 CHAPTER X HETHER TOO UNPUBLISHED PARENTHASIS BEING THE REPORT WHICH WAS NOT SENT TO THE RECORD CLOSE PARENTHASIS MARLSTONE, JUNE 16TH My dear Malloy, this is in case I don't find you at your office. I have found out who killed Manderson, as this dispatch will show. That was my problem. Your sister decide what used to make of it. It definitely charges an unsuspected person with having a hand in the crime, and practically accuses him of being the murderer, so I don't suppose you will publish it before his arrest, and I believe it is illegal to do so afterwards until he has been tried and found guilty. You may decide to publish it then, and you may find it possible to make some use or other before then of the facts I have given. That is your affair. Meanwhile, will you communicate with Scotland Yard, and let them see what I have written? I have done with the Manderson mystery, and I wish to God I had never touched it. Here follows my dispatch. P. T. I begin this, my third, and probably my final dispatch to the record upon the Manderson murder, with conflicting feelings. I have a strong sense of relief, because in my two previous dispatches I was obliged, in the interest of justice, to withhold facts ascertained by me, which would, if published then, have put a certain person upon his guard and possibly have led to his escape, for he is a man of no common boldness and resource. Those facts I shall now set forth. But I have, I confess, no liking for the story of treachery and perverted cleverness which I have to tell. It leaves an evil taste in my mouth, a savor of something revolting in the deeper puzzle of motive underlying the puzzle of the crime itself, which I believe I have solved. It will be remembered that in my first dispatch I described the situation as I found it on reaching this place early on Tuesday morning. I told how the body was found, and in what state, dwelt upon the complete mystery surrounding the crime, and mentioned one or two local theories about it, gave some account of the dead man's domestic surroundings, and furnished a somewhat detailed description of his movements on the evening before his death. I gave, too, a little fact which may or may not have seemed irrelevant. That a quantity of whiskey much larger than Manderson habitually drank at night had disappeared from his private decanter since the last time he was seen alive. On the following day, the day of the inquest, I wired little more than an abstract of the proceedings in the coroner's court, of which a verbatim report was made at my request by other representatives of the record. And it will be remembered that the police evidence showed that two revolvers, with either of which the crime might have been committed, had been found. One in Manderson's bureau, and the other in the room of the secretary Marlowe. But that no importance could be attached to this, as the weapons were of an extremely popular make. I write these lines in the last hours of the same day, and I have now completed an investigation which has led me directly to the man who must be called upon to clear himself of the guilt of the death of Manderson. Apart from the central mystery of Manderson's having arisen long before his usual hour to go out and meet his death, there are two minor points of oddity about this affair which, I suppose, must have occurred to thousands of those who have read the accounts in the newspapers. Points apparent from the very beginning. The first of these was that, whereas the body was found at a spot not thirty yards from the house, all the people of the house declared that they had heard no cry or other noise in the night. Manderson had not been gagged, the marks on his wrists pointed to a struggle with his assailant, and there had been at least one pistol shot. I say at least one, because it is the fact that in murders with firearms, especially if there has been a struggle, the criminal commonly misses his victim at least once. This odd fact seemed all the more odd to me when I learned that Martin, the butler, was a bad sleeper, very keen of hearing, and that his bedroom, with the window open, faced almost directly toward the shed by which the body was found. The second odd little fact that was apparent from the outset was Manderson's leaving his dental plate by the bedside. It appeared that he had risen and dressed himself fully down to his necktie and watch and chain, and had gone out of doors without remembering to put in this plate, which he had carried in his mouth every day for years, and which contained all the visible teeth of the upper jaw. It had evidently not been a case of frantic hurry, and even if it had been, he would have been more likely to forget almost anything than this denture. Anyone who wears such a removable plate will agree that the putting it in on rising is a matter of second nature. Speaking as well as eating, to say nothing of appearances, depend upon it. Neither of these queer details, however, seemed to lead to anything at the moment. They only awakened in me a suspicion of something lurking in the shadows, something that lent more mystery to the already mysterious question how and why and through whom Manderson met his end. With this much of preamble I cometh once to the discovery which, in the first few hours of my investigation, set me upon the path which so much ingenuity had been directed to concealing. I have already described Manderson's bedroom, the rigorous simplicity of its furnishings, contrasted so strangely with the multitude of clothes and shoes, and the manner of its communication with Mrs. Manderson's room. On the upper of the two long shells on which the shoes were ranged, I found, where I had been told I should find them, the pair of patent leather shoes which Manderson had worn on the evening before his death. I had glanced over the row, not with any idea of there giving me a clue, but merely because it happens that I am a judge of shoes, and all these shoes were of the very best workmanship. But my attention was at once caught by a little peculiarity in this particular pair. They were the lightest kind of lace-up dress shoes, very thin in the sole, without toe caps, and beautifully made, like all the rest. These shoes were old and well worn, but being carefully polished and fitted, as all the shoes were, upon their trees they looked neat enough. What caught my eye was a slight splitting of the leather in that part of the upper known as the vamp, a splitting at the point where the two laced parts of the shoe rise from the upper. It is at this point that the strain comes when a tight shoe of this sort is forced upon the foot, and it is usually guarded with the strong stitching across the bottom of the opening. In both the shoes I was examining this stitching had parted, and the leather below had given way. The splitting was a tiny affair in each case, not an eighth of an inch long, and the torn edges having come together again on the removal of the strain there was nothing that a person who was not something of a connoisseur of shoe leather would have noticed. Even less noticeable, and indeed not to be seen at all unless one were looking for it, was a slight straining of the stitches uniting the upper to the sole. At the toe and on the outer side of each shoe this stitching had been dragged until it was visible on a close inspection of the joining. These indications, of course, could mean only one thing. The shoes had been worn by someone for whom they were too small. Now it was clear at a glance that Manderson was always thoroughly well shod and careful, perhaps a little vain, of his small and narrow feet. Not one of the other shoes in the collection, as I soon ascertained, bore similar marks. They had not belonged to a man who squeezed himself into tight shoe leather. Someone who was not Manderson had worn these shoes and worn them recently. The edges of the tears were quite fresh. The possibility of someone having worn them since Manderson's death was not worth considering. The body had only been found about twenty-six hours when I was examining the shoes. Besides, why should anyone wear them? The possibility of someone having borrowed Manderson's shoes and spoiled them for him while he was alive seemed about as negligible. With others to choose from, he would not have worn these. Besides, the only men in the place were the butler and the two secretaries. But I do not say that I gave those possibilities even as much consideration as they deserved, for my thoughts were running away with me, and I have always found it good policy in cases of this sort to let them have their heads. Ever since I had got out of the train at Marlstone early that morning I had been steeped in details of the Manderson affair. The thing had not once been out of my head. Suddenly the moment had come when the demon wakes and begins to range. Let me put it less fancifully. After all, it is a detail of psychology, familiar enough to all whose business or inclination brings them in contact with difficult affairs of any sort. Swiftly and spontaneously, when chance or efforts puts one in possession of the key fact in any system of baffling circumstances, once ideas seem to rush to group themselves anew in relation to that fact, so that they are suddenly rearranged almost before one has consciously grasped the significance of the key fact itself. In the present instance my brain had scarcely formulated within itself the thought somebody who was not Manderson has been wearing those shoes, when there flew into my mind a flock of ideas, all of the same character and all bearing upon this new notion. It was unheard of for Manderson to drink much whiskey at night. It was very unlike him to be untidily dressed, as the body was when found. The cuffs dragged up inside the sleeves, the shoes unevenly laced, very unlike him not to wash when he rose, and to put on last night's evening shirt and collar and under-clothing, very unlike him to have his watch in the waistcoat pocket that was not lined with leather for its reception. In my first dispatch I mentioned all these points, but neither I nor anyone else saw anything significant in them when examining the body. It was very strange in the existing domestic situation that Manderson should be communicative to his wife about his doings, especially at the time of his going to bed when he seldom spoke to her at all. It was extraordinary that Manderson should leave his bedroom without his false teeth. All these thoughts, as I say, came flocking into my mind together, drawn from various parts of my memory of the morning's inquiries and observations. They had all presented themselves in far less time than it takes to read them to sit down here, as I was turning over the shoes, confirming my own certainty on the main point. And yet when I confronted the definite idea that had sprung up suddenly and unsupported before me, it was not Manderson who was in the house that night. It seemed a stark absurdity at the first formulating. It was certainly Manderson who had