BOOK II
THE MAN OF NO REPUTATION
XXI
SWEETWATER REASONS
And what of Sweetwater, in whose thoughts and actions the interest nowcentres?
When he left Mr. Sutherland it was with feelings such as few who knewhim supposed him capable of experiencing. Unattractive as he was inevery way, ungainly in figure and unprepossessing of countenance, thisbutt of the more favoured youth in town had a heart whose secret fireswere all the warmer for being so persistently covered, and this heartwas wrung with trouble and heavy with a struggle that bade fair to leavehim without rest that night, if not for many nights to come. Why? Oneword will explain. Unknown to the world at large and almost unknown tohimself, his best affections were fixed upon the man whose happiness hethus unexpectedly saw himself destined to destroy. He loved Mr.Sutherland.
The suspicion which he now found transferred in his own mind from theyoung girl whose blood-stained slippers he had purloined during theexcitement of the first alarm, to the unprincipled but only son of hisone benefactor, had not been lightly embraced or thoughtlesslyexpressed. He had had time to think it out in all its bearings. Duringthat long walk from Portchester churchyard to Mr. Halliday's door, hehad been turning over in his mind everything that he had heard and seenin connection with this matter, till the dim vision of Frederick'sfigure going on before him was not more apparent to his sight than wasthe guilt he so deplored to his inward understanding.
He could not help but recognise him as the active party in the crime hehad hitherto charged Amabel with. With the clew offered by Frederick'ssecret anguish at the grave of Agatha, he could read the whole story ofthis detestable crime as plainly as if it had been written in letters offire on the circle of the surrounding darkness. Such anguish under suchcircumstances on the part of such a man could mean but onething--remorse; and remorse in the breast of one so proverbiallycareless and corrupt, over the death of a woman who was neither relativenor friend, could have but one interpretation, and that was guilt.
No other explanation was possible. Could one be given, or if anyevidence could be adduced in contradiction of this assumption, he wouldhave dismissed his new suspicion with more heartiness even than he hadembraced his former one. He did not wish to believe Frederick guilty. Hewould have purchased an inner conviction of his innocence almost at theprice of his own life, not because of any latent interest in the youngman himself, but because he was Charles Sutherland's son, and the dear,if unworthy, centre of all that noble man's hopes, aims, and happiness.But he could come upon no fact capable of shaking his present belief.Taking for truth Amabel's account of what she had seen and done on thatfatal night--something which he had hesitated over the previous day, butwhich he now found himself forced to accept or do violence to his ownsecret convictions--and adding to it such facts as had come to his ownknowledge in his self-imposed role of detective, he had but to test theevents of that night by his present theory of Frederick's guilt, to findthem hang together in a way too complete for mistake.
For what had been his reasons for charging Amabel herself with the guiltof a crime she only professed to have been a partial witness to?
They were many.
First--The forced nature of her explanations in regard to her motive forleaving a merry ball and betaking herself to the midnight road in herparty dress and slippers. A woman of her well-known unsympathetic naturemight use the misery of the Zabels as a pretext for slipping into townat night, but never would be influenced by it as a motive.
Second--The equally unsatisfactory nature of the reasons she gave forleaving the course she had marked out for herself and entering upon thepursuit of an unknown man into a house in which she had no personalinterest and from which she had just seen a bloody dagger thrown out.The most callous of women would have shrunk from letting her curiositycarry her thus far.
Third--The poverty of her plea that, after having braved so much in herdesire to identify this criminal, she was so frightened at his nearapproach as to fail to lift her head when the opportunity was given herto recognise him.
Fourth--Her professed inability to account for the presence of theorchid from her hair being found in the room with Batsy.
Fifth--Her evident attempt to throw the onus of the crime on an old manmanifestly incapable from physical causes of committing it.
