LITMIR.BIZ

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altogether worthy of her husband’s friendship; but she could not dissociate him from the horror of the event which caused his presence in that house. She felt that of those gathered around her table that night, in the shaded light of the low lamps, amidst the perfume of hothouse flowers, the greater number were brooding upon a mystery which might mean murder.

      She was very glad to escape to the drawing-room with Hilda, directly dinner was over.

      “And now, I suppose, they will talk of that poor creature’s death,” she said. “Come, Hilda, sing one of Schubert’s ballads, and let us try to forget all that horror.”

      Hilda seated herself at the piano obediently, and began “Mignon.” She had a superb mezzo-soprano, clear as a bell, ripe and round and full. The rich notes went pealing up to the low ceiling and floating out at the open windows. Perhaps Bothwell heard them in the dining-room, for he came sauntering in presently, and slipped quietly into a seat in a shadowy corner. Hilda always sang and played from memory. There was no irksome duty to be done in the way of turning over music.

      “What made you desert the gentlemen, Bothwell?” asked Dora, when the song was over.

      “They were talking of that diabolical inquest again. Nobody in Bodmin seems able to talk of anything else. Wherever I went today I heard the same ghastly talk—every imaginable suggestion, and not one grain of common sense. What ghouls people must be to gloat over such a subject! No wonder that men who live in great cities despise the rustic mind.”

      “I do not find that the inhabitants of cities are any less ghoulish,” retorted Dora, who felt warmly about her native soil, and would have fought for Cornish people and Cornish institutions to the death. “See how the London papers gloat over the details of crime.”

      These three spent the evening very quietly in the drawing-room, while the three men in the dining-room were discussing the event on the railway.

      Hilda sang some of Mrs. Wyllard’s favourite songs, while her hostess sat in the lamp-light by an open window working at a group of sunflowers on a ground of olive plush. Bothwell kept in his dark corner all the evening, so quiet that he might have been asleep, save that he murmured a “Thank you, Miss Heathcote, very lovely,” after one of Hilda’s songs. She thought that he was only grateful for having had his slumber soothed by a vague strain of melody.

      The men in the dining-room had turned away from the lighted table, and were sitting in a little knot in the embrasure of the wide Tudor window, smoking their cigars, half in the ruddy glow of the lamps and half in the mellow light of the newly-risen moon. They could hardly see each other’s faces in that uncertain light. Stodden, the butler, had wheeled a table over to the window and arranged the claret-jugs and glasses upon it, before he left the room. The little knot of men smoking and drinking by the window looked a picture of comfort, with the soft sweet air blowing in from the garden, and the great full moon shining over the roses and the fountain in the old-fashioned parterre. Joseph Distin’s keen eye noted every detail of his friend’s surroundings; and he told himself that, for the fourth son of a village vicar, Julian Wyllard had done remarkably well.

      Between them Wyllard and the Coroner had contrived to put the London lawyer in full possession of the facts relating to the girl’s death. Those facts were unfortunately of the scantiest. Edward Heathcote breathed no hint of that dark suspicion about Bothwell which had flashed into his mind after the inquest, and which he had vainly endeavoured to shake off since that time. Bothwell’s manner at dinner this evening had not been calculated to disarm suspicion. His moody brow, his silence and abstraction, were the unmistakable signs of secret trouble of some kind. That trouble was coincidental in time with the event on the railway; for Heathcote and Bothwell had met in Bodmin, and had ridden home together on the previous day, and the young man had been cheery enough.

      “The ticket found upon the girl was from London to Plymouth, I apprehend,” said Distin, when he had heard everything.

      “Yes.”

      “Then she started from Paddington that morning. My business will be to find out who she was, and the motive of her journey.”

      “And do you think there is a possibility of tracing her in London, without a shred of evidence—except the photograph of a dead face?” exclaimed Wyllard. “To my mind it seems like looking in a brook for a bubble that broke there a week ago.”

      “As a west countryman you should remember how otter-hounds hunt the bead on the water,” answered Distin. “With a photograph, the police ought to be able to trace that girl—even in the wilderness of London.”

      “But if she were a foreigner, and only passed through London?” suggested Wyllard.

      “Even then she would leave her bead, like the otter. She could not get a night’s shelter without some one knowing of her coming and going. Unless she slept in the lowest form of lodging-house—a place through which the herd of strange faces are always passing—the probabilities are in favour of her face being remembered.”

      “Judging by the neatness of her clothes and the refinement of her features, she must have been the last person likely to set foot in a common lodging-house,” said Heathcote. “But there was no money found upon her; neither purse nor papers of any kind.”

      “That fact is to me almost conclusive,” said Distin.

      “Upon what point?”

      “It convinces me that she was made away with.”

      “Indeed!” exclaimed Wyllard, much surprised. “The thing never occurred to me in that light.”

      “Naturally, my dear friend. You have not devoted twenty years of your life to the study of the criminal mind,” answered the lawyer easily. “Don’t you see that the first thought of a man who made up his mind to throw a girl out of a train—unless he did the act in a blind fury which gave him no time for thought of any kind—his first precaution, I say, would be to see that there was no evidence of her identity upon her, more especially where the victim was a stranger in the land, as this poor thing was? The identification of the victim is often half-way towards the identification of the murderer. But if the dead can be buried unrecognised—a nameless unknown waif, in whose fate no private individual is interested—why, after the funeral the murderer may take his ease and be merry, assured that he will hear no more of the matter. Public interest in a mysterious crime of that kind soon dies out.”

      “And you think that this poor girl was the victim of a crime?” asked the Coroner, surprised to find his own idea shared by the great authority.

      “In my own mind I have no doubt she was murdered.”

      “But why should she not have committed suicide?”

      “Why should she have travelled from London to Cornwall in order to throw herself over that particular embankment?” demanded Distin. “An unnecessary luxury, when there were the Holborn Viaduct and a score of bridges at her service, to say nothing of the more natural exit by her own bedroom window. Besides, in the statistics of self-murder you will find that nineteen out of twenty suicides—nay, I might almost say ninety-nine out of a hundred—leave a piteous little note explaining the motive of the deed—an appeal to posterity, as it were. ‘See how great a sufferer I have been, and what a heroic end I have made.’ No, there is only one supposition that would admit this girl being her own destroyer. Some ruffian in the train might have so scared her that she flung herself out, in a frantic effort to escape from him. But against this possibility there is the fact of the absence of any purse or papers. She could not have been travelling that distance without, at least, a few shillings in her possession.”

      “Who knows!” said Julian Wyllard. “Very narrow are the straits of genteel poverty. If, as I suppose, she was a poor little nursery governess going to her situation, she may have had just money enough to pay for her railway ticket, and no more. She may have relied upon her employers meeting her at the station with a conveyance.”

      “If she were a nursery governess, due at some country house on that day, surely her employers would have communicated with the Bodmin police before now,” said Distin.

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