dined at the house and gone out with Marlowe in the car. People had seen him at close quarters. But was it he who returned at ten? That question, too, seemed absurd enough, but I could not set it aside. It seemed to me as if a faint light was beginning to creep over the whole expanse of my mind, as it does overland at dawn, and that presently the sun would be rising. I set myself to think over, one by one, the points that had just occurred to me, so as to make out, if possible, why any man masquerading as Manderson should have done these things that Manderson would not have done. I had not to cast about very long for the motive a man might have in forcing his feet into Manderson's narrow shoes. The examination of footmarks is very well understood by the police. But not only was the man concerned to leave no footmarks of his own, he was concerned to leave Manderson's, if any. His whole plan, if my guess was right, must have been directed to producing the belief that Manderson was in the place that night. Moreover, his plan did not turn upon leaving footmarks. He meant to leave the shoes themselves, and he did so. The maid-servant had found them outside the bedroom door, as Manderson always left his shoes, and had polished them, replacing them on the shoe-shells later in the morning after the body had been found. When I came to consider in this new light the leaving of the false teeth, an explanation of what had seemed the maddest part of the affair broke upon me at once. A dental plate is not inseparable from its owner. If my guess was right, the unknown had brought the denture to the house with him, and left it in the bedroom with the same object as he had in leaving the shoes, to make it impossible that anyone should doubt that Manderson had been in the house and had gone to bed there. This, of course, led me to the inference that Manderson was dead before the false Manderson came to the house, and other things confirmed this. For instance, the clothing to which I now turned in my review of the position, if my guess was right, the unknown in Manderson's shoes had certainly had possession of Manderson's trousers, waistcoat, and shooting jacket. They were there before my eyes in the bedroom, and Martin had seen the jacket, which nobody could have mistaken, upon the man who sat at the telephone in the library. It was now quite plain, if my guess was right, that this unmistakable garment was a cardinal feature of the unknown's plan. He knew that Martin would take him for Manderson at the first glance. And there my thinking was interrupted by the realization of a thing that had escaped me before. So strong had been the influence of the unquestioned assumption that it was Manderson who was present that night, that neither I nor, so far as I know, anyone else had known at the point. Martin had not seen the man's face, nor had Mrs. Manderson. Mrs. Manderson, judging by her evidence at the inquest, of which, as I have said, I had a full report made by the record stenographers in court, had not seen the man at all. She hardly could have done as I shall show presently. She had merely spoken with him as she lay half asleep, resuming a conversation which she had had with her living husband about an hour before. Martin, I perceived, could only have seen the man's back as he sat crouching over the telephone. No doubt a characteristic pose was imitated there, and the man had worn his hat, Manderson's broad brimmed hat. There is too much character in the back of a head, a neck. The unknown, in fact, supposing him to have been of about Manderson's build, had had no need for any disguise, apart from the jacket and the hat and his powers of mimicry. I paused there to contemplate the coolness and ingenuity of the man. The thing I now began to see was so safe and easy, provided that his mimicry was good enough, and that his nerve held. Those two points assured only some wholly unlikely accident could unmask him. To come back to my puzzling out of the matter, as I sat in the dead man's bedroom with the telltale shoes before me, the reason for the entrance by the window instead of by the front door will already have occurred to anyone reading this. Entering by the door, the man would almost certainly have been heard by the sharp-eared Martin in his pantry just across the hall. He might have met him face to face. Then there was the problem of the whisky. I had not attached much importance to it. Whisky will sometimes vanish in very queer ways in a household of eight or nine persons. But it had seemed strange that it should go in that way on that evening. Martin had been plainly quite dumbfounded by the fact. It seemed to me now that many a man, fresh as this man in all likelihood was from a bloody business, from the unclothing of a corpse, and with a desperate part still to play, would turn to that decanter as to a friend. No doubt he had a drink before sending for Martin. After making that trick with ease and success he probably drank more. But he had known when to stop. The worst part of the enterprise was before him. The business, clearly of such vital importance to him for whatever reason, of shedding himself in Manderson's room and preparing a mass of convincing evidence of its having been occupied by Manderson. And this, with the risk, very slight, as no doubt he understood, but how unnerving, of the woman on the other side of the half-open door, waking and somehow discovering him. True, if he kept out of her limited field of vision from the bed, she could only see him by getting up and going to the door. I found that to a person lying in her bed, which stood with its head to the wall a little beyond the door, nothing was visible through the doorway but one of the cupboards by Manderson's bedhead. Moreover, since this man knew the ways of the household, he would think it most likely that Mrs. Manderson was asleep. Another point with him, I guessed, might have been the estrangement between the husband and wife, which they had tried to cloak by keeping up, among other things, their usual practice of sleeping in connected rooms, but which was well known to all who had anything to do with them. He would hope from this that if Mrs. Manderson heard him, she would take no notice of the supposed presence of her husband. So, pursuing my hypothesis, I followed the unknown up to the bedroom and saw him sitting about his work, and it was with a catch in my own breath that I thought of the hideous shock with which he must have heard the sound of all others he was dreading most, the drowsy voice from the adjoining room. What Mrs. Manderson actually said, she was unable to recollect at the inquest. She thinks she asked her supposed husband whether he had had a good run in the car. And now, what does the unknown do? Here, I think, we come to a supremely significant point. Not only does he, standing rigid there, as I picture him, before the dressing-table, listening to the sound of his own leaping heart, not only does he answer the lady in the voice of Manderson, he volunteers an explanatory statement. He tells her that he has, on a sudden inspiration, sent Marlowe in the car to Southampton, that he has sent him to bring back some important information from a man leaving for Paris by the steamboat that morning. Why these details from a man who had long been uncommunicative to his wife, and that upon a point scarcely likely to interest her? Why these details about Marlowe? Having taken my story so far, I now put forward the following definite propositions. That between a time somewhere about ten, when the car started, and a time somewhere about eleven, Manderson was shot, probably at a considerable distance from the house, as no shot was heard, that the body was brought back, left by the shed, and stripped of its outer clothing, while the car was left in hiding somewhere at hand, that at some time round about eleven o'clock a man who was not Manderson, wearing Manderson's shoes, hat, and jacket, entered the library by the garden window, that he had with him Manderson's black trousers, waistcoat, and motor coat, the denture taken from Manderson's mouth, and the weapon with which he had been murdered, that he concealed these, rang the bell for the butler, and sat down at the telephone with his hat on and his back to the door, that he was occupied with the telephone all the time Martin was in the room, that on going up to the bedroom floor he quietly entered Marlowe's room and placed the revolver with which the crime had been committed, Marlowe's revolver, in the case on the mantelpiece from which it had been taken, and that he then went to Manderson's room, placed Manderson's shoes outside the door, threw Manderson's garments on a chair, placed the denture in the bowl by the bedside, and selected a suit of clothes, a pair of shoes, and a tie from those in the bedroom. Here I will pause in my statement of this man's proceedings to go into a question for which the way is now sufficiently prepared. Who was the false Manderson? Reviewing what was known to me, or might almost certainly be surmised, about that person, I set down the following five conclusions. 1. He had been in close relations with the dead man. In his acting before Martin and his speaking to Mrs. Manderson he had made no mistake. 2. He was of a build not unlike Manderson's, especially as to height and breath of shoulder which mainly determined the character of the back of a seated figure when the head is concealed and the body loosely clothed, but his feet were larger, though not greatly larger, than Manderson's. 3. He had considerable aptitude for mimicry and acting, probably some experience too. 4. He had a minute acquaintance with the ways of the Manderson household. 5. He was under a vital necessity of creating the belief that Manderson was alive and in that house until some time after midnight on the Sunday night. So much I took as either certain or next door to it. It was as far as I could see, and it was far enough. I proceed to give in an order corresponding with the numbered paragraphs above such relevant facts as I was able to obtain about Mr. John Marlowe from himself and other sources. 1. He had been Manderson's private secretary upon a footing of great intimacy for nearly three years. 2. The two men were nearly of the same height about five feet eleven inches. Both were powerfully built and heavy in the shoulder. Marlowe, who was the younger by some twenty years, was slider about the body, though Manderson was a man in good physical condition. Marlowe's shoes, of which I examined several pairs, were roughly about one shoemaker's size longer and broader than Manderson's. 3. In the afternoon of the first day of my investigation, after arriving at the results already detailed, I sent a telegram to a personal friend, a fellow of a college at Oxford, whom I knew to be interested in theatrical matters, in these terms. Police wire John Marlowe's record in connection with acting at Oxford some time past decade very urgent and confidential. My friend replied in the following telegram, which reached me next morning, the morning of the inquest. Marlowe was member of OUDS for three years and President 19-dash. Plate Bardolph-Cleon and Mercutio excelled in character acting and imitations, in great demand at smokers, was hero of some historic hoaxes. I had been led to send the telegram, which brought this very helpful answer, by seeing on the mantle shelf in Marlowe's bedroom a photograph of himself and two others in the costume of Falstaff's three followers, with an inscription from the Mary Wives, and by noting that it bore the imprint of an Oxford firm of photographers. 