And so, "Please come this way," he muttered hoa.r.s.ely. "I ought perhaps to warn you--to prepare you for something of a shock." And, turning round, beckoning to the other to follow him, he opened the door of the studio, stepping aside to allow Wingfield to pa.s.s in before him.

But once through the doorway the lawyer suddenly recoiled and stopped short, so dreadful and so unexpected was the sight which met his eyes.

What Wingfield saw remained with him for weeks, and even for months, an ever-present, torturing vision, full of mingled horror and mystery, a mystery to which he was destined never to find the solution.

Focussed against a blurred background made up of distempered light green walls, a curtainless, open window, and various plain deal studio properties pushed back against the wall, lay, stretched out on some kind of low couch brought forward into the middle of the room, a rigid, motionless figure.

The lower half of the figure, including the feet, which rested on a chair placed at the bottom of the couch, was entirely covered by a blanket; but the chest and head, slightly raised by pillows, seemed swathed and bound up in broad strips of white linen, which concealed chin and forehead, hair and ears, while the head was oddly supported by a broad band or sling fastened with safety-pins--Wingfield's eyes took note of every detail--to the side of the couch. Under the blanket, which was stretched tightly across the man's breast, could be seen the feeble twitching of fingers, but even so, the only sense of life and feeling seemed to the onlooker centred in the eyes, whose glance Wingfield found himself fearing yet longing to meet.

To the right of the couch a large j.a.panese screen had been so placed as to hide some object spread out on the floor. To the left, watching every movement of the still, rec.u.mbent figure, stood a powerful-looking woman in nursing dress. Wingfield's gaze, after wandering round the large, bare room, returned and again clung to the sinister immobile form which he longed to be told was that of Hinton, and as he gazed he forced himself to feel a fierce gladness and relief in the knowledge that Dering was dead,--that in his pocket lay the telegram which proved it.

At last, to gain courage and to stifle a horrible doubt, he compelled himself to meet those at once indifferent and appealing eyes, which seemed to stare fixedly beyond the group of men by the door; and suddenly the lawyer became aware that just behind him hurried whispered words were being uttered.

"This gentleman is Mr. Dering's solicitor; perhaps he will be able to throw some light on the whole affair," and he felt himself being plucked by the sleeve and gently pulled back into the hall.

"It is--isn't it?--poor Hinton?" and he looked imploringly from one man to the other.

"Hinton?" said the doctor sharply. "He's there, sure enough--but you didn't see him, for we put him under a sheet, behind that screen. Your friend shot him dead first, and then cut his own throat, but he didn't set about that in quite the right way, so he's alive still, as you can see."

Wingfield drew a long breath of something like relief. The torturing suspense of the last few moments was at an end.

"And where is Mrs. Dering?" he spoke in a quiet, mechanical voice; and Johnstone felt angered by his callousness.

"We've just sent her back into the next house," he answered curtly, "and made her take the Hinton children with her. For--well, it often is so in such cases, you know--the presence of his wife seems positively to distress Mr. Dering; besides, the nurse and I can do, and have done, all that is possible."

"And have you no clue to what has happened? Has Dering been able to give no explanation of this--this--horrible business?"

Johnstone shook his head. "Of course he can't speak. He will never speak again. He wrote a few words to his wife, but they amounted to nothing save regret that he had bungled the last half of the affair."

"And what do you yourself think?"

Wingfield spoke calmly and authoritatively. He had suddenly become aware, during the last few moments, that he was talking to a medical man.

"I haven't had time to think much about it;" the tone was rough and sore. "Mr. Dering seems to have come into a large sum of money, and such things have been known to upset men's brains before now."

"Still, he might write something of consequence, now that this gentleman has come," interposed the inspector.

But when Wingfield, standing by that which he now knew was indeed his friend, watched the painful, laboured moving of the pencil across the slate which had been hurriedly fetched some two hours before from the young Hintons' nursery, all he saw, traced again and again, were the words:

"Look after Louise. Look after Louise ..." and then at last: "I mean to die. I mean to die. I mean to die."

V

SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR?

"Yes; there; wives be such a provoking cla.s.s of society, because though they be never right, they be never more than half wrong."--THE TRANTER in _Under the Greenwood Tree_.

I

The fact that it was Mrs. Rigby's Silver Wedding Day, and that she was now awaiting her only brother who was to be the fourth at the dinner she and her husband, the respected Town Clerk of Market Dalling, were giving in honour of the event, appeared to her no reason why she should sit in her parlour with hands idle in her lap. There was a large work-basket on a table close to her elbow, and with quick, capable fingers she was engaged in mending a pillow-case.

