The House of the Whispering Pines, Anna Katharine Green [ebook reader screen txt] 📗

"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.

"You wish to return to your sister? You are at liberty to do so; I will trouble you no more to-night. Your sleigh is at the door, I presume."

The young man nodded, then rising slowly, looked first at the district attorney, then at the coroner, with a glance of searching inquiry which did not escape the watchful eye of Sweetwater, lurking in the rear. There was no display of anger, scarcely of impatience, in him now. If he spoke, they did not hear him; and when he moved, it was heavily and with a drooping head. They watched him go, each as silent as he. The coroner tried to speak, but succeeded no better than the boy himself. When the door opened under his hand, they all showed relief, but were startled back into their former attention by his turning suddenly in the doorway with this final remark:

"What did you say about a bottle with a special label on it being found at our house? It never was, or, if it was, some fellow has been playing you a trick. I carried off those two bottles myself. One you see there; the other is—I can't tell where; but I didn't take it home. That you can bet on."

One more look, followed by a heavy frown and a low growling sound in his throat—which may have been his way of saying good-bye—and he was gone.

Sweetwater came forward and shut the door; then the three men drew more closely together, and the district attorney remarked:

"He is better at the house. I hadn't the heart on your account, Dr.
Perry, to hurry matters faster than necessity compels. What a lout he is!
Pardon me, but what a lout he is to have had two such uncommon and
attractive sisters."

"And such a father," interposed the coroner.

"Just so—and such a father. Sweetwater? Hey! what's the matter? You don't look satisfied. Didn't I cover the ground?"

"Fully, sir, so far as I see now, but—"

"Well, well—out with it."

"I don't know what to out with. It's all right but—I