by H. F. Heard
“Alice,” I said, “would you please make my bedroom now? I may have caught a chill and will probably go back to bed after breakfast.”
She left the room with that stiff rapidity which indicates deep offense. I had cut her off retailing first-class news. She, the semi-sacred bearer of almost first-hand evil tidings, was silenced. Well, at least she did not suspect how horribly prepared I had been for her news. I did go back to bed after breakfast. I wanted to lie and think undisturbed. It was clear that Heregrove was dead. I was safe. But the clearer it became that he was gone, the more tenuous seemed the risk which I had run while he was alive and the darker loomed the possible danger which I must now watch rise and hang over me—perhaps never to be dissipated—certainly beyond the power of any private, well-meaning, but really busybodying old gentleman to deliver me from.
About noon there was a ring at the bell. Alice knocked and entered with a look of muted triumph which at once added to my misgivings.
“Please, sir, Bob Withers, the policeman, would like to see you for a moment.”
I went downstairs, my heart sinking at every step. The village constable is not an awe-inspiring functionary. This one was as nervous as I, which was saying a great deal then. He had taken off his helmet and was passing it from one hand to the other, as though it were hot. He certainly was. After our mumbled good-mornings, he broke his message. It was about that there Mr. Heregrove. Perhaps I’d heard, perhaps not, but he was in the mortuary and as (here was the point) I had last been seen with him, it was wondered whether I could ’elp showing ’ow ’e came to his Hend.
It was preposterous that they should come to me when Mr. Mycroft had actually planned the visit and—but I must not ever even let my mind finish that sentence! Anyhow, I simply could not go through this alone. Only a little while ago in this abominable affair, I had foreseen myself driven into the lunatic asylum for life; now even such an end seemed an escape, a refuge, considering the alternative place where it seemed that a single slip of the tongue, a single thought aloud, would land me with—the best I could hope for—a life sentence!
My mind moved quickly, but I think my tongue was even quicker, for I heard myself saying, “Mr. Mycroft, of Waller’s Lane, and I did visit Mr. Heregrove last evening. He had supplied us with honey. We spent a few minutes with him in his garden. He seemed quite well then.”
“Oh, if Mr. Mycroft was with you, sir, perhaps you’d come along of me while I get is statement, too.”
I saw that was quite the best thing in the bad circumstances and agreed. However much I did not want to see the old man, a time had come when he must carry us out of our common difficulty. It was his, really, more than mine, and anything which that cunning old brain planned to cover its own self and tracks would cover mine too.
On reaching his house we found him on his lawn. I felt as though he had been expecting us. He certainly showed no surprise, and nodded silently when Bob Withers told him that Heregrove had been discovered dead. We did not know whether he had heard the news before or not, and when asked for a statement, he simply remarked that he had seen the deceased the evening before and thought he seemed well.
Then he added, “I know, constable, you would like us to go with you to the magistrate to whom this case has been reported. Is it Colonel Treaves? Yes, I thought it was likely. He is generally on the spot. I can come along now.”
He picked up his hat which was lying on a chair near him and without a word to me walked along with Withers, I at the constable’s other side.
Ten minutes took us to the magistrate’s house. We were shown in at once to his study. A lean, athletic man of about sixty, I judged, he rose from his chair as we entered and put out his hand to Mr. Mycroft—he only nodded to me—saying, “It is kind of you to come over so promptly, sir. Always better to have a direct talk than get statements. But didn’t want to trouble you, were you busy at the moment. I was informed that Mr. Silchester here and someone who accompanied him—and I suppose you were that person—last saw this man Heregrove alive?”
“Yes,” replied Mr. Mycroft. “We visited him, for he had supplied both Mr. Silchester and myself with honey.”
“Well, you probably know,” remarked Colonel Treaves, “his bees caught him—like Acteon, wasn’t it, and his hounds, what?”
