The House of the Whispering Pines (19 page)

"
No!"

"Yet you recognise these?"

"Why shouldn't I? They're mine. Only I don't wear them any more. They're
done for. You must have rooted them out from some closet."

"We did; perhaps you can tell us what closet."

"I? No. What do I know about my old clothes? I leave that to the women."

The slight faltering observable in the latter word conveyed nothing to
these men.

"Mr. Cumberland,"—the district attorney was very serious,—"this hat and
this coat, old as they are, were worn into town from your house that
night. This we know, absolutely. We can even trace them to the
club-house."

Mechanically, not spontaneously this time, the young man rose to his
feet, staring first at the man who had uttered these words, then at the
garments which Sweetwater still held in view. No anger now; he was too
deeply shaken for that, too shaken to answer at once—too shaken to be
quite the master of his own faculties. But he rallied after an interval
during which these three men devoured his face, each under his own
special anxiety, and read there possibly what each least wanted to see.

"I don't know anything about it," were the words with which Arthur
Cumberland sought to escape from the net which had been thus deftly cast
about him. "I didn't wear the things. Anybody can tell you what clothes I
came home in. Ranelagh may have borrowed—"

"Ranelagh wore his own coat and hat. We will let the subject of apparel
drop, and come to a topic on which you may be better qualified to speak.
Mr. Cumberland, you have told us that you didn't know at the time, and
can't remember now, where you spent that night and most of the next
morning. All you can remember is that it was in some place where they let
you drink all you wished and leave when the fancy took you, and not
before. It was none of your usual haunts. This seemed strange to your
friends, at the time; but it is easier for us to understand, now that you
have told us what had occurred at your home-table. You dreaded to have
your sister know how soon you could escape the influence of that moment.
You wished to drink your fill and leave your family none the wiser. Am I
not right?"

"Yes; it's plain enough, isn't it? Why harp on that string? Don't you see
that it maddens me? Do you want to drive me to drink again?"

The coroner interposed. He had been very willing to leave the burden of
this painful inquiry to the man who had no personal feelings to contend
with; but at this indignant cry he started forward, and, with an air of
fatherly persuasion, remarked kindly:

"You mustn't mind the official tone, or the official persistence. There
is reason for all that Mr. Fox says. Answer him frankly, and this
inquiry will terminate speedily. We have no wish to harry you—only to
get at the truth."

"The truth? I thought you had that pat enough. The truth? The truth about
what? Ranelagh or me? I should think it was about me, from the kind of
questions you ask."

"It is, just now," resumed the district attorney, as his colleague drew
back out of sight once more. "You cannot remember the saloon in which you
drank. That's possible enough; but perhaps you can remember what they
gave you. Was it whiskey, rum, absinthe, or what?"

The question took his irritable listener by surprise. Arthur gasped, and
tried to steal some comfort from Coroner Perry's eye. But that old
friend's face was too much in shadow, and the young man was forced to
meet the district attorney's eye, instead, and answer the district
attorney's question.

"I drank—absinthe," he cried, at last.

"From this bottle?" queried the other, motioning again to Sweetwater, who
now brought forward the bottle he had picked up in Cuthbert Road.

Arthur Cumberland glanced at the bottle the detective held up, saw the
label, saw the shape, and sank limply in his chair, his eyes starting,
his jaw falling.

"Where did you get that?" he asked, pulling himself together with a
sudden desperate self-possession that caused Sweetwater to cast a quick
significant glance at the coroner, as he withdrew to his corner, leaving
the bottle on the table.

"That," answered the district attorney, "was picked up at a small hotel
on Cuthbert Road, just back of the markets."

"I don't know the place."

"It's not far from The Whispering Pines. In fact, you can see the
club-house from the front door of this hotel."

"I don't know the place, I tell you."

