The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK ™: 20 Modern and Classic Tales of Female Detectives

by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

  He raised his head, strode forward, and grasped my hand. “Forgive me, Cumberledge,” he cried. “But a proscribed and hounded man! If you knew what a relief it is to me to get out on the water!”

  “You forget all there?”

  “I forget it—the red horror!”

  “You meant just now to drown yourself?”

  “No! If I had meant it I would have done it.… Hubert, for my children’s sake, I will not commit suicide!”

  “Then listen!” I cried. I told him in a few words of his sister’s scheme—Sebastian’s defence—the plausibility of the explanation—the whole long story. He gazed at me moodily. Yet it was not Hugo!

  “No, no,” he said, shortly; and as he spoke it was he. “I have done it; I have killed her; I will not owe my life to a falsehood.”

  “Not for the children’s sake?”

  He dashed his hand down impatiently. “I have a better way for the children. I will save them still.… Hubert, you are not afraid to speak to a murderer?”

  “Dear Hugo—I know all; and to know all is to forgive all.”

  He grasped my hand once more. “Know all!” he cried, with a despairing gesture. “Oh, no; no one knows all but myself; not even the children. But the children know much; they will forgive me. Lina knows something; she will forgive me. You know a little; you forgive me. The world can never know. It will brand my darlings as a murderer’s children.”

  “It was the act of a minute,” I interposed. “And—though she is dead, poor lady, and one must speak no ill of her—we can at least gather dimly, for your children’s sake, how deep was the provocation.”

  He gazed at me fixedly. His voice was like lead. “For the children’s sake—yes,” he answered, as in a dream. “It was all for the children! I have killed her—murdered her—she has paid her penalty; and, poor dead soul, I will utter no word against her—the woman I have murdered! But one thing I will say: If omniscient justice sends me for this to eternal punishment, I can endure it gladly, like a man, knowing that so I have redeemed my Marian’s motherless girls from a deadly tyranny.”

  It was the only sentence in which he ever alluded to her.

  I sat down by his side and watched him closely. Mechanically, methodically, he went on with his dressing. The more he dressed, the less could I believe it was Hugo. I had expected to find him close-shaven; so did the police, by their printed notices. Instead of that, he had shaved his beard and whiskers, but only trimmed his moustache; trimmed it quite short, so as to reveal the boyish corners of the mouth—a trick which entirely altered his rugged expression. But that was not all; what puzzled me most was the eyes—they were not Hugo’s. At first I could not imagine why. By degrees the truth dawned upon me. His eyebrows were naturally thick and shaggy—great overhanging growth, interspersed with many of those stiff long hairs to which Darwin called attention in certain men as surviving traits from a monkey-like ancestor. In order to disguise himself, Hugo had pulled out all these coarser hairs, leaving nothing on his brows but the soft and closely pressed coat of down which underlies the longer bristles in all such cases. This had wholly altered the expression of the eyes, which no longer looked out keenly from their cavernous penthouse; but being deprived of their relief, had acquired a much more ordinary and less individual aspect. From a good-natured but shaggy giant, my old friend was transformed by his shaving and his costume into a well-fed and well-grown, but not very colossal, commercial gentleman. Hugo was scarcely six feet high, indeed, though by his broad shoulders and bushy beard he had always impressed one with such a sense of size; and now that the hirsuteness had been got rid of, and the dress altered, he hardly struck one as taller or bigger than the average of his fellows.

  We sat for some minutes and talked. Le Geyt would not speak of Clara; and when I asked him his intentions, he shook his head moodily. “I shall act for the best,” he said—“what of best is left—to guard the dear children. It was a terrible price to pay for their redemption; but it was the only one possible, and, in a moment of wrath, I paid it. Now, I have to pay, in turn, myself. I do not shirk it.”

  “You will come back to London, then, and stand your trial?” I asked, eagerly.

