CHAPTER IV
THE EPISODE OF THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT COMMIT SUICIDE
After my poor friend Le Geyt had murdered his wife, in a sudden
access of uncontrollable anger, under the deepest provocation, the
police naturally began to inquire for him. It is a way they have;
the police are no respecters of persons; neither do they pry into
the question of motives. They are but poor casuists. A murder is
for them a murder, and a murderer a murderer; it is not their habit
to divide and distinguish between case and case with Hilda Wade's
analytical accuracy.
As soon as my duties at St. Nathaniel's permitted me, on the
evening of the discovery, I rushed round to Mrs. Mallet's, Le
Geyt's sister. I had been detained at the hospital for some hours,
however, watching a critical case; and by the time I reached Great
Stanhope Street I found Hilda Wade, in her nurse's dress, there
before me. Sebastian, it seemed, had given her leave out for the
evening. She was a supernumerary nurse, attached to his own
observation-cots as special attendant for scientific purposes, and
she could generally get an hour or so whenever she required it.
Mrs. Mallet had been in the breakfast-room with Hilda before I
arrived; but as I reached the house she rushed upstairs to wash her
red eyes and compose herself a little before the strain of meeting
me; so I had the opportunity for a few words alone first with my
prophetic companion.
"You said just now at Nathaniel's," I burst out, "that Le Geyt
would not be hanged: he would commit suicide. What did you mean by
that? What reason had you for thinking so?"
Hilda sank into a chair by the open window, pulled a flower
abstractedly from the vase at her side, and began picking it to
pieces, floret after floret, with twitching fingers. She was
deeply moved. "Well, consider his family history," she burst out
at last, looking up at me with her large brown eyes as she reached
the last petal. "Heredity counts. . . . And after such a
disaster!"
She said "disaster," not "crime"; I noted mentally the reservation
implied in the word.
"Heredity counts," I answered. "Oh, yes. It counts much. But
what about Le Geyt's family history?" I could not recall any
instance of suicide among his forbears.
"Well--his mother's father was General Faskally, you know," she
replied, after a pause, in her strange, oblique manner. "Mr. Le
Geyt is General Faskally's eldest grandson."
"Exactly," I broke in, with a man's desire for solid fact in place
of vague intuition. "But I fail to see quite what that has to do
with it."
"The General was killed in India during the Mutiny."
"I remember, of course--killed, bravely fighting."
"Yes; but it was on a forlorn hope, for which he volunteered, and
in the course of which he is said to have walked straight into an
almost obvious ambuscade of the enemy's."
"Now, my dear Miss Wade"--I always dropped the title of "Nurse," by
request, when once we were well clear of Nathaniel's,--"I have
every confidence, you are aware, in your memory and your insight;
but I do confess I fail to see what bearing this incident can have
on poor Hugo's chances of being hanged or committing suicide."
She picked a second flower, and once more pulled out petal after
petal. As she reached the last again, she answered, slowly: "You
must have forgotten the circumstances. It was no mere accident.
General Faskally had made a serious strategical blunder at Jhansi.
He had sacrificed the lives of his subordinates needlessly. He
could not bear to face the survivors. In the course of the
retreat, he volunteered to go on this forlorn hope, which might
equally well have been led by an officer of lower rank; and he was
permitted to do so by Sir Colin in command, as a means of
retrieving his lost military character. He carried his point, but
he carried it recklessly, taking care to be shot through the heart
himself in the first onslaught. That was virtual suicide--
honourable suicide to avoid disgrace, at a moment of supreme
remorse and horror."
"You are right," I admitted, after a minute's consideration. "I
see it now--though I should never have thought of it."
"That is the use of being a woman," she answered.
I waited a second once more, and mused. "Still, that is only one
doubtful case," I objected.
"There was another, you must remember: his uncle Alfred."
"Alfred Le Geyt?"
"No; HE died in his bed, quietly. Alfred Faskally."
"What a memory you have!" I cried, astonished. "Why, that was
before our time--in the days of the Chartist riots!"
She smiled a certain curious sibylline smile of hers. Her earnest
face looked prettier than ever. "I told you I could remember many
things that happened before I was born," she answered. "THIS is
one of them."
"You remember it directly?"
"How impossible! Have I not often explained to you that I am no
diviner? I read no book of fate; I call no spirits from the vasty
deep. I simply remember with exceptional clearness what I read and
hear. And I have many times heard the story about Alfred
Faskally."
"So have I--but I forget it."
"Unfortunately, I CAN'T forget. That is a sort of disease with
me. . . . He was a special constable in the Chartist riots; and
being a very strong and powerful man, like his nephew Hugo, he used
his truncheon--his special constable's baton, or whatever you call
it--with excessive force upon a starveling London tailor in the mob
near Charing Cross. The man was hit on the forehead--badly hit, so
that he died almost immediately of concussion of the brain. A woman
rushed out of the crowd at once, seized the dying man, laid his head
on her lap, and shrieked out in a wildly despairing voice that he
was her husband, and the father of thirteen children. Alfred
Faskally, who never meant to kill the man, or even to hurt him, but
who was laying about him roundly, without realising the terrific
force of his blows, was so horrified at what he had done when he
heard the woman's cry, that he rushed off straight to Waterloo
Bridge in an agony of remorse and--flung himself over. He was
drowned instantly."