"It's not a high-class resort; not select enough by a long shot, to
have this brand of liquor in its cellar. They tell me that this is of
very choice quality. That very few private families, even, indulge in
it. That there were only two bottles of it left in the club-house
when the inventory was last taken, that those two bottles are now
gone, and that—"

"This is one of them? Is that what you want to say? Well, it may be for
all I know. I didn't carry it there. I didn't have the drinking of it."

"We have seen the man and woman who keep that hotel. They will talk, if
they have to."

"They will?" His dogged self-possession rather astonished them. "Well,
that ought to please you. I've nothing to do with the matter."

A change had taken place in him. The irritability approaching to
violence, which had attended every speech and infused itself into every
movement since he came into the room, had left him. He spoke quietly,
and with a touch of irony in his tone. He seemed more the man, but not
a whit more prepossessing, and, if anything, less calculated to
inspire confidence. The district attorney showed that he was baffled,
and Dr. Perry moved uneasily in his seat, until Sweetwater, coming
forward, took up the cue and spoke for the first time since young
Cumberland entered the room.

"Then I have no doubt but you will do us this favour," he volunteered, in
his pleasantest manner. "It's not a long walk from here. Will you go
there in my company, with your coat-collar pulled up and your hat well
down over your eyes, and ask for a seat in the snuggery and show them
this bottle? They won't know that it's empty. The man is sharp and the
woman intelligent. They will see that you are a stranger, and admit you
readily. They are only shy of one man—the man who drank there on the
night of your sister's murder."

"You 're a—" he began, with a touch of his old violence; but realising,
perhaps, that his fingers were in a trap, he modified his manner again,
and continued more quietly. "This is an odd request to make. I begin to
feel as if my word were doubted here; as if my failings and reckless
confession of the beastly way in which I spent that night, were making
you feel that I have no good in me and am at once a liar and a sneak. I'm
not. I won't go with you to that low drinking hell, unless you make me,
but I'll swear—"

"Don't swear." It is unnecessary to say who spoke. "We wouldn't believe
you, and it would be only adding perjury to the rest."

"You wouldn't believe me?"

"No; we have reasons, my boy. There were two bottles."

"Well?"

"The other has been found nearer your home."

"That's a trick. You're all up to tricks—"

"Not in this case, Arthur. Let me entreat you in memory of your father to
be candid with us. We have arrested a man. He denies his guilt, but can
produce no witnesses in support of his assertions. Yet such witnesses may
exist. Indeed, we think that one such does exist. The man who took the
bottles from the club-house's wine-vault did so within a few minutes of
the time when this crime was perpetrated on your sister. He should be
able to give valuable testimony for or against Elwood Ranelagh. Now, you
can see why we are in search of this witness and why we think you can
serve us in this secret and extraordinary matter. If you can't, say so;
and we will desist from all further questions. But this will not help
you. It will only show that, in our opinion, you have gained the rights
of a man suspected of something more than shirking his duty as an unknown
and hitherto unsuspected witness."

"This is awful!" Young Cumberland had risen to his feet and was swaying
to and fro before them like a man struck between the eyes by some
maddening blow.

"God! if I had only died that night!" he muttered, with his eyes upon
the floor and every muscle tense with the shock of this last calamity.
"Dr. Perry," he moaned suddenly, stretching out one hand in entreaty,
and clutching at the table for support with the other, "let me go for
to-night. Let me think. My brain is all in a whirl. I'll try to answer
to-morrow." But even as he spoke he realised the futility of his
request. His eye had fallen again on the bottle, and, in its shape and
tell-tale label, he beheld a witness bound to testify against him if he
kept silent himself.

"Don't answer," he went on, holding fast to the table, but letting his
other hand fall. "I was always a fool. I'm nothing but a fool now. I may
as well own the truth, and be done with it. I was in the clubhouse. I did
rob the wine-vault; I did carry off the bottles to have a quiet spree,
and it was to some place on Cuthbert Road I went. But, when I've admitted
so much, I've admitted all. I saw nothing of my sister's murder; saw
nothing of what went on in the rooms upstairs. I crept in by the open
window at the top of the kitchen stairs, and I came out by the same. I
only wanted the liquor, and when I got it, I slid out as quickly as I
could, and made my way over the golf-links to the Road."