It was late June, and Mrs. Rigby sat by the widely open French windows which gave access to her garden--one of those fragrant walled gardens which still embellish the rear of the High Street in a very typically English market town.

Now and again the work would drop between her hands, and lie unheeded on her knee, while she looked out, focussing her dark, bright eyes on the distant figure of a woman who sat in a summer-house situated at the extreme end of the garden; and as Mrs. Rigby gazed thoughtfully at this, her other wedding guest, her whole face would soften--so might a mother look at a daughter whom instinct prompted her to love, and reason to condemn as foolish.

And yet the sitting figure was that of a contemporary of Mrs. Rigby, being, as a matter of fact, a certain Matilda Wellow, who had been her bridesmaid twenty-five years ago to-day, and who was now, in more than one sense of the term, the most substantial spinster of Market Dalling.

The sound of the door behind her quietly opening and shutting made Mrs.

Rigby turn round, and a moment later she was looking up at a tall, straight, still young-looking man, who, clad in evening dress, stood smiling down at her. He was David Banfield, her half-brother.

"Why, you've put on all your war-paint!" she exclaimed in half-pretended dismay. "Didn't you know that there was only Matilda Wellow coming?"

"I don't know that I thought anything about it," he answered, more gaily than his sister was now in the habit of hearing him speak. "I dressed out of compliment to you, Kate, and because--well, I've got into the way of it lately. But pray don't let Matt think that he must needs follow my example!"

Then he sat down by Mrs. Rigby, and gazed out with quick, sensitive appreciation at the old walled garden.

"You're a wonderful gardener, Kate," he said suddenly.

"There's a lot of nonsense talked now about gardening," she said drily.

"With the grand ladies you see such a lot of, Dave, it's just a pa.s.sing fad."

Her brother made no answer; he looked down at her with uncritical and yet dissatisfied eyes. She was a handsome woman, and even now only forty-six, and yet she managed to convey an impression of age. This was partly owing to her unsuitable dress, for Mrs. Rigby was wearing a dark blue silk gown, chosen, not only to grace her silver wedding day, but also with a view to being her best dress during the coming autumn and winter.

Kate Rigby loved her half-brother, David Banfield, as only a childless woman can love the creature to whom she has stood for long years in the place of mother. David was twelve years younger than herself, and, with one exception, he had never caused her a moment's real unhappiness or unease. The exception, however, had been paramount, for with him had been connected Mrs. Rigby's only taste of sharp pain and sorrow, and, worse still, to such a woman as herself, of disgrace.

The young man's marriage to an Irish singer, which had taken place without his sister's knowledge, had proved disastrous. Rosaleen Tara--to give her the stage name by which her charming rendering of the old national ballads had made her widely known--had never liked, or been suited to, life as led at Market Dalling; and to make matters worse, she was a Roman Catholic.

After a few years' unsatisfactory married life, and the birth of one child, a girl, Mrs. David Banfield had returned, with her husband's grudging consent, to the musical stage. Then, on the very day Banfield had been expecting his wife home for a short holiday, there had come from her a letter telling him shortly, bluntly, cruelly, that she had been unfaithful to her marriage vow, and that she hoped he would forget her.

Had he forgotten her? No. It had only been owing to his sister's urgency, and to Matthew Rigby's more measured advice, that Banfield had at last consented to take the step of divorcing his wife.

This step Mrs. Rigby had not only never regretted, but--and in this she was more fortunate than her husband--no doubt had ever crossed her mind of its having been the wisest thing for her brother's happiness and peace. But Matthew Rigby, cautious member of a cautious profession, had learned very early in his married life the futility of disagreeing with the wife with whom Providence had blessed him.

Now Banfield lived in solitary state with his little girl, his household managed by the child's nurse, an old Irishwoman, who, if devoted to the child, was incapable of managing such a decorous household as should have been that of the Brew House.

Any day, any hour, Mrs. Rigby would have bartered her personal happiness for that of her half-brother, and yet the two seldom met--and they met almost daily--without the saying on her part of something likely either to wound or to annoy him.

"I suppose Rosy is well? I thought you meant sending the child in to see me to-day?"

"Didn't she come?" A look of worry and anger crossed Banfield's dark, mobile face. "I can't think what prevented it, unless--well, there's been rather an upset at the Brew House, and perhaps Mary Scanlan didn't like to go out."

"I heard there had been an upset," observed his sister drily, "for baker told cook. He said your housekeeper turned the younger maid, old Hornby's daughter, out of the house last night, and that the girl could be heard crying all down the street."

Mrs. Rigby let her work fall unheeded on the floor; quite unconscious of her action she clasped her hands tightly together.