Already my future intention was colouring my life. I grew a beard, wore gla.s.ses and pretended delicacy of const.i.tution; for after the war was done I intended murdering three men, and I proposed to do so in such a manner that society would find it impossible to a.s.sociate me with the crimes. We devoted many hours to the project, for my wife was, of course, at one with me in my determination. She hated her family, as only relations can hate; and she had her own ground of grievance, in that her legacy of twenty thousand pounds was withheld pending the deliberations of Albert Redmayne. The money interested Jenny more than myself; but she pointed out that her grandfather's fortune, representing considerably over a hundred thousand pounds, was left entirely to her uncles and herself, and that as they were all three bachelors, she might reasonably hope to inherit in fulness of time.

To that end we identified ourselves with war work and expected presently to secure the trust and good-will of the brothers before they were banished off the earth. At Princetown we adopted that strenuous, simple-minded att.i.tude to life most calculated to satisfy those among whom our toil now threw us. We pretended an enthusiasm for the work and an affection for Dartmoor which were alike illusory. As an example of our far-reaching methods I may relate how we returned to the wilderness after the war was done and actually began to build a bungalow upon it, which, needless to say, we never had the least intention of occupying. But the seed was sown and we had created in many minds the impression of a devoted and simple pair--conventional, narrow-minded, ingenuous and therefore attractive to the many.

I now come to my confession and must admit at the outset how circ.u.mstance served to modify detail and improve the original plan.

My own greatness gradually increases to any intelligent, unprejudiced critic when my adaptability is considered, for that play of blind chance, in which ninety and nine men out of a hundred find themselves entangled throughout their lives, was to me an added inspiration and opportunity. I tamed Chance and put a bit in its jaws, a bridle on its fiery neck. Chance immensely altered my original schemes; but it was powerless to modify my genius; it became the Slave of the Ring, to serve an adamant purpose superior to itself.

The war left the three brothers alive; and I had designed first to destroy Bendigo and Albert Redmayne, who had never seen me, and finally deal with my old friend, Robert; but it was he who came at the critical moment as a lamb to the slaughter and so inspired the superb conception now familiar to the civilized world.

The time was ripe to pluck these men who had insulted and outraged me; and when Bendigo Redmayne advertised for a motor boatman, the challenge was accepted. I left my wife and, from Southampton, offered my services as an Italian marine engineer familiar with this country and now seeking occupation in England. The sea was my playground in youth and I understood very perfectly the mechanism to be under my control. That Ben would select me seemed improbable and I regarded this tentative opening as unlikely to introduce me to my first objective. I forged certain foreign letters of commendation and left it at that. He approved, however. He liked Italians, from experience of them aboard ship, and he appreciated my letter and my imaginary war record. It was arranged that I should join him on a day in late June; and I returned to Princetown with the interesting intelligence.

My original plans need not be related; but any reader of imagination will perceive that Bendigo Redmayne must quickly have been in my power to dispose of as I thought best. Then, within a fortnight of the date fixed for my arrival at "Crow's Nest," all was changed by the advent of Robert Redmayne. Strange to say, upon the day previous to his appearance, my wife had nearly prevailed upon me not to keep my engagement with Bendigo. She had learned that Robert was at Paignton and the danger of a meeting between him and me--the possibility that he might visit his brother and recognize me--was too considerable to risk. I had therefore almost abandoned the impersonation of "Giuseppe Doria" when Robert arrived at Princetown and we were reconciled. But then Jenny, to whom all credit belongs at this stage--my devoted, glorious Jenny!--began to see a glimpse of the dazzling opportunity now presented. Every detail was worked out with meticulous precaution; not a hazard was ignored, not a risk unguarded.

With Robert Redmayne free to visit Bendigo at any time, "Doria"

would obviously be a danger; for, though a man of little perception--noisy dolt easily enough hoodwinked--there remained strong likelihood that he must recognize me in the Italian "Doria."

And the more so that we had now renewed our former friendship. But let Robert Redmayne be reduced to silence, let Robert Redmayne vanish, and I should be safe enough as "Giuseppe Doria" with the old sailor!

From this determination: to obliterate Robert before going to Bendigo, the inevitable means appeared. A week before Robert Redmayne died, every stage of the journey had been planned.

What was the first step? An entreaty from Jenny that I should shave my beard! She begged again and again and appealed to Robert, who supported her. I withstood them until the day of his destruction.

Upon that morning I appeared without it and they congratulated me.

Other trifling preliminaries there were. On one occasion, when my wife rode down to Plymouth with her uncle on his motor bicycle, she left him to do some shopping and, visiting Burnell's the theatrical costumer, she purchased a red wig for a woman. At home again she transferred it into a red wig for a man. Meantime I had made a pair of large mustaches, helping myself when Mrs. Gerry, our landlady, was out of the way to hair from the brush of one of her stuffed foxes, whose colour exactly resembled the rufous adornments of Robert Redmayne. That was all I wanted. The rest of my disguise would go to the quarry on the person of Robert himself.