"I recall the story now," I answered; "but, do you know, as it was
told me, I think they said the mob THREW Faskally over in their
desire for vengeance."
"That is the official account, as told by the Le Geyts and the
Faskallys; they like to have it believed their kinsman was
murdered, not that he committed suicide. But my grandfather"--I
started; during the twelve months that I had been brought into
daily relations with Hilda Wade, that was the first time I had
heard her mention any member of her own family, except once her
mother--"my grandfather, who knew him well, and who was present in
the crowd at the time, assured me many times that Alfred Faskally
really jumped over of his own accord, NOT pursued by the mob, and
that his last horrified words as he leaped were, 'I never meant it!
I never meant it!' However, the family have always had luck in
their suicides. The jury believed the throwing-over story, and
found a verdict of 'wilful murder' against some person or persons
unknown."
"Luck in their suicides! What a curious phrase! And you say,
ALWAYS. Were there other cases, then?"
"Constructively, yes; one of the Le Geyts, you must recollect, went
down with his ship (just like his uncle, the General, in India)
when he might have quitted her. It is believed he had given a
mistaken order. You remember, of course; he was navigating
lieutenant. Another, Marcus, was SAID to have shot himself by
accident while cleaning his gun--after a quarrel with his wife.
But you have heard all about it. 'The wrong was on my side,' he
moaned, you know, when they picked him up, dying, in the gun-room.
And one of the Faskally girls, his cousin, of whom his wife was
jealous--that beautiful Linda--became a Catholic, and went into a
convent at once on Marcus's death; which, after all, in such cases,
is merely a religious and moral way of committing suicide--I mean,
for a woman who takes the veil just to cut herself off from the
world, and who has no vocation, as I hear she had not."
She filled me with amazement. "That is true," I exclaimed, "when
one comes to think of it. It shows the same temperament in
fibre. . . . But I should never have thought of it."
"No? Well, I believe it is true, for all that. In every case, one
sees they choose much the same way of meeting a reverse, a blunder,
an unpremeditated crime. The brave way is to go through with it,
and face the music, letting what will come; the cowardly way is to
hide one's head incontinently in a river, a noose, or a convent
cell."
"Le Geyt is not a coward," I interposed, with warmth.
"No, not, a coward--a manly spirited, great-hearted gentleman--but
still, not quite of the bravest type. He lacks one element. The
Le Geyts have physical courage--enough and to spare--but their
moral courage fails them at a pinch. They rush into suicide or its
equivalent at critical moments, out of pure boyish impulsiveness."
A few minutes later, Mrs. Mallet came in. She was not broken down--
on the contrary, she was calm--stoically, tragically, pitiably
calm; with that ghastly calmness which is more terrible by far than
the most demonstrative grief. Her face, though deadly white, did
not move a muscle. Not a tear was in her eyes. Even her bloodless
hands hardly twitched at the folds of her hastily assumed black
gown. She clenched them after a minute when she had grasped mine
silently; I could see that the nails dug deep into the palms in her
painful resolve to keep herself from collapsing.
Hilda Wade, with infinite sisterly tenderness, led her over to a
chair by the window in the summer twilight, and took one quivering
hand in hers. "I have been telling Dr. Cumberledge, Lina, about
what I most fear for your dear brother, darling; and . . . I think
. . . he agrees with me."
Mrs. Mallet turned to me, with hollow eyes, still preserving her
tragic calm. "I am afraid of it, too," she said, her drawn lips
tremulous. "Dr. Cumberledge, we must get him back! We must induce
him to face it!"
"And yet," I answered, slowly, turning it over in my own mind; "he
has run away at first. Why should he do that if he means--to
commit suicide?" I hated to utter the words before that broken
soul; but there was no way out of it.
Hilda interrupted me with a quiet suggestion. "How do you know he
has run away?" she asked. "Are you not taking it for granted that,
if he meant suicide, he would blow his brains out in his own house?
But surely that would not be the Le Geyt way. They are gentle-
natured folk; they would never blow their brains out or cut their
throats. For all we know, he may have made straight for Waterloo
Bridge,"--she framed her lips to the unspoken words, unseen by Mrs.
Mallet,--"like his uncle Alfred."
"That is true," I answered, lip-reading. "I never thought of that
either."
"Still, I do not attach importance to this idea," she went on. "I
have some reason for thinking he has run away . . . elsewhere; and
if so, our first task must be to entice him back again."
"What are your reasons?" I asked, humbly. Whatever they might be,
I knew enough of Hilda Wade by this time to know that she had
probably good grounds for accepting them.
