The House of the Whispering Pines (7 page)

"Tell me, how you came to know there was trouble here? What brought you
to this house? There can be nothing wrong in telling me that."

"Well, if you don't know—" he began.

"I do not," I broke in.

"I guess you'd better wait till the chief has had a word with you."

I suppressed all tokens of my disappointment, and by a not unnatural
reaction, perhaps, began to take in, and busy myself with, the very
considerations I had hitherto shunned. Where was Carmel, and how was she
enduring these awful hours? Had repentance come, and with it a desire to
own her guilt? Did she think of me and the effect this unlooked-for death
would have upon my feelings? That I should suffer arrest for her crime
could not have entered her mind. I had seen her, but she had not seen me,
in the dark hall which I must now traverse as a prisoner and a suspect.
No intimation of my dubious position or its inevitable consequences had
reached her yet. When it did, what would she do? I did not know her well
enough to tell. The attraction she had felt for me had not been strong
enough to lead her to accommodate herself to my wishes and marry me
off-hand, but it had been strong enough to nerve her arm in whatever
altercation she may have had with her jealous-minded sister. It was the
temper and not the strength of the love which would tell in a strait like
this. Would it prove of a generous kind? Should I have to combat her
desire to take upon herself the full blame of her deed, with all its
shames and penalties? Or should I have the still deeper misery of finding
her callous to my position and welcoming any chance which diverted
suspicion from herself? Either supposition might be possible, according
to my judgment in this evil hour. All communication between us, in spite
of our ardent and ungovernable passion, had been so casual and so slight.
Looks, a whispered word or so, one furtive clasp in which our hands
seemed to grow together, were all I had to go upon as tests of her
feeling towards me. Her character I had judged from her face, which was
lovely. But faces deceive, and the loveliness of youth is not like the
loveliness of age—an absolute mirror of the soul within. Was not Medusa
captivating, for all her snaky locks? Hide those locks and one might have
thought her a Daphne.

What would relieve my doubts? As Hexford drew near me again on our way to
the head of the staircase, I summoned up courage to ask:

"Have you heard anything from the Hill? Has the news of this tragedy been
communicated to Miss Cumberland's family, and if so, how are they bearing
this affliction?"

His lip curled, and for a minute he hesitated; then something in my
aspect or the straight-forward look I gave him, softened him and he
answered frankly, if coldly:

"Word has gone there, of course, but only the servants are affected by
it so far. Miss Cumberland, the younger, is very ill, and the boy—I
don't know his name—has not shown up since last evening. He's very
dissipated, they say, and may be in any one of the joints in the lower
part of the town."

I stopped in dismay, clutching wildly at the railing of the stairs we
were descending. I had hardly heard the latter words, all my mind was on
what he had said first.

"Miss Carmel Cumberland ill?" I stammered, "too ill to be told?"

I was sufficiently master of myself to put it this way.

"Yes," he rejoined, kindly, as he urged me down the very stairs I had
seen her descend in such a state of mind a few hours before. "A servant
who had been out late, heard the fall of some heavy body as she was
passing Miss Cumberland's rooms, and rushing in found Miss Carmel, as she
called her, lying on the floor near the open fire. Her face had struck
the bars of the grate in falling, and she was badly burned. But that was
not all; she was delirious with fever, brought on, they think, by anxiety
about her sister, whose name she was constantly repeating. They had a
doctor for her and the whole house was up before ever the word came of
what had happened here."

I thanked him with a look. I had no opportunity for more. Half a dozen
officers were standing about the front door, and in another moment I was
bustled into the conveyance provided and was being driven away from the
death-haunted spot.

I had heard the last whisper of those pines for many, many days. But not
in my dreams; it ever came back at night, sinister, awesome, haunted with
dead hopes and breathing of an ever doubtful future.

This hand of mine
Is yet a maiden and an innocent hand,
Not painted with the crimson spots of blood.
Within this bosom never enter'd yet
The dreadful motion of a murd'rous thought.

King John
.

My first thought (when I could think at all) was this:

"She has some feeling, then! Her terror and remorse have maddened her. I
can dwell upon her image with pity." The next, "Will they find her wet
clothes and discover that she was out last night?" The latter possibility
troubled me. My mind was the seat of strange contradictions.