  “Come back to London?” he cried, with a face of white panic. Hitherto he had seemed to me rather relieved in expression than otherwise; his countenance had lost its worn and anxious look; he was no longer watching each moment over his children’s safety. “Come back…to London…and face my trial! Why, did you think, Hubert, ’twas the court or the hanging I was shirking? No, no; not that; but it—the red horror! I must get away from it to the sea—to the water—to wash away the stain—as far from it—that red pool—as possible!”

  I answered nothing. I left him to face his own remorse in silence.

  At last he rose to go, and held one foot undecided on his bicycle.

  “I leave myself in Heaven’s hands,” he said, as he lingered. “It will requite.… The ordeal is by water.”

  “So I judged,” I answered.

  “Tell Lina this from me,” he went on, still loitering: “that if she will trust me, I will strive to do the best that remains for my darlings. I will do it, Heaven helping. She will know what, to-morrow.”

  He mounted his machine and sailed off. My eyes followed him up the path with sad forebodings.

  All day long I loitered about the Gap. It consisted of two bays—the one I had already seen, and another, divided from it by a saw-edge of rock. In the further cove crouched a few low stone cottages. A broad-bottomed sailing boat lay there, pulled up high on the beach. About three o’clock, as I sat and watched, two men began to launch it. The sea ran high; tide coming in; the sou’-wester still increasing in force to a gale; at the signal-staff on the cliff, the danger-cone was hoisted. White spray danced in air. Big black clouds rolled up seething from windward; low thunder rumbling; a storm threatened.

  One of the men was Le Geyt, the other a fisherman.

  He jumped in, and put off through the surf with an air of triumph. He was a splendid sailor. His boat leapt through the breakers and flew before the wind with a mere rag of canvas. “Dangerous weather to be out!” I exclaimed to the fisherman, who stood with hands buried in his pockets, watching him.

  “Ay that ur be, zur!” the man answered. “Doan’t like the look o’ ut. But thik there gen’leman, ’ee’s one o’ Oxford, ’ee do tell me; and they’m a main venturesome lot, they college volk. ’Ee’s off by ’isself droo the starm, all so var as Lundy!”

  “Will he reach it?” I asked, anxiously, having my own idea on the subject.

  “Doan’t seem like ut, zur, do ut? Ur must, an’ ur mustn’t, an’ yit again ur must. Powerful ’ard place ur be to maake in a starm, to be zure, Lundy. Zaid the Lord ’ould dezide. But ur ’ouldn’t be warned, ur ’ouldn’t; an’ voolhardy volk, as the zayin’ is, must go their own voolhardy waay to perdition!”

  It was the last I saw of Le Geyt alive. Next morning the lifeless body of “the man who was wanted for the Campden Hill mystery” was cast up by the waves on the shore of Lundy. The Lord had decided.

  Hugo had not miscalculated. “Luck in their suicides,” Hilda Wade said; and, strange to say, the luck of the Le Geyts stood him in good stead still. By a miracle of fate, his children were not branded as a murderer’s daughters. Sebastian gave evidence at the inquest on the wife’s body: “Self-inflicted—a recoil—accidental—I am sure of it.” His specialist knowledge—his assertive certainty, combined with that arrogant, masterful manner of his, and his keen, eagle eye, overbore the jury. Awed by the great man’s look, they brought in a submissive verdict of “Death by misadventure.” The coroner thought it a most proper finding. Mrs. Mallet had made the most of the innate Le Geyt horror of blood. The newspapers charitably surmised that the unhappy husband, crazed by the instantaneous unexpectedness of his loss, had wandered away lik
e a madman to the scenes of his childhood, and had there been drowned by accident while trying to cross a stormy sea to Lundy, under some wild impression that he would find his dead wife alive on the island. Nobody whispered murder. Everybody dwelt on the utter absence of motive—a model husband!—such a charming young wife, and such a devoted stepmother. We three alone knew—we three, and the children.

  On the day when the jury brought in their verdict at the adjourned inquest on Mrs. Le Geyt, Hilda Wade stood in the room, trembling and white-faced, awaiting their decision. When the foreman uttered the words, “Death by misadventure,” she burst into tears of relief. “He did well!” she cried to me, passionately. “He did well, that poor father! He placed his life in the hands of his Maker, asking only for mercy to his innocent children. And mercy has been shown to him and to them. He was taken gently in the way he wished. It would have broken my heart for those two poor girls if the verdict had gone otherwise. He knew how terrible a lot it is to be called a murderer’s daughter.”