"Oh, they may wait for the present," she answered. "Other things
are more pressing. First, let Lina tell us what she thinks of most
moment."
Mrs. Mallet braced herself up visibly to a distressing effort.
"You have seen the body, Dr. Cumberledge?" she faltered.
"No, dear Mrs. Mallet, I have not. I came straight from Nathaniel's.
I have had no time to see it."
"Dr. Sebastian has viewed it by my wish--he has been so kind--and
he will be present as representing the family at the post-mortem.
He notes that the wound was inflicted with a dagger--a small
ornamental Norwegian dagger, which always lay, as I know, on the
little what-not by the blue sofa."
I nodded assent. "Exactly; I have seen it there."
"It was blunt and rusty--a mere toy knife--not at all the sort of
weapon a man would make use of who designed to commit a deliberate
murder. The crime, if there WAS a crime (which we do not admit),
must therefore have been wholly unpremeditated."
I bowed my head. "For us who knew Hugo that goes without saying."
She leaned forward eagerly. "Dr. Sebastian has pointed out to me a
line of defence which would probably succeed--if we could only
induce poor Hugo to adopt it. He has examined the blade and
scabbard, and finds that the dagger fits its sheath very tight, so
that it can only be withdrawn with considerable violence. The
blade sticks." (I nodded again.) "It needs a hard pull to wrench
it out. . . . He has also inspected the wound, and assures me its
character is such that it MIGHT have been self-inflicted." She
paused now and again, and brought out her words with difficulty.
"Self-inflicted, he suggests; therefore, that THIS may have
happened. It is admitted--WILL be admitted--the servants overheard
it--we can make no reservation there--a difference of opinion, an
altercation, even, took place between Hugo and Clara that evening"--
she started suddenly--"why, it was only last night--it seems like
ages--an altercation about the children's schooling. Clara held
strong views on the subject of the children"--her eyes blinked
hard--"which Hugo did not share. We throw out the hint, then, that
Clara, during the course of the dispute--we must call it a dispute--
accidentally took up this dagger and toyed with it. You know her
habit of toying, when she had no knitting or needlework. In the
course of playing with it (we suggest) she tried to pull the knife
out of its sheath; failed; held it up, so, point upward; pulled
again; pulled harder--with a jerk, at last the sheath came off; the
dagger sprang up; it wounded Clara fatally. Hugo, knowing that
they had disagreed, knowing that the servants had heard, and seeing
her fall suddenly dead before him, was seized with horror--the Le
Geyt impulsiveness!--lost his head; rushed out; fancied the
accident would be mistaken for murder. But why? A Q.C., don't
you know! Recently married! Most attached to his wife. It is
plausible, isn't it?"
"So plausible," I answered, looking it straight in the face,
"that . . . it has but one weak point. We might make a coroner's
jury or even a common jury accept it, on Sebastian's expert
evidence. Sebastian can work wonders; but we could never make--"
Hilda Wade finished the sentence for me as I paused: "Hugo Le Geyt
consent to advance it."
I lowered my head. "You have said it," I answered.
"Not for the children's sake?" Mrs. Mallet cried, with clasped
hands.
"Not for the children's sake, even," I answered. "Consider for a
moment, Mrs. Mallet: IS it true? Do you yourself BELIEVE it?"
She threw herself back in her chair with a dejected face. "Oh, as
for that," she cried, wearily, crossing her hands, "before you and
Hilda, who know all, what need to prevaricate? How CAN I believe
it? We understand how it came about. That woman! That woman!"
"The real wonder is," Hilda murmured, soothing her white hand,
"that he contained himself so long!"
"Well, we all know Hugo," I went on, as quietly as I was able;
"and, knowing Hugo, we know that he might be urged to commit this
wild act in a fierce moment of indignation--righteous indignation
on behalf of his motherless girls, under tremendous provocation.
But we also know that, having once committed it, he would never
stoop to disown it by a subterfuge."
The heart-broken sister let her head drop faintly. "So Hilda told
me," she murmured; "and what Hilda says in these matters is almost
always final."
We debated the question for some minutes more. Then Mrs. Mallet
cried at last: "At any rate, he has fled for the moment, and his
flight alone brings the worst suspicion upon him. That is our
chief point. We must find out where he is; and if he has gone
right away, we must bring him back to London."
"Where do you think he has taken refuge?"
"The police, Dr. Sebastian has ascertained, are watching the
railway stations, and the ports for the Continent."
"Very like the police!" Hilda exclaimed, with more than a touch of
contempt in her voice. "As if a clever man-of-the-world like Hugo
Le Geyt would run away by rail, or start off to the Continent!
Every Englishman is noticeable on the Continent. It would be sheer
madness!"
"You think he has not gone there, then?" I cried, deeply
interested.
