CHAPTER XVII.
THE STRANGE HOUSE AT SCALBY
To pretend that Paul Renishaw and the sham detective, Josiah Sawdry, were not tremendously excited by the prospect of their visit to Scalby would be both useless and foolish. Naturally enough, the two men looked forward to this interview with poor demented Rebecca Charlton with the greatest anxiety and eagerness, though no doubt each was urged forward by a totally different reason.
Thus, the journalist, for example, only cared that the innocence of his friend, Arthur Hudson, should be proved and set above the suspicion of the censorious. If that act implicated Ventris Blake—good. The man was a rogue, and it was only right that the mask of a respectable life should be torn from his features, and that he should stand revealed to the whole world as the impudent satyr he undoubtedly was. If, on the contrary, the millionaire escaped his just deserts, and some other figure loomed forward as the murderer of Aimée Blake, the venture would answer equally well. Arthur would be released. His marriage with Winifred Pontifex would be hurried forward. The girl, too, would be saved.
On the other hand, Josiah Sawdry’s thoughts were all for himself. He had mixed much too deeply in the shady throng that flit goblin-like through the dirty bye-paths of city life to care seriously whether one more innocent man was hanged, or a true love hopelessly ruined and broken. To his mind, indeed, the one factor in that expedition was his own cleverness. Had he not been the one to see that the criminal could be no other than this wild, weird creature freshly released from Brentwood Asylum? And on the principle of “to the vulture, the carcase,” or, perhaps, more politely still, “to the victor, the spoils,” was he not entitled to claim his own payment out of it? In this case, commercial and social rehabilitation and a life appointment in the snug and comfortable offices of “Palamountains Limited” that meant ease and a certain five pound a week? Consequently, his feelings were not very far different to those he had experienced in his early days in the city, when he had, to use the vernacular of the Stock Exchange, tried to “pull a good thing off.” This alliance with Paul was “a good thing,” he was certain. By hook or by crook, it must be cemented by success.
So that strangely assorted pair, the optimist and the opportunist, stepped forward briskly in the crisp January air. Maybe, neither of them was quite right in his mental outlook—maybe, the absolutely unselfish man is as foolish as the man who cannot see anything except that precise gap where he “comes in,” but from the point of view of accomplishing what they had set themselves to do, the alliance was a good one enough, and few of us to-day have any doubt as to the one person with whom we would have exchanged places had we been proffered the chance.
Very soon, too, they reached the house they sought—a picturesque but deserted looking farm residence, built about the time of Queen Elizabeth and set back some fifty yards from the road on a raised lawn which was dominated by a huge Crimean cannon. The first plot of land reached, on passing through the familiar white gate, was also grass laid, with trees running along the side, fringed by a deep, dank, stagnant pool. To this succeeded another gate, and a drive, and then the house itself, over which a strange silence and melancholy seemed to brood. The place, in point of fact, was too remote from the road for any sounds of passing traffic to penetrate, and as the farm buildings were deserted, and no fowls wandered about the yards or the orchard, there was over all a sense of infinite mystery and desolation.
“What a dreadful place for a born Londoner like Rebecca Charlton to take refuge in,” whispered Sawdry. “If she wasn’t mad when she came here, the gloom and oppressive atmosphere of this ancient pile are quite enough to wear out every nerve and sound thought she could ever have, away from her dear murky Thames and the ceaseless roll and boom of the traffic up and down Queen Victoria Street.”
“I am only afraid this may have so preyed on her mind that she will be too far gone to be of any practical use to us,” added Paul. “After all, we want something coherent out of her, remember. We shan’t be able to produce her as the real criminal unless we can more or less prove her guilt in open court.”
Sawdry took the old rust-eaten, weather-beaten knocker in his hand, and gave a knock that seemed to go reverberating through empty galleries and dozens of deserted furnitureless rooms. There followed some scuffling, scratching sounds, almost immediately afterwards. “Rats, only rats,” explained Paul, whose hearing was more acute than his companion’s, and he drew back a step and gazed up at the windows in front of the house. All were closed and shuttered, the glass being stained mud colour with storm and dust and rain.
Not a sign, indeed, showed that the place was inhabited. Not a shutter moved. The chimneys remained smokeless. Sawdry bent down and applied both ear and eye to the keyhole. Everything appeared as still and as desolate as a tomb.
“It’s no good,” he said at length rising and facing the journalist. “We can’t stay here all day when such momentous results depend on our action. We must strike at once, or the poor creature may get some other crazy notion in her head and take herself off to sea—to Holland or some God-forsaken country like that, and may never be heard of again, for her thoughts might turn to suicide and she might even plunge into the Scheldt.”
“Well, let us break in then,” returned Paul calmly. “I am no advocate of sitting down and waiting like those poor creatures did in the Bible for an angel to come down and a miracle to happen. After all, you have plenty of excuse for doing so. The woman wrote to her husband and asked him to send you up here to her at once. Well, you’ve come, that’s all.” And the Jew nodded and looked round for some suitable object with which he could smash in the panels of the door.
“Stop! Stop! don’t let us be violent,” said Paul with a shudder as he saw Sawdry’s crude preparations.
“ ‘Gently go-ee
Monkey catch-ee,’
as ‘B.P.’ told his comrades at Mafeking. After all, a loud noise might frighten her so much that she would throw herself from an upstairs window to escape our attentions. Besides, I don’t think it will be necessary to make any real noise over the business. I forgot to tell you that once I had a lesson in housebreaking from one of the cleverest men that ever used a ‘jemmy’,” smiling, as he recalled how his experiences in this line had already proved of service to Arthur when they wished to spy on “The Three Glass Eyes” in the millionaire’s garret, and it was necessary to break into the caretaker’s deserted rooms.
A moment later Renishaw had dropped to his knees, and gently pressed his shoulder against the woodwork. As he had suspected, he now proved from the way in which the door gave in places, that no bolts had been shot in their sockets. All that stood against them indeed, was simply an antiquated lock—but as the key had been conveniently left in it, all that was necessary for any cracksman, amateur or professional, to do was to take a miniature pair of pincers (which he always carried in his revolver pocket) and to fix them on the shaft of the key and turn it, which as a matter of fact, he did with one turn of the wrist.
“Now we can enter,” he cried with a smile of gratification, and springing to his feet again he twisted round the handle of the door, which yielded, and both men stepped swiftly across the threshold.
A damp, musty smell like that of newly turned earth assailed their nostrils immediately they did so. It shewed, at all events, that the door had not been opened very recently, but as the hall was so dark, it was difficult to see very far beyond the doorway; and when the door itself was closed, so that no chance passers by might become suspicious, they found themselves completely enveloped in blackness.
Luckily, Paul carried a box of wax vestas, and lighting one of these they pressed forward to one of the rooms the door of which stood open. As they had surmised, this was bare of all decoration or furniture, but the Jew’s quick eyes caught a glimpse of an empty beer bottle containing a piece of candle in the fireplace—and instantly he pounced on this and lit the candle which was three or four inches in length.