  I did not realise at the time with what profound depth of personal feeling she said it.

  CHAPTER V

  THE EPISODE OF THE NEEDLE THAT DID NOT MATCH

  “Sebastian is a great man,” I said to Hilda Wade, as I sat one afternoon over a cup of tea she had brewed for me in her own little sitting-room. It is one of the alleviations of an hospital doctor’s lot that he may drink tea now and again with the Sister of his ward. “Whatever else you choose to think of him, you must admit he is a very great man.”

  I admired our famous Professor, and I admired Hilda Wade: ’twas a matter of regret to me that my two admirations did not seem in return sufficiently to admire one another. “Oh, yes,” Hilda answered, pouring out my second cup; “he is a very great man. I never denied that. The greatest man, on the whole, I think, that I have ever come across.”

  “And he has done splendid work for humanity,” I went on, growing enthusiastic.

  “Splendid work! Yes, splendid! (Two lumps, I believe?) He has done more, I admit, for medical science than any other man I ever met.”

  I gazed at her with a curious glance. “Then why, dear lady, do you keep telling me he is cruel?” I inquired, toasting my feet on the fender. “It seems contradictory.”

  She passed me the muffins, and smiled her restrained smile.

  “Does the desire to do good to humanity in itself imply a benevolent disposition?” she answered, obliquely.

  “Now you are talking in paradox. Surely, if a man works all his life long for the good of mankind, that shows he is devoured by sympathy for his species.”

  “And when your friend Mr. Bates works all his life long at observing, and classifying lady-birds, I suppose that shows he is devoured by sympathy for the race of beetles!”

  I laughed at her comical face, she looked at me so quizzically. “But then,” I objected, “the cases are not parallel. Bates kills and collects his lady-birds; Sebastian cures and benefits humanity.”

  Hilda smiled her wise smile once more, and fingered her apron. “Are the cases so different as you suppose?” she went on, with her quick glance. “Is it not partly accident? A man of science, you see, early in life, takes up, half by chance, this, that, or the other particular form of study. But what the study is in itself, I fancy, does not greatly matter; do not mere circumstances as often as not determine it? Surely it is the temperament, on the whole, that tells: the temperament that is or is not scientific.”

  “How do you mean? You are so enigmatic!”

  “Well, in a family of the scientific temperament, it seems to me, one brother may happen to go in for butterflies—may he not?—and another for geology, or for submarine telegraphs. Now, the man who happens to take up butterflies does not make a fortune out of his hobby—there is no money in butterflies; so we say, accordingly, he is an unpractical person, who cares nothing for business, and who is only happy when he is out in the fields with a net, chasing emperors and tortoise-shells. But the man who happens to fancy submarine telegraphy most likely invents a lot of new improvements, takes out dozens of patents, finds money flow in upon him as he sits in his study, and becomes at last a peer and a millionaire; so then we say, What a splendid business head he has got, to be sure, and how immensely he differs from his poor wool-gathering brother, the entomologist, who can only invent new ways of hatching out wire-worms! Yet all may really depend on the first chance direction which led one brother as a boy to buy a butterfly net, and sent the other into the school laboratory to dabble with an electric wheel and a cheap battery.”

  “Then you mean to say it is chance that has made Sebastian?”

  Hilda shook her pretty head. “By no means. Don’t be so stupid. We both know Sebastian has a wonderful brain. Whatever was the work he undertook with that brain in science, he would carry it out consummately. He is a born thinker. It is like this, don’t you know.” She tried to arrange her thoughts. “The particular branch of science to which Mr. Hiram Maxim’s mind happens to have been directed was the making of machine-guns—and he slays his thousands. The particular branch to which Sebastian’s mind happens to have been directed was medicine—and he cures as many as Mr. Maxim kills. It is a turn of the hand that makes all the difference.”

