In the Mayor's Parlour Part 12

"I am," replied Brent. "Sole everything."

"Then, of course, you have entire charge and custody of his papers?" she suggested.

"That's so," answered Brent. "Everything's in my possession."

Mrs. Saumarez sighed gently; it seemed to Brent that there was something of relief in the sigh.

"Last autumn and winter," she continued presently, "I was away from home a long time; I was in the South of France. Mr. Wallingford and I kept up a regular, and frequent, correspondence: it was just then, you know, that he became Mayor, and began to formulate his schemes for the regeneration of this rotten little town----"

"You think it's that, eh?" interrupted Brent, emphasizing the personal p.r.o.noun. "That's your conviction?"

Mrs. Saumarez's violet eyes flashed, and a queer little smile played for a second round the corner of her pretty lips.

"Rotten to the core!" she said quietly. "Ripe rotten! _He_ knew it!--knew more than he ever let anyone know!"

"More than he ever let you know?" asked Brent.

"I knew a good deal," she replied evasively. "But this correspondence.

We wrote to each other twice a week all the time I was away. I have all his letters--there, in that safe."

"Yes?" said Brent.

Mrs. Saumarez looked down at the slim fingers which lay in her lap.

"He kept all mine," she continued.

"Yes?" repeated Brent.

"I want them," she murmured, with a sudden lifting of her eyelids in her visitor's direction. "I, naturally, I don't want them to--to fall into anybody else's hands. You understand, Mr. Brent?"

"You want me to find them?" suggested Brent.

"Not to find them, that is, not to search for them," she replied quickly. "I know where they are. I want you, if you please, to give them back to me."

"Where are they?" asked Brent.

"He told me where he kept them," answered Mrs. Saumarez. "They are in a cedar-wood cabinet, in a drawer in his bedroom."

"All right," said Brent. "I'll get them."

Was he mistaken in thinking that it was an unmistakable sigh of relief that left Mrs. Saumarez's delicate red lips and that an additional little flush of colour came into her cheeks? But her voice was calm and even enough.

"Thank you," she said. "So good of you. Of course, they aren't of the faintest interest to anybody. I can have them, then--when?"

Brent rose to his feet.

"When I was taught my business," he said, with a dry smile, "I'd a motto drummed into my head day in and day out. DO IT NOW! So I guess I'll just go round to my cousin's old rooms and get you that cabinet at once."

Mrs. Saumarez smiled. It was a smile that would have thrilled most men.

But Brent merely got a deepened impression of her prettiness.

"I like your way of doing things," she said. "That's business. You ought to stop here, Mr. Brent, and take up your cousin's work."

"It would be a fitting tribute to his memory, wouldn't it?" answered Brent. "Well, I don't know. But this letter business is the thing to do now. I'll be back in ten minutes, Mrs. Saumarez."

"Let yourself in, and come straight here," she said. "I'll wait for you."

Wallingford's old rooms were close at hand--only round the corner, in fact--and Brent went straight to them and into the bedroom. He found the cedar cabinet at once; he had, in fact, seen it the day before, but finding it locked had made no attempt to open it. He carried it back to Mrs. Saumarez, set it on her desk, and laid beside it a bunch of keys.

"I suppose you'll find this key amongst those," he said. "They're all the private keys of his that I have anyway."

"Perhaps you will find it?" she suggested. "I'm a bad hand at that sort of thing."

Brent had little difficulty in finding the right key. Unthinkingly, he raised the lid of the cabinet--and quickly closed it again. In that momentary glimpse of the contents it seemed to him that he had unearthed a dead man's secret. For in addition to a pile of letters he had seen a woman's glove; a knot of ribbon; some faded flowers.

"That's it," he said hurriedly, shutting down the lid and affecting to have seen nothing. "I'll take the key off the bunch."

Mrs. Saumarez took the key from him in silence, relocked the cabinet, and carried it over to a safe let in to the wall of the room.

"Thank you, Mr. Brent," she said. "I'm glad to have those letters."

Brent made as if to leave. But he suddenly turned on her.

"You know a lot," he remarked brusquely. "What's your opinion about my cousin's murder?"

Mrs. Saumarez remained silent so long that he spoke again.

"Do you think, from what you've seen of things in this town, that it was what we may call political?" he asked. "A--removal?"

He was watching her closely, and he saw the violet eyes grow sombre, and a certain hardness settle about the lines of the well-shaped mouth and chin.

"It's this!" she said suddenly. "I told you just now that this town is rotten--rotten and corrupt, as so many of these little old-world English boroughs are! _He_ knew it, poor fellow; he's steadily been finding it out ever since he came here. I dare say you, coming from London, a great city, wouldn't understand, but it's this way: this town is run by a gang, the members of which manoeuvre everything for their own and their friends' benefit, their friends and their hangers-on, their a.s.sociates, their toadies. They----"

"Do you mean the Town Trustees?" asked Brent.

"Not wholly," replied Mrs. Saumarez. "But all that Epplewhite said to-day about the Town Trustees is true. The three men control the financial affairs of the borough. Wallingford, by long and patient investigation, had come to know _how_ they controlled them, and how utterly corrupt and rotten the whole financial administration is. If you could see some of the letters of his which I have in that safe----"

"Wouldn't it be well to produce them?" suggested Brent.

"Not yet anyway," she said. "I'll consider that--much of it's general statement, not particular accusation. But the Town Trustees question is not all. Until very recently, when a Reform party gradually got into being and increased steadily--though it's still in a minority--the whole representation and administration of the borough was hopelessly bad and unprincipled. For what do you suppose men went into the Town Council? To represent the ratepayer, the townspeople? No, but to look after their own interests; to safeguard themselves; to get what they could out of it: the whole policy of the old councils was one of--there's only one word for it, Mr. Brent, and that's only just becoming Anglicized--Graft!

Now, the Corporation of a town is supposed to exist for the good, the welfare, the protection of a town, but the whole idea of these Hathelsborough men, in the past, has been to use their power and privileges as administrators, for their own ends. So here you've had, on the one hand, the unfortunate ratepayer and, on the other, a close Corporation, a privileged band of pirates, battening on them. In plain words, there are about a hundred men in Hathelsborough who have used the seven or eight thousand other folk as a means to their own ends. The town has been a helpless, defenceless thing, from which these harpies have picked whatever they could lay their talons on!"

"That's the conclusion he'd come to?" asked Brent.

"He couldn't come to any other after many years of patient investigation," declared Mrs. Saumarez. "And he was the sort of man who had an inborn hatred of abuses and shams and hypocrisy! And now put it to yourself--when a man stands up against vested interests, such as exist here, and says plainly that he's never going to rest, nor leave a stone unturned, until he's made a radical and thorough reformation, do you think he's going to have a primrose path of it? Bah! But _he_ knew!

He knew his danger."

"But--murder?" said Brent. "Murder!"