Afternoon Tea Mysteries [Vol Three] Read online

  “I should like to see if it also fits the portion that was left in the typewriter,” suggested the other, ignoring the anxious looks bent upon him from every side. Passing by us all, he laid the three pieces together on the library table with a glance at the young Gillespies which was not without its element of compassion.

  “Let us see it. What’s on it?” urged Alfred. “Why, this is worse than father’s death.”

  “If Miss Meredith will tell me how this central portion came to be on the attic floor, I will presently oblige you,” rejoined the coroner.

  She who of all present showed no interest in the completed sheet answered instantly, and without any further attempt at subterfuge or denial:

  “I carried it there. I had come upon my uncle lying dead in his study, and thinking, fearing, that he had been struck while at the typewriter, I flew to the latter, and, lifting up the carriage, consulted the letter attached to it for some indication of this, and saw—George, Leighton, Alfred,” she vehemently cried, facing them with a look before which each proud and spirited head sank in turn, “I do not know upon which of your three souls the weight of this crime rests. But one of you, one, I say, lies under the ban of your father’s denunciation. Read!” And her trembling finger crossed that of the detective and fell upon a line terminating the half-finished letter which they had already partially read.

  This was the appearance of that letter as now presented:

  New York, N.Y., Oct. 17, 1899

  James C. Taylor, Esq.,

  18 State St.,

  Boston, Mass,

  Dear Sir:—

  In regard to .the financing of the $10, 000, 000 mentioned in our conversation on the 12th inst., it is of the utmost importance that I am placed as soon as possible in full possession of the important facts regarding the property covered by these bonds.

  First, the actual cost per mile, and if such cost covers the necessary equipment for same both for freight and passenger service; also if these bonds are the first lien one of my sons he

  “Those last words were written after he felt himself sinking under the poison,” rang out in instinctive emphasis from her lips. “Contradict me, George! Contradict me, Leighton! or you, Alfred, if you can! It would give me new life. It would restore me—”

  She was sinking, fainting, almost at the point of death herself, but not a voice was lifted, not a hand raised. This suggestion of crime had robbed them, one and all, of breath, almost of life.

  VIII. The Man behind the Screen

  SUDDENLY one voice rang out in passionate protest. “Hope! Hope! It was not I! It was not I!” And Alfred, leaving his brothers, stood before his young cousin, with self-forgetful gestures expressing a denial which was half-prayer.

  George flushed, and his fist rose; Leighton drooped his head in shame—or was it sorrow; but the next minute he had that rebellious fist in his own clutch. Miss Meredith kept her eyes turned sedulously away from them all.

  “I only want one of you to speak; the man who can exonerate his brothers by confessing his own guilt. Do not touch me!”

  This to Alfred, whose hand had caught hold of her dress.

  With an air of pride, the first I had seen in him, the youngest son of Mr. Gillespie withdrew from her side and took up his stand on the farther side of the hall.

  “You are quick with your suspicions,” he flashed out. “What sort of men do you think us, that you should allow an incoherent phrase like this at the end of a letter begun in health but finished in agony, prejudice you to the death against persons of your own blood? It would take more than that to make me think evil of you, Hope.”

  It was a natural reproach, and it told not only upon her, but upon us all. The words which had precipitated this situation might mean much and might mean little. Had the reputation of these young men been of a more stable character, or had no attempt been made to suppress this portion of the letter, suspicion would never have followed the discovery of this incongruous addition to the half-finished business letter found in the typewriter; “one of my sons he”—was that an accusation of crime? George and Leighton were on the point of asserting not, and Alfred had just begun to swagger with an air of injured pride, when Miss Meredith, recovering herself, laid her hand upon her bosom in repetition of her former action, and slowly drew forth a letter, the appearance of which evidently produced a new and still greater shock in the breasts of the three young men.