“Now you’ve got your hands free,” he said to Paul. “Just draw your shooting iron, will you? I don’t expect for a moment that you will have to use it—that anybody will dare to molest us—but it is just as well to show even Mrs. Charlton (if she has got any glimmering of reason left) that we are quite prepared if she desires to be nasty, to be nasty too.”
Paul nodded and took out his revolver, altering the trigger to full cock. He had no sentimental objection to the use of a weapon—and he had no intention of offering himself for a target to unseen, unknown enemies without a fair chance of making himself objectionable to an equal degree in return.
A door at the far end of this room led into a passage that communicated with the kitchens, but just as he was about to open it he was certain he heard a sound like a groan come from some space beneath his feet. Instantly he stopped and listened again. Yes, there was no doubt about it. He had heard aright. There was somebody in the cellar, groaning, apparently in great distress.
Sawdry now caught the same sound, and nodding to his companion, enjoining stealth and silence, he crept softly through the doorway into the passage where he came upon a few steps that led downward to another door which evidently communicated with the cellars.
Down these he crept like a shadow, Paul following him closely. Away in the distance now they caught sight of some rays of artificial light curiously like those of their own candle, and, guided by these, they came quickly to an arched-in cellar brilliantly illuminated by candles stuck in certain beer-bottles, hundreds of which had been scattered about and literally covered the floor of the place almost to the depths of their knees.
And in the centre of these, squatted the woman they sought, Rebecca Charlton, who was seated on a truss of straw and fondling a big black rat which she had evidently only recently tamed.
For a few seconds nobody uttered a word. That strange creature remained where she was, seated on a pile of straw, crooning meaninglessly over her pet rat, and rocking herself to and fro with her eyes fixed on a piece of blank white-washed wall in front of her. At a sign from the Jew, Paul Renishaw himself quietly pocketed his revolver, and took a seat too on an upturned empty case beside Josiah Sawdry, who now did nothing but nurse the empty beer bottle bearing a lighted candle. And all about them were strewn the signs of the woman’s wild debauch—of a woman who had gone to the task with all the frenzy and delirium of the born dipsomaniac and had smashed or drunk all that she could lay her hands on.
At that moment, however, it was obvious she was sober enough. There was a steadiness about the swing of her body and the way she used her fingers and her eyes when her pet, alarmed by the presence of strangers, tried to make its escape, that showed her brain was not much out of its normal balance. Just then too she spoke—and her tones were clear and bell-like, and she came in a most unfeminine way straight to the point.
“I am glad to see you, Josiah,” she said, twisting round and facing Sawdry who contented himself with bowing. “Very glad. Somehow though I knew that you would come. It seems to me now the time never was when you were not a true friend of mine. Leastways now I need your assistance.”
“Very good,” said the Jew briskly. “I shall be very glad to give it to you. I may be blunt—but I can be relied on.” And quite unconscious of his own hypocrisy, he put the bottle he was nursing down on the floor and patted himself approvingly on the chest.
“That is so,” the woman returned, but there was no emotion or suggestion of gratitude in her voice. “You always were true where truth paid you. Why, however did you bring a gentleman, a stranger, with you? How did you know that the business I wanted you for was not quite private or confidential?”
“I couldn’t help it,” Sawdry answered quickly. “I wasn’t really equal to finding you alone. Besides, Mr. Renishaw here is a gentleman. Anything he hears now won’t be shouted all over Scarborough.”
“Very well,” replied Rebecca Charlton listlessly. “First of all, I want you to take charge of these Bank of England notes.” She fumbled in an old petticoat she was wearing, and then took therefrom a package exactly similar to the one which the newsboy had found on the Filey road and which it was supposed had been given to the telegraph-operator Drummond by Aimée Blake’s murderer, but it was considerably larger. “Count them,” she added. “In all, they ought to total two thousand. And, perhaps, after all, it is well as that gentleman came with you. He will see nobody robs you—or me!” And she gave a low mirthless laugh.
Sawdry bent down and did as he had been directed. Yes, in all they reached the respectable total of £2,000, and were also obviously genuine. Paul also checked their number and narrowly inspected each one for proof that they were not false. He had to agree they certainly stood for a very solid and positive £2,000.
“The point is, what do you want me to do with them?” said Sawdry finally, placing two very distinctive india-rubber bands around them and thrusting them into his pocket. “Open an account at some good bank for you, and invest the balance in good dividend-earning bank shares? Or would you rather I bought you some gilt-edged securities like consols or colonial inscribed stock, stuff that can’t break or melt and will be always there when you want to lay your hands on the solid?”
“Neither,” said the woman shortly. “If I had, I wouldn’t have sent for you. I’d have gone to the bank or the stockbroker myself. No, I’ll tell you what I want you to do for me. Split that two thousand into two sums of a thousand each. Take the first thousand and buy a Post Office annuity for my husband. He’ll probably drink himself to death just like I shall, but then he’ll die happy if young, and nobody will be the poorer for his loss.”
“And the other thousand?” queried the Jew greedily, moistening his lips unconsciously in the hope that after all some pickings in this unexpected windfall might come in his direction.
“Take it to the best detective that has ever chucked up his job at Scotland Yard in disgust at the wooden way they there treat men with brains. Give it to him and tell him to find the murderer of Aimée Blake.”
“My!” The candle he had taken up again almost dropped from the hands of Josiah Sawdry at the same moment as this expression of absolute stupefaction fell from his lips. There was something indeed almost ludicrous now in his looks of profound amazement. Either this woman was the most finished actress he had ever seen or, what appeared more likely, she had no hand in the doing to death of Ventris Blake’s wife—in which event where would be his promised £5 a week?
For a second his reason quite deserted him. “Oh, talk to her Renishaw,” he gasped. “I can’t. I’m stumped!” And he sprang to his feet and began to pace up and down the cellar. Paul smiled indulgently, but at the bottom he too began to fear that that house of speculation they had built in that arbour off the Filey road after they had found that gold link stamped “K” was perilously near destruction. With an effort, nevertheless, he rallied himself.
“You wish them to find the murderer of Aimée Blake!” he said turning and looking keenly at Rebecca Charlton. “But there is no need to spend any more money on that quest. They have found the criminal. It was the work of a wretch named Arthur Hudson, who is now safe enough in Scarborough police station.”
“Don’t you believe it,” retorted the woman, with a cunning shake of the head. “I know better than that. Arthur Hudson is no more guilty of the crime than I am.”
Paul’s heart gave a great leap! After all, then, his theory that Ventris Blake had really killed his wife to be free to win Winifred Pontifex might not be so far out as Sawdry had contended. He would move with caution. He seemed on the brink of great far-reaching, startling discoveries.
“But how can you be so sure of it?” he questioned. “There are plenty of witnesses against Hudson. The matter doesn’t seem to me to admit of any doubt he did it, and fled at once back to London.”