4. During his connection with Manderson, Marlowe had lived as one of the family. No other person, apart from the servants, had his opportunities for knowing the domestic life of the Mandersons in detail. 5. I ascertained beyond doubt that Marlowe arrived at a hotel in Southampton on the Monday morning at 6.30, and there proceeded to carry out the commission which, according to his story, and to the statement made by Mrs. Manderson in the bedroom by the false Manderson, had been entrusted to him by his employer. He had then returned in the car to Marlstone, where he had shown great amazement and horror at the news of the murder. 6. These, I say, are the relevant facts about Marlowe. We must now examine fact number five, as set out above, in connection with conclusion number five about the false Manderson. 7. I would first draw attention to one important fact. The only person who professed to have heard Manderson mention Southampton at all before he started in the car was Marlowe. His story, confirmed to some extent by what the butler overheard, was that the journey was all arranged in a private talk before they set out, and he could not say, when I put the question to him, why Manderson should have concealed his intentions by giving out that he was going with Marlowe for a moonlight drive. This point, however, attracted no attention. Marlowe had an absolutely airtight alibi in his presence at Southampton by 6.30. Nobody thought of him in connection with the murder which must have been committed after 12.30, the hour at which Martin the butler had gone to bed. But it was the Manderson who came back from the drive who went out of his way to mention Southampton openly to two persons. He even went so far as to ring up a hotel in Southampton and ask questions which bore out Marlowe's story of his errand. This was the call he was busy with, when Martin was in the library. 8. Now let us consider the alibi. If Manderson was in the house that night, and if he did not leave until some time after 12.30, Marlowe could not by any possibility have had a direct hand in the murder. It is a question of the distance between Marlestone and Southampton. If he had left Marlestone in the car at the hour when he is supposed to have done so, between 10 and 10.30, with a message from Manderson, the run would be quite an easy one to do in the time. But it would be physically impossible for the car, a fifteen-horsepower four-cylinder Northumberland, an average medium-power car, to get to Southampton by half-past six unless it left Marlestone by midnight at latest. Motorists who will examine the road map and make the calculations required, as I did in Manderson's library that day, will agree that on the facts as they appeared there was absolutely no case against Marlowe. But even if they are not as they appeared, if Manderson was dead by eleven o'clock, and if at about that time Marlowe impersonated him at White Gables, if Marlowe retired to Manderson's bedroom, how can all this be reconciled with his appearance next morning at Southampton? He had to get out of the house unseen and unheard and away in the car by midnight, and Martin, the shop-beard Martin, was sitting up until twelve-thirty in his pantry, with the door open, listening for the telephone bell. Practically he was standing sentry over the foot of the staircase, the only staircase leading down from the bedroom floor. With this difficulty we arrived at the last and crucial phase of my investigation. Having the foregoing points clearly in mind, I spent the rest of the day before the inquest in talking to various persons and in going over my story, testing it link by link. I could only find the one weakness which seemed to be involved in Martin sitting up until twelve-thirty, and since his having been instructed to do so was certainly a part of the plan meant to clinch the alibi for Marlowe, I knew there must be an explanation somewhere. If I could not find that explanation, my theory was valueless. I must be able to show that at the time Martin went up to bed, the man who had shed himself in Manderson's bedroom might have been many miles away on the road to Southampton. I had, however, a pretty good idea already, as perhaps the reader of these lines has by this time, if I have made myself clear, of how the escape of the false Manderson before midnight had been contrived. But I did not want what I was now about to do to be known. If I had chance to be discovered at work, there would have been no concealing the direction of my suspicions. I resolved not to test them on this point until the next day during the opening proceedings at the inquest. This was to be held I knew at the hotel, and I reckoned upon having white gables to myself so far as the principal inmates were concerned. So in fact it happened. By the time the proceedings at the hotel had begun, I was hard at work at white gables, I had a camera with me. I made search on principles well known to and commonly practiced by the police and often enough by myself for certain indications. Without describing my search, I may say at once that I found and was able to photograph two fresh fingerprints very large and distinct on the polished front of the right-hand top drawer of the chest of drawers in Manderson's bedroom. Five more, among a number of smaller and less recent impressions made by other hands, on the glasses of the French window in Mrs. Manderson's room, a window which always stood open at night with a curtain before it, and three more upon the glass bowl in which Manderson's dental plate had been found lying. I took the bowl with me from white gables. I took also a few articles which I selected from Marlowe's bedroom, as bearing the most distinct of the innumerable fingerprints which are always to be found upon toilet articles in daily use. I already had in my possession made upon leaves cut from my pocket diary some excellent fingerprints of Marlowe's which he had made in my presence without knowing it. I had shown him the leaves asking if he recognized them, and the few seconds during which he had held them in his fingers had suffice to leave impressions which I was afterward able to bring out. By six o'clock in the evening, two hours after the jury had brought in their verdict against a person or person's unknown, I had completed my work, and was in a position to state that two of the five large prints made on the window glasses and the three on the bowl were made by the left hand of Marlowe, that the remaining three on the window and the two on the drawer were made by his right hand. By eight o'clock I had made at the establishment of Mr. H. T. Copper, photographer of Bishop's Bridge, and with his assistance a dozen enlarged prints of the finger marks of Marlowe, clearly showing the identity of those which he unknowingly made in my presence and those left upon articles in his bedroom with those found by me as I have described, and thus establishing the facts that Marlowe was recently in Manderson's bedroom where he had, in the ordinary way, no business and in Mrs. Manderson's room where he had still less. I hope it may be possible to reproduce these prints for publication with this dispatch. At nine o'clock I was back in my room at the hotel and sitting down to begin this manuscript. I had my story complete. I bring it to a close by advancing these further propositions, that on the night of the murder the impersonator of Manderson, being in Manderson's bedroom, told Mrs. Manderson, as he had already told Martin, that Marlowe was at the moment on his way to Southampton, that having made his dispositions in the room he switched off the light and lay in the bed in his clothes, that he waited until he was assured that Mrs. Manderson was asleep, that he then arose and stealthily crossed Mrs. Manderson's bedroom in his stocking feet, having under his arm the bundle of clothing and shoes for the body, that he stepped behind the curtain, pushing the doors of the window a little further open with his hands, strode over the iron railing of the balcony, and let himself down until only a drop of a few feet separated him from the soft turf of the lawn. All this might very well have been accomplished within half an hour of his entering Manderson's bedroom, which according to Martin he did at about half past eleven. What followed, your readers and the authorities may conjecture for themselves. The corpse was found next morning, clothed, rather untidily. Marlowe in the car appeared at Southampton by half past six. I bring this manuscript to an end in my sitting room at the hotel at Marlstone. It is four o'clock in the morning. I leave for London by the noon train from Bishop's Bridge. By this evening these pages will be in your hands, and I ask you to communicate the substance of them to the Criminal Investigation Department. CHAPTER X This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Red Abrus. TRENT'S LAST CASE by E. C. Bentley. CHAPTER XI. EVIL DAYS I am returning the check you sent for what I did on the Manderson case. Trent wrote to Sir James Marlowe from Munich. Whether he had gone immediately after handing in at the record office a brief dispatch bringing his work on the case to an unexciting close. What I sent you wasn't worth one tenth of the amount, but I should have no scruple about pocketing it. If I hadn't taken a fancy, never mind why not to touch any money at all for this business. I should like you if there is no objection to pay for the stuff at your ordinary space rate and hand the money to some charity which does not devote itself to bullying people if you know of any such. I have come to this place to see some old friends and arrange my ideas. And the idea that comes out uppermost is that for a little while I want some employment with activity in it. I find I can't paint at all. I couldn't paint a fence. Will you try me as your own correspondent somewhere? If you can find me a good adventure I will send you good accounts. After that I could settle down and work. Sir James sent him instructions by telegram to proceed at once to Kirlan and Livonia where Citizen Browning was abroad again and town and countryside blazed in revolt. It was a roving commission and for two months Trent followed his luck. It served him not less well than usual. He was the only correspondent who saw General Draghi Liu killed in the street at Walmart by a girl of eighteen. He saw