Sixth--The improbability, which she herself should have recognised, ofthis old man, in his extremely weak condition, ignoring thehiding-places offered by the woods back of his own house, for the sakeof one not only involving a long walk, but situated close to amuch-frequented road, and almost in view of the Sutherland mansion.
Seventh--The transparent excuse of sympathy for the old man and herdesire to save him from the consequences of his crime, which she offeredin extenuation of her own criminal avowal of having first found and thenreburied the ill-gotten gains she had come upon in her persistentpursuit of the flying criminal. So impulsive an act might be consistentwith the blind compassion of some weak-headed but warm-hearted woman,but not with her self-interested nature, incapable of performing anyheroic deed save from personal motives or the most headlong passion.
Lastly--The weakness of her explanation in regard to the cause which ledher to peer into the Zabel cottage through a hole made in thewindow-shade. Curiosity has its limits even in a woman's breast, andunless she hoped to see more than was indicated by her words, her actionwas but the precursor of a personal entrance into a room where we haveevery reason to believe the twenty-dollar bill was left.
A telling record and sufficient to favour the theory of her personalguilt if, after due thought, certain facts in contradiction to thisassumption had not offered themselves to his mind even before he thoughtof Frederick as the unknown man she had followed down the hillside, as,for instance:
This crime, if committed by her, was done deliberately and with apremeditation antedating her departure from the ballroom. Yet she wentupon this errand in slippers, white slippers at that, something which socool and calculating a woman would have avoided, however careless shemight have shown herself in other regards.
Again, guilt awakens cunning, even in the dullest breast; but she, keenbeyond most men even, and so self-poised that the most searchingexamination could not shake her self-control, betrayed an uttercarelessness as to what she did with these slippers on her return,thrusting them into a place easily accessible to the most casual search.Had she been conscious of guilt and thus amenable to law, the sight ofblood and mud-stains on those slippers would have appalled her, and shewould have made some attempt to destroy them, and not put them behind apicture and forgotten them.
Again, would she have been so careless with a flower she knew to beidentified with herself? A woman who deliberately involves herself incrime has quick eyes; she would have seen that flower fall. At allevents, if she had been immediately responsible for its being on thescene of crime she would, with her quick wit, have found some excuse orexplanation for it, instead of defying her examiners with some suchwords as these: "It is a fact for you to explain. I only know that I didnot carry this flower into that room of death."
Again, had she been actuated in her attempt to fix the crime on oldJames Zabel by a personal consciousness of guilt and a personal dread,she would not have stopped at suggestion in her allusions to the personshe watched burying the treasure in the woods. Instead of speaking ofhim as a shadow whose flight she had followed at a distance, she wouldhave described his figure as that of the same old man she had seen enterthe Zabel cottage a few minutes before, there being no reason forindefiniteness on this point, her conscience being sufficiently elasticfor any falsehood that would further her ends. And lastly, her manner,under the examination to which she had been subjected, was not that ofone who felt herself under a personal attack. It was a strange,suggestive, hesitating manner, baffling alike to him who had more orless sounded her strange nature and to those who had no previousknowledge of her freaks and subtle intellectual power, and only reachingits height of
hateful charm and mysterious daring when Frederickappeared on the scene and joined, or seemed to join, himself to thenumber of her examiners.
Now, let all suspicion of her as an active agent in this crime bedropped, assume Frederick to be the culprit and she the simple accessoryafter the fact, and see how inconsistencies vanish, and how much morenatural the whole conduct of this mysterious woman appears.
Amabel Page left a merry dance at midnight and stole away into theSutherland garden in her party dress and slippers--why? Not to fulfil anerrand which anyone who knows her cold and unsympathetic nature can butregard as a pretext, but because she felt it imperative to see if herlover (with whose character, temptations, and necessities she was fullyacquainted, and in whose excited and preoccupied manner she had probablydiscovered signs of a secretly growing purpose) meant indeed to eludehis guests and slip away to town on the dangerous and unholy enterprisesuggested by their mutual knowledge of the money to be obtained there byone daring enough to enter a certain house open like their own tomidnight visitors.
