her feet, he did, it seemed, display a sincere regret: again half chiding, that it was not courteous of her,—nay, not very cousinly—to abandon him to an afternoon of wintry solitude, and the cheerless prospect of drinking alone.
“Then perhaps you should not drink at all,” Thérèse quietly said.
Xavier appeared to acquiesce, though without visible enthusiasm; and, going to get Thérèse’s cloak for her, asked ironically what sort of occupation or diversion she might recommend, for whiling away the interminable day,—not to mention the night.
Thérèse blushed under the somber scrutiny of his gaze, and stammered that she knew not, precisely,—she knew not what would please him,—though, she supposed, any kind of fruitful occupation would suffice.
“‘Fruitful occupation’!” Xavier exclaimed. “Why, I have had my fill of that; and of ‘doing good’ as well. It is all a Sisyphean labor, Thérèse. A trial possesses the awesome lucidity of a flash of lightning, I have seen,—by which I mean, it illuminates all the principals, unsparingly, and unforgettably: toiling away in our roles, industrious, and fully absorbed, and each quite convinced we are right: very like miniature gods, worshipping our own godheads. Prosecution,—and defense,—and judge,—and jurors,—and defendant,—and, not least, the avid pack of spectators, hanging upon every syllable: all miniature deities. But I am speaking too wildly,” Xavier said, “and am causing you distress.”
“Not distress so much as bewilderment,” Thérèse hurriedly corrected him, “and surprise. For I read in your words a measure of disappointment, shading into outright despondency; and, ah! dear Cousin, I wish I possessed the means of dissuading you from it!”
“You are very kind,” Xavier murmured, helping her with the woolen cloak; and watching as, blushing the more, she wrapped her cashmere scarf several times about her slender throat. “But I fear I am as my mother thinks me,—and perhaps it is Perdita’s judgment as well,—a kind of aberration, or contaminant,—‘fruitfully occupied,’ doubtless—and yet, harvesting what singular fruit!”
Thérèse stared at him in mute appeal; and, for a long impassioned moment, could not bring herself to speak, for fear she would say something irrevocable. Then, at last, in a rush of emotion, she heard herself saying something she had not intended, nor even rehearsed,—the which quite astonished Xavier.
In a quavering voice she confessed that, for many weeks, she had been tormented about her responsibility in withholding certain information from him,—certain confidential information entrusted to her by one of her young pupils (whose name she must not reveal),—which, for all she knew, and taxed herself for knowing, might have made an enormous difference in his approach; and in the outcome of the case. “Even now that the trial is concluded, and the villain freed, I cannot say much,” Thérèse whispered, “for I have given my word, with God as my witness; I have vowed not to violate confidence; and, ah! what a burden it has been!—and to so little purpose. For I knew, Xavier,—I mean, I half knew, or had been led to think that I knew—that your unhappy brother Colin was in some way involved in Valentine’s activities; and that the more you pursued the one, the more you pursued the other; and in exposing one, you would doubtless expose the other.”
Blushing crimson beneath her cousin’s astonished stare, yet not pausing to reconsider her words,—indeed, scarcely to draw breath, for fear she would stammer and fall silent—Thérèse continued to tell him that (may God forgive her!) his brother Wolf was not altogether innocent either: “I mean of certain peripheral matters,—Wolf, and Calvin Shaw, and one or two others,—companions of Valentine’s—whose ‘crime,’ or ‘sin,’ was in failing to denounce certain outrages, or to forestall them. Do you understand! Do I speak clearly? Your error all along,—if I, Thérèse, dare speak of such, in you—your error was always in thinking that Valentine acted alone, and unabetted; or, what is more peculiar yet, that he could have done the things he did, without hinting or boasting to his friends, or,—and here I am only speculating, Xavier, for I cannot actually know—without exciting their fearful admiration: albeit of course they are not murderers themselves, nor indeed monsters, but only cowardly young ‘gentlemen,’ perhaps.” At this, Thérèse hesitated; and murmured, in some agitation, that she had best say no more,—for, she feared, she had already revealed too much.