Wiping the sweat from his brow, he stood trembling. There was something
in the silence surrounding him which seemed to go to his heart; for his
free right hand rose unconsciously to his breast, and clung there.
Sweetwater began to wish himself a million of miles away from this scene.
This was not the enjoyable part of his work. This was the part from which
he always shrunk with overpowering distaste.

The district attorney's voice sounded thin, almost piercing, as he made
this remark:

"You entered by an open window. Why didn't you go in by the door?"

"I hadn't the key. I had only abstracted the one which opens the
wine-vault. The rest I left on the ring. It was the sight of this key,
lying on our hall-table, which first gave me the idea. I feel like a cad
when I think of it, but that's of no account now. All I really care
about is for you to believe what I tell you. I wasn't mixed up in that
matter of my sister's death. I didn't know about it—I wish I had.
Adelaide might have been saved; we might all have been saved;
but it was
not to be.
"

Flushed, he slowly sank back into his seat. No complaint, now, of being
in a hurry, or of his anxiety to regain his sick sister's bedside. He
seemed to have forgotten those fears in the perturbations of the
moment. His mind and interest were here; everything else had grown dim
with distance.

"Did you try the front door?"

"What was the use? I knew it to be locked."

"What was the use of trying the window? Wasn't it also,
presumably, locked?"

The red mounted hot and feverish to his cheek.

"You'll think me no better than a street urchin or something worse,"
he exclaimed. "I knew that window; I had been through it before. You
can move that lock with your knife-blade. I had calculated on entering
that way."

"Mr. Ranelagh's story receives confirmation," commented the district
attorney, wheeling suddenly towards the coroner. "He says that he found
this window unlocked, when he approached it with the idea of escaping
that way."

Arthur Cumberland remained unmoved.

The district attorney wheeled back.

"There were a number of bottles taken from the wine-vault; some half
dozen were left on the kitchen table. Why did you trouble yourself to
carry up so many?"

"Because my greed outran my convenience. I thought I could lug away
an armful, but there are limits to one's ability. I realised this
when I remembered how far I had to go, and so left the greater part
of them behind."

"Why, when you had a team ready to carry you?"

"A—I had no team." But the denial cost him something. His cheek lost its
ruddiness, and took on a sickly white which did not leave it again as
long as the interview lasted.

"You had no team? How then did you manage to reach home in time to make
your way back to Cuthbert Road by half-past eleven?"

"I didn't go home. I went straight across the golf-links. If fresh
snow hadn't fallen, you would have seen my tracks all the way to
Cuthbert Road."

"If fresh snow had not fallen, we should have known the whole story of
that night before an hour had passed. How did you carry those bottles?"

"In my overcoat pockets. These pockets," he blurted out, clapping his
hands on either side of him.

"Had it begun to snow when you left the clubhouse?"

"No."

"Was it dark?"

"I guess not; the links were bright as day, or I shouldn't have got over
them as quickly as I did."

"Quickly? How quickly?" The district attorney stole a glance at the
coroner, which made Sweetwater advance a step from his corner.

"I don't know. I don't understand these questions," was the sullen reply.

"You walked quickly. Does that mean you didn't look back?"

"How, look back?"

"Your sister lit a candle in the small room where her coat was found.
This light should have been visible from the golf-links."

"I didn't see any light."

He was almost rough in these answers. He was showing himself now at his
very worst.

A few more questions followed, but they were of minor import, and aroused
less violent feeling. The serious portion of the examination, if thus it
might be called, was over, and all parties showed the reaction which
follows all unnatural restraint or subdued excitement.

The coroner glanced meaningly at the district attorney, who, tapping with
his fingers on the table, hesitated for a moment before he finally turned
again upon Arthur Cumberland.