But other things went to the quarry also, for I had to look far ahead. When we started on his motor cycle, after tea, to do some work at the bungalow, I took a handbag containing my costume as Giuseppe Doria--a plain, blue serge suit, coat, waistcoat and trousers and yachtsman's cap. I also carried a tool--the little instrument with which I murdered the three Redmaynes. It resembled the head of a butcher's pole-axe, of great weight with the working end sharpened. I made it in a forge at Southampton and it lies to-day under the waters of Como. My bag I had taken on previous occasions to the quarry, with a bottle of whisky and gla.s.ses, so Robert thought it not strange that I should do so again.

We started for Foggintor and it was still broad daylight when we got there. I had already studied the quarry and determined on Robert Redmayne's resting-place. You will find him--and the suit of clothes I was wearing that evening--in the moraine, where it opens fanwise from the cliff above and spreads into the bottom beneath. On the right, at its base, water eternally drips from the ledges of the granite and here, two feet beneath the surface, he doubtless still lies. The falling water smooths the slope and the earth descends daily to increase the volume of granite sand and gravel above him.

The drip must swiftly have washed away any trace of my handiwork and, even with these directions, it may be hard to find him.

Arrived at the bungalow, Robert's first demand was a bath in the quarry pool. To this I had accustomed him and we stripped and swam for ten minutes. You will perceive the value of this operation. His clothes were ready for me without speck or blemish; and when we returned from the pool into the shelter of the bungalow it was a naked man I smote and dropped with one blow of my formidable weapon.

His back was turned and the pole-axe head went through his skull like b.u.t.ter. He was dead before I cut his throat, put on my shoes and hastened, naked, to the moraine with a spade.

I opened the grave under the falling water and dug two feet into the loose stuff, for that was deep enough. Then I carried him and my clothes from the bungalow, interred them, heaped back the soil and left the eternal percolations from above to do the rest. By the following morning it had demanded very keen eyes to discover any disturbance at that spot even had search been inst.i.tuted at Foggintor. But I did not desire a search and my subsequent measures prevented it. A Ganns might have discovered clues, no doubt; a Brendon was more easily deluded.

I stood now free of the vital object in a murder--the corpse, and it remained for me to create the false appearance of reality with which these operations have always been so successfully enshrouded. I donned Redmayne's clothes. We were men nearly of a size and they fitted closely enough, though too large in detail. I then adjusted my wig and mustaches, drew Robert's cap over my head--it was too large, but that mattered not. I next obtained the sack, touched it in blood and put into it my handbag and a ma.s.s of fern and litter to fill it out. Then I fastened it behind the motor bicycle--an unwieldy object designed to create the necessary suspicion.

There was now nothing of either Redmayne or myself left at Foggintor. The gloaming had long thickened to darkness when I went my way and laid the trail through Two Bridges, Postbridge and Ashburton to Brixham. Once only was I bothered--at the gate across the road by Brixham coast-guard station; but I lifted the motor bicycle over it and presently ascended to the cliffs of Berry Head.

Fate favoured me in details, for, despite the hour, there were witnesses to every step of the route; I even pa.s.sed a fisher lad, descending from the lighthouse for a doctor, where no witness might have been hoped for or expected. Thus my course was followed and each stage of the long journey correctly recorded.

On the cliff I emptied my sack, cast its stuffing to the winds, fastened my handbag to the bicycle, thrust the bloodstained sack into a rabbit hole, where it could not fail to be discovered, and then returned to Robert Redmayne's lodging at Paignton. There a telegram had already been sent informing the landlady of his return that night. The place and its details I had gleaned from Redmayne himself; therefore I knew where he kept his machine and, having put it in its shed, entered the house about three o'clock with his latchkey and ate the ample meal left for his consumption. Only a widow and her servant occupied the dwelling and they slept soundly enough.

I did not venture to seek Bob's bedroom, for I knew not where it might lie; but I changed into the serge suit, cap and brown shoes of Doria and packed Redmayne's clothes, tweeds and showy waistcoat, boots and stockings into my handbag with the wig and mustaches and my weapon. Soon after four o'clock I left--a clean-shorn, brown sailorman: "Giuseppe Doria," of immortal memory.

It was now light, but Paignton slumbered and I did not pa.s.s a policeman until half a mile from the watering-place. Having admired the dawn over Torquay, I walked to Newton Abbot and reached that town before six o'clock. At the railway station I breakfasted and presently took a train to Dartmouth. Before noon I reached "Crow's Nest" and made acquaintance with Bendigo Redmayne. He was such a man as Jenny had led me to expect and I found it easy enough to win his friendship and esteem.