"Of course not. That is the point I hinted at just now. He has
defended many persons accused of murder, and he often spoke to me
of their incredible folly, when trying to escape, in going by rail,
or in setting out from England for Paris. An Englishman, he used
to say, is least observed in his own country. In this case, I
think I KNOW where he has gone, how he went there."
"Where, then?"
"WHERE comes last; HOW first. It is a question of inference."
"Explain. We know your powers."
"Well, I take it for granted that he killed her--we must not mince
matters--about twelve o'clock; for after that hour, the servants
told Lina, there was quiet in the drawing-room. Next, I conjecture,
he went upstairs to change his clothes: he could not go forth on the
world in an evening suit; and the housemaid says his black coat and
trousers were lying as usual on a chair in his dressing-room--which
shows at least that he was not unduly flurried. After that, he put
on another suit, no doubt--WHAT suit I hope the police will not
discover too soon; for I suppose you must just accept the situation
that we are conspiring to defeat the ends of justice."
"No, no!" Mrs. Mallet cried. "To bring him back voluntarily, that
he may face his trial like a man!"
"Yes, dear. That is quite right. However, the next thing, of
course, would be that he would shave in whole or in part. His big
black beard was so very conspicuous; he would certainly get rid of
that before attempting to escape. The servants being in bed, he
was not pressed for time; he had the whole night before him. So,
of course, he shaved. On the other hand, the police, you may be
sure, will circulate his photograph--we must not shirk these
points"--for Mrs. Mallet winced again--"will circulate his
photograph, BEARD AND ALL; and that will really be one of our great
safeguards; for the bushy beard so masks the face that, without it,
Hugo would be scarcely recognisable. I conclude, therefore, that
he must have shorn himself BEFORE leaving home; though naturally I
did not make the police a present of the hint by getting Lina to
ask any questions in that direction of the housemaid."
"You are probably right," I answered. "But would he have a razor?"
"I was coming to that. No; certainly he would not. He had not
shaved for years. And they kept no men-servants; which makes it
difficult for him to borrow one from a sleeping man. So what he
would do would doubtless be to cut off his beard, or part of it,
quite close, with a pair of scissors, and then get himself properly
shaved next morning in the first country town he came to."
"The first country town?"
"Certainly. That leads up to the next point. We must try to be
cool and collected." She was quivering with suppressed emotion
herself, as she said it, but her soothing hand still lay on Mrs.
Mallet's. "The next thing is--he would leave London."
"But not by rail, you say?"
"He is an intelligent man, and in the course of defending others
has thought about this matter. Why expose himself to the needless
risk and observation of a railway station? No; I saw at once what
he would do. Beyond doubt, he would cycle. He always wondered it
was not done oftener, under similar circumstances."
"But has his bicycle gone?"
"Lina looked. It has not. I should have expected as much. I told
her to note that point very unobtrusively, so as to avoid giving
the police the clue. She saw the machine in the outer hall as
usual."
"He is too good a criminal lawyer to have dreamt of taking his
own," Mrs. Mallet interposed, with another effort.
"But where could he have hired or bought one at that time of
night?" I exclaimed.
"Nowhere--without exciting the gravest suspicion. Therefore, I
conclude, he stopped in London for the night, sleeping at an hotel,
without luggage, and paying for his room in advance. It is
frequently done, and if he arrived late, very little notice would
be taken of him. Big hotels about the Strand, I am told, have
always a dozen such casual bachelor guests every evening."
"And then?"
"And then, this morning, he would buy a new bicycle--a different
make from his own, at the nearest shop; would rig himself out, at
some ready-made tailor's, with a fresh tourist suit--probably an
ostentatiously tweedy bicycling suit; and, with that in his
luggage-carrier, would make straight on his machine for the
country. He could change in some copse, and bury his own clothes,
avoiding the blunders he has seen in others. Perhaps he might ride
for the first twenty or thirty miles out of London to some minor
side-station, and then go on by train towards his destination,
quitting the rail again at some unimportant point where the main
west road crosses the Great Western or the South-Western line."
"Great Western or South-Western? Why those two in particular?
Then, you have settled in your own mind which direction he has
taken?"
"Pretty well. I judge by analogy. Lina, your brother was brought
up in the West Country, was he not?"
Mrs. Mallet gave a weary nod. "In North Devon," she answered; "on
the wild stretch of moor about Hartland and Clovelly."
Hilda Wade seemed to collect herself. "Now, Mr. Le Geyt is
essentially a Celt--a Celt in temperament," she went on; "he comes
by origin and ancestry from a rough, heather-clad country; he
belongs to the moorland. In other words, his type is the
mountaineer's. But a mountaineer's instinct in similar
circumstances is--what? Why, to fly straight to his native
mountains. In an agony of terror, in an access of despair, when
all else fails, he strikes a bee-line for the hills he loves;
rationally or irrationally, he seems to think he can hide there.
Hugo Le Geyt, with his frank boyish nature, his great Devonian
frame, is sure to have done so. I know his mood. He has made for
the West Country!"