  “I shall not try to vindicate myself,” said she. “I have lived like a sister in this house, and you would have a right to reproach me if it were not for what I hold here. Alfred, you have complained that the few words left in the typewriter by your dying father were incoherent and unsatisfactory. Will you regard as equally meaningless this letter written four weeks ago? Sir,”—here she turned to the coroner,—“my uncle was ill a month ago. It was not a dangerous illness, but the remedies given—Oh! Dr. Bennett help me to say it—were remedies we all knew to be dangerous if taken in too great quantities. One night—I cannot go on—he had reason to think his glass was tampered with, and after that, he wrote this letter, and charged me with its delivery in case he—he—Ah! I need not say in case of what. You have seen his dear head lying low in the room over there. Only,—as this letter is addressed to my cousins conjointly, will you allow them to read it without witnesses if they will swear to respect it and restore it in an unmutilated condition to your hands? It is the only favour I ask you to show them, and this I humbly entreat you to grant, if only in recognition of what I have suffered at having precipitated this horror when I only meant to—to—”

  She was sinking—falling—nay, almost at the point of death herself. But she reached out the letter, and the coroner, giving it one glance, handed it over to Leighton as the one least shaken by the calamity which had just overwhelmed the house.

  “God forbid that I should deny to sons the privilege of being the first to read the last letter addressed them by their father.”

  But he made no move towards drawing the curtain between himself and the room from which he was retreating, nor could he be said to have really taken his eye off any of them during the reading of this long letter.

  “You see I had need of a friend,” murmured Miss Meredith, swaying towards me.

  I gave her a commiserating look. Was ever a girl more unfortunately situated? Two at least of the men against whom she had felt forced to utter this denunciation of crime, loved her (or so I believed), Alfred passionately, George with less show of feeling, but possibly with fully as much depth and fervour.

  “You might have held the letter back,” I whispered.

  But she met me with a noble look.

  “You mean if I have not drawn suspicion upon them by my first subterfuge. But with so much in their disfavour, how could I calculate upon another opportunity of seeing them all together. And they must read it together. So my uncle told me. But he never thought it would be with police-officers in the house.”

  Here the coroner advanced to question her, and I am happy to say that my presence gave her courage to bear up under the ordeal. This was what he elicited from her.

  She did not know what was in the letter. It had been written by her uncle while still on his sick bed and after an experience which I will not relate here, as it will be found more fully stated in the letter itself. This letter I will reproduce for you at once, though it was weeks before I knew its whole contents:

  GEORGE, LEIGHTON, AND ALFRED:

  I may not have been a good father, but I have at least been a just one. Though each and all of you since coming to man’s estate have given me great cause for complaint, I have never been harsh towards you, nor have I ever denied you anything from mere caprice or from an egotistic desire to save myself trouble. Yet to one of you my life is of so little value that he is willing to resort to crime to rid himself of me. Does this shock you, Leighton, George, Alfred? We are a Christian family, members of an honourable community, trained each and all in religious principles, you, by the b
est, the sweetest of mothers—does it move you to think that one of you could contemplate parricide and even attempt it? It moves me; and in two of you must awaken a horror, the anticipation of which affords me the sole comfort now remaining to my doomed and miserable life. For nothing will ever make me believe that this act was a concerted one or that the attempt which has just been made upon my life had its birth in more than one dark breast. One guilty soul there is among you, but only one; and lest to the remaining two the accusation I have just made may seem fanciful, unreal, the result of nightmare or the effect of fever, I will relate what happened in this room last night, just as I related it to Hope when she asked me this morning why I seemed so loath to see you before you went out to your several lounging places.

  I was dozing. The lamp which since my illness has never been turned out in my room, threw great shadows on wall and ceiling. I seemed conscious of these shadows, though I was half asleep, but not so conscious that I was not aware of the light shining through the transom from the gas jet near the top of the stairs. This light has always been company for me, especially in wakeful nights or when I found myself troubled by dreams or any physical distress. It seemed to connect me with the rest of the house, and simple as it may seem to you, accounts for the cheerfulness with which I have declined the offers of my sons to sit with me during these last painful nights. I had no need of their company while this light shone; and as for pain—why, that is an evil which all men are called upon sooner or later to endure.