“Do you mean to say that he was attacked by his own hives?” asked Mr. Mycroft, with convincing interest.
“Well, I don’t think there can be a shadow of doubt on that point. You may not know—think it was before you came to the village—but his wretched wife died the same way and the coroner then told him to have the bees destroyed. He said he would, too. He either disobeyed the court’s order or the Heregroves must have had something about them that bees can’t stand. Never liked either of them myself—and the man! Well, nisi bonum. He was certainly stung to death; the body is swollen and black as a ripe mulberry.”
That made me feel quite sick.
“All I would like to ask you gentlemen,” he continued, “is whether, when you called on him, he seemed well and in a normal frame of mind?”
“Oh, yes,” replied Mr. Mycroft. “I thought he was a queer customer and he was obviously a bit of a recluse, but he was certainly sane and healthy when we saw him, wasn’t he, Mr. Silchester?”
“Oh, quite, quite,” was all I could say, and all it seemed that I was expected to say.
“We took a turn or two with him in his garden,” went on Mr. Mycroft. “It was impossible to judge on what terms he was with his bees, for they had retired for the evening. Perhaps we ran more of a risk than seemed apparent by calling on a man who was in such peril.”
“Perhaps so, perhaps so,” answered the colonel. “You never can tell. Bees are certainly queer beasts. In India I have known fifty people going down a lane. Suddenly from the sky will drop what seems a cloud of dust. It’s a swarm of small, savage, forest bees. The swarm’ll slump on one poor fellow, leaving unvisited everyone else. If there isn’t a pool handy for him to be flung into, he may be dead in a few minutes and swollen like Heregrove’s body. Some people say it’s smell, but I don’t believe anyone really knows. In India we say Bismillah—Allah’s Will, and, after all, everything ends there finally.”
Chapter X
AS WE WERE?
And there, to my surprise, our fantastic mixture of adventure and persecution, of gratuitous attack and undetected counterattack, of scientific planning and Wild-West justice, came to an end. As suddenly as this typhoon had blown across the quiet track of my life, as suddenly it dropped. I live now in what I can only call a suspicious hush. We attended, more as honored guests than as summoned witnesses, the coroner’s court. The coroner took the same view as the magistrate, with the added animus of, “Serve him right, disobeying my instructions.” He also ordered, with the pointless pleasure to himself of just exercising authority, but to my keen though concealed delight, the destruction of the Heregrove hives.
As we left the court, Mr. Mycroft, who had, till now, abstained from speaking to me, strolled along at my side until the small crowd had dissipated itself. Then he remarked quietly, “Unpleasant associations are not the best foundation for an acquaintance, but an adventure shared sometimes is. I realize that you have had many shocks during these days and that once or twice I had to push you harder than you found agreeable, if we were not to be caught in the Caudine Forks, with results which would have been disastrous. I think now, however, you will realize that the wood is behind, the pursuers are scattered.”
He seemed complacently assured. Perhaps it was the wish to find some adequate excuse for resenting his complacency and coolness, neither of which I could myself feel, that made me reply, “But what about our actual position? After all, whether we were really in such grave danger as we thought we can never be certain.”
He looked as though he were going to interrupt, but I was determined to have my say out. Not only had I been treated like a child throughout this whole affair, as though I could not be expected to have a clear judgment o
n matters which did concern me more than anyone else, but when we went to see Colonel Treaves I had been hurt at the way both men had behaved, again, as though I were a child. Now I would assert my rights and he should hear my considered opinion.
“What we can be sure of,” I continued, “is that we threw off what we took to be our pursuer by throwing him to his death. He may, at the worst, have intended to do no more than scare us. We certainly killed him. It is, I know, a nasty word, but it is better out and off my mind.”
Mr. Mycroft allowed himself a short sigh.