burnings, lynchings, fusillades, hangings. Each day his soul sickened afresh at the imbecilities born of misrule. Many nights he lay down in danger. Many days he went fasting. But there was never an evening or a morning when he did not see the face of the woman whom he hopelessly loved. He discovered in himself an unhappy pride at the lasting force of this infatuation. It interested him as a phenomenon. It amazed and enlightened him. Such a thing had not visited him before. It conformed so much that he had found dubious in the recorded experience of men. It was not that at thirty-two he could pretend to ignorance of this world of emotion about his knowledge, let it be enough to say that what he had learned had come unpursued and unpurchased and was without intolerable memories broken to the realities of sex. He was still troubled by its inscrutable history. He went through life full of a strange respect for sudden feminine weakness and a very simple terror of sudden feminine strength. He had held to a rather lukewarm faith that something remained in him to be called forth and that the voice that should call would be heard in its own time if ever and not through any seeking. But he had not thought of the possibility that if this proved true someday the truth might come in a sinister shape. The two things that had taken him utterly by surprise in the matter of his feeling towards Mabel Manderson were the insane suddenness of its uprising in full strength and its extravagant hopelessness. Before it came, he had been much disposed to laugh at the permanence of unrequited passion as a generous boyish delusion. He knew now that he had been wrong and he was living bitterly in the knowledge. Before the eye of his fancy the woman always came just as she was when he had first had sight of her with the gesture which he had surprised as he walked past unseen on the edge of the cliff. That great gesture of passionate joy in her new liberty which had told him more plainly than speech that her widowhood was a release from torment and had conformed with terrible force the suspicion active in his mind before that it was her passport to happiness with a man whom she loved. He could not with certainty name to himself the moment when he had first suspected that it might be so. The seed of the thought must have been sown he believed at his first meeting with Marlow. His mind would have noted automatically that such evident strength and grace with the sort of looks and manners that the tall young man possessed might go far with any woman of unfixed affections and the connection of this with what Mr. Couples had told him of the Manderson's married life must have formed itself in the unconscious depths of his mind. Suddenly it had presented itself as an already established thing when he began after satisfying himself of the identity of the murderer to cast about for the motive of the crime. Motive, motive how desperately he had sought for another turning his back upon that grim thought that Marlow obsessed by passion like himself and privy perhaps to maddening truths about wipes and happiness had taken a leaf the guiltiest from the book of Bothwell. But in all his investigations at the time in all his broodings on the matter afterwards he had been able to discover nothing else that could prompt Marlow to such a deed. Nothing but that temptation the whole strength of which he could not know but which if it had existed must have pressed urgently upon a bold spirit in which Scruple had been somehow paralyzed. If he could trust his senses at all the young man was neither insane nor by nature evil but that could not clear him murder for a woman's sake he thought was not a rare crime. Heaven knew if the modern feebleness of impulse in the comfortable classes and their respect for the modern apparatus of detection had made it rare among them it was yet far from impossible. It only needed a man of equal daring and intelligence his soul drugged with the vapours of an intoxicating intrigue to plan and perform such a deed. A thousand times with a heart full of anguish he had sought to reason away the dread that Mabel Manderson had known too much of what had been intended against her husband's life that she knew all the truth after the thing was done. He could not doubt her unforgettable collapse in his presents when the question about Marlow was suddenly and bluntly put had swept away his last hope that there was no love between the pair and had seemed to him moreover to speak of dread of discovery. In any case she knew the truth after reading what he had left with her and it was certain that no public suspicion had been cast upon Marlow since she had destroyed his manuscript then and taken him at his word to keep the secret that threatened her lover's life but it was the monstrous thought that she might have known murder was brewing and guiltily kept silence that haunted Trent's mind she might have suspected have guessed something was it conceivable that she was aware of the whole plot that she connived he could never forget that his first suspicion of Marlow's motive in the crime had been roused by the fact that his escape was made through the lady's room at that time when he had not yet seen her he had been ready enough to entertain the idea of her equal guilt and her cooperation he had figured to himself some passionate history merciless as a tiger in her hate and her love a zealous a better perhaps even the ruling spirit in the crime then he had seen her had spoken with her had helped her in her weakness and such suspicions since their first meeting had seemed the vilest of infamy he had seen her eyes and her mouth he had breathed the woman's atmosphere Trent was one of those who fancy they can send true wickedness in the air in her presence he had felt an inward certainty of her ultimate goodness of heart and it was nothing against this that she had abandoned herself a moment that day on the cliff to the sentiment of relief at the ending of her bondage of her years of starved sympathy and unquickened motherhood that she had turned to Marlowe in her destitution he believed that she had any knowledge of his deadly purpose he did not believe and yet morning and evening the sickening doubts returned and he recalled again that it was almost in her very presence that Marlowe had made his preparations in the bedroom of the murdered man that it was from the window of her own chamber that he had escaped from the house had he forgotten his cunning and taken the risk of telling her then or had he as Trent thought more likely still played his part with her then and stolen off while she slept he did not think she had known of the masquerade when she gave evidence at the inquest it read like honest evidence or the question would never be silenced though he scorned it had she lain expecting the footstep in the room and the whisper that could tell her it was done among the foul possibilities of human nature was it possible that black ruthlessness and black deceit as well were hidden behind that good and straight and gentle seeming these thoughts would scarcely leave him when he was alone Trent served Sir James well earning his pay for six months and then returned to Paris where he went to work again with a better heart his powers had returned to him and he began to live more happily than he had expected among a tribe of strangely assorted friends French English and American artists poets journalists policemen hotel keepers shoulders lawyers businessmen and others his old faculty of sympathetic interest in his fellows one for him just as in his student days privileges seldom extended to the Brighton he enjoyed again the rare experience of being taken into the bosom of a Frenchman's family he was admitted to the momentous confidence of late Jones and found them as sure that they had surprised the secrets of art and life as the departed Jones of ten years before had been one morning in June as he descended the slope of the real day martyr he saw approaching a figure that he remembered he glanced quickly round for the thought of meeting Mr. Bonner again was unacceptable for some time he had recognized that his wound was healing under the spell of creative work he thought less often of the woman he loved and with less pain he would not have the memory of those three days reopened but the straight and narrow thoroughfare offered no refuge and the Americans saw him almost at once his unforced geniality made Trent ashamed for he had liked the man they sat long over a meal and Mr. Bonner talked Trent listened to him now that he was in for it with genuine pleasure now and then contributing a question or remark besides liking his companion he enjoyed his conversation for its own sake Mr. Bonner was it appeared resident in Paris as the chief continental agent of the manderson farm and fully satisfied with his position and prospects he discursed on these for some 20 minutes this subject at length exhausted he went on to tell Trent who confessed that he had been away from England for a year that Marlowe had shortly after the death of manderson entered his father's business which was now again in a flourishing state and had already come to be virtually in control of it they had kept up their intimacy and were even now planning a holiday for the summer Mr. Bonner spoke with generous admiration of his friend's talent for affairs Jack Marlowe has a natural big head he declared and if he had more experience I wouldn't want to have him up against me he would put a crimp in me every time as the American stock flowed on Trent listened with growing surprise and anxiety it became more and more plain that something was very wrong in his theory of the situation there was no mention of its central figure presently Mr. Bonner mentioned that Marlowe was engaged to be married to an Irish girl whose charms he celebrated with native enthusiasm Trent clasped his hands savagely together beneath a table what could have happened his ideas were sliding and shifting at last he forced himself to put a direct question Mr. Bonner was not very fully informed he knew that Mrs. Manerson left England immediately after the settlement of her husband's affairs and had lived for some time in Italy she had returned not long ago to London where she had decided not to live in the house in Mayfair and had bought a smaller one in the Hampstead neighborhood also he understood one somewhere in the country she was set to go but little into society and all the good hard dollars just waiting for someone to sprawl them around said Mr. Bonner with a note of pathos in his voice why she has money to burn money to feed to the birds and nothing doing the old man left her more than half his ward and think of the figure she might make in the world she is beautiful and she's the best woman I ever met too but she couldn't ever seem to get the habit of spending money the way it ought to be spent his words now become a soliloquy Trent's thoughts were occupying all his attention he pleaded business soon and the two