“None the less, you are wrong,” persisted the woman; and then, catching sight of Sawdry’s look of incredulity, which he had purposely made as irritating as he could, she added: “And you, Josiah, needn’t twist up your face in scorn like that. I haven’t forgotten what I said to you in our old rooms in Queen Victoria Street. I did hate Aimée Blake. I would willingly have given half my life to see her stretched dead in front of me. Only I didn’t kill her.”
“What are you doing here in Scarborough then?”
The words came from Paul—and behind them seemed a clash of steel.
“I am hiding myself as I promised a certain party.”
“Who was that party?”
“Why the real murderer of Aimée Blake of course.”
Paul and Sawdry exchanged glances. By this time they had come to have very grave doubts of the speaker’s sanity. Her replies were prompt enough and clear enough, it was true—but they led to nothing and to nowhere. Everything indeed that she said seemed to make the confusion more confounded.
The Jew now took up the conversation.
“Look here, Rebecca,” he said sharply, taking up a position straight in front of her; “put that wretched rodent you are hugging down for a moment and talk quite plainly to me. What the deuce have you been up to since you did that moonlight flit from your home? And where in this bleak, desolate, deserted hole of a house did you raise a big sum like this two thousand pounds.”
The woman gave a hoarse chuckle. “Money as ever, Josiah,” she replied tauntingly. “Always money with you gentlemen of the crooked noses—and consciences. That twist was placed on you Jews’ phizzes by your Maker to shew plainly to everyone that clapped eyes on you, that you had a twist in your mind as well. The mere sight of money sends you all demented or frantic or consumed with covetousness!”
“Well, answer my questions that’s all,” said Sawdry sullenly. “Don’t beat any more about the bush. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“All right,” said the woman changing her tone. “I won’t chaff you any further. As a matter of fact, you annoyed me by your denseness. I will, however, be patient and explain to you more fully so that there can be no excuse for you not understanding me this time. Well, as you ought to have guessed, I did come to Scarborough to kill Aimée Blake. I bought a knife in Gray’s Inn Road for that precise purpose, and also a return tourist ticket for a sovereign at the office at King’s Cross, feeling sure that I should be able to drop on her when she took her walks abroad, and to plunge it in her and to slip off before anybody dared lift a finger to detain me.
“When I got to Scarborough I made a point of enquiring at all the principal hotels, and I soon spotted the one she was at. For some hours I hung about outside, but at length I was rewarded for she came out when it was dark and late! and quite unattended, she set off at a brisk walk along the Filey road. I followed her. My plan of action was perfected. ‘When you turn to come home again I will spring out of the shadow and bury this steel in your foul and treacherous heart,’ I told myself, ‘I will not do it a moment sooner. I will not fail a moment later.’
“For several miles she walked on. Apparently she was very excited and very determined. I too had made up my mind, and so although I got some fine chances to slip up behind her and to finish her off, I wouldn’t do it. ‘A bargain’s a bargain even to yourself;’ said I. ‘Keep it, and you will be all right.’ Only as it happened I wasn’t. The man she had gone to meet was before me, and just as she reached a lonely spot he sprang out from behind a hedge and dashed out her brains with a hedge stick.”
“A man?” queried both her hearers dumbfounded. “What man?”
“A man you ought both of you to know very well. He’s a big public character in London although this time he was made up to resemble Arthur Hudson exactly.”
“His name, his name,” cried both hearers, distracted.
“Why, the Rev. Duncan Kilroy, of course, the man at St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage. He it was who gave me the two thousand to shut my mouth and to come here to lie low until all the hue and cry was over.”
At first Paul could scarcely restrain a strong inclination to laugh aloud. Rebecca Charlton’s assertion appeared so preposterous. Then he chanced to turn and look at his companion. Instead of Josiah Sawdry’s face expressing incredulity and amazement, another and totally different feeling seemed struggling for expression—as though the Jew had been recalled suddenly, by a chance phrase or name, to a series of events which he had long since forgotten, and was now searching helplessly in and out amongst them—intent only on piecing them together to construct a new, a certain, and an absolutely reliable clue.
“Surely,” the journalist began irritably, “you don’t credit this amazing statement! Why, it knocks the bottom out of your own theory completely. It starts a totally new chain of surmise—the end of which might even land us in a bishop’s palace before we had finished with it!” And again he shrugged his shoulders and laughed scornfully.
“I am not so sure that I have not been in the wrong,” replied Sawdry, passing his hand nervously across his forehead. “After all, Mrs. Charlton’s words are not such a surprise as they ought to be in the circumstances. They have recalled to me a lot of things about Ventris Blake’s past which I had dismissed as absolutely irrelevant.”
“But what about your own clue?” cried Paul triumphantly, “the gold link?”
“Yes,” said the Jew, slowly, “what about that gold cuff link you lost, Mrs. Charlton? Have you any idea where you dropped it?”
“Of course I have—I let it fall in that garden off the Filey road, where the murderer of Aimée Blake washed the blood-stains off his hands. I went into the exact greenhouse he took refuge in, and, in poking about, the sleeve of my blouse caught on a rusty nail, and snapped the gold band in half. I looked everywhere for it, but I could not see it. Have you got it?” And she stretched out her fingers for it with the most natural air in the world.
Paul hesitated—but only for a second. Then he resolved to play an entirely different role with her—to appear to believe every word that she uttered; and he gave her the tiny piece of gold marked “K” without any demur. “I wish you would tell us in your own words,” he said kindly, “all that you know about the Reverend Duncan Kilroy’s association with the Blakes and my friend Arthur Hudson. At present we don’t doubt what you assert—but without more particulars, we find it very hard to understand why this well-known London clergyman should be mixed up at all in a squalid crime such as this?”
“Then you need not be,” answered Rebecca Charlton. “First and foremost, you must get fixed in your mind this fact—Duncan Kilroy and his twin-brother, who used to be employed in the same office as Mr. Hudson, namely ‘Palamountains Limited,’ and Ventris Blake have been intimate friends for a number of years. Naturally, Duncan Kilroy resented Mr. Hudson’s triumph over his twin-brother, for he had expected that his brother would not only feather his nest out of old Allen Palamountain, and would succeed to that fine business in Cheapside as a matter of course, and become one of the richest house agents in the City of London, but also that he would get the old man to leave him a nice snug fortune by which he might buy his way to very high preferment in the Church.
“As a consequence, when his twin-brother came to him, broken, despairing and hopeless, a confirmed dipsomaniac, his hatred grew beyond all bounds. Just as the brother sank lower and lower, passing through the Triple Chambers of the Drunkard’s Doom—beer, whiskey, brandy—so his determination to be revenged on Hudson grew from the plain desire to the burning wish, and then on to positive mania.
“Finally, the brother died a raving drink-maniac in a top-room of St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage. By his deathbed Duncan swore to pay Arthur Hudson one even if it cost him his position in the Church. Now, in matters like this, the form which the revenge takes turns very much on the nature of the man who pants to be avenged. For instance, some cannot rest by day or by night until they have set about their task and either demolished their opponent utterly, or been propelled themselves to their own destruction. Others can wait—wait one year, two years, aye, even twenty years if necessary—and these are the most dangerous, for they go on adding blow to blow, trap to trap, torture to torture, and never, never let themselves be beaten.