“No law in any country,” he said, slowly, “and I know something of the rules which men have made in attempting to save the innocent and helpless from the ruthless strong—no law would have given a cruel and calculating murderer the chances I gave him or would authorize the running of those risks which I took in order that he should have every opportunity, in fact, even a bribe, to turn him from his course. He was, you will remember, already a murderer and I was prepared, rather than take the line which all human justice has decreed, to treat his horrible, patiently-worked-out crime as a slip, as a bygone to be treated as something which had not taken place and not—as, alas, mankind is right in judging—as the fruit, and only the first fruit, of a long-nourished and now richly yielding root of evil.
The Romans with their legal minds were correct. I quoted the Latin judgment that day when we were discussing the evolution of venom in animals. It is certainly as true of us: Nemo repente fuit turpissimus, the murderer ripens more slowly than the saint—both are not accidents but achievements. Heregrove could not turn from his way, at the point where he crossed our path, even if the past were to be blotted out and the present to offer him a prize if he would only abstain from turning bloodshed into a business. He needed someone to bring home his crime to him, and that we could not do. We could only offer to deflect him. He would have gone on the same way in other fields.”
I broke in there. “But your offer was a sham!” I exclaimed.
It was the only time I saw Mr. Mycroft nearly angry. His face didn’t change color or the expression alter, but I caught sight of some slight alteration in his eyes which I own made me positively scared. Somehow I had never thought of him as someone who might be fearsome. Helpful, amusing, irritating, managing, boring—yes, all these things, but never formidable. Yet that gleam—I can’t call it a flash—was certainly very disconcerting. It seemed not so much as though one were looking at a man whom I was trying to provoke and who I suddenly realized, might strike back at me, but rather that I was suddenly looking through a porthole, through the eyeholes of a mask out onto something as cold, impersonal, and indifferent as an iceberg emerging from a mist and seen bearing down on my ship.
“I mean,” I rather stammered, “the letter was a fake. There was no offer for Heregrove, as a matter of fact, to accept?”
“You think then, that I did not really plead with that wretched man, caught in the toils of his own evil thought which had set until it became evil deed? Did not seek to make it possible, if it might be, that he should break out of his self-made trap? That I simply mocked him, pretending to hold out a helping hand and point a way out of the false dilemma he had caught and impaled his conscience on: ‘Murder or starve’? That I put on a piece of play-acting the better to amuse myself and you with an exposition of the skill with which I had trapped and deluded a fellow creature, even though he was our enemy and mankind’s?”
“Well,” I protested, with my heart, I must confess, beating quite unpleasantly, for he was driving me onto the defensive when I had been sure I had a case against him. “Well, he could not have taken an opportunity which actually was quite fictitious.”
“The offer,” replied Mr. Mycroft gravely, “had to be—as are all life’s offers—in a form in which he could believe and could, if there were no wish in him to serve Life and not Death, refuse. Do you suppose he would have been more likely and more able to accept had I said, ‘You are, of course, a murderer whom the law cannot convict or even recognize. You are now planning to murder us and God knows how many more. If you will abstain I will pay you three or four hundred pounds and get you out of your financial embarrassments’?”
Mr. Mycroft waited a moment, but I was dogged. He was certainly putting his dreadful and very awkward deed in a very clear light.
“Still,” I replied, “I am sorry to appear stubborn and to be precise. The real fact that remains, when all is said, is that he could not have been given the alternative to which you verbally urged him.”
“I am sorry,” answered Mr. Mycroft—and I was alarmed to hear come into his voice actually something of that very same tone which I had heard when Heregrove refused the offer which we were now discussing and Mr. Mycroft used those same words with a curious, ominous conviction.