men parted with cordiality half an hour later Trent was in his studio swiftly and mechanically cleaning up he wanted to know what had happened somehow he must find out he could never approach herself he knew he would never bring back to her the shame of the last encounter with him it was scarcely likely that he would even set eyes on her but he must know couples was in London Marlowe was there and anyhow he was sick of badass such thoughts came and went and below them all strained the fibers of an unseen cord that dragged mercilessly at his heart and that he cursed bitterly in the moments when he could not deny to himself that it was there the folly the useless pitiable folly of it in 24 hours his feeble roots in Paris had been torn out he was looking over a leaden sea at the shining fortress wall of the dover cliffs but though he had instinctively picked out the lines of a set purpose from among the welter of promptings in his mind he found it delayed at the very outset he had decided that he must foresee Mr. Couples who would be in a position to tell him much more than the American knew but Mr. Couples was away on his travels not expected to come back for a month and Trent had no reasonable excuse for hastening his return Marlowe he would not confront until he had tried at least to reconnoiter the position he constrained himself not to commit the crowning folly of seeking out Mrs. Manderson's house in Hampstead he could not enter it and the thought of the possibility of being seen by her lurking in its neighborhood brought the blood to his face he stayed at a hotel took a studio and while he awaited Mr. Couples return attempted vainly to lose himself in work at the end of a week he had an idea that he acted upon with eager precipitancy she had let fall somewhat at their last meeting of a taste for music Trent went that evening and then forward regularly to the opera he might see her and if in spite of his caution she got sight of him they could be blind to each other's presence anybody might happen to go to the opera so he went alone each evening passing as quickly as he might through the people in the vestibule and each evening he came away knowing that she had not been in the house it was a habit that yielded him a sort of satisfaction along with a guilty excitement of his search for he too loved music and nothing gave him so much peace while its magic endured one night as he entered hurrying through the brilliant crowd he felt a touch on his arm flooded with an incredible certainty at the touch he turned it was she so much more radiant in the absence of grief and anxiety in the fact that she was smiling and in the allurement of evening dress that he could not speak she too breathed a little quickly and there was a light of daring in her eyes and cheeks as she greeted him her words were few i wouldn't miss a note of trust and she said nor must you come and see me in the interval she gave him the number of the box end of chapter 11 recording by red abrus december 2007 chapter 12 of trends last case this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by red abrus trends last case by ec Bentley chapter 12 eruption the following two months were a period in trends life that he has never since remembered without shuddering he met mrs. manderson half a dozen times and each time her cool friendliness a nicely calculated mean between mere acquaintance and the first stage of intimacy baffled and maddened him at the opera he had found her to his further amazement with a sudden mrs Wallace a frisky matron whom he had known from childhood mrs. manderson it appeared on her return from italy had somehow wandered into circles to which he belonged by nurture and disposition it came she said of her having pitched her tent in their hunting grounds several of his friends were near neighbors he had a dim but horrid recollection of having been on that occasion unlike himself ill at ease burning in the face talking with idiot locacity of his adventures in the Baltic provinces and finding from time to time that he was addressing himself exclusively to mrs. Wallace the other lady when he joined them had completely lost the slight appearance of agitation with which she had stopped him in the vestibule she had spoken pleasantly to him of her travels of her settlement in london and of people whom they both knew during the last half of the opera which he had stayed in the box to hear he had been conscious of nothing as he sat behind them but the angle of a cheek and the mass of her hair the lines of her shoulder and arm her hand up in the cushion the black hair had seemed at last a forest immeasurable pathless and enchanted luring him to a fatal adventure at the end he had been pale and subdued parting with them rather formally the next time he saw her it was at a country house where both were guests and the subsequent times he had had himself in hand he had matched her manner and had acquitted himself he thought decently considering considering that he lived in an agony of bewilderment and remorse and longing he could make nothing absolutely nothing of her attitude that she had read his manuscript and understood the suspicion indicated in his last question to her at wide gables was beyond the possibility of doubt then how could she treat him thus amiably and frankly as she treated all the world of men who had done her no injury for it had become clear to his intuitive sense for all the absence of any shade of differentiation in her outward manner that an injury had been done and that she had felt it several times on the rare and brief occasions when they had talked apart he had warning from the same sense that she was approaching this subject and each time he had turned the conversation with the ingenuity born of fear two resolutions he made the first was that when he had completed a commissioned work which tied him to London he would go away and stay away the strain was too great he no longer burned to know the truth he wanted nothing to confirm his fixed internal conviction by faith that he had blundered that he had misread the situation misinterpreted her tears written himself down a slanderous fool he speculated no more on marlowe's motive in the killing of maderson mr. couples returned to london and Trent asked him nothing he knew now that he had been right in those words Trent remembered them for the emphasis with which they were spoken so long as she considered herself bound to him no power on earth could have persuaded her he met mrs. maderson at dinner at her uncle's large and tomblike house in bloomsbury and there he conversed most of the evening with a professor of archaeology from Berlin his other resolution was that he would not be with her alone but when a few days after she wrote asking him to come and see her on the following afternoon he made no attempt to excuse himself this was a formal challenge while she celebrated the rites of tea and for some little time thereafter she joined with such natural ease in his slightly favored conversation on matters of the day that he began to hope she had changed what he could not doubt had been her resolve to corner him and speak to him gravely she was to all appearances careless now smiling so that he recalled not for the first time since that night at the opera what was written long ago of a princess of bernswick her mouth was 10 000 chance that touched the soul she made a tour of the beautiful room where she had received him singling out this treasure or that from the spoils of a hundred brick-a-brack shops laughing over her quests discoveries and bargainings and when he asked if she would delight him again with a favorite piece of his which he had heard her play at another house she consented at once she played with a perfection of execution and feeling that moved him now as it had moved him before you are a musician born he said quietly when she had finished and the last tremor of the music had passed away i knew that before i first heard you play i have played a great deal ever since i can remember it has been a great comfort to me she said simply and half turned to him smiling when did you first detect music in me oh of course i was at the opera but that wouldn't prove much would it no he said abstractedly his sense still busy with the music that had just ended i think i knew it the first time i saw you then understanding of his own words came to him and turned him rigid for the first time the past had been invoked there was a short silence mrs manderson looked at Trent then he still looked away color began to rise in her cheeks and she pursed her lips as if for whistling then with a defiant gesture of the shoulders which he remembered she rose suddenly from the piano and placed herself in a chair opposite to him that speech of yours will do as well as anything she began slowly looking at the point of her shoe to bring us to what i wanted to say i asked you here today on purpose mr Trent because i couldn't bear it any longer ever since the day you left me at white gables i have been saying to myself that it didn't matter what you thought of me in that affair that you were suddenly not the kind of man to speak to others of what you believed about me after what you had told me of your reasons for suppressing your manuscript i asked myself how it could matter but all the time of course i knew it did matter it mattered horribly because what you thought was not true she raised her eyes and met his gaze calmly Trent with a completely expressionless face returned her look since i began to know you he said i have ceased to think it thank you said mrs manderson and blessed suddenly and deeply then playing with a glove she added but i want you to know what was true i did not know if i should ever see you again she went on in a lower voice but i felt that if i did i must speak to you about this i thought it would not be hard to do so because you seemed to me an understanding person and besides a woman who has been married isn't expected to have the same sort of difficulty as a young girl in speaking about such things when it is necessary and then we did meet again and i discovered that it was very difficult indeed you made it difficult how he asked quietly i don't know said the lady but yes i do know it was just because you treated me exactly as if you had never thought or imagined anything of that sort about me i'd always suppose that if i saw you again you would turn on me that hard horrible sort of look you had when you asked me that last question do you remember at white gables instead of that you were just like any other acquaintance you were just she hesitated and spread her hands nice you know after that first time at the opera when i spoke to you i went home positively wondering if you had really recognized me i mean i thought you might have recognized my face without remembering who it was a short laugh broke from Trent in spite of himself but he said nothing she smiled deprecatingly well i couldn't remember if you had spoken my name and i thought