“As it happened, however, chance favoured Duncan in a very curious fashion in his desire to ruin Mr. Hudson. As no doubt you have gathered by this time, this clergyman is a bad lot in every sense—and particularly where it turns upon questions of women. In the course of his nocturnal wanderings about this time, he came upon Aimée Burgoyne—in point of fact, during a visit he had paid to a fellow vicar in Peterborough. His desire to make love to her overcame every other impulse, good and bad. He hastened back to London, to my little cottage in Blackfriars Road, and, on some petty pretexts, he got some well-known costumier and wig-maker to come there and make him up so that he resembled Arthur Hudson exactly.
“Then he went back to Peterborough, and, taking rooms at the Angel Hotel, he soon managed to contrive to call on the woman on a matter of business connected with the painting of a portrait—and that acquaintanceship rapidly ripened into the marriage we have heard so much of lately. I, as you know, was one of the witnesses, and I got fifty pounds for my trouble, but it went very rapidly in drink, alas! Israel Sawdry was the other witness, and, as he stated, he went at the request of the bride, but, growing suspicious, he started later to make mischief; and so, to save his friend from exposure, Ventris Blake gave the man a berth in his office in London, and then, finding him utterly unscrupulous, he quickly promoted him to the confidential position he now occupies.
“Unfortunately, the millionaire’s curiosity was aroused as to the kind of woman for which his friend, Duncan Kilroy, had dared so much. In return for saving him from the machinations of Israel Sawdry, he stipulated that Duncan Kilroy should introduce him to the woman with whom he had contracted this bigamous alliance. Fearful but powerless, Kilroy did so. As the clergyman had dreaded, Aimée Burgoyne was fascinated by Blake, particularly by his wealth. Indeed she loathed the secrecy, the mystery, and the poverty, in which she was kept by Kilroy, and finally the pair of them made Kilroy own his perfidy, and then, to crown all, to marry them, which he did in some out of the way village I can’t remember just now, but which act certainly brought him many large gifts of money, both from the millionaire, and the woman who had thrown him over for a better and a lawful union.
“At the same time it must not be supposed that Kilroy took to this arrangement with any particular grace. As a matter of fact he did not. He was inarticulate with rage over it—but, as I said at first, he was the kind of man who could wait, and he waited, and finally evolved this peculiarly diabolical scheme by which he confounded both his enemies, Blake and Hudson, in one huge cataclysm of crime and ill-starred passion. Of course, his initial difficulty was to get Blake interested in Winifred Pontifex, but so curiously are the lives of all of us mingled together, that he had a certain strand of a connection to work upon in the fact of Russell Langford’s complicity over a thing they call The Three Glass Eyes, and an old association with her father, Colonel Pontifex. As it happened, too, Blake very quickly wearied of his wife, and so he drank in greedily Kilroy’s accounts of Winifred’s beauty and suggestions, how easy it would be for him to terrorise Russell Langford and so get the niece entirely at his mercy.
“When he had sufficiently inflamed Blake’s imagination, Kilroy took the millionaire to a ball at Stamford, with the result you are probably aware of. The girl’s charm but aloofness worked on the wretched man like newly made wine, and, as Kilroy told me after the murder, even Satan seemed at this point, to make a big move for him. Not only was he able to produce that sham marriage certificate that socially ostracised Arthur Hudson, but Aimée Blake herself suddenly determined to get rid of Ventris and to make the clergyman take up with her again. In vain Duncan Kilroy wriggled—procrastinated—promised—protested. She was adamant; all at once the woman seems to have realised what a terrible vampire she was bound to and to have determined to free herself from him by the agency of the very man who had led her into this pit of evil.
“For this precise purpose she went to Scarborough. From this place she despatched telegram after telegram to St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage. The burden of each one was the same. ‘Come to me. Go with me. Fail me, and I expose you. But, I beseech you, go with me.’ In his despair, Kilroy went to Blake and told him all about it. He begged him that just as he had helped him over Israel Sawdry, he would assist him over this.
“But, of course, Blake did nothing of the sort. In the first place, he told the wretched man that he never helped any lame dog more than once over any critical stile. In the second, he suggested that it would pay them both to see Mrs. Blake nicely interred in a freshly turfed grave, and as he, Kilroy, was the one who was in danger from the woman it was obviously Kilroy’s duty to take this little job in hand and to remove the woman from their path for ever.
“Frantic and despairing Kilroy made that fatal appointment with Aimée Blake on the Filey Road. As in the early Peterborough days, he had only one idea—to use Arthur’s name and personality, and he did so in this instance, so that when she scornfully rejected his appeal to leave him alone, he fell on her without compunction, and killed her as we have seen—certain that he would never be discovered.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
ALL ABOUT THOSE GLASS EYES
Rebecca Charlton finished her strange story with a sigh; and for a few moments that oddly-assorted trio sat in the cellar of that deserted house at Scalby without exchanging a word.
On both Paul Renishaw and Josiah Sawdry indeed the effect of her recital had been little short of marvellous. At first they had listened to her laborious explanations as to Kilroy and his twin brother with something like looks of indulgent good nature. Then, as the dramatic character of the plot began to unfold itself, and they saw how clearly she had pieced in all those different and opposing elements in the lives and fortunes of the persons involved in this exceedingly modern tragedy of love and hate and passion until at last the whole hideous mystery stood out boldly and distinctly as it had been conceived in the minds of the monster who had originated it, their faces changed like magic. Open scepticism gave way to doubt—for several minutes their convictions hung nicely poised in the balance, midway between absolute rejection and acceptance—until finally she reached the most baffling point of all. “Why did some absolute stranger personate Arthur Hudson in that sham marriage at Peterborough?”
That was the real crux—and when that was solved in the perfect complete way it was, they looked at each other, both convinced that this woman spoke the truth, and nodded. For the rest of her story they were plain level-headed yet sympathetic and unbiassed auditors. No longer did they seek to persuade themselves that she was not a most daring and cunning adventuress. They were her keen and eager partisans and they simply tested each statement as she put it forth to assure themselves that when it came before a judge and assize, and was torn to pieces by the most acute legal minds they could find a way to prop it up and make it emerge unshaken from the ordeal.
“We won’t trouble to discuss all the remarkable but convincing facts you have put before us,” said Paul, rising at length and taking up one of the lighted candles preparatory to making an ascent into the daylight. “If we did we should sit here all night, and one of the greatest scoundrels existing—Duncan Kilroy I mean—might escape from justice. There is, however, one matter I don’t understand quite as plainly as I ought to do. It is this. In what state of mind did you leave Kilroy after the murder?”