As the reader might imagine, Xavier was astonished by his frail cousin’s outburst: and begged her to repeat all she had said. One of her pupils had told her—? Had told her,—precisely, what? But Thérèse drew away, saying she must honor the boy’s request not to tell a third party these hideous secrets. “The boy is terrified that Valentine,—or, indeed, Colin—will take revenge on him,” Thérèse said, “albeit there seems to me little reason for that now. But, I dare say no more: and had wanted only to convey to you, however inadequately, the fact that, dear Xavier, I have long been wretched, in harboring such unspeakable knowledge,—and knowing, moreover, certain things you could not have known,—and that no one would tell you.”
Xavier followed the agitated young woman to his ill-lit vestibule, and to his door: too stunned, it seemed, to respond at once. As they parted, however, he managed to say, in a stumbling sort of voice, that, no matter the circumstances,—whether Colin had been involved, or no; whether Wolf, or any, or all, of his brothers had been involved—he would have pursued Valentine Westergaard exactly as he had: which is to say, he would have pursued Justice, no matter the personal cost.
“Ah, I knew that was so!—I knew!” Thérèse all breathlessly exclaimed, as she hurried down the stairs.
While crossing windy Parthian Square, Thérèse felt her eyelashes begin to frost over, and her burning cheeks to sting: and had not, until that moment, known how tears spilled from her eyes.
Epilogue
All coincidentally, and not in the least, I hasten to say, by crude melodramatic design, this narrative closes,—draws away, as it were—with yet a second vision of half-conscious weeping: and eyelashes, and tender burning cheeks, frosting over in the February wind: as Xavier Kilgarvan himself, the following night, stands bruising his bared knuckles on the stolid oaken door of his family’s Wycombe Street home,—his desperate energies, I am loath to say, to no purpose. For the door is closed and bolted against him: and will not be opened.
Earlier this very day, a Sunday, the distraught young detective was turned away from his family’s doorstep, by Mr. Kilgarvan himself (greatly aged and soured since we have last been in his company,—and vehement in his command that Xavier betake himself off: and depart Winterthurn altogether); and, just now, as the hour of eleven is being sounded through the city, by Mr. Kilgarvan’s faithful assistant Tobias,—who, with pained reluctance, and not a little shame at his appointed task, explained somberly to Xavier that neither his father nor his mother wished to gaze upon his face, at the present time; or, perhaps, at any time in the imminent future;—albeit Xavier would be hurriedly summoned, if Mrs. Kilgarvan’s health suddenly worsened, or her state of mind, regarding him, improved.
Words that admit of very little ambiguity, it seems to me: yet Xavier, infused with a spurious sort of strength, and optimism, by drink (of a potency many times superior to that of mere sherry, it might be said), continues knocking at the door: his knuckles now beginning to bleed, and to sting most ferociously in the—15 degree F. temperature: his voice lifted stubbornly and childishly in a plea for admittance so injurious to his pride (“Please let me in,—dear Father, and Mother,—you must let me in,—for an hour, at least,—ah, please!—for I am your son Xavier, whom you have always loved,—you cannot wish to banish me”), I hesitate to record it here, for Posterity’s judgment.
Thus, while this youngest, once favored, and now, indeed, truly “banished,” of the Kilgarvan sons, persists in his folly,—scarcely notin
g that the gas-jets beside the door have been rudely turned off, and he stands in bleak darkness—I shall conclude Devil’s Half-Acre; or, The Mystery of the “Cruel Suitor,” by withdrawing, by degrees, from the piteous scene: retreating by feet, and by yards, and now by a half-block of darkened brick façades, about which snowflurries undulate: as Xavier’s lean and urgent form is gradually enshrouded, by the fine mist of snow; and, withal, by the singular gloom of Winterthurn’s chill, when massed snowclouds choke the nocturnal sky, and no chaste-glowing moon, or diamond-bright stars, shed their light upon the earth.
Alas, poor Xavier,—farewell!
WITH INFINITE RELIEF, I must confess, I end my chronicle at this point; indeed, at this very moment; for the near future brings with it no surcease of pain and humiliation, for the Kilgarvan family. As the obstreperous Colin is so little subdued or chastened by his new-acquired circumstances, he provokes fights of a brutish nature (employing fists, feet, gouging fingers, and, not least, teeth), in his place of imprisonment, he will shortly be thrown into solitary confinement, and, there, by a means never satisfactorily explained, he will so despair as to take his own life, by hanging: to be found by his jailer one chill March morning, stone dead, and unrepentant.
