The Woman in Black. E. C. Bentley
one thing," replied Sir James as he took up the receiver. "I want you to make a bad mistake some time, Miss Morgan; an everlasting bloomer—just to put us in countenance." She permitted herself the fraction of what would have been a charming smile as she went out.
"Anthony?" asked Sir James; and was at once deep in consultation with the editor on the other side of the road. He seldom entered the Sun building in person: the atmosphere of an evening paper, he would say, was all very well if you liked that kind of thing. Mr. Anthony, the Murat of Fleet Street, who delighted in riding the whirlwind and fighting a tumultuous battle against time, would say the same of a morning paper.
It was some five minutes later that a uniformed boy came in to say that Mr. Trent was on the wire. Sir James abruptly closed his talk with Mr. Anthony. "They can put him through at once," he said to the boy.
"Hullo!" he cried into the telephone after a few moments. A voice in the instrument replied: "Hullo be blowed! What do you want?"
"This is Molloy," said Sir James.
"I know it is," the voice said. "This is Trent. He is in the middle of painting a picture, and he has been interrupted at a critical moment. Well, I hope it's something important, that's all!"
"Trent," said Sir James impressively, "it is important. I want you to do some work for us."
"Some play, you mean," replied the voice. "Believe me, I don't want a holiday. The working fit is very strong. I am doing some really decent things. Why can't you leave a man alone?"
"Something very serious has happened."
"What?"
"Sigsbee Manderson has been murdered—shot through the brain—and they don't know who has done it. They found the body this morning. It happened at his place near Bishopsbridge." Sir James proceeded to tell his hearer, briefly and clearly, the facts that he had communicated to Mr. Figgis. "What do you think of it?" he ended.
A considering grunt was the only answer.
"Come now!" urged Sir James.
"Tempter!"
"You will go down?"
There was a brief pause. "Are you there?" said Sir James.
"Look here, Molloy," the voice broke out querulously, "the thing may be a case for me, or it may not. We can't possibly tell. It may be a mystery: it may be as simple as bread and cheese. The body not being robbed looks interesting, but he may have been outed by some wretched tramp whom he found sleeping in the grounds and tried to kick out. It's the sort of thing he would do. Such a murderer might easily have sense enough to know that to leave the money and valuables was the safest thing. I tell you frankly, I wouldn't have a hand in hanging a poor devil who had let daylight into a man like Sig Manderson as a measure of social protest."
Sir James smiled at the telephone: a smile of success. "Come, my boy, you're getting feeble. Admit you want to go and have a look at the case. You know you do. If it's anything you don't want to handle, you're free to drop it. By the bye, where are you?"
"I am blown along a wandering wind," replied the voice irresolutely, "and hollow, hollow, hollow all delight."
"Can you get here within an hour?" persisted Sir James.
"I suppose I can," the voice grumbled. "How much time have I?"
"Good man! Well, there's time enough—that's just the worst of it. I've got to depend on our local correspondent for to-night. The only good train of the day went half an hour ago. The next is a slow one, leaving Paddington at midnight. You could have the Buster, if you like"—Sir James referred to a very fast motor-car of his—"but you wouldn't get down in time to do anything to-night."
"And I'd miss my sleep. No, thanks. The train for me. I am quite fond of railway-traveling, you know; I have a gift for it. I am the stoker and the stoked, I am the song the porter sings."
"What's that you say?"
"It doesn't matter," said the voice sadly. "I say," it continued, "will your people look out a hotel near the scene of action, and telegraph for a room?"
"At once," said Sir James. "Come here as soon as you can!" He replaced the receiver. As he turned to his papers again a shrill outcry burst forth in the street below. He walked to the open window. A band of excited boys was rushing down the steps of the Sun building and up the narrow thoroughfare toward Fleet Street. Each carried a bundle of newspapers and a large broadsheet with the simple legend:
MURDER OF SIGSBEE MANDERSON
Sir James smiled and rattled the money in his pockets cheerfully.
"It makes a good bill," he observed to Mr. Silver, who stood at his elbow.
Such was Manderson's epitaph.
CHAPTER II
BREAKFAST
At about eight o'clock in the morning of the following day Mr. Nathaniel Burton Cupples stood on the veranda of the hotel at Marlstone. He was thinking about breakfast. In his case the colloquialism must be taken literally; he really was thinking about breakfast, as he thought about every conscious act of his life when time allowed deliberation. He reflected that on the preceding day the excitement and activity following upon the discovery of the corpse had disorganized his appetite and led to his taking considerably less nourishment than usual. This morning he was very hungry, having already been up and about for an hour; and he decided to allow himself a third piece of toast and an additional egg; the rest as usual. The remaining deficit must be made up at luncheon; but that could be gone into later.
So much being determined, Mr. Cupples applied himself to the enjoyment of the view for a few minutes before ordering his meal. With a connoisseur's eye he explored the beauty of the rugged coast, where a great pierced rock rose from a glassy sea, and the ordered loveliness of the vast tilted levels of pasture and tillage and woodland that sloped gently up from the cliffs toward the distant moor. Mr. Cupples delighted in landscape.
He was a man of middle height and spare figure, nearly sixty years old, by constitution rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his age. A sparse and straggling beard and mustache did not conceal a thin but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and narrow jaw gave him very much the air of a priest, and this impression was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. He was a man of unusually conscientious, industrious and orderly mind, with little imagination. His father's household had been used to recruit its domestic establishment by means of advertisements in which it was truthfully described as a serious family. From that fortress of gloom he had escaped with two saintly gifts somehow unspoiled: an inexhaustible kindness of heart and a capacity for innocent gaiety which owed nothing to humor. In an earlier day and with a clerical training he might have risen to the scarlet hat. He was, in fact, a highly regarded member of the London Positivist Society, a retired banker, a widower without children. His austere but not unhappy life was spent largely among books and in museums; his profound and patiently accumulated knowledge of a number of curiously disconnected subjects which had stirred his interest at different times had given him a place in the quiet, half-lit world of professors and curators and devotees of research; at their amiable, unconvivial dinner-parties he was most himself. His favorite author was Montaigne.
Just as Mr. Cupples was finishing his meal at a little table on the veranda, a big motor-car turned into the drive before the hotel. "Who is this?" he inquired of the waiter. "Id is der manager," said the young man listlessly. "He have been to meed a gendleman by der train."
The car drew up and the porter hurried from the entrance. Mr. Cupples uttered an exclamation of pleasure as a