“Distracted,” said the woman quietly. “Up to a point, of course, everything went splendidly with him. His disguise was perfect. He shewed himself about so that everybody might give such a description of the murderer as would tally with the exact personal appearance of Arthur Hudson, but when he went into the greenhouse whilst I waited for him he got an ugly shock that quite turned his brain. A boy’s face suddenly appeared at the glass! True, he threw something at it and dashed out into the open, but, when he reached my side, his mind seemed to have gone quite. At that time a bit of wind was playing through the telegraph wires; and the doleful dirge-like sound racked his nerves to such a degree that he could think of nothing else. ‘Listen to the law’s sleuth hounds’ he kept saying, stopping suddenly and pointing to the lines over our heads. ‘How they whisper! How they hate me! What dark evil things they will do to me when they get the chance.’ ”
“No wonder he conceived that mad idea of tapping them,” rejoined Sawdry, who had been quietly turning over the woman’s story to see if he could find any weak point in it too, but could discover none. “Mrs. Charlton has certainly disposed of the only difficulty which I could see in the way of an arrest of the unworthy clergyman of St. Sepulchre’s—that was the explanation of his gift of £500 to the telegraph clerk Drummond. I have also just been glancing over the bundle of bank notes she gave me, and which were handed to her by Kilroy as a price of his silence. What do you think I have found stamped on them? Why the same mark as I saw on the pile that were given to Drummond—the mark of the Piccadilly branch of the London and Westminster Bank, where doubtless we shall learn the Rev. Duncan Kilroy, M.A., D.D., as he delights to call himself, has his private account.”
“If that be so, the police will have got on his track before this for, as you must remember, I sent what I will call the Drummond package of Bank of England notes down to the Scarborough police station by a local constable before we started to go to Scalby at all. Doubtless the local detectives would at once wire that branch of the London and Westminster Bank, and are now puzzling their brains to know why the manager has wired back they were issued to a respectable West End clergyman, and not, as they were certain, to my poor friend Arthur Hudson.”
“Still,” remarked the Jew diplomatically, “we shan’t do much good in confronting these Yorkshire Sherlock Holmeses unless we have something pretty substantial to back up our opinions. What do you say, Mrs. Charlton? You see, everything turns on you. Are you prepared to go down with us to the Scarborough police station, and to make a clean breast of all you have heard and known and suffered? If so, you needn’t employ a firm of private detectives and spend a thousand pounds on proving poor Hudson’s innocence. The police will do that for you free?”
“But,” said the woman craftily, “suppose they insist on my giving up the other thousand, what then? Poor Charlton will be as poor as ever and maybe neither of us will get a cent.”
“I will promise in Mr. Hudson’s name to make good any loss like that,” interposed Paul promptly. “Just leave it to me. You shall only gain in pocket by speaking the truth.”
“And what’s going to happen to me,” queried the Jew with a comical little grin. “I was promised a berth at Palamountain’s, worth £5 a week for life, if a little theory of mine came off. It didn’t—but still if it hadn’t been for it you might never have discovered Mrs. Charlton and this little retreat of hers at Scalby and got, at a bound as it were, right on top of the track.”
“My promise holds good still whoever is convicted,” said Paul, holding out his hand which was shaken warmly by both his companions in turn. “I only ask Mrs. Charlton to give me her word in one other little matter. It is this—that until Mr. Hudson is liberated she will not go on a drunken burst like this again;” and he pointed very gravely to the hundreds of beer bottles that littered the floor of the cellar.
The woman flushed and hung down her head. “I promise,” she said. “You can trust me. Had I not been mad indeed I would never have done it. As it happened though it proved my salvation. It enabled me to forget—everything—even my insensate rage against Aimée Blake. When next I came to my senses I was a changed woman. I saw things in a totally different light—in a word, I became quite sane again. And so I shall remain. I shall touch no more drink.”
“Good,” said Paul gaily, secretly overjoyed. “Now we all understand each other perfectly, we had better get off.” And waving the light he carried, he advanced towards the cellar steps, and a few moments later all three were soon stepping briskly along the road towards the village.
Luckily just then an empty cab rumbled up to them. The driver had been taking a well-known Scarborough tradesman to his home in this suburb, to dine and was only too glad to get a fare on the return journey which, spurred by the promise of double payment, he performed in an incredibly short time.
Inside and outside the police station things had assumed their normal appearance. The crowd that had listened to the proceedings with breathless interest and attention when Arthur had been brought before the local magistrates, had vanished now, and the street on the north side were as quiet and deserted as though “The Romantic Affair at Scarborough” was a story nine days old. Darkness, too, had set in that January night. A cold wind swept past the Castle and went whistling hungrily in and out of the doors and windows of the police station, making the fat old sergeant who was dozing over the fire draw his stool a little nearer and grunt a little more than was even his custom when duty interfered with comfort.
“May I see the Chief Constable?” said Paul suddenly, looming up against the counter flanked by his two companions.
The old fellow started up. “Certainly,” he replied, and before he quite realised what he was doing he shewed the three of them into the private office of the Chief Constable, who happened to be talking very excitedly to two keen-looking men in plain clothes, detectives.
Naturally all three recognised Paul, and, gathering from his manner that he had something important to communicate, they dropped the bundle of bank notes and series of telegrams that had caused them all this commotion, and let him take a chair and tell his story through from beginning to end without any interruption.
Even the journalist felt that there was something strangely uncanny, unnatural, in the way they took his disclosures. All their faces might have been made of wax, so little emotion did they exhibit. Even when he pushed forward Rebecca Charlton, and she filled in a complete account of how she had talked and reasoned with Kilroy just after the commission of the crime, and then advanced Josiah Sawdry and produced the other bundle of notes, similar to those they had on the table in front of them, the officers expressed neither surprise, dissent, nor pleasure. They just let all three run themselves down before they shewed a sign of the tremendous surprise they had in store for these self-invited investigators who were actually prepared with evidence to knock all their card castles to pieces. Then the Chief Constable rose, and standing with his back to the fire, spoke:
“I am sure we are very much obliged to you for all the trouble you have taken, Mr. Renishaw, and for this most valuable evidence which you have put into our possession; also, I want to thank you for that bundle of notes you sent down to me by one of our officers on the South Cliff. They enabled me to wire to Scotland Yard, who sent one of their best inspectors to the bank they came from. He quickly heard that they had been given to Mr. Duncan Kilroy, but when he went to St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage he found himself just five minutes too late.”
“Too late,” cried Paul. “Too late. What do you mean?”
“That this wretched man five minutes earlier had stabbed Ventris Blake to the heart and then blown out his own brains.”
The consternation that followed the Chief Constable’s announcement was simply appalling. The poor woman, Rebecca Charlton, was carried out of the police office in a fit of raving hysteria, while even Paul and Sawdry turned sick and white with the horror of it all, and the suddenness, and then the sense of its awful justice and completeness.
“How can it have happened?” they asked the two detectives who, it appeared, had the case against Arthur Hudson in hand. “So far as we are aware, not one of them had any suspicion that he was in danger. To all intents and purposes, everything was prospering with their crimes. All they had to do was to sit tight, and in the end the man they hated so much would be ruined, if not hanged.”
