Johnny Ludlow Fourth Series Part 64

Captain Tanerton did not adopt her views. He shook his head, and said Sir Dace it _could not_ have been. Sir Dace was at his house in the Marylebone Road at the very hour the calamity happened off Tower Hill.

I followed suit, hearing out Jack's word. Was I not at the Marylebone Road that evening myself, playing chess with Coralie?--and was not Sir Dace shut up in his library all the time, and never came out of it?

Alice listened, and looked puzzled to death. But she held to her own opinion. And when a fit of desperate obstinacy takes possession of a woman without rhyme or reason, you cannot shake it. As good try to argue with the whistling wind. She did not pretend to see how it could have been, she said, but Sir Dace was guilty. And she haunted Paul and Chandler's office at Islip, praying them to take the matter up.

At length, to soothe her, and perhaps to prevent her carrying it elsewhere, they promised they would. And of course they had to make some show of doing it.

One evening Tom Chandler came to Crabb Cot and asked to see me alone.

"I want you to tell me all the particulars you remember of that fatal night," he began, when I went to him in the Squire's little room. "I have taken down Captain Tanerton's testimony, and I must have yours, Johnny."

"But, are you going to stir in it?"

"We must do something, I suppose. Paul thinks so. I am going to London to-morrow on other matters, and shall use the opportunity to make an inquiry or two. It is rather a strange piece of business altogether,"

added Mr. Chandler, as he took his place at the table and drew the inkstand towards him. "John Tanerton is innocent. I feel sure of that."

"How strongly Mrs. Tanerton has taken it up!"

"Pretty well for that," answered Tom Chandler, a smile on his good-natured face. "She told us yesterday in the office that it must be the consciousness of guilt which has worried Sir Dace to a skeleton. Now then, we'll begin."

He dotted down my answers to his questions, also what I voluntarily added. Then he took a sheet of paper from his pocket, closely written upon, and compared its statements--they were Tanerton's--with mine.

Putting his finger on the paper to mark a place, he looked at me.

"Did Sir Dace speak of Pym or of Captain Tanerton that night, when you were playing chess with Miss Fontaine?"

"Sir Dace did not come into the drawing-room. He had left the dinner-table in a huff to shut himself up in his library, Miss Fontaine said; and he stayed in it."

"Then you did not see Sir Dace at all that night?"

"Oh yes, later--when Captain Tanerton and young Saxby came up to tell him of the death. We then all went down to Ship Street together. You have taken that down."

"True," said Chandler. "Well, I cannot make much out of it as it stands," he concluded, folding the papers and putting them in his pocket-book. "What do you say is the number of the house in the Marylebone Road?"

I told him, and he went away, wishing he could accept my offer of staying to drink tea with us.

"Look here, Chandler," I said to him at the front-door: "why don't you take down Sir Dace Fontaine's evidence, as well as mine and Tanerton's?"

"I have done it," he answered. "I was with Sir Dace to-day. Mrs.

Tanerton's suspicions are of course--absurd," he added, making a pause, as if at a loss for a suitable word, "but for her peace of mind, poor lady, we would like to pitch upon the right individual if we can. And as yet he seems to be a myth."

The good ship, _Rose of Delhi_, came gaily into port, and took up her berth in St. Katharine's Docks as before; for she had been chartered for London. Her owners, the Freemans, wrote at once from Liverpool to Captain Tanerton, begging him to resume command. Jack wrote back, and declined.

How is it that whispers get about! Do the birds in the air carry them?--or the winds of heaven? In some cases it seems impossible that anything else can have done it. Paul and Chandler, John Tanerton and his wife, the Squire and myself: we were the only people cognizant of the new suspicion that Alice was striving to cast on Sir Dace, one and all of us had kept silent lips: and yet, the rumour got abroad. Sir Dace Fontaine was accused of knowing more about Pym's death than he ought to know, and Tom Chandler was in London for the purpose of investigating it. This might not have mattered very much for ordinary ears, but it reached those of Sir Dace.