As to the more canny Roland, or Wolf, with whom we have become but slenderly acquainted,—he has already, in truth, disappeared from Winterthurn, with the pretense of visiting a business associate in New York City; but will be reported never to have arrived there,—or, at any rate, never to have arrived at the address he had indicated. Whether he fell prey to that lowlife company of gamblers, cardsharks, racetrack idlers, and their ilk, with whom, it seems, he and the other “young bloods” of Winterthurn sometimes mingled; or whether, as some persons afterward insisted, he had, under an alias, joined the United States Navy, to set sail for Manila Bay with the famed Asiatic Squadron,—and to sink all the Spanish warships in sight; or whether, all mysteriously, he had simply disappeared from the earth’s surface,—I am in no position to say; nor did Xavier Kilgarvan ever choose to investigate his brother’s fate.
AS TO THE BEAUTEOUS, but, alas, faithless, Perdita,—she and Mr. Harmon Bunting were indeed wed, some three months following her letter, in a small, stately, and pious ceremony at the Grace Episcopal Church: with the Archbishop of the diocese presiding, and a very select number of relatives and friends in attendance,—not including, it scarcely needs be said, Xavier Kilgarvan.
SUCH FAMILIAR WINTERTHURN personages as Hollingshead, and Munck, and Shearwater fell by the wayside, as it were, within a space of a few months; retiring from public life, and, in Mr. Shearwater’s case, forced to his bed, with a heart disorder so serious, he was not expected to outlive the winter. Elderly Chief Justice Armbruster lost strength rapidly, following the trial, and died on the first day of April: stating on his deathbed that he was departing this life “with no great regret,” as, he feared, he had “meted out his share of Justice,—and Injustice—in his time.”
In the wake of the Rosenwald case, in particular, one gentleman alone emerged not only unscathed but, indeed, near-glorified,—this, Winterthurn’s ebullient Congressman James Hanrahan Dorsey, who, in subsequent years, with a goodly proportion of the rural and “poor white” populace supporting him, and the vociferous backing of the Jericho Brethren, was to rise to the enviable office of United States Senator (to which he was elected for four terms): and to not a little national prominence, as a consequence of powerful friendships in the Senate.
Angus Peregrine, as the reader doubtless knows, was launched, all ironically, upon his “dazzling” career as a criminal lawyer of the highest rank,—and one who commanded the highest fees: for, prudently, he did not choose to sue Colonel Westergaard for the money owed him: and, as it happened, the publicity accruing to his success in freeing his client, whether good, or bad, or distinctly mixed, was, in the end, like all such publicity, good.
AS FOR VALENTINE WESTERGAARD,—some months later, near the end of September, Xavier, then living in his bachelor townhouse in Washington Square Park, was the recipient of an altogether guileless, and, withal, warm and comradely message from him, posted in Ravenna, Italy—! For, it seems, Valentine and his “Veiled Lady” admirer (subsequently revealed as Miss Valeria Vanderbilt, an heiress of enviable wealth and reputation) had eloped shortly after the conclusion of the trial; and were yet in the midst of their year-long honeymoon cruise. Valentine’s brief message, scrawled in a lazy, looping, languorous hand, in ink the shade of the duskiest of Muscovy grapes, commended to Xavier’s “discerning” eye the classical beauties of the Northern Italian landscape; and, to other of his senses, the “exotic & sometimes agreeable divertissements of the Marital Bed”; and closed with these enigmatic words, which could not fail to pierce the trembling Xavier to the heart,—
“The ‘Bishop’ having assuredly decamped from my being, pray, sweet Xavier, he does not next settle in yours.”
The Bloodstained Bridal Gown
or
Xavier Kilgarvan’s Last Case
Every crime engenders clues.
—HANS GROSS, 1892
Editor’s Note
Amongst the more churlish criticisms leveled against the art of Murder and Mystery,—in their classic literary forms, I should hasten to say—is the objection, whether philosophical or aesthetic, to the inevitable tidiness of the conclusion, toward which the form instinctively moves: whereby all that has been bewildering, and problematic, and, indeed, “mysterious” is, oft-times not altogether plausibly, resolved: which is to say, explained. It is objected that “life is not like that”: that mere Mystery, binding together a group of persons for a certain space of time, cannot adequately define them, or proffer a noble vision of life: that it is an affront to our sense of the complex (and doubtless tragic) human condition that the most devilish of mariner’s knots are handily untied, to assure what is, after all, a happy ending,—the anathema of the modern sensibility.