"You are, right, Hilda," Mrs. Mallet exclaimed, with conviction.
"I'm quite sure, from what I know of Hugo, that to go to the West
would be his first impulse."
"And the Le Geyts are always governed by first impulses," my
character-reader added.
She was quite correct. From the time we two were at Oxford
together--I as an undergraduate, he as a don--I had always noticed
that marked trait in my dear old friend's temperament.
After a short pause, Hilda broke the silence again. "The sea
again; the sea! The Le Geyts love the water. Was there any place
on the sea where he went much as a boy--any lonely place, I mean,
in that North Devon district?"
Mrs. Mallet reflected a moment. "Yes, there was a little bay--a
mere gap in high cliffs, with some fishermen's huts and a few yards
of beach--where he used to spend much of his holidays. It was a
weird-looking break in a grim sea-wall of dark-red rocks, where the
tide rose high, rolling in from the Atlantic."
"The very thing! Has he visited it since he grew up?"
"To my knowledge, never."
Hilda's voice had a ring of certainty. "Then THAT is where we
shall find him, dear! We must look there first. He is sure to
revisit just such a solitary spot by the sea when trouble overtakes
him."
Later in the evening, as we were walking home towards Nathaniel's
together, I asked Hilda why she had spoken throughout with such
unwavering confidence. "Oh, it was simple enough," she answered.
"There were two things that helped me through, which I didn't like
to mention in detail before Lina. One was this: the Le Geyts have
all of them an instinctive horror of the sight of blood; therefore,
they almost never commit suicide by shooting themselves or cutting
their throats. Marcus, who shot himself in the gun-room, was an
exception to both rules; he never minded blood; he could cut up a
deer. But Hugo refused to be a doctor, because he could not stand
the sight of an operation; and even as a sportsman he never liked
to pick up or handle the game he had shot himself; he said it
sickened him. He rushed from that room last night, I feel sure, in
a physical horror at the deed he had done; and by now he is as far
as he can get from London. The sight of his act drove him away;
not craven fear of an arrest. If the Le Geyts kill themselves--a
seafaring race on the whole--their impulse is to trust to water."
"And the other thing?"
"Well, that was about the mountaineer's homing instinct. I have
often noticed it. I could give you fifty instances, only I didn't
like to speak of them before Lina. There was Williams, for
example, the Dolgelly man who killed a game-keeper at Petworth in a
poaching affray; he was taken on Cader Idris, skulking among rocks,
a week later. Then there was that unhappy young fellow, Mackinnon,
who shot his sweetheart at Leicester; he made, straight as the crow
flies, for his home in the Isle of Skye, and there drowned himself
in familiar waters. Lindner, the Tyrolese, again, who stabbed the
American swindler at Monte Carlo, was tracked after a few days to
his native place, St. Valentin, in the Zillerthal. It is always
so. Mountaineers in distress fly to their mountains. It is a part
of their nostalgia. I know it from within, too: if _I_ were in
poor Hugo LeGeyt's place, what do you think I would do? Why, hide
myself at once in the greenest recesses of our Carnarvonshire
mountains."
"What an extraordinary insight into character you have!" I cried.
"You seem to divine what everybody's action will be under given
circumstances."
She paused, and held her parasol half poised in her hand.
"Character determines action," she said, slowly, at last. "That is
the secret of the great novelists. They put themselves behind and
within their characters, and so make us feel that every act of
their personages is not only natural but even--given the conditions--
inevitable. We recognise that their story is the sole logical
outcome of the interaction of their dramatis personae. Now, _I_ am
not a great novelist; I cannot create and imagine characters and
situations. But I have something of the novelist's gift; I apply
the same method to the real life of the people around me. I try to
throw myself into the person of others, and to feel how their
character will compel them to act in each set of circumstances to
which they may expose themselves."
"In one word," I said, "you are a psychologist."
"A psychologist," she assented; "I suppose so; and the police--
well, the police are not; they are at best but bungling materialists.
They require a CLUE. What need of a CLUE if you can interpret
character?"
So certain was Hilda Wade of her conclusions, indeed, that Mrs.
Mallet begged me next day to take my holiday at once--which I could
easily do--and go down to the little bay in the Hartland district
of which she had spoken, in search of Hugo. I consented. She
herself proposed to set out quietly for Bideford, where she could
be within easy reach of me, in order to hear of my success or
failure; while Hilda Wade, whose summer vacation was to have begun
in two days' time, offered to ask for an extra day's leave so as to
accompany her. The broken-hearted sister accepted the offer; and,
secrecy being above all things necessary, we set off by different
routes: the two women by Waterloo, myself by Paddington.
We stopped that night at different hotels in Bideford; but next
morning, Hilda rode out on her bicycle, and accompanied me on mine
for a mile or two along the tortuous way towards Hartland. "Take
nothing for granted," she said, as we parted; "and be prepared to
find poor Hugo Le Geyt's appearance greatly changed. He has eluded
the police and their 'clues' so far; therefore, I imagine he must
have largely altered his dress and exterior."