“That no doubt was so,” said the Chief Constable, “only you forget two circumstances. The first is—that Kilroy despatched a large number of telegraphic messages to Aimée Blake. True, they were in the name of Arthur Hudson, but, as we discovered several days ago, they were not in Hudson’s handwriting, and were presumably in Kilroy’s own. That, I am certain, made him so fearful of the telegraphic communication which he saw everywhere about him and which was in all probability the cause of his crazy bribe to the telegraphic clerk, Drummond. Secondly, you must remember that almost immediately after the crime the man’s brain gave way. In a word, he went mad, and, being mad, he must have thrown all idea of prudence to the wind, and have gone with a knife for the man whom, rightly enough, he may have blamed for the wretched tragic pass to which he had come.”
“Then you have no actual particulars of the crimes through yet?” queried Sawdry, steadying himself with an effort. “You don’t know whether the thing was done in public or in private.”
“Not at all,” said the Chief Constable quickly. “I wired for further information, but none has come through yet, except an intimation that one of the officers from Scotland Yard who was early on the scene of the tragedies is now travelling down to consult with me, and will give me every information and assistance.”
“Then I shall go to the office of the local daily newspaper, the Daily Post,” said Paul, suddenly rising and taking up his hat. “That editor will get the news through sooner than anyone, I am certain; and he is just the kind to oblige a brother journalist.”
“And I will go with you,” added Sawdry, stepping closely after his companion. “The atmosphere of the police station never does agree with me. It is too suggestive of what I have missed to make me breathe quite easily, or to cause me to feel a longing to rest there and be thankful that even on a bleak day like this I’ve got a Government roof over my head and a Government fire whereat I may warm myself.”
As it chanced, too, they were lucky enough to find the editorial offices of the paper open, and, at a word, the entire resources of the organisation were placed at their disposal, and telegrams of enquiry for full details were despatched to the three great newsgathering organisations of the country—the Press Association, the Central News, and the Exchange Telegraph Company, while the editor himself pieced together a graphic, yet incisive account of the extraordinary discovery that had been made and hurried out a special edition which took Scarborough by storm from end to end.
The Press Association was the first to wire any fresh facts about the crime at St Sepulchre’s, and it did so in the following terms:—
TERRIBLE TRAGEDY AT A LONDON VICARAGE.
A POPULAR PREACHER GOES MAD
AND STABS HIS BEST FRIEND.At a late hour this afternoon the news became known of a shocking occurrence at St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage, Piccadilly, the home of that highly popular and successful preacher and parish worker, the Rev. Duncan Kilroy, M.A., D.D.
The Rev. gentleman, it seems, had recently returned from the briefest of visits to a well-known Yorkshire watering place for the benefit of his health. His wife has noticed that ever since his behaviour was distinctly curious, but, thinking that the recent scene in his church, when a mad woman rushed forward just before he started his sermon and denounced him, had slightly unhinged the balance of a naturally highly strung and imaginative intellect, she contented herself with leaving him free to do as he thought best.
Whether his most intimate friend, Mr. Ventris Blake, the famous Park Lane millionaire, heard of his sad condition and simply called to condole with him, or whether he was drawn thither by some specious but evilly designed letter or message, is not yet known. This much is clear: Mr. Blake called at the Vicarage about four o’clock this afternoon, and, according to the housemaid’s story, went at once to the unfortunate gentleman’s study. A moment later, the servant heard the sound of a violent altercation, combined with maniacal ravings and screams and then gibberish laughter. This she declares must have gone on for fully ten minutes when suddenly the door of the study was flung open and Ventris Blake rushed out with his face stricken with horror, his eyes rolling fearfully and a knife plunged to the hilt in his back.
“I am stabbed, I am stabbed,” he shouted in tones that struck horror to the brains of all that heard them, and in a flash he had flung out his arms wildly to grab furiously at the air, and then he collapsed, and lay on the floor quite dead.
Almost instantly afterwards, Duncan Kilroy appeared attired only in his shirt and trousers. “Where is the biggest scoundrel that ever walked the earth gone to?” he yelled in a voice of thunder. “Take me to him that I may complete the beneficent work I have begun!” And he waved a revolver about wildly and cut some mad capers around the corpse at his feet.
A moment later his mood changed. His looks altered. All at once the expression on his face grew strangely grim and tense. “There is only one thing in the wide world that is absolutely true. It is this,” he screamed. “The wages of sin is death. So perish the last of the Three Glass Eyes,” and he placed the weapon to his head and blew out his brains, his body falling rigidly across the corpse of his friend whom he had just slain.
Paul and Sawdry read this terrifying story through with dry eyes it is true, but with fingers that trembled and hearts torn with emotion. After all, they had not really expected so tragic and awful a finish to their quest for the murder of Aimée Blake as this was—and for some time they did not know what to do or what to say, so full seemed the future of alarming possibilities.
Fortunately a few minutes later there came a second message from the Press Association; and then they realised that Arthur Hudson would indeed be cleared of the terrible odium that had fallen upon him, for the following facts were now telegraphed:—
A MAN WITH A DOUBLE LIFE.
APPALLING CONFESSION OF THE PICCADILLY CLERGYMAN.
A NEW PERIL TO SOCIETY—“THE THREE GLASS EYES.”Later inquiries into that dreadful affair at St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage disclose a most appalling state of things. The Vicar who murdered Ventris Blake, the millionaire, and then shot himself, left, it seems, a long written confession which seems almost too horrible to be true.
Briefly the Rev. Duncan Kilroy was a man with a double life. He had, he asserts, most vicious and depraved tastes, which he gratified in secret, and so had Ventris Blake, whom he also accuses of poisoning his first wife, a girl named Kaufmann. The second wife, Aimée Kilroy, he admits he went to Scarborough to kill, and also that he managed to do so. The reason for this crime is not very clear from his statement but this much is evident—Kilroy had years ago at Peterborough personated Mr. Arthur Hudson, who now is under arrest on the capital charge—and he in that character had contracted a bigamous marriage with Aimée Blake, who was then known as Burgoyne. Is it not time that our marriage laws are altered, and that registrars take proofs of the identity of the parties before they permit this sacred and far-reaching ceremony to be solemnised?
The most thrilling of these awful disclosures, however, turn on what the unhappy man calls “The Three Glass Eyes.” This, it appears, was a band of three men who swore to each other they would never respect any human life except each other’s, but would remove anybody they disliked from their path by the use of a secret poison of which Blake alone knew the secret. They had a kind of ritual and a horrible symbol of a huge shield of black with three great staring rolling eyes of glass.
The Mystic Three, as they dubbed themselves were Blake, Kilroy and a twin brother of Kilroy’s (now deceased) and their method of settling their intended victims was to invite them to become the members of a far-reaching and powerful Secret Society which they pretended had relations with financial magnates all over the world. Many as time went on consented—but in each case the procedure was the same.