As the day advanced and I began to realise that I, Elwood Ranelagh,
easy-going man of the world, but with traditions of respectable living on
both sides of my house and a list of friends of which any man might be
proud, was in a place of detention on the awful charge of murder, I found
that my keenest torment arose from the fact that I was shut off from the
instant knowledge of what was going on in the house where all my
thoughts, my fears, and shall I say it, latent hopes were centred. To
know Carmel ill and not to know how ill! To feel the threatening arm of
the law hovering constantly over her head and neither to know the instant
of its fall nor be given the least opportunity to divert it. To realise
that some small inadvertance on her part, some trivial but incriminating
object left about, some heedless murmur or burst of unconscious frenzy
might precipitate her doom, and I remain powerless, bearing my share of
suspicion and ignominy, it is true, but not the chief share if matters
befell as I have suggested, which they were liable to do at any hour,
nay, at any minute.

My examination before the magistrate held one element of comfort.
Nothing in its whole tenor went to show that, as yet, she was in the
least suspected of any participation in my so-called crime. But the
knowledge which came later, of how the police first learned of trouble
at the club-house did not add to this sense of relief, whatever
satisfaction it gave my curiosity. A cry of distress had come to them
over the telephone; a wild cry, in a woman's choked and tremulous voice:
"Help at The Whispering Pines! Help!" That was all, or all they revealed
to me. In their endeavour to find out whether or not I was present when
this call was made, I learned the nature of their own suspicions. They
believed that Adelaide in some moment of prevision had managed to reach
the telephone and send out this message. But what did I believe? What
could I believe? All the incidents of the deadly struggle which must
have preceded the fatal culminating act, were mysteries which my mind
refused to penetrate. After hours of torturing uncertainty, and an
evening which was the miserable precursor of a still more miserable
night, I decided to drop conjecture and await the enlightenment which
must come with the morrow.

It was, therefore, in a condition of mingled dread and expectation that I
opened the paper which was brought me the next morning. Of the shock
which it gave me to see my own name blotting the page with suggestions of
hideous crime, I will not speak, but pass at once to the few gleams of
added knowledge I was able to gather from those abominable columns.
Arthur, the good-for-nothing brother, had returned from his wild carouse
and had taken affairs in charge with something like spirit and a decent
show of repentance for his own shortcomings and the mad taste for liquor
which had led him away from home that night. Carmel was still ill, and
likely to be so for many days to come. Her case was diagnosed as one of
brain fever and of a most dangerous type. Doctors and nurses were busy at
her bedside and little hope was held out of her being able to tell soon,
if ever, what she knew of her sister's departure from the house on that
fatal evening. That her testimony on this point would be invaluable was
self-evident, for proofs were plenty of her having haunted her sister's
rooms all the evening in a condition of more or less delirium. She was
alone in the house and this may have added to her anxieties, all of the
servants having gone to the policemen's ball. It was on their return in
the early morning hours that she had been discovered, lying ill and
injured before her sister's fireplace.

One fact was mentioned which set me thinking. The keys of the club-house
had been found lying on a table in the side hall of the Cumberland
mansion—the keys which I have already mentioned as missing from my
pocket. An alarming discovery which might have acted as a clew to the
suspicious I feared, if their presence there had not been explained by
the waitress who had cleared the table after dinner. Coming upon these
keys lying on the floor beside one of the chairs, she had carried them
out into the hall and laid them where they would be more readily seen.
She had not recognised the keys, but had taken it for granted that they
belonged to Mr. Ranelagh who had dined at the house that night.

They were my keys, and I have already related how I came to drop them on
the floor. Had they but stayed there! Adelaide, or was it Carmel, might
not have seen them and been led by some strange, if not tragic, purpose,
incomprehensible to us now and possibly never to find full explanation,
to enter the secret and forsaken spot where I later found them, the one
dead, the other fleeing in frenzy, but not in such a thoughtless frenzy
as to forget these keys or to fail to lock the club-house door behind
her. That she, on her return home, should have had sufficient presence of
mind to toss these keys down in the same place from which she or her
sister had taken them, argued well for her clear-headedness up to that
moment. The fever must have come on later—a fever which with my
knowledge of what had occurred at The Whispering Pines, seemed the only
natural outcome of the situation.

The next paragraph detailed a fact startling enough to rouse my deepest
interest. Zadok Brown, the Cumberlands' coachman, declared that Arthur's
cutter and what he called the grey mare had been out that night. They
were both in place when he returned to the stable towards early morning,
but the signs were unmistakable that both had been out in the snow since
he left the stable at about nine. He had locked the stable-door at that
time, but the key always hung in the kitchen where any one could get it.
This was on account of Arthur, who, if he wanted to go out late,
sometimes harnessed a horse himself. Zadok judged that he had done so
this night, though how the horse happened to be back and in her stall and
no Mr. Arthur in the house, it would take wiser heads than his to
explain. But he was sure the mare had been out.