"I will find him," I answered, "if he is anywhere within twenty
miles of Hartland."
She waved her hand to me in farewell. I rode on after she left me
towards the high promontory in front, the wildest and least-visited
part of North Devon. Torrents of rain had fallen during the night;
the slimy cart-ruts and cattle-tracks on the moor were brimming
with water. It was a lowering day. The clouds drifted low. Black
peat-bogs filled the hollows; grey stone homesteads, lonely and
forbidding, stood out here and there against the curved sky-line.
Even the high road was uneven and in places flooded. For an hour I
passed hardly a soul. At last, near a crossroad with a defaced
finger-post, I descended from my machine, and consulted my ordnance
map, on which Mrs. Mallet had marked ominously, with a cross of red
rink, the exact position of the little fishing hamlet where Hugo
used to spend his holidays. I took the turning which seemed to me
most likely to lead to it; but the tracks were so confused, and the
run of the lanes so uncertain--let alone the map being some years
out of date--that I soon felt I had lost my bearings. By a little
wayside inn, half hidden in a deep combe, with bog on every side, I
descended and asked for a bottle of ginger-beer; for the day was
hot and close, in spite of the packed clouds. As they were opening
the bottle, I inquired casually the way to the Red Gap bathing-
place.
The landlord gave me directions which confused me worse than ever,
ending at last with the concise remark: "An' then, zur, two or
dree more turns to the right an' to the left 'ull bring 'ee right
up alongzide o' ut."
I despaired of finding the way by these unintelligible sailing-
orders; but just at that moment, as luck would have it, another
cyclist flew past--the first soul I had seen on the road that
morning. He was a man with the loose-knit air of a shop assistant,
badly got up in a rather loud and obtrusive tourist suit of brown
homespun, with baggy knickerbockers and thin thread stockings. I
judged him a gentleman on the cheap at sight. "Very Stylish; this
Suit Complete, only thirty-seven and sixpence!" The landlady
glanced out at him with a friendly nod. He turned and smiled at
her, but did not see me; for I stood in the shade behind the half-
open door. He had a short black moustache and a not unpleasing,
careless face. His features, I thought, were better than his
garments.
However, the stranger did not interest me just then I was far too
full of more important matters. "Why don't 'ee taake an' vollow
thik ther gen'leman, zur?" the landlady said, pointing one large
red hand after him. "Ur do go down to Urd Gap to zwim every
marnin'. Mr. Jan Smith, o' Oxford, they do call un. 'Ee can't go
wrong if 'ee do vollow un to the Gap. Ur's lodgin' up to wold
Varmer Moore's, an' ur's that vond o' the zay, the vishermen do
tell me, as wasn't never any gen'leman like un."
I tossed off my ginger-beer, jumped on to my machine, and followed
the retreating brown back of Mr. John Smith, of Oxford--surely a
most non-committing name--round sharp corners and over rutty lanes,
tire-deep in mud, across the rusty-red moor, till, all at once, at
a turn, a gap of stormy sea appeared wedge-shape between two
shelving rock-walls.
It was a lonely spot. Rocks hemmed it in; big breakers walled it.
The sou'-wester roared through the gap. I rode down among loose
stones and water-worn channels in the solid grit very carefully.
But the man in brown had torn over the wild path with reckless
haste, zigzagging madly, and was now on the little three-cornered
patch of beach, undressing himself with a sort of careless glee,
and flinging his clothes down anyhow on the shingle beside him.
Something about the, action caught my eye. That movement of the
arm! It was not--it could not be--no, no, not Hugo!
A very ordinary person; and Le Geyt bore the stamp of a born
gentleman.
He stood up bare at last. He flung out his arms, as if to welcome
the boisterous wind to his naked bosom. Then, with a sudden burst
of recognition, the man stood revealed. We had bathed together a
hundred times in London and elsewhere. The face, the clad figure,
the dress, all were different. But the body--the actual frame and
make of the man--the well-knit limbs, the splendid trunk--no
disguise could alter. It was Le Geyt himself--big, powerful,
vigorous.
That ill-made suit, those baggy knickerbockers, the slouched cap,
the thin thread stockings, had only distorted and hidden his
figure. Now that I saw him as he was, he came out the same bold
and manly form as ever.
He did not notice me. He rushed down with a certain wild joy into
the turbulent water, and, plunging in with a loud cry, buffeted the
huge waves with those strong curving arms of his. The sou'-wester
was rising. Each breaker as it reared caught him on its crest and
tumbled him over like a cork, but like a cork he rose again. He
was swimming now, arm over arm, straight out seaward. I saw the
lifted hands between the crest and the trough. For a moment I
hesitated whether I ought to strip and follow him. Was he doing as
so many others of his house had done--courting death from the
water?