  “I see,” I said. “The aim of medicine happens to be a benevolent one.”

  “Quite so; that’s just what I mean. The aim is benevolent; and Sebastian pursues that aim with the single-minded energy of a lofty, gifted, and devoted nature—but not a good one!’

  “Not good?”

  “Oh, no. To be quite frank, he seems to me to pursue it ruthlessly, cruelly, unscrupulously. He is a man of high ideals, but without principle. In that respect he reminds one of the great spirits of the Italian Renaissance—Benvenuto Cellini and so forth—men who could pore for hours with conscientious artistic care over the detail of a hem in a sculptured robe, yet could steal out in the midst of their disinterested toil to plunge a knife in the back of a rival.”

  “Sebastian would not do that,” I cried. “He is wholly free from the mean spirit of jealousy.”

  “No, Sebastian would not do that. You are quite right there; there is no tinge of meanness in the man’s nature. He likes to be first in the field; but he would acclaim with delight another man’s scientific triumph—if another anticipated him; for would it not mean a triumph for universal science?—and is not the advancement of science Sebastian’s religion? But…he would do almost as much, or more. He would stab a man without remorse, if he thought that by stabbing him he could advance knowledge.”

  I recognised at once the truth of her diagnosis. “Nurse Wade,” I cried, “you are a wonderful woman! I believe you are right; but—how did you come to think of it?”

  A cloud passed over her brow. “I have reason to know it,” she answered, slowly. Then her voice changed. “Take another muffin.”

  I helped myself and paused. I laid down my cup, and gazed at her. What a beautiful, tender, sympathetic face! And yet, how able! She stirred the fire uneasily. I looked and hesitated. I had often wondered why I never dared ask Hilda Wade one question that was nearest my heart. I think it must have been because I respected her so profoundly. The deeper your admiration and respect for a woman, the harder you find it in the end to ask her. At last I almost made up my mind. “I cannot think,” I began, “what can have induced a girl like you, with means and friends, with brains and”—I drew back, then I plumped it out—“beauty, to take to such a life as this—a life which seems, in many ways, so unworthy of you!”

  She stirred the fire more pensively than ever, and rearranged the muffin-dish on the little wrought-iron stand in font of the grate. “And yet,” she murmured, looking down, “what life can be better than the service of one’s kind? You think it a great life for Sebastian!”

  “Sebastian! He is a man. That is different; quite different. But a woman!
Especially you, dear lady, for whom one feels that nothing is quite high enough, quite pure enough, quite good enough. I cannot imagine how—”

  She checked me with one wave of her gracious hand. Her movements were always slow and dignified. “I have a Plan in my life,” she answered earnestly, her eyes meeting mine with a sincere, frank gaze; “a Plan to which I have resolved to sacrifice everything. It absorbs my being. Till that Plan is fulfilled—” I saw the tears were gathering fast on her lashes. She suppressed them with an effort. “Say no more,” she added, faltering. “Infirm of purpose! I will not listen.”

  I leant forward eagerly, pressing my advantage. The air was electric. Waves of emotion passed to and fro. “But surely,” I cried, “you do not mean to say—”

  She waved me aside once more. “I will not put my hand to the plough, and then look back,” she answered, firmly. “Dr. Cumberledge, spare me. I came to Nathaniel’s for a purpose. I told you at the time what that purpose was—in part: to be near Sebastian. I want to be near him…for an object I have at heart. Do not ask me to reveal it; do not ask me to forego it. I am a woman, therefore weak. But I need your aid. Help me, instead of hindering me.”

  “Hilda,” I cried, leaning forward, with quiverings of my heart, “I will help you in whatever way you will allow me. But let me at any rate help you with the feeling that I am helping one who means in time—”

  At that moment, as unkindly fate would have it, the door opened, and Sebastian entered.

  “Nurse Wade,” he began, in his iron voice, glancing about him with stern eyes, “where are those needles I ordered for that operation? We must be ready in time before Nielsen comes.… Cumberledge, I shall want you.”

  The golden opportunity had come and gone. It was long before I found a similar occasion for speaking to Hilda.