There was some comment made on this, because Arthur had denied using his
cutter that night. He declared instead that he had gone out on foot and
designated the coachman's tale as all bosh. "I was not the only one who
had a drop too much down-town," was the dogged assertion with which he
met all questions on this subject. "I wouldn't give a snap of my finger
for Zadok's opinion on any subject, after five hours of dancing and the
necessary drinks. There were no signs of the mare having been out when I
got home." As this was about noon the next day, his opinion on this point
could not be said to count for much.

As for myself, I felt inclined to believe that the mare had been out,
that one or both of the women had harnessed him and that it was by these
means they had reached The Whispering Pines. The night was too cold, a
storm too imminent, for them to have contemplated so long a walk on a
road so remote as that leading to the club-house. Arthur was athletic but
Adelaide was far from strong and never addicted to walking under the
most favourable conditions. Of all the mysteries surrounding her dead
presence in the club-house, the one which from the first had struck me as
the most inexplicable was the manner of her reaching there. Now I could
understand both that fact and how Carmel had succeeded in returning in
safety to her home. She had ridden both ways—a theory which likewise
explained how she came to wear a man's derby and possibly a man's
overcoat. With her skirts covered by a bear-skin she would present a very
fair figure of a man to any one who chanced to pass her. This was
desirable in her case. A man and woman driving at a late hour through the
city streets would attract little, if any, attention, while two women
might. Having no wish to attract attention, they had resorted to
subterfuge—or Carmel had; it was not like Adelaide to do so. She was
always perfectly open, both in manner and speech.

These were my deductions drawn from my own knowledge. Would others who
had not my knowledge be in any wise influenced to draw the same? Would
the fact that the mare had been out during those mysterious hours when
everybody had appeared to be absent from the house, saving the one young
girl whom they afterwards found stark, staring mad with delirium, serve
to awaken suspicion of her close and personal connection with this crime?
There was nothing in this reporter's article to show that such an idea
had dawned upon his mind, but the police are not readily hoodwinked and I
dreaded the result of their inquiries, if they chose to follow this
undoubted clew.

Yet, if they let this point slip, where should I be? Human nature is
human all the way through, and I could not help having moments when I
asked myself if this young girl were worth the sacrifice I contemplated
making for her? She was lovely to look at, amiable and of womanly promise
save at those rare and poignant moments when passion would seize her in a
gust which drove everything before it. But were any of these
considerations sufficient to justify me in letting my whole manhood slip
for the sake of one who, whatever the provocation, had used the strength
of her hands against the sister who had been as a mother to her for so
many years. That she had had provocation I did not doubt. Adelaide, for
all her virtues, was not an easy person to deal with. Upright and
perfectly sincere herself, she had no sympathy with or commiseration for
any lack of principle or any display of selfishness in others. A little
cold, a little reserved, a little lacking in spontaneity, though always
correct and always generous in her gifts and often in her acts, her whole
nature would rise at any evidence of meanness or ingratitude, and though
she said little, you would feel her disapprobation through and through.
She would even change physically. Naturally pallid and of small
inconspicuous features, her eyes on these occasions would so flame and
her whole figure so dilate that she looked like another woman. I have
seen her brother, six feet in height and weighty for his years, cringe
under her few quiet words at these times till she absolutely seemed the
taller of the two. It was only in these moments she was handsome, and had
I loved her, I should probably have admired this passionate purity, this
intolerance of all that was small or selfish or unworthy a good woman's
esteem. But not loving her, I had merely cherished a wholesome fear of
her displeasure, and could quite comprehend what a full display of anger
on her part might call up in her sensitive, already deeply suffering
sister. The scathing arraignment, the unbearable taunt—Well, well, it
was all dream-work, but I had time to dream and opportunity for little
else, and pictures, which till now I had sedulously kept in the
background of my imagination, would come to the front as I harped on this
topic and weighed in my disturbed mind the following question: Should I
continue the course which I had instinctively taken out of a natural
sense of chivalry, or face my calumniators with the truth and leave my
cause and hers to the justice of men, rather than to the slow but
righteous workings of Providence?