The condemned wretch was conducted to a quaint looking old fashioned garret in front of some draped curtains and made to sit in a certain easy chair in the arms of which pins innoculated with this deadly poison were hidden. The curtains then were rolled aside by the aid of electricity, which also compelled those Three Terrible Eyes to revolve at a tremendous rate until at last the victim, sick and dizzy, and almost mesmerised, frantically caught hold of the arms of the chair. Then instantly his hand would be pricked and the deadly poison would be received into his system. Probably too he screamed.
At all events, the ceremony of initiation would be stopped, and the poor doomed novice would be hurried off to his home, but he never lived more than thirty to fifty minutes after the moment he actually received the pin-point into his flesh. Usually he tried to walk to recover from an apparent attack of faintness, and, the death register kept by Blake which was found open in the study after the murder, discloses one curious fact, that he nearly always fell under the feet of some approaching horse; and an intelligent coroner’s jury invariably returned a verdict of “Accidental Death,” varied sometimes by a rider to the effect that the driver ought to be cautioned for not having been more careful!!!
CHAPTER XIX.
THE PARTING OF THE CLOUDS
Very full of stress and excitement were the days that followed this tragic end of the Vicar of St. Sepulchre’s and of Ventris Blake the millionaire. The British police, being British no doubt, are very slow to move where it is a case of the proof of the innocence of a prisoner whom they have taken in charge, and not of his guilt—and for several days after the news of the murder and suicide had leaked out Arthur Hudson had to content himself with his lot in that tiny cell in Scarborough police-station.
Paul Renishaw, of course, stuck loyally to him, and visited him daily. Nor, as the reader may perhaps guess, was he the only visitor who braved those wild easterly gales that sweep over that Yorkshire coast in the early days of the year. Winifred quickly followed the officer sent down from Scotland Yard to confer with the local Chief Constable—and while these two wise heads were deep in the technicalities of criminal law and lunacy, and the discussion of how far they were justified in accepting an admitted madman’s confession as correct, these two young hearts found joy and brightness and solace in each other; and once again hope beat high within their breasts.
In the longest lane, too, comes the inevitable turning, and, perhaps, it was as well Arthur did not regain his liberty at once, for there was much of shame and scandal and intolerable suspicion to lift from his shoulders, which only Time—the greatest healer of all—could be trusted to do with any effect. Happily, just as the details of the murder at Scarborough and his arrest had been published broadcast, so the news of his innocence, his sufferings and his fortitude were now printed, with the result that public opinion swung round once again in his favour; and he was hailed as a man who had been the victim of one of the cruellest conspiracies known in fashionable London life. Indeed, it is a mistake to suppose that all this sensationalism of the Press makes for evil. It cleanses the hidden sewers of crime—and it is almost the only instrument we possess that sets the innocently-accused up securely on their public seats.
In the sunshine of Winifred’s love too, Arthur quickly forgot all the terrible hours of anguish that had been meted out to him. Young hearts like his are intensely recuperative, and to-day he often recalls with a merry laugh the conversation they had when he was finally released from the police-station one morning early, to avoid any popular demonstration, and they strolled almost at break of day through the Valley, down to the sea with its ceaseless message of high purpose and great endeavour, and of the undying dignity of breadth and freedom and resistless power.
“Do you grieve, dearest,” questioned Winnie suddenly, turning on him two eyes that shone with devotion and trust, “that we did not find the course of true love smooth? Is there any bitterness in your heart that all at once, through no apparent fault of our own, we were called on to suffer so much shame and hurt?”
For a full minute he paused, and thought deeply. Then, just as the yellow sun came steering out from behind a mass of billowy cloud, so did the eternal instinct of the creature towards the Creator, arise in him and call him, as it calls each one of us in our several fashions, to the great act of renunciation of self.
“I do not grieve, dearest,” he answered slowly, simply, reverently. “Nay, I am thankful that I have been tried as by fire in a furnace, and that neither you nor I have sunk down under it, but have arisen the better, the wiser, the stronger, may I say, the sweeter for our day of affliction.” Then slowly lifting his hat he looked far out across the sea, and there came floating into his mind the one triumphant prayer of the Catholic Church, when its greatest service and mystery have moved in all their majestic splendour to that crowning act on Calvary, so intensely symbolical of the Divine Life as well as the Human.
“Benedicamus Domino,” he said in his clear purposeful tones.
“Deo Gratias,” responded Winifred with a great sigh of thankfulness—and their eyes involuntarily filled with tears.
CONCLUSION
Now if you, my reader, go to Scarborough to-day and wander in and out amongst those quaintly designed mansions on the South Cliff that are the pride of the inhabitants, and the wonder of all the visitors, for in the most cunning fashion they recall all the beauty and strength of dead-and-gone masters, you will assuredly pause before St. Michael’s Mount, the most artistic and delightful of them all. Should you inquire of any passer-by who it is lives there, he will tell you it is owned by the famous Mr. Arthur Hudson and his charming wife—and he will be of a peculiarly garrulous type almost unknown to Yorkshire if he ever tells you anything further about the Filey Road murder, for Scarborough people feel as keenly the injustice of Arthur’s and Winifred’s sufferings as though they had been their own. Arthur, indeed, could never bear the idea of returning to London again, and so they made their home in this, one of the most beautiful spots on our coast, and no longer is he a partner in the firm of Palamountains, but one who frankly and freely spends his life and wealth simply in “doing good.”
As Vera had foreseen, the Eastern leprosy of the Abyssinian Ring ate quickly into her system—and, although her father, who suddenly became intolerably grey and broken, threw up his practice at the Bar and chartered a private yacht to take them out to Abyssinia in the hope of discovering some antidote from the natives, she never rallied. The hideous thing made its fearsome inroads quite unchecked, and as they journeyed home again she took advantage of one dark night and her attendant’s sleepiness in the tropics to throw herself from the side of the yacht, and was never seen again.
As for Ventris Blake’s wealth, that went to his gentle old aunt, Prudence Gordon. For a time it was feared the shock of the exposure of her nephew’s villainies would kill her outright, but she rallied, although frailer than ever, and after she had purchased an annuity for Mrs. Kilroy and her daughter, she found her main delight in appearing mysteriously at the offices of different charities like Dr. Barnado’s and St. Thomas’s Hospital, and in handing the secretary of each a Bank of England note for one thousand pounds, and then disappearing, unknowing and unknown. Long may she be spared to practise this unselfish form of good work!
The caretaker, Charlton, was killed the same week as Blake, in a drunken brawl in Seven Dials—and rumour whispers that the good wife Rebecca, who is now quite comfortably off, does not regret him quite as bitterly as one might have expected. I think, too, I know the reason. I called the other day on her in that bright little house which she has taken in Ravenscourt Park, and I was startled to find that she had one lodger with whom I, for one, had a certain amount of acquaintance—Josiah Sawdry, who blushed furiously when I was shewn in, and only his landlady and himself were present. Can it be that they have loved each other years longer than they care to remember? Does it portend an alliance between the one thousand pounds she got from Arthur, and the annuity of five pounds a week which Arthur purchased for him in full redemption of Paul’s promise? I wonder, yet I don’t wonder very much. Do you?