But he had little leisure for me at this moment, for there had already come news from his niece of the mysterious fatality on Dartmoor.

Needless to say that my thoughts were now entirely devoted to my wife and I longed for her first communication. Our briefest separation caused me pain, for our souls were as one and we had not been parted, save for my visit to Southampton, since our marriage day.

It was her exquisite thought to involve the man from Scotland Yard.

Mark Brendon, then known to be taking holiday at Princetown, had been pointed out to her; she appraised him correctly and her woman's intuition told her what verisimilitude would spring from his active cooperation. Secure in her own genius, she therefore complicated the issues by appealing to Brendon and winning his enthusiastic a.s.sistance. Much sprang from this, for the poor fellow was soon a willing victim to Jenny; and while he lent a thousand happy touches to subsequent incidents by his inefficiencies and sins of omission, such moderate talent as he possessed was still farther obscured by the emotion of love which sprang up in his heart for my widowed partner. Thus he became exceedingly useful as time pa.s.sed; yet fortune favours fools and his very stupidity served him well at the end; for when I sought to destroy him on Griante and believed that I had done so, the man displayed an ingenuity for which I did not give him credit and unconsciously laid the foundations of subsequent disaster.

The letter which Bendigo Redmayne received, and supposed had come from his brother at Plymouth, was posted by Jenny on her journey to "Crow's Nest." We had written it together a week earlier and studied her uncle's indifferent penmanship very carefully before doing so.

This blind I held valuable, and indeed it proved to be; for it concentrated attention on the port and led to the theory that Robert had escaped to France or Spain.

Thus closed our opening episode. The murder of Michael Pendean became received as a fact capable of everything but proof absolute, while the escape of Robert Redmayne offered an insoluble problem to the authorities. Michael Pendean indeed was dead enough, for it had been a part of my original conception that he should never reappear.

Obviously he could not do so; and I, who had already created "Doria," now began to live my new part in life with zest and gusto--a dramatist and actor in one. He did not spring full-fledged from my brain; but like other great impersonators, I gradually enlarged and enriched the character and finally found myself actually living and thinking the new being into which I was translated. Pendean sank to the shadow of a shade.

My past, by an effort of will, was banished from my mind. I invented and presently believed in another past. When my wife returned to my side, I fell in love with her for the second time; and so superbly did I enter into the existence and mental outlook of Giuseppe Doria that I was almost shocked by the familiarity of Jenny when she kissed me and hugged me at the first convenient opportunity after her arrival at "Crow's Nest"!

And her own echoing genius swiftly accepted this magnificent apotheosis of her Cornish husband. I became a new man in her eyes also. With that marvellous power of make-believe, possible only to women of supreme genius, she swiftly conceived of me as something altogether different from Michael Pendean--a creature richer and rarer--and this effort of imagination enabled us both to create that solid appearance of a new and quickening understanding that so amply sufficed to deceive Bendigo Redmayne and delude Brendon.

It is impossible to exaggerate the unique entertainment we derived from this phase of our deception. We proposed to let six months pa.s.s before the death of Bendigo Redmayne, and we were already contemplating details and considering how best to bring his brother back upon the stage for the purpose of Ben's destruction, when Mark Brendon blundered in upon us once again. He came very pat with calf love in his eyes; and it seemed that he might well a.s.sist us once more and apply his limited attainments to the problem of our sea wolf's approaching exit. Because we knew our Marco well, by this time, and perceived how useful he might be in disseminating that atmosphere of reality so desirable in cases such as these.

We were called upon to act quickly--so quickly that the first steps were taken before the last had been fully planned; but the place, the time of long, dark nights and other circ.u.mstances--these all lent value and a.s.sistance to the acute operations now undertaken. I swiftly brought Robert Redmayne to life; and though, with more leisure for refinements, I should not have clothed him in his old attire, yet that crude detail possessed a value of its own and certainly served to deceive Brendon, who, before the sudden apparition under that night of storm, did not stop to be logical or weigh probability. In the windy moonlight he saw the red head, huge mustache and bra.s.s-b.u.t.toned waistcoat of Robert Redmayne, and any question of detail escaped him in the whirl of the larger emotions and suspicions awakened by such an unexpected vision.

Doubtless he was thinking of Jenny and speculating with deep unrest how he might approach that lonely and lovely woman. Nor had he missed my attractions and we may feel sure that jealousy shared his heart with pa.s.sion. Upon these reflections broke Redmayne, the murderer, and Marco's first thought was doubtless unflattering to the residents of "Crow's Nest." What he designed to do next morning I cannot say, but we determined his actions from the other end.