As if it were not, to all right-thinking persons, a triumphant matter that Evil be exposed in human form, and murderers,—or murderesses—be brought to justice; and the fundamental coherence of the Universe confirmed!
Thus it is, through my long career as an amateur collector of Murder and Mystery, and as the editor of numerous volumes similar to the one the reader holds in his hand, I have never felt the slightest inclination to apologize for my tastes; nor to shrink from declaring that the mystery or detective novel boldly upholds the principle, in defiance of contemporary sentiment, that infinite Mystery, beyond that of the finite, may yield to human ratiocination: that truth will “out”: that happiness is possible once Evil is banished: and that God, though, it seems, withdrawn at the present time from both Nature and History, is yet a living presence in the world,—an unblinking eye that sees all, absorbs all, comprehends all, each and every baffling clue; and binds all multifariousness together, in a divine unity. Without God, I have no doubt that mysteries would continue to exist, and even to proliferate: but Mystery assuredly would not.
To essay, all bravely, to see the whole, and to “remember forward,” and never to blink at wickedness,—as Xavier Kilgarvan oft tortured himself to do: thus, in emulation of God, the detective aspires to invent that which already exists, in order to see what is there before his (and our) eyes. He is the very emblem of our souls, a sort of mortal savior, not only espying but isolating, and conquering, Evil; in his triumph is our triumph. Even should he fail, is not such failure noble?—for to be human is, indeed, to fail to be divine; and no shame must be attached.
In the span of approximately twelve years during which Xavier Kilgarvan achieved a modicum of fame, or notoriety, in his hazardous profession, it became a nettlesome issue with him that his successes were so vulgarly emphasized in the tabloid press, and his failures rarely reported, as being, perhaps, not sufficiently newsworthy; or too commonplace. (For, up until very recent times, most crimes went not only unsolved but undetected: a “suspicious” death might as well be deemed “natural,�
�� for what might have been done about it, in any case? I am shocked that the usually perspicacious De Quincey should offer the rough estimate that, of 230,000 deaths reported in London in a twenty-year period during the seventeenth century, naught but 86 were murders!—the more plausible figure being, to my way of thinking, 86,000.) Such an emphasis, Xavier Kilgarvan felt, blinded the public to the painstaking labor, the daily and hourly “grind,” of the detective’s work: and woefully misled as to the glamorous ease with which mysteries were solved. (It were well for Xavier that he had long been retired, and settled into the blissful harmony of domestic life, when the first of Mountjoy Price’s exploitative detective novels, featuring the dandyish “Zachariah Kilpatrick,” began to appear in the 1920s: to eventually earn far more financial largesse for their author, it has been estimated, than Xavier Kilgarvan himself had ever earned—! For these slick, shallow, and infuriatingly breezy works of fiction, some nineteen in all, presented a glib young gentleman who rarely struggled with a cerebral problem for more than an hour, who never displayed fear or apprehension, and never shrank from physical combat: and seemed, at the conclusion of an adventure, precisely the same person he had been at the outset.)
Indeed, so taxing did Xavier Kilgarvan’s “accursèd” profession prove, he withdrew from it, all abruptly, in his fortieth year: which is to say, within a scant six months of his return to Winterthurn, to solve the sensational case known variously as “The Rectory Murders,” “The Winterthurn Ax Murders,” “The Mystery of the Minister and the Society Lady,” etc.,—though, for our particular purposes, it bears the title of The Bloodstained Bridal Gown; or, Xavier Kilgarvan’s Last Case. (A close parallel to this title being Mountjoy Price’s The Case of the Bloody Bridal Gown, a best-seller of 1938: but, beyond this, there is little resemblance between Price’s meretricious mystery and the definitive study of the case I have here assembled.) The loss to the profession of Detection was an extreme one, for no American detective, with the possible exception of Allan Pinkerton, achieved as great a renown as Xavier Kilgarvan; and no one at all was so brilliant a detective,—Pinkerton being but a mere hack, set beside Xavier Kilgarvan, and so lost to all standards of gentlemanly decorum, he did not shrink from hiring himself out to the highest bidder, no matter the degree of justice or injustice involved. Yet I suppose it a sad necessity that Xavier Kilgarvan did retire at so early an age, whether for purposes of health, or to save his immortal soul, or whatever.
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