  I was resting then, in this mild reflected light, when suddenly it went out. This woke me, for the orders are strict that this jet be left burning till the servants come downstairs in the morning. But I did not stir in my bed; I simply listened. Though aroused and somewhat disturbed by this palpable disregard of my wishes, I exerted all of my faculties to detect the step I now heard loitering about my door. But it was studiously cautious and made no distinct sound in my ear. I did not like this, and listened still more intently, whereupon I heard the door open and someone come in, softly, and with long pauses such as were not wont to accompany the entrance of any member of my household. I was deciding whether to raise an alarm or lie still and let myself be robbed of the money which I had just received from the bank, when I heard the whispered “Father” with which one and all of you approach me at night when you wish to ascertain if I am asleep or awake.

  Why did I hear myself called and yet make no reply? What was in my heart, or what have I seen of late in your natures or conduct, that I should remain quiet under this appeal and lie there shut-eyed and watchful? I had no definite reason for doubting any of you. I knew you were in debt and that two of you at least were in crying need of money, but I hardly think I dreaded the rifling of my desk by the hands of one of my sons. Yet that approach so gentle and so measured! the drawn-in breath! the shadow that grew and grew upon the wall!—all these spoke of something quite different from the anxiety of a son keeping watch over a sick father’s slumbers.

  The desk was near the window towards which my eyes were turned in open watchfulness, and I hoped by lying still to catch sight of the intruder’s figure at the moment of his passing between me and the faint illumination made on the curtains by the street lamp opposite. But the intruder did not advance in that direction. He passed instead to the little cup board over the wash-stand, where, as you all know, my medicines are kept. This I was made aware of by the faint click made by one bottle striking another. “George has come home ill, or Leighton has one of his terrible headaches,” was the soothing thought which then came to me, and I found it difficult not to speak out and ask who was sick and what bottle was wanted. But the something which from the first had acted in the way of restraint upon me, held me still, and I remained dumb while that sneaking hand continued to fumble among the phials and glasses. Suddenly a fear struck me, a fear so far removed from any which I had ever before known, that my whole attitude of thought towards my sons must have undergone an instantaneous change—a gulf opening where an instant before was confidence and love. The medicine was kept there from which my nightly dose was prepared; a medicine which you have all heard declared by my physician to be a deadly poison, which must be measured most carefully and given in only such doses as he had prescribed. Could it be that my son was feeling about for this? Had George bet once too often on that mare which will be his ruin, or Leighton found his religion an insufficient cloak for indiscretions which ever shunned the light of day; or Alfred—the child of my heart, he whom his dying mother placed as a last trust in my arms—confounded the ennui of inaction with that weariness of life which is the bane of rich men’s sons? I know the despairs that come in youth, and I quaked where I lay; but it was not upon self-destruction that this man at the cupboard was bent. I felt my whole frame tremble and my heart sink in unutterable despair as he advanced, still quietly and with great pauses, up to the foot-board of my bed, then around to the side, protected, as you know, by a screen, till he crouched out of sight, but within reach of the small table where my glass stands with the spoon beside it, ready for my use if I grow restless and weary.