Coralie Fontaine heard it from Mary Ann Letsom. In Mary Ann's indignation at the report, she spoke it out to Coralie; and Coralie, laughing at the absurdity of the thing, repeated it to Sir Dace. How _he_ received it, or what he said about it, did not transpire.

A stagnant kind of atmosphere seemed to hang over us just then, like the heavy, unnatural calm that precedes the storm. Sir Dace got weaker day by day, more of a shadow; Herbert Tanerton and his brother were still at variance, so far as Jack's future was concerned; and Mr. Chandler seemed to have taken up his abode in London for good.

"Does he _never_ mean to come back?" demanded Alice one day of the Squire: and her lips and cheeks were red with fever as she asked it. The truth was, that some cause of Paul and Chandler's then on at Westminster was prolonging itself out--even when it did begin--unconscionably.

One morning I met Ben Rymer as he was leaving Oxlip Grange. Coralie Fontaine had walked with him to the gate, talking earnestly, their two heads together. Ben shook hands with her and came out, looking as grave as a judge.

"How is Sir Dace?" I asked him. "Getting on?"

"Getting off," responded Ben. "For that's what it will be now; and not long first, unless he mends."

"Is he worse?"

"He is nearly as bad as he can be, to be alive. And yesterday, he must needs go careering off to Islip by himself to transact some business with Paul the lawyer! He was no more fit for it than--than _this_ is,"

concluded Ben, giving a flick to his silk umbrella as he marched off.

Ben went in for silk umbrellas now: in the old days a cotton one would have been too good for him.

"I am so sorry to hear Sir Dace is no better," I said to Coralie Fontaine, who had waited at the gate to speak to me.

Coralie shook her head. Some deep feeling sat in her generally pa.s.sive face: the tears stood in her eyes.

"Thank you, Johnny Ludlow. It is very sad. I feel sure Mr. Rymer has given up all hope, though he does not say so to me. Verena looks nearly as ill as papa. I wish we had never come to Europe!"

"Sir Dace exerts himself too greatly, Mr. Rymer says."

"Yes; and worries himself also. As if his affairs needed as much as a thought!--I am sure they must be just as straight and smooth as yonder green plain. He had to see Mr. Paul yesterday about some alteration in his will, and went to Islip, instead of sending for Paul here.

I thought he would have died when he got home. Papa has a strange restlessness upon him. Good-bye, Johnny. I'd ask you to come in but that things are all so miserable."

It was late in the evening, getting towards bedtime. Mrs. Todhetley had gone upstairs with the face-ache, Tod was over at old Coney's, and I and the Squire were sitting alone, when Thomas surprised us by showing in Tom Chandler. We did not know he was back from London.

"Yes, I got back this evening," said he, as he sat down near the lamp, and spread some papers out on the table. "I am in a bit of a dilemma, Mr. Todhetley; and I am come here at this late hour to put it before you."

Chandler's voice had dropped to a mysterious whisper; his eyes were glancing at the door to make sure it was shut. The Squire pushed up his spectacles and drew his chair nearer. I sat on the opposite side, wondering what was coming.

"That suspicion of Alice Tanerton's--that Sir Dace killed Pym," went on Chandler, his left hand resting on the papers, his eyes on the Squire's.

"I think it was a true one."

"A what?" cried the pater.

"A true one. That Sir Dace did kill him."

"Goodness bless me!" gasped the Squire, his good old face taking a lighter tint. "What on earth do you mean, man?"

"Well, I mean just that," answered Chandler. "And I feel myself to be, in consequence, in an uncommonly awkward position. One can't well accuse Sir Dace, a man close upon the grave; and Paul's relative in addition.

And yet, Captain Tanerton must be cleared."

"I can't make top or tail of what you mean, Tom Chandler!" cried the Squire, blinking like a bewildered owl. "Don't you think you are dreaming?"

"Wish I was," said Tom, "so far as this business goes. Look here. I'll begin at the beginning and go through the story. You'll understand it then."