it might be so but the next time at the waltzes you did speak it so i knew and a dozen times during those few days i almost brought myself to tell you but never quite i began to feel that you wouldn't let me that you would slip away from the subject if i approached it wasn't i right tell me please he nodded but why he remained silent well she said i will finish what i had to say and then you will tell me i hope why you had to make it so hard when i began to understand that you wouldn't let me talk of the matter to you it made me more determined than ever i suppose you didn't realize that i would insist on speaking even if you were quite discouraging i dare say i couldn't have done it if i had been guilty as you thought you walked into my parlor today never thinking i should dare well now you see mrs. manderson had lost all her air of hesitancy she had as she was want to say talked herself enthusiastic and in the order of her purpose to annihilate the misunderstanding that had troubled her so long she felt herself mistress of the situation i'm going to tell you the story of the mistake you made she continued as trend his hands clasped between his knees still looked at her enigmatically you will have to believe it mr trend it is so utterly true to life with its confusions and hidden things and cross purposes and perfectly natural mistakes that nobody thinks twice about taking for facts please understand that i don't blame you in the least and never did for jumping to the conclusion you did you knew that i had no love for my husband and you knew what that so often means you knew before i told you i expect that he had taken up an injured attitude towards me and i was silly enough to try and explain it away i gave you the explanation of it that i had given myself at first before i realized the wretched truth i told you he was disappointed in me because i couldn't take a brilliant lead in society well that was true he was so but i could see you weren't convinced you had guessed what it took me much longer to see because i knew how irrational it was yes my husband was jealous of john marlowe you had divined that then i behaved like a fool when you let me see you had divined it it was such a blow you understand when i had supposed all the humiliation and strain was at an end and that his delusion had died with him you practically asked me if my husband's secretary was not my lover mr trend i have to say it because i want you to understand why i broke down and made a scene you took that for a confession you thought i was guilty of that and i think you even thought i might be a party to the crime that i had consented that did hurt me but perhaps you couldn't have thought anything else i don't know trend who had not hitherto taken his eyes from her face hung his head at the words he did not raise it again as she continued but really it was simple shock and distress that made me give way and the memory of all the misery that mad suspicion had meant to me and when i pulled myself together again you had gone she rose and went to an escritoir beside the window unlocked a drawer and drew out a long seal envelope this is the manuscript you left with me she said i have read it through again and again i have always wondered as everybody does at your cleverness in things of this kind a faintly mischievous smile flashed upon her face and was gone i thought it was splendid mr trend i almost forgot that the story was my own i was so interested and i want to say now while i have this in my hand how much i thank you for your generous chivalrous act in sacrificing the strength of yours rather than put a woman's reputation in peril if all had been as you supposed the facts must have come out when the police took up the case you put in their hands believe me i understood just what you had done and i never ceased to be grateful even when i felt most crushed by your suspicion as she spoke her thanks her voice shook a little and her eyes were bright trend perceived nothing of this his head was still bent he did not seem to hear she put the envelope into his hand as it lay open palm upwards on his knee there was a touch of gentleness about the act which made him look up can you he began slowly she raised her hand as she stood before him no mr trend let me finish before you say anything it is such an unspeakable relief to me to have broken the ice at last and i want you to end the story while i am still feeling the trimph of beginning it she sank down into the sofa from which she had first risen i'm telling you a thing that nobody else knows everybody knew i suppose that something had come between us though i did everything in my power to hide it but i don't think anyone in the world ever guessed what my husband's notion was people who know me don't think that sort of think about me i believe and his fans he was so ridiculously opposed to the facts i'll tell you what the situation was mr marlowe and i had been friendly enough since he came to us for all his cleverness my husband said he had a keener brain than any man he knew i looked upon him as practically a boy you know i am a little older than he is and he had a sort of amiable lack of ambition that made me feel it the more one day my husband asked me what i thought was the best thing about marlowe and not thinking much about it i said his manners he surprised me very much by looking black at that and after a silence he said yes marlowe is a gentleman that's so not looking at me nothing was ever said about that again until about a year ago when i found that mr marlowe had done what i always expected and hoped he would do fallen desperately in love with an american girl but to my disgust he had picked out the most worthless girl i do believe of all those whom we used to meet she was the daughter of wealthy parents and she did as she liked with them very beautiful well educated very good at games what they all call a woman athlete and caring for nothing on earth but her own amusement she was one of the most unprincipled floods i ever knew and quite the cleverest everyone knew it and mr marlowe must have heard it but she made a complete fool of him brain and all i don't know how she managed it but i can imagine she liked him of course but it was quite plain to me that she was playing with him the whole affair was so idiotic i became perfectly furious one day i asked him to row me in a boat on the lake all this happened at our house by lake george we had never been alone together for any length of time before in the boat i talked to him i was very kind about it i think and he took it admirably but he didn't believe me a bit he had the impudence to tell me that i misunderstood alice's nature when i hinted at his prospects i knew he had scarcely anything of his own he said that if she loved him he could make himself a position in the world i dare say that was true with his abilities and his friends he is rather well connected you know as well as popular but his enlightenment came very soon after that my husband helped me out of the boat when we came back he joked with mr marlowe about something i remember for through all that followed he never once changed in his manner to him and that was one reason why i took so long to realize what he thought about him and myself but to me he was reserved and silent that evening not angry he was always perfectly cold and expressionless to me after he took this idea into his head after dinner he only spoke to me once mr marlowe was telling him about some horse he had bought for the farm in kentucky and my husband looked at me and said marlowe may be the gentleman but he seldom quits loser in a horse raid i was surprised at that but at that time and even on the next occasion when he found us together i didn't understand what was in his mind the next time was the morning when mr marlowe received a sweet little note from the girl asking for his congratulations on our engagement it was in our new york house he looked so wretched at breakfast that i thought he was ill and afterwards i went to the room where he worked and asked what was the matter he didn't say anything but just handed me the note and turned away to the window i was very glad that was all over but terribly sorry for him too of course i don't remember what i said but i remember putting my hand on his arm as he stood there staring out on the garden and just then my husband appeared at the open door with some papers he just glanced at us and then turned and walked quietly back to his study i thought he might have heard what i was saying to comfort mr marlowe and that it was rather nice of him to slip away mr marlowe neither saw nor heard him my husband left the house that morning for the west while i was out even then i did not understand he used often to go off suddenly like that if some business project called him it was not until he returned a week later that i grasped the situation he was looking white and strange and as soon as he saw me he asked me where mr marlowe was somehow the tone of his question told me everything in a flash i almost gasped i was wild with indignation you know mr trend i don't think i should have minded at all if anyone had thought me capable of openly breaking with my husband and leaving him for somebody else i dare say i might have done that but that coarse suspicion a man whom he trusted and the notion of concealment it made me see scarlet every shred of pride in me was strung up till i quivered and i swore to myself on the spot that i would never show any word or sign that i was conscious of his having such a thought about me i would behave exactly as i always had behaved i determined and that i did up to the very last though i knew that a wall had been made between us now that could never be broken down even if he asked my pardon and obtained it i never once closed the door between our rooms at night and so it went on i never could go through such a time again my husband showed silent and cold politeness to me always when we were alone and that was only when it was unavoidable he never once alluded to what was in his mind but i felt it and he knew that i felt it both of us were stubborn in our own different attitudes to mr marlow he was more friendly if anything than before heaven only knows why i fancied he was planning some sort of revenge but that was only a fancy certainly mr marlow never knew what was suspected of him he and i remained good friends though we never spoke of anything intimate after that disappointment of his but i made a point of seeing no less of him than i had always done then we came over to england and to white cables and after that followed my husband's dreadful end she threw out her right hand in a gesture of finality you know about the rest so much more than any other man she added and glanced up at him with a quaint expression trend wandered at that look but the wonder was only a passing shadow on his thought inwardly his whole being was possessed by the thankfulness all the capacity had returned to his face long