Having first appeared before him by Black Wood and lifted the curtain on the second act of my romantic comedy, I remained there a while, then ascended to Strete Farm and presently, in the small hours, awakened the farmer, showed myself stealing food and so hastily departed.

Thus a few hours later, when Giuseppe goes for the milk, he hears of the robbery, returns to "Crow's Nest" and describes a man that Ben has no difficulty in recognizing as his brother, or Jenny as her uncle. Robert Redmayne is on the war-path once more!

Of subsequent events, most are so familiar that there is no need to retrace them. It is to be noted, however, that Robert does not appear again to anybody but Jenny and Doria. In other words, he does not appear again at all. His disguise is doffed--not to be resumed until many months have pa.s.sed, when once more he leaps out upon the wild ranges of Griante. No. While alive enough and close enough to impress both Bendigo and Brendon with his presence as described by Jenny and myself, he has in reality vanished to the void. The "forgery" again goes to sleep--as soundly as the real man in Foggintor.

Accident, indeed, modified the original scheme and once more Chance befriended us and enabled us to improve upon the first intention.

My tears fall when I think of my incomparable Jenny and her astounding mastery of minutiae at "Crow's Nest"--her finesse and exquisite touch, her kittenlike delicacy, her catlike swiftness and sureness. The two beings involved were as children in her hands. Oh, precious phoenix of a woman, you and I were of the same spirit, kneaded into our clay! Through your father you won it--and I had it from my mother--the primeval fire that burns through all obstacles to its inveterate purpose!

I say that accident made a radical alteration of design vital, for I had intended, on the night when Robert Redmayne would come and see Bendigo, to murder the old sailor in his tower room and remove him before morning with my wife's a.s.sistance. But the victim postponed his own destruction, for upon the night when his death was intended, during my previous conversation with him touching Jenny, I had perceived, by his clumsy glances and evidence of anxiety, that somebody else was in the tower room--unseen.

There was but one hiding-place and but one man likely to occupy it.

I did not indicate that I had discovered the secret and it was not the detective who gave himself away; but, once alive to his presence, I swiftly marked a flash of light at one of the little ventilation holes in the cupboard and perceived that our sleuth stood hid within it. My plan of campaign was altered accordingly and to great advantage. Indeed, to have slain Ben in his house, when I should have appeared instead of the brother he expected, had been a maladroit achievement, contrasted with the far more notable feat of the following night.

Having conveyed the old sailor to the cave, where, on my recent run up the coast after dropping Brendon, I had already looked in and lighted the lamp, I landed behind him and, as his foot touched the sh.o.r.e, the pole-axe fell. He was dead in an instant and five minutes later his blood ran upon the sand. Next I dug a grave under the shingle, at a spot destined within half an hour to be covered by the tide. In less than twenty minutes Bendigo Redmayne reposed beneath three feet of sand and stone and I was on my way back again to "Crow's Nest." There I reported to Brendon that the brothers had met and would expect me again anon. I smoked a cigarette or two, descended to our little harbour, removed my spade from the launch to the boathouse, took a sack and so set out again.

By the time that I had reached the cavern the waves already flowed over old sea wolf's resting-place. I landed, half filled my sack with stones and sand, scattered judicious drops of blood and climbed the steps and tunnel, laying the trail that occupied official attention to such poor purpose during the days that followed.

Having reached the plateau, I emptied my sack, casting its contents over the cliff; I then left a good impression or two of Robert Redmayne's shoes, which I had, of course, remembered to put on. They would be recollected by Mark Brendon, for impressions had been found and records taken at Foggintor.

I swiftly descended the tunnel again after these operations, returned to my boathouse, stowed my sack, changed my boots and hastened to Brendon with my story. How we proceeded to the cave, our fruitless inquiries and the subsequent failure to find any solution to the disappearance of Bendigo and the reappearance of Robert are all facts within the memory. I need not tell you that tale again; but may declare how specially attractive it was to picture the puzzled police upon the little beach next day, and know that Bendigo Redmayne lay not a yard beneath their feet.

Once more my amazing wife and I parted for a brief period and then I had the joy of introducing her to Italy, where the remainder of our task awaited us. But we resolved that considerable time should pa.s.s before proceeding and we did not appear before her remaining uncle for many months. Meantime we revelled in a second honeymoon, reported our marriage to Albert Redmayne and the egregious Marco, to whom, at Jenny's suggestion we conveyed a piece of wedding cake, that he might the better grasp our achievement. We had not finished yet with the pride of New Scotland Yard.

And now for Italy. It is true that in my early manhood I had suffered a sad accident at Naples, the secret of which was known to my mother and myself alone. I therefore entertained some grudge against her country; but the fact at no time lessened my love for the south; and Jenny and I had always determined that when our task was accomplished the balance of our united life should there be spent in dignity and peace.

CHAPTER XIX

A LEGACY FOR PETER GANNS