“Mr. Silchester, I am sorry that we have seen so much of each other and you are yet capable of thinking that I would lie to a man in mortal peril, offering him a spurious escape. As I have said, I could not tell him from whence in actual fact would come the resources which I guaranteed for his deliverance, would he but accept and turn, if only for a moment, from his way. We were his prey. Even if he could have faced the fact that we knew he was a murderer, he could not have believed in our bona fides. Man imputes himself. The fact that we were in possession of such knowledge he could only interpret as his nature could understand—that we would for the rest of his life do as he would do to such another who should fall into his power—blackmail him. Add to that fact that we come to offer him money, not immediately to extort it, and he can only be the more certain that here is a doubly cunning trap, beside which blackmail is aboveboard business. No; the disguise of form was essential for his one chance of safety, even more than for ours. But the substance, the firm offer was there.
“Because I have learned that expression of emotion is mere sentimentality, Mr. Silchester, I must ask you to believe that that certainly does not mean that I am without feelings, still less coolly irresponsible. By every possible means, I was determined to rescue that murderer and to spare him from the fate he was drawing on himself, if I could. I was as set on that as on saving your life at the cost of compelling you more than once to act, when you would much have preferred to procrastinate and dally.
“The offer made Heregrove was a real one. I had arranged that, should he go to the address I would name and which I should see he would think was that of the registered offices and the legal adviser of the Society where he would receive his grant-in-aid, he should be received by a long-trusted solicitor friend of mine, given £200 with his ticket and any other expenses paid to any place he should choose to go, and with a firm offer of another £200 when he arrived at his destination. My friend was to be sufficiently (but not too fully) seized of the case, being told that Heregrove was a blackmailer against whom a charge would be difficult to present and who should be given this chance of clearing out. This friend of mine, as have many fine solicitors in the course of their practice, has dealt across his quiet, brief-covered table with more than one such dangerous man in this effective way. What the large forceps of the law cannot pick up and must leave lurking under our feet, often the steady hand of a wise solicitor can lay hold of and drop out of the window. The plan would have worked, had Heregrove assented, for I have so broken the news—if I may use that phrase—to several unconvictable criminals, that I knew their record and would give them one more chance, and quite a number have made good. But Heregrove was by nature not one of these. I repeat the question, and must ask you to reply, ‘Was not he self-doomed?’”
He was right, just, and generous, I had to allow, but still I could say nothing. This last display of such courageous, thoughtful efficiency, I know, ought to have swept away my last timid considerations and have made me apologize as handsomely as possible, urged by a not less generous trustfulness. Awkward as it was for me to recognize, I could no longer avoid seeing—indeed, I had forced him to prove to me—that he was a wonder, a man ahead of his age in skill
and also in justice. His attempt to save the murderer was no less wonderful, patient, and daring than his success in saving the designated murderee.
Yet, somehow, the very supermanly quality about it all put me off, daunted me. I don’t want to have to live with mental or moral geniuses. They may always be expecting you to be heroic, and he certainly had landed me in a position which might quite easily at any moment become dangerous.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t know. I shall never be sure. Right or wrong, the thing, as it has actually happened, or been made to happen, will always be hanging over me. It might at any time come out, and then in spite of all the fine motives which I don’t doubt prompted the actual deed, where shall we be, what will be my position?”
He looked at me again as though he were making up his mind whether to say more or no, whether to tell me something further or to leave things as they were. As I did not believe that there was any answer to my question and so felt pretty hopeless about the whole matter, I really didn’t care whether he went on trying to console me, or left me alone. Evidently he decided, in the end, that he could do something for me.
“As to your position,” he said, “I think I can reassure you by telling you one more thing. It, too, is a secret. Mycroft is only one of my family names.”
I could not help wondering, on hearing this opening, to what fresh freak of vanity I was to be introduced. This sudden emphasis upon himself showed how his egotism had to peep out even when the matter in hand was my safety. How could his family names matter to me, much less protect me? We were not in the Middle Ages and he a big baron.
“I have used Mycroft,” he complacently continued, “because my full name was once pretty widely known, and I wanted, when I retired, to be quiet and unmolested. You have been served, and, I may add, if you so wish, you are still under the protection” (the man seemed quite self-assured that I should so wish)—“your case still has as its defense—”