before mrs manderson ended her story he had recognized the certainty of its truth as from the first days of the renewed acquaintance he had doubted the story that his imagination had built up at white cables upon foundations that seemed so good to him he said i don't know how to begin the apologies i have to make there are no words to tell you how ashamed and disgraced i feel when i realized what a crude cockshare blundering at a conclusion my suspicion was yes i suspected you i had almost forgotten that i was ever such a fool almost not quite sometimes when i have been alone i have remembered that folly and poured contempt on it i've tried to imagine what the facts were i've tried to excuse myself she interrupted him quickly but nonsense do the sensible mr trend you had only seen me on two occasions in your life before you came to me with your solution of the mystery again the quaint expression came and was gone if you talk of folly it really is folly for a man like you to pretend to woman like me that i had innocence written all over me in large letters so large that you couldn't believe very strong evidence against me after seeing me twice mrs manderson laughed and her laugh carried him away with it he knew well by this time that sudden rush of cascading notes of mirth the perfect expression of enjoyment he had many times tried to amuse her merely for his delight in the sound of it and now it's all over and you know and we'll never speak of it anymore i hope not trend said in a sincere relief if you were resolved to be so kind at this about it i'm not high principled enough to insist on your blasting me with your lightnings and now mrs manderson i had better go changing the subject after this would be like playing puts in the corner after an earthquake he rose to his feet you're right she said but no wait there's another thing part of the same subject and we ought to pick up all the pieces now while we are about it please sit down she took the envelope containing trends manuscript dispatched from the table where he had laid it i want to speak about this his bros bent and he looked at her questioningly so do i if you do he said slowly i want very much to know one thing tell me since my reason for suppressing the information was all a fantasy why did you never make any use of it when i began to realize that i had been wrong about you i explained your silence to myself by saying that you could not bring yourself to do a thing that would put a rope around a man's neck whatever he might have done i can quite understand that feeling was that what it was another possibility i thought of was that you knew of something that was by way of justifying or excusing marlowe's act or i thought you might have a simple horror quite apart from humanitarian scruples of appearing publicly in connection with a murder trial many important witnesses in such cases have to be practically forced into giving their evidence they feel there is defilement even in the shadow of the scaffold mrs manderson tapped her lips with the envelope without quite concealing a smile you didn't think of another possibility i suppose mr trend she said no he looked puzzled i mean the possibility of your having been wrong about mr marlowe as well as about me no no you did not tell me that the chain of evidence is complete i know it is but evidence of what of mr marlowe having impersonated my husband that night and having escaped by way of my window and built up an alibi i have read your dispatch again and again mr trend and i don't see that those things can be doubted print gazed at her with narrowed eyes he said nothing to fill the brief pause that followed mrs manderson smoothed her skirt with a preoccupied air as one collecting her ideas i did not make any use of the facts found out by you she slowly said at last because it seemed to me very likely that they would be fatal to mr marlowe i agree with you trend remarked in a colorless tone and pursued mrs manderson looking up at him with a mild reasonableness in her eyes as i knew that he was innocent i was not going to expose him to that risk there was another little pause trend rubbed his chin with an affectation of turning over the idea inwardly he was telling himself somewhat feebly that this was very right and proper that it was quite feminine and that he liked her to be feminine it was permitted to her more than permitted to set her loyal belief in the character of a friend above the clearest demonstrations of the intellect nevertheless it chaffed him he would have had her declaration of faith a little less positive in form it was too irrational to say she knew in fact he put it to himself bluntly it was quite unlike her if to be unreasonable when reason led to the unpleasant was especially feminine trait and if mrs manderson had it she was accustomed to wrap it up better than any woman he had known you suggest he said at length that marlowe constructed an alibi for himself by means which only a desperate man would have attempted to clear himself of a crime he did not commit did he tell you he was innocent she uttered a little laugh of impatience so you think he has been talking me around no that is not so i'm merely sure he did not do it ah i see you think that absurd but see how unreasonable you are mr trend just now you were explaining to me quite sincerely that it was foolishness in you to have had a sudden suspicion of me trend started in his chair she glanced at him and went on now i know a great deal more about mr marlowe than you know about me even now i saw him constantly for several years i don't pretend to know all about him but i do know that he's incapable of a crime of bloodshed the idea of his planning a murder is as unthinkable to me as the idea of your picking a poor woman's pocket mr trend i can imagine you killing a man you know if the man deserved it and had an equal chance of killing you i could kill a person myself in some circumstances but mr marlowe was incapable of doing it i don't care what the provocation might be he had a temper that nothing could shake and he looked upon human nature with a sort of cold magnanimity that would find excuses for absolutely anything it wasn't a pose you could see it was a part of him he never put it forward but it was there always it was quite irritating at times he really loathed and hated physical violence he was a very strange man in some ways mr trend he gave one a feeling that he might do unexpected things do you know that feeling one has about some people what part he really played in the events of that night i have never been able to guess but nobody who knew anything about him could possibly believe in his deliberately taking a man's life again the movement of her head expressed finality and she leaned back in the sofa calmly regarding him then said trend who had followed this with earnest attention we are forced back on two other possibilities which i had not thought worth much consideration until this moment accepting what you say he might still considerably have killed in self-defense or he might have done so by accident the lady nodded of course i thought of those two explanations when i read your manuscript and i suppose you felt as i did myself that in either of those cases the natural thing and obviously the safest thing for him to do was to make a public statement of the truth instead of setting up a series of deceptions which would suddenly stamp him as guilty in the eyes of the law if anything went wrong with them yes she said verily i thought over all that until my head ached and i thought somebody else might have done it and that he was somehow screening the guilty person but that seemed wild i could see no light in the mystery and after a while i simply let it alone all i was clear about was that mr marlowe was not a murderer and that if i told you what you had found out the judge and jury would probably think he was i promised myself that i would speak to you about it if we should meet again and now i have kept my promise trend his chin resting on his hand was staring at the carpet the excitement of the hunt for the truth was steadily rising in him he had not in his own mind accepted mrs manderson's account of marlowe's character as unquestionable but she had spoken forcibly he could by no means set it aside and his theory was much shaken there's only one thing for it he said looking up i must see marlowe it worries me too much to have the thing left like this i will get at the truth can you tell me he broke off how he behaved after the day i left white gables i never saw him after that said mrs manderson simply for some days after you went away i was ill and didn't go out of my room when i was about again he had left and was in london settling things with the lawyers he did not come down to the funeral immediately after that i went abroad after some weeks a letter from him reached me saying he had concluded his business and given the solicitors all the assistance in his power he thanked me very nicely for what he called all my kindness and said goodbye there was nothing in it about his plans for the future and i thought it particularly strange that he said not a word about my husband's death i didn't answer knowing what i knew i couldn't in those days i shuddered whenever i thought of that masquerade in the night rather than face him i was ready to go on in ignorance of what had really happened i never wanted to see or hear of him again then you don't know what has become of him no but i dare say uncle burton mr couples you know could tell you sometime ago he told me that he had met mr marlowe in london and had some talk with him i changed the conversation she paused and smiled with a trace of miss chief i rather wonder what you supposed had happened to mr marlowe after you withdrew from the scene of the drama that you had put together so much to your satisfaction trend flushed do you really want to know he said i asked you she retorted quietly you ask me to humiliate myself again mrs manderson very well i'll tell you what i thought i should most likely find when i returned to london this year that you had married marlowe and gone to live abroad she heard him with unmoved composer we certainly couldn't have lived very comfortably in england on his money and mine she observed thoughtfully he had practically nothing then he stared at her gaped she told him sometime afterwards at the moment she laughed with a little embarrassment dear me mr trend have i said anything dreadful you surely must know i thought everybody understood by now i'm sure i have had to explain it often enough if i marry again i lose everything that my husband left me the effect of the speech upon trend was curious for an instant his face was flooded with the emotion of surprise as this passed away he gradually drew himself together as he sat into a tense attitude he looked she thought as she saw his knuckles grow white on the arms of the chair like a man prepared for pain under the hand of the surgeon but all he said in a voice