But some strange hand restrained me. Who was I that I should stand
between Hugo Le Geyt and the ways of Providence?
The Le Geyts loved ever the ordeal by water.
Presently, he turned again. Before he turned, I had taken the
opportunity to look hastily at his clothes. Hilda Wade had
surmised aright once more. The outer suit was a cheap affair from
a big ready-made tailor's in St. Martin's Lane--turned out by the
thousand; the underclothing, on the other hand, was new and
unmarked, but fine in quality--bought, no doubt, at Bideford. An
eerie sense of doom stole over me. I felt the end was near. I
withdrew behind a big rock, and waited there unseen till Hugo had
landed. He began to dress again, without troubling to dry himself.
I drew a deep breath of relief. Then this was not suicide!
By the time he had pulled on his vest and drawers, I came out
suddenly from my ambush and faced him. A fresh shock awaited me.
I could hardly believe my eyes. It was NOT Le Geyt--no, nor
anything like him!
Nevertheless, the man rose with a little cry and advanced, half
crouching, towards me. "YOU are not hunting me down--with the
police?" he exclaimed, his neck held low and his forehead
wrinkling.
The voice--the voice was Le Geyt's. It was an unspeakable mystery.
"Hugo," I cried, "dear Hugo--hunting you down?--COULD you imagine
it?"
He raised his head, strode forward, and grasped my hand. "Forgive
me, Cumberledge," he cried. "But a proscribed and hounded man! If
you knew what a relief it is to me to get out on the water!"
"You forget all there?"
"I forget IT--the red horror!"
"You meant just now to drown yourself?"
"No! If I had meant it I would have done it. . . . Hubert, for my
children's sake, I WILL not commit suicide!"
"Then listen!" I cried. I told him in a few words of his sister's
scheme--Sebastian's defence--the plausibility of the explanation--
the whole long story. He gazed at me moodily. Yet it was not
Hugo!
"No, no," he said, shortly; and as he spoke it was HE. "I have
done it; I have killed her; I will not owe my life to a falsehood."
"Not for the children's sake?"
He dashed his hand down impatiently. "I have a better way for the
children. I will save them still. . . . Hubert, you are not
afraid to speak to a murderer?"
"Dear Hugo--I know all; and to know all is to forgive all."
He grasped my hand once more. "Know ALL!" he cried, with a
despairing gesture. "Oh, no; no one knows ALL but myself; not even
the children. But the children know much; THEY will forgive me.
Lina knows something; SHE will forgive me. You know a little; YOU
forgive me. The world can never know. It will brand my darlings
as a murderer's children."
"It was the act of a minute," I interposed. "And--though she is
dead, poor lady, and one must speak no ill of her--we can at least
gather dimly, for your children's sake, how deep was the
provocation."
He gazed at me fixedly. His voice was like lead. "For the
children's sake--yes," he answered, as in a dream. "It was all for
the children! I have killed her--murdered her--she has paid her
penalty; and, poor dead soul, I will utter no word against her--the
woman I have murdered! But one thing I will say: If omniscient
justice sends me for this to eternal punishment, I can endure it
gladly, like a man, knowing that so I have redeemed my Marian's
motherless girls from a deadly tyranny."
It was the only sentence in which he ever alluded to her.
I sat down by his side and watched him closely. Mechanically,
methodically, he went on with his dressing. The more he dressed,
the less could I believe it was Hugo. I had expected to find him
close-shaven; so did the police, by their printed notices. Instead
of that, he had shaved his beard and whiskers, but only trimmed his
moustache; trimmed it quite short, so as to reveal the boyish
corners of the mouth--a trick which entirely altered his rugged
expression. But that was not all; what puzzled me most was the
eyes--they were not Hugo's. At first I could not imagine why. By
degrees the truth dawned upon me. His eyebrows were naturally
thick and shaggy--great overhanging growth, interspersed with many
of those stiff long hairs to which Darwin called attention in
certain men as surviving traits from a monkey-like ancestor. In
order to disguise himself, Hugo had pulled out all these coarser
hairs, leaving nothing on his brows but the soft and closely
pressed coat of down which underlies the longer bristles in all
such cases. This had wholly altered the expression of the eyes,
which no longer looked out keenly from their cavernous penthouse;
but being deprived of their relief, had acquired a much more
ordinary and less individual aspect. From a good-natured but
shaggy giant, my old friend was transformed by his shaving and his
costume into a well-fed and well-grown, but not very colossal,
commercial gentleman. Hugo was scarcely six feet high, indeed,
though by his broad shoulders and bushy beard he had always
impressed one with such a sense of size; and now that the
hirsuteness had been got rid of, and the dress altered, he hardly
struck one as taller or bigger than the average of his fellows.
We sat for some minutes and talked. Le Geyt would not speak of
Clara; and when I asked him his intentions, he shook his head
moodily. "I shall act for the best," he said--"what of best is
left--to guard the dear children. It was a terrible price to pay
for their redemption; but it was the only one possible, and, in a
moment of wrath, I paid it. Now, I have to pay, in turn, myself.