And the mention of Paul’s promise reminds me of Paul himself. I wish I could, as a last word, tell you something new and startling and strange of Paul himself. Only I can’t. As a matter of fact, Paul went quietly, and loyally, and simply back to his sub-editorial work on The Moon, his heart perhaps a little more sensitive to the sufferings of “a world bursting with sin and sorrow,” his brain perhaps, a little more eager to think the better of people and not the worse. Such men as he are the salt and sweetness of journalism. I tremble to think what might happen if my old craft were given over entirely to clever young men, and men who had never felt the pinch of want or known what it was to sit by the bedside of a dying child.
A little voice and a little bird, it is true, sometimes whispers to me that Paul did love once, and that the little locket which the sentimental fellow wears around his neck does not contain the portrait of his grandmother who found a mighty cure for rheumatism, as he pretends, at all: but of Winifred herself.
Only sometimes I am not quite sure little birds are so simple and innocent as they appear. I know for a fact Paul started a terribly fierce correspondence in The Moon, with a column-letter on “Do Journalists Really Love?” in which he made out nobody who cared for journalism in the big sense and had that great aching love of humanity which characterises all who pursue that craft, could content himself with the love of one simple silly girl when an entire people clamoured for sympathy and comprehension at the doors of his heart.
Only I must see inside that locket before I really decide. Perhaps though it only contains a duplicate of that Shield of Black which was published in The Moon and which gave a most startling presentiment of The Three Glass Eyes.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. armchair/arm-chair, tea-rooms/tea rooms, unbiased/unbiassed, etc.) have been preserved.
Alterations to the text:
Add ToC.
Adjust the chapter numbering—the source text skipped XVI.
Change two instances of “Reverend Duncan Kilroy, M.A., B.D.” to D.D.
Change five instances of Aimeé, and one of Aimee, to Aimée.
Punctuation: fix some quotation mark pairings/nestings and some missing periods and commas.
[Chapter I]
Change “came to my office—aud did business with me” to and.
[Chapter III]
“repulsed with some scorn aud a good deal of quite unnecessary” to and.
[Chapter IV]
(discreetly announce “Tragedy at Scarborongh,”) to Scarborough.
“I have given a gool deal of thought to this same subject” to good.
[Chapter V]
“end of his knowledge of the millionaire’s villanies” to villainies.
“Tbe man snarled for a few seconds longer, but” to The.
[Chapter VI]
“depression that was stealing over him. he broke into a low” change the period to a comma.
“smashed the whole contrivanee to atoms” to contrivance.
“eyes were fixed upon him, with that huugry, strained” to hungry.
“let him see Arthur safely ensconsed in his cell” to ensconced.
“and had no donbt had long consultations” to doubt.
[Chapter VII]
“For a second an indiscribable sense of nausea seized” to indescribable.
“provincial town in which she had taken np her quarters” to up.
(“you will hononr us with your presence in the Vicarage”) to honour.
they were horrified to see the young women, clad from head to foot” to woman.
“and on a conspicious board had been written the warning-notice” to conspicuous.
[Chapter VIII]
“the Scarborough paper did he think any more of the occurence” to occurrence.
(“As yon know, Ventris Blake has set his mind) to you.
(“By jove,” he said quickly, “I had forgotten one) to Jove.
[Chapter IX]
“before Arthur could confide to Paul any fnrther particulars” to further.
“scrambled on one of the red busses that run from Liverpool Street” to buses.
“is a neice of that eminent barrister, Mr. Russell Langford” to niece.
“another reason in requesting you to let me see Miss Pohtifex” to Pontifex.
(“and she tells me she ain’t agoin to stay here) to agoin’.
“taking her to some tea rooms in Bond Steeet” to Street.
(“the prospect of being rich dosen’t appeal to me) to doesn’t.
[Chapter X]
“to save Arther Hudson from all that intolerable burden” to Arthur.
(“You know we, Kaufmanns, as a family, don’t trust you) delete the comma after we.
“in the widest sense, may be easy enongh” to enough.
“grieved at his sister’s child heing turned adrift” to being.
(“Vera is out at present,” hs said, “but left a note to say) to he.
[Chapter XI]
“a member of the misercordia who goes about in a habit” to misericordia.
“the cloud of douht and suspicion seemed to lift from his face” to doubt.
“aroused a new source of interest n him, no other than” to in.
“seclusion and remoteness of the office of of a responsible newspaper” delete one of.
(“Why, Silas Q. Pinkerton, the great New York dectective,”) to detective.
[Chapter XII]
(“First and foremost. it will stop his espionage on you) change the period to a comma.
“certainly more dangerous, Thirdly—and this is the most important” change the comma to a period.
“against a trotting horse and had heen picked up dead” to been.
“but finally he seemcd to throw prudence to the winds” to seemed.
“unless he yielded the information he sougbt” to sought.
“and exactly of the amount of Five hundred pounds” to five.
“about how telegraph wires conld be tapped” to could.
[Chapter XIII]
“but all the good impression he he had made was obliterated” delete one he.
[Chapter XIV]
“I feel as though I should never be able to breath anything” to breathe.
(“Quite so,” replied the psuedo-detective. “What else) to pseudo.
(“What of that?” said Sawdry cooly. “Remember Rebecca) to coolly.
“her sisters in the early days were well known amateur actressess” to actresses.
[Chapter XV]
“soft splash of the waves as they rolled against she cliffs” to the.
“Clear your mind for a second of all prejndice, and consider” to prejudice.
(“Unfortunately, to-morrow morning may be to late,”) to too.
“Paul promptly produced a Five pound Bank of England note” to five.
[Chapter XVI]
“his feelings of honour, of family pride, of loyality” to loyalty.
“althongh you seldom did oblige anyone except yourself” to although.
“who I understand he will marry to-morrow at St. Georges, Hanover Square” to George’s.
“I was mad with jealously and rage because Jules Prendergast” to jealousy.
[Chapter XVII]
“that meant ease and a certain Five pound a week” to five.
“his thoery that Ventris Blake had really killed his wife” to theory.
“put that wretched rodent you are hugging, down for a moment” delete the comma after hugging.
[Chapter XVIII]
“unbiassed auditors, No longer did they seek to persuade” change the comma to a period.
“bundle of notes, similiar to those they had on the table” to similar.
“the officers expressed neither surprise. dissent, nor pleasure” change the period to a comma.
“The poor woman, Rebeccca Charlton, was carried out” to Rebecca.
[Chapter XIX]
“quickly forgot all the terrible hours of auguish” to anguish.
[Conclusion]
“she took advantage of of one dark night and her” delete one of.
“tell you something new and startling and strange of Paul him-himself” to himself.
[End of text]