lower than his usual tone was i had no idea of it it is so she said calmly shuffling with a ring on her finger really mr trend it is not such a very unusual thing i think i'm glad of it for one thing it has secured me at least since it became generally known from a good many attentions of a kind that a woman in my position has to put up with as a rule no doubt he said gravely and the other kind she looked at him questioningly ah she laughed the other kind troubled me even less i have not yet met a man silly enough to want to marry a widow with a selfish disposition and luxurious habits and taste and nothing but the little my father left me she shook her head slowly and something in the gesture shattered the last remnants of trends self-position haven't you by god he exclaimed rising with the violent movement and advancing a step towards her then i'm going to show you that human passion is not always stifled by the smell of money i'm going to end the business my business i'm going to tell you what i dare say scores of better men have wanted to tell you but couldn't summon up what i have summoned up the infernal cheek to do it they were afraid of making fools of themselves i'm not you have accustomed me to the feeling this afternoon he laughed aloud in his rush of words and spread out his hands look at me it is the site of the century it is the one who says he loves you and would ask you to give up very great wealth to stand at his side she was hiding her face in her hands he heard her say brokenly please don't speak in that way he answered it will make a great difference to me if you will allow me to say all i have to say before i leave you perhaps it is in bad taste but i will risk that i want to relieve my soul it needs open confession this is the truth you have troubled me ever since the first time i saw you and you did not know it as you sat under the edge of the cliff at marl stone and held out your arms to the sea it was only your beauty that filled my mind then as i passed by you it seemed as if all the life in the place were crying out a song about you in the wind and the sunshine and the song stayed in my ears but even your beauty would be no more than an empty memory to me by now if that had been all it was when i led you from the hotel there to your house with your hand on my arm that what was it that happened i only knew that your stronger magic had struck home and that i never should forget that day whatever the love of my life should be till that day i had admired as i should admire the loveliness of a still lake but that day i felt the spell of the divinity of the lake and next morning the waters were troubled and she rose the morning when i came to you with my questions tied out with doubts that were as bitter as pain when i saw you without your pale sweet mask of composer when i saw you moved and glowing with your eyes and your hands alive and when you made me understand that for such a creature as you there had been emptiness and the mere waste of yourself for so long madness rose in me then and my spirit was clamouring to say what i say at last now that life would never seem a full thing again because you could not love me that i was taken forever in the nets of your black hair and by the incantation of your voice oh stop she cried suddenly throwing back her head her face flaming and her hands clutching the cushions beside her she spoke fast and disjointedly her breath coming quick you shall not talk me into forgetting common sense what does all this mean oh i do not recognize you at all you seem another man we are not children have you forgotten that you speak like a boy in love for the first time it is foolish unreal i know that if you do not i will not hear it what has happened to you she was half sobbing how can these sentiments come from a man like you where is yourself restrained gone exclaimed Trent with an abrupt laugh it has got right away i'm going after it in a minute he looked gravely down into her eyes i don't care so much now i never could declare myself to you under the cloud of your great fortune it was too great there's nothing credible in that feeling as i look at it as a matter of simple fact it was a form of cowardice fear of what you think and very likely say fear of the world's comment too i suppose but the cloud being rolled away i have spoken and i don't care so much i can face things with a quiet mind now and that i have told you the truth in its own terms you may call it sentimentality or any other nickname you like it is quite true that it was not intended for a scientific statement since it annoys you let it be extinguished but please believe that it was serious to me if it was comedy to you i have said that i love you and honor you and would hold you dearest of all the world now give me leave to go but she held out her hands to him end of chapter 12 recording by red abras december 2007 chapter 13 of Trent's last case this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by red abras Trent's last case by E.C. Bentley chapter 13 if you insist Trent said i suppose you will have your way but i had much rather write it when i'm not with you however if i must bring me a tablet whiter than a star or a hand of hymning angel don't underestimate the sacrifice i am making i never felt less like correspondence in my life she rewarded him what shall i say he inquired he spent hovering over the paper shall i compare him to a summer's day what shall i say say what you want to say he shook his head what i want to say what i have been wanting for the past 24 hours to say to every man woman and child i met is Mabel and i are betrothed and joy is born on burning wheels but that wouldn't be a very good opening for a letter of strictly formal not to say sinister character i have got as far as dear mr marlowe what comes next i'm sending you a manuscript which i thought you might like to see she prompted as she came to his chair before the escalator something of that kind please try i want to see what you write and i want it to go to him at once you see i would be contented enough to leave things as they are but you say you must get at the truth and if you must i want it to be as soon as possible do it now you know you can if you will and i will send it off the moment it is ready don't you ever feel that the longing to get the worrying letter into the post and off your hands so that you can't recall it if you would and it's no use fussing any more about it i will do as you wish he said and turned to the paper which he dated as from his hotel mrs manderson looked down at his bent head with a gentle light in her eyes and made as if to place a smoothing and upon his rather untidy crop of hair but she did not touch it going in silence to the piano she began to play very softly it was 10 minutes before Trent spoke at last i am his faithfully do you want to see it she ran across the twilight room and turned on a reading lamp beside the escritol then leaning on his shoulder she read what follows dear mr marlowe you will perhaps remember that we met under unhappy circumstances in june of last year at marlestone on that occasion it was my duty as representing a newspaper to make an independent investigation of the circumstances of the death of the late six b manderson i did so and i arrived at certain conclusions you may learn from the enclosed manuscript which was originally written as a dispatch for my newspaper what those conclusions were for reasons which it is not necessary to state i decided at the last moment not to make them public or to communicate them to you and they are known to only two persons beside myself at this point mrs manderson raised her eyes quickly from the letter her dark prose were drawn together two persons she said with a note of inquiry your uncle is the other i sought him out last night and told him the whole story have you anything against it i always felt uneasy at keeping it from him as i did because i had led him to expect i should tell him all i discovered and my silence looked like mystery making now that it is to be cleared up finally and there is no question of shielding you i wanted him to know everything he is a very shrewd advisor too in a way of his own and i should like to have him with me when i see marlowe i have a feeling that two heads will be better than one on my side of the interview she sighed yes of course uncle ought to know the truth i hope there is nobody else at all she pressed his hand i so much want all that horror buried buried deep i'm very happy now dear but i shall be happier still when you have satisfied that curious mind of yours and found out everything and stamped down the earth upon it all she continued her reading quite recently however the letter went on facts have come to my knowledge which have led me to change my decision i do not mean that i shall publish what i discovered but that i have determined to approach you and ask you for a private statement if you have anything to say which would place the matter in another light i can imagine no reason why you should withhold it i expect then to hear from you when and where i may call upon you unless you would prefer the interview to take place at my hotel in either case i desire that mr couples whom you will remember and who has read the enclosed document should be present also faithfully yours philip trend what a very stiff letter she said now i'm sure you couldn't have made it any stiffer in your own rooms trend slipped the letter and enclosed her into a long envelope this thing must not run any risk of going wrong it would be best to send a special messenger with orders to deliver it into his own hands if he is aware it ought not to be left she nodded i can arrange that wait here for a little when mrs manderson returned he was hunting through the music cabinet she sank on the carpet beside him in a wave of dark brown skirts tell me something philip she said if it is among the few things that i know when you saw uncle last night did you tell him about about us i did not he answered i remembered you had said nothing about telling anyone it is for you isn't it to decide whether we take the world into our confidence at once or later on then will you tell him she looked down at her last hands i wish you to tell him perhaps if you think you will guess why there that is settled she lifted her eyes again to his and for a time there was silence between them he leaned back at the length in the deep chair what a world he said mabel will you play something on the piano that expresses mere joy the genuine article nothing feverish or like thorns under a pot but joy that has decided in favor of the universe it's a mood that can't last altogether so we had better get all weekend out of it she went to the instrument and struck a few cards while she thought then she began to work with all her soul at the theme in the last movement of the ninth symphony which is like the sound of the opening of the gates of paradise end of chapter 13 recording by red abris december 2007