I do not shirk it."
"You will come back to London, then, and stand your trial?" I
asked, eagerly.
"Come back TO LONDON?" he cried, with a face of white panic.
Hitherto he had seemed to me rather relieved in expression than
otherwise; his countenance had lost its worn and anxious look; he
was no longer watching each moment over his children's safety.
"Come back . . . TO LONDON . . . and face my trial! Why, did you
think, Hubert, 'twas the court or the hanging I was shirking? No,
no; not that; but IT--the red horror! I must get away from IT to
the sea--to the water--to wash away the stain--as far from IT--that
red pool--as possible!"
I answered nothing. I left him to face his own remorse in silence.
At last he rose to go, and held one foot undecided on his bicycle.
"I leave myself in Heaven's hands," he said, as he lingered. "IT
will requite. . . . The ordeal is by water."
"So I judged," I answered.
"Tell Lina this from me," he went on, still loitering: "that if she
will trust me, I will strive to do the best that remains for my
darlings. I will do it, Heaven helping. She will know WHAT,
to-morrow."
He mounted his machine and sailed off. My eyes followed him up the
path with sad forebodings.
All day long I loitered about the Gap. It consisted of two bays--
the one I had already seen, and another, divided from it by a saw-
edge of rock. In the further cove crouched a few low stone
cottages. A broad-bottomed sailing boat lay there, pulled up high
on the beach. About three o'clock, as I sat and watched, two men
began to launch it. The sea ran high; tide coming in; the sou'-
wester still increasing in force to a gale; at the signal-staff on
the cliff, the danger-cone was hoisted. White spray danced in air.
Big black clouds rolled up seething from windward; low thunder
rumbling; a storm threatened.
One of the men was Le Geyt, the other a fisherman.
He jumped in, and put off through the surf with an air of triumph.
He was a splendid sailor. His boat leapt through the breakers and
flew before the wind with a mere rag of canvas. "Dangerous weather
to be out!" I exclaimed to the fisherman, who stood with hands
buried in his pockets, watching him.
"Ay that ur be, zur!" the man answered. "Doan't like the look o'
ut. But thik there gen'leman, 'ee's one o' Oxford, 'ee do tell me;
and they'm a main venturesome lot, they college volk. 'Ee's off by
'isself droo the starm, all so var as Lundy!"
"Will he reach it?" I asked, anxiously, having my own idea on the
subject.
"Doan't seem like ut, zur, do ut? Ur must, an' ur mustn't, an' yit
again ur must. Powerful 'ard place ur be to maake in a starm, to
be zure, Lundy. Zaid the Lord 'ould dezide. But ur 'ouldn't be
warned, ur 'ouldn't; an' voolhardy volk, as the zayin' is, must go
their own voolhardy waay to perdition!"
It was the last I saw of Le Geyt alive. Next morning the lifeless
body of "the man who was wanted for the Campden Hill mystery" was
cast up by the waves on the shore of Lundy. The Lord had decided.
Hugo had not miscalculated. "Luck in their suicides," Hilda Wade
said; and, strange to say, the luck of the Le Geyts stood him in
good stead still. By a miracle of fate, his children were not
branded as a murderer's daughters. Sebastian gave evidence at the
inquest on the wife's body: "Self-inflicted--a recoil--accidental--
I am SURE of it." His specialist knowledge--his assertive
certainty, combined with that arrogant, masterful manner of his,
and his keen, eagle eye, overbore the jury. Awed by the great
man's look, they brought in a submissive verdict of "Death by
misadventure." The coroner thought it a most proper finding. Mrs.
Mallet had made the most of the innate Le Geyt horror of blood.
The newspapers charitably surmised that the unhappy husband, crazed
by the instantaneous unexpectedness of his loss, had wandered away
like a madman to the scenes of his childhood, and had there been
drowned by accident while trying to cross a stormy sea to Lundy,
under some wild impression that he would find his dead wife alive
on the island. Nobody whispered MURDER. Everybody dwelt on the
utter absence of motive--a model husband!--such a charming young
wife, and such a devoted stepmother. We three alone knew--we
three, and the children.
On the day when the jury brought in their verdict at the adjourned
inquest on Mrs. Le Geyt, Hilda Wade stood in the room, trembling
and white-faced, awaiting their decision. When the foreman uttered
the words, "Death by misadventure," she burst into tears of relief.
"He did well!" she cried to me, passionately. "He did well, that
poor father! He placed his life in the hands of his Maker, asking
only for mercy to his innocent children. And mercy has been shown
to him and to them. He was taken gently in the way he wished. It
would have broken my heart for those two poor girls if the verdict
had gone otherwise. He knew how terrible a lot it is to be called
a murderer's daughter."
I did not realise at the time with what profound depth of personal
feeling she said it.