She followed at such an hour and into such a place, not an unknown mancasually come upon, but her lover, whom she had tracked from the gardenof his father's house, where she had lain in wait for him. It tookcourage to do this, but a courage no longer beyond the limit of femininedaring, for her fate was bound up in his and she could not but feel theimpulse to save him from the consequences of crime, if not from thecrime itself.
As for the aforementioned flower, what more natural than that Frederickshould have transferred it from her hair to his buttonhole during someof their interviews at the ball, and that it should have fallen from itsplace to the floor in the midst of his possible struggle with Batsy?
And with this assumption of her perfect knowledge as to who the man waswho had entered Mrs. Webb's house, how much easier it is to understandwhy she did not lift her head when she heard him descend the stairs! Nowoman, even one so depraved as she, would wish to see the handsome faceof her lover in the glare of a freshly committed crime, and besides shemight very easily be afraid of him, for a man has but a blow for thesuddenly detected witness of his crime unless that witness is hisconfidant, which from every indication Sweetwater felt bound to believeAmabel was not.
Her flight to the Zabel cottage, after an experience which would maddenmost women, can now be understood. She was still following her lover.The plan of making Agatha's old and wretched friend amenable for herdeath originated with Frederick and not with Amabel. It was he who firststarted for the Zabel cottage. It was he who left the bank bill there.This is all clear, and even the one contradictory fact of the daggerhaving been seen in the old man's hand was not a stumbling-block toSweetwater. With the audacity of one confident of his own insight, heexplained it to himself thus: The dagger thrown from the window by theassassin, possibly because he knew of Zabel's expected visit there thatnight, fell on the grass and was picked up by Amabel, only to be flungdown again in the brightest part of the lawn. It was lying there then,when, a few minutes later and before either Frederick or Amabel had leftthe house, the old man entered the yard in a state of misery borderingon frenzy. He and his brother were starving, had been starving for days.He was too proud to own his want, and too loyal to his brother to leavehim for the sake of the food prepared for them both at Agatha's house,and this was why he had hesitated over his duty till this late hour,when his own secret misery or, perhaps, the hope of relieving hisbrother drove him to enter the gate he had been accustomed to see openbefore him in glad hospitality. He finds the lights burning in the houseabove and below, and encouraged by the welcome they seem to hold out, hestaggers up the path, ignorant of the tragedy which was at that verymoment being enacted behind those lighted windows. But half-way towardthe house he stops, the courage which has brought him so far suddenlyfails, and in one of those quick visions which sometimes visit men inextremity, he foresees the astonishment which his emaciated figure islikely to cause in these two old friends, and burying his face in hishands he stops and bitterly communes with himself before venturingfarther. Fatal stop! fatal communing! for as he stands there he sees adagger, his own old dagger, how lost or how found he probably did notstop to ask, lying on the grass and offering in its dumb way suggestionsas to how he might end this struggle without any further suffering.Dizzy with the new hope, preferring death to the humiliation he sawbefore him in Agatha's cottage, he dashes out of the yard, almostupsetting Mr. Crane, who was passing by on his homeward way from anerrand of mercy. A little while later Amabel comes upon him lying acrosshis own doorstep. He has made an effort to enter, but his long walk andthe excitement of this last bitter hour have been too much for him. Asshe watches him he gains strength and struggles to his feet, while she,aghast at the sight of the dagger she had herself flung down in Agatha'syard, and dreading the encounter between this old man and the lover shehad been following to this place, creeps around the house and looks intothe first window she finds open. What does she expect to see? Frederickbrought face to face with this desperate figure with its uplifted knife.But instead of that she beholds another old man seated at a tableand--Amabel had paused when she reached that AND--and Sweetwater had notthen seen how important this pause was, but now he understood it. Now hesaw that if she had not had a subtle purpose in view, that if she hadwished to tell the truth rather than produce false inferences in theminds of those about her calculated to save the criminal as she calledhim, she would have completed her sentence thus: "I saw an old manseated at a table and Frederick Sutherland standing over him." ForSweetwater had no longer a doubt that Frederick was in that room at thatmoment. What further she saw, whether she was witness to an encounterbetween this intruder and James, or whether by some lingering on thelatter's part Frederick was able to leave the house without runningacross him, was a matter of comparative unimportance. What is ofimportance is that he did leave it and that Amabel, knowing it wasFrederick, strove to make her auditors believe it was Zabel, who carriedthe remainder of the money into the woods. Yet she did not say so, andif her words on this subject could be carefully recalled, one would seethat it was still her lover she was following and no old man, totteringon the verge of the grave and only surviving because of the task he wasbent on performing.