  To have turned, to have intercepted the creeping figure in its work, and thus have known definitely and forever which one of you had thus furtively visited my medicine cabinet before proceeding to my bedside, might have been the natural course with some; but it was not my course. I was not content just to interrupt. I wanted to know the full extent of what I had to fear. A remark which Dr. Bennett had once let fall recurred to me, transfixing me to my bed. “If you were not a careful man,” he had said in diagnosing my present illness, “I should say that you had taken something foreign into your system; something which has no business there; something which under other circumstances and in another man’s case I should denominate poison.” It had seemed nonsense to me at the time, and I laughed at what I considered a fatuous remark, uttered with unnecessary gravity; but now that there was really poison in the house, and one of my own blood stood hiding behind the screen within a foot of my medicine glass, I could not but choke down the cry which this thought caused to rise in my throat and listen for what might come. Alas! I was destined to behold with my eyes as well as hear with my ears the next move made by my unknown visitant. By the grace of God or through some coincidence equally providential, the gas at this momentous instant was relit in the hall, and I perceived, amid the old shadows thus called out upon the wall, a new one—that of a hand holding a bottle, which, projecting itself beyond the straight line cast by the screen, was now stealing slowly but surely in the direction of the table on which stood my glass of medicine. I did not gasp or cry. Thought, feeling, consciousness even of my own unfathomable misery seemed lost in the one instinct—to watch that hand. Would it falter? Should I see it tremble or hesitate in its short passage across the faintly illumined space upon which my eyes were fixed? Yes, some monition of conscience, some secret fear or filial remembrance made it pause for an instant; but even as my heart bounded in glad relief and human feelings began to reawake in my frozen breast, it steadied and passed on, and though I could no longer see aught but a shadowy arm, I could hear one—two—three—a dozen drops falling into my drink—a sound which, faint as it was, made the guilty heart behind the screen quake; for the hand shook as it retreated, and I beheld distinctly outlined on the illumined space before me the end of the semi-detached label which marked the special bottle on which the word poison is printed in large letters. No further doubt was possible. The medicine in my glass had been strengthened and by the hand of one of my sons.

  Which one?

  In the misery of the moment I felt as if I did not care. That any of you should seek my death was an overwhelming grief to me. But as thought and reason returned, the wild desire to know just what and whom I had to fear seized me in the midst of my horror, mixed with another sentiment harder to explain, and which I can best characterise as a feeling of dread lest I should betray my suspicions and so raise between my children and myself an insurmountable barrier.

/>   Subduing my emotion and summoning to my aid all the powers of acting with which I have been by nature endowed, I moved restlessly under the clothes, calling out in a sort of sleepy alarm:

  “Who’s there? Is it you, George? If so, reach me my medicine.”

  But no George stepped forth. “Leighton?” I cried petulantly. “Surely I hear one of you in the room.” But my son Leighton did not reply.

  I did not call for Alfred. I could not! He was the last son of his mother.

  Did I wrong the others in not uttering his name also?

  Meantime all was quiet behind the screen. Then I heard a quick movement, followed by the shutting of a door, and I realised that an escape had been effected from the room in a way I had not calculated on—that is, by means of the dressing-room opening out of the alcove in which my bed stands.

  I had thought myself a weak man up to that hour; but when I heard that door close, I bounded to my feet and attempted to reach the hall before the man who had thus escaped me could find refuge in any of the adjoining rooms. But I must have fallen insensible almost immediately, for when I came to myself I found the foot-board of the bed within reach of my hand, and the clock on the point of striking two.

  I dragged myself up and staggered back to bed. I had neither the courage nor the strength to push the matter further at that time. Indeed, I felt a sort of physical fear, probably the result of illness, which made it quite impossible for me to traverse the halls and creep from room to room seeking for guilt in eyes whose expression up to this unhallowed hour had betrayed nothing worse than a reckless disregard of my wishes.

  Yet it was torment unspeakable to lie there in an uncertainty which threw a cloud over all my sons. For hours my thoughts ran the one gamut, George, Leighton, Alfred, clinging agonisedly to each beloved name in turn, only to drop into a dreadful uncertainty as I remembered the temptations besetting each one of you, and the readiness with which you all, from the oldest to the youngest, have ever succumbed to them. There was no determining point in the character of any of you which made me able to say in this solitary and awful communion with my own fears, “This one at least is innocent!” If I dwelt on George’s generous good nature, I also recalled his wild extravagance and the debts he so recklessly heaps up at every turn he makes in this God-forsaken city; if some recollection of Leighton’s strict ways in open matters of conscience came to soothe me, there instantly came with it the remembrance of the various tales which had reached my ears of certain secret attachments which drew him into circles where crime is more than a suggestion, and murder a possible attendant upon every feast. Then Alfred—youngest of all but the least youthful in his attitude towards the world and his fellow-men—what honourable ambition had he ever shown calculated to give me solace at this awful time, and make the association of his name with a damnable crime an impossibility and an outrage?