Amabel's excuse for handling the treasure, and for her reburial of thesame, comes now within the bounds of possibility. She hoped to sharethis money some day, and her greed was too great for her to let such anamount lie there untouched, while her caution led her to bury it deeper,even at the risk of the discovery she was too inexperienced to fear.
That she should forget to feign surprise when the alarm of murder wasraised was very natural, and so was the fact that a woman with a soul soblunted to all delicate instincts, and with a mind so intent uponperfecting the scheme entered into by the murderer of throwing the blameupon the man whose dagger had been made use of, should persist invisiting the scene of crime and calling attention to the spot where thatdagger had fallen. And so with her manner before her examiners. Bafflingas that manner was, it still showed streaks of consistency, when youthought of it as the cloak of a subtle, unprincipled woman, who seesamongst her interlocutors the guilty man whom by a word she can destroy,but whom she exerts herself to save, even at the cost of a series ofbizarre explanations. She was playing with a life, a life she loved, butnot with sincerity sufficient to rob the game of a certain delicate, ifinconceivable, intellectual enjoyment. [Footnote: That Sweetwater in hishate, and with no real clew to the real situation, should come so nearthe truth as in this last supposition, shows the keenness of hisinsight.]
And Frederick? Had there been anything in his former life or in hisconduct since the murder to give the lie to these heavy doubts againsthim? On the contrary. Though Sweetwater knew little of the dark recordwhich had made this young man the disgrace of his family, what he didknow was so much against him that he could well see that the distanceusually existing between simple dissipation and desperate crime might beeasily bridged by some great necessity for money. Had there be
en such anecessity? Sweetwater found it easy to believe so. And Frederick'smanner? Was it that of an honest man simply shocked by the suspicionswhich had fallen upon the woman he loved? Had he, Sweetwater, notobserved certain telltale moments in his late behaviour that required adeeper explanation even than this?
The cry, for instance, with which he had rushed from the empty ballroominto the woods on the opposite side of the road! Was it a natural cry oran easily explainable one? "Thank God! this terrible night is over!"Strange language to be uttered by this man at such a time and in such aplace, if he did not already know what was to make this night of nightsmemorable through all this region. He did know, and this cry which hadstruck Sweetwater strangely at the time and still more strangely when heregarded it simply as a coincidence, now took on all the force of arevelation and the irresistible bubbling up in Frederick's breast ofthat remorse which had just found its full expression on Agatha's grave.
To some that remorse and all his other signs of suffering might beexplained by his passion for the real criminal. But to Sweetwater it wasonly too evident that an egotist like Frederick Sutherland cannot sufferfor another to such an extent as this, and that a personal explanationmust be given for so personal a grief, even if that explanation involvesthe dreadful charge of murder.
It was when Sweetwater reached this point in his reasoning thatFrederick disappeared beneath Mr. Halliday's porch, and Mr. Sutherlandcame up behind him. After the short conversation in which Sweetwater sawhis own doubts more than reflected in the uneasy consciousness of thisstricken father, he went home and the struggle of his life began.