The Hunt Ball Mystery Part 27

"He had driven her to the other corner on the window side of the room.

As I leaned forward ready to fasten on the man when he should offer violence I heard a peculiar sound as of a loose piece of wood or iron striking the sill.

"'Keep away!' the girl said in a hoa.r.s.e whisper. 'If you drive me to desperation I swear I will kill you.'

"There followed a vicious laugh from Henshaw and I could tell from the panting which followed that a struggle was going on. Just then the moon came out and I could see that Henshaw was trying to get some object--a weapon, I guessed--away from the girl. It is a wonder that neither of them saw me. In the dark opening I must have still been practically hidden, and they too intent on their struggle to notice anything beyond.

"I was just on the point of springing out to the girl's a.s.sistance when she staggered back and, turning, made a rush for the door. In a moment Henshaw was after her, but in his blind haste he either tripped or stumbled and fell heavily. I think it likely that in the dark he struck against the corner of the rather ma.s.sive oak table in the centre of the room and was thrown off his balance. He rose immediately, but I was now close behind him, and as he put out his arm to clutch the girl, who was then half through the doorway, I gripped him by the collar and with all my strength swung him back into the room.

"He must have been most horribly surprised, for he uttered a gasping cry as he spun round, and instead of keeping his feet and rushing at me as I expected he went down with a thud by the window."

They had stopped in their walk now, and Edith Morriston was listening almost breathlessly to Gifford's graphic story. Never for a moment had he suggested the lady's ident.i.ty; for all that had pa.s.sed neither of them might have known it.

"I turned quickly to the door," Gifford continued, "but to my surprise the lady whom I expected to find there had disappeared. I could neither see nor hear any sign of her.

"I took a step back into the room, fully expecting an onslaught from the infuriated Henshaw. 'You cowardly brute!' I exclaimed in the heat of my anger and excitement. But no reply came, and to my wonder he lay still on the floor where he had fallen."

CHAPTER XXII

HOW GIFFORD ESCAPED

"I waited for some time in silence, expecting him every moment to rise and retaliate. He was a big, muscular man, but it never occurred to me to be in any fear of him physically. For one thing my indignation was too hot to admit fear; I happen to be quite good enough at boxing to be able to take care of myself, and I was sure--all the more from his continuing to lie there--that such a despicable bully must be a coward.

"'You had better get up and clear out of this house,' I said wrathfully, 'before you get the thrashing you so richly deserve.'

"No answer came. As I waited for one there was, save for my own breathing, dead silence in the room. Before speaking I had heard something like a long drawn sigh come from the man on the floor, but now, listening intently, I could hear nothing. Two explanations suggested themselves to account for his still lying there. One, shame at his vile conduct having been witnessed by a third person, the other that he had struck his head against the wall in falling and was stunned.

"Naturally I was not greatly concerned at the fellow's condition, whichever it was; still it would, I concluded, be well to settle the matter, and if he was merely skulking see that he cleared out of the house. I shut the door, and then crossing to where the man lay, struck a match and held it out to get a view of him.

"He lay on his face with his arms bent under him. I prodded him with my foot, but he did not stir; he lay absolutely, rather uncannily still. The match burned out; I struck another and leaned over to get a sight of his face. To my horror there met my eyes a dark wet patch on the floor which I instinctively felt must be blood. You may imagine the terrible thrill the conviction gave me. Yet I could not believe even then that anything really serious had happened.

"I struck a fresh match and holding it up with one hand, with the other took the man's shoulder and turned him over on his back. Then I knew that I was there with a dead man. The hue of the face was unmistakably that of death. And the cause of it was plainly to be seen. There was a wound in the man's neck from which blood came freely.

"How had the wound--clearly a fatal one--been caused? I searched for an explanation. That which forced itself upon me was that the girl had in her desperation stabbed her persecutor with some weapon she had found there or brought with her. It was a horrible idea to entertain, although the act would have been almost justified. I wondered if by chance the weapon was still there. Striking a match I looked round. Yes; there on the floor near the spot where Henshaw had first fallen, lay a narrow blood-stained chisel.

"Whatever my first conclusions were I can see now the most probable explanation of how Henshaw came by his death-wound. He had forced the chisel away from the girl; he had kept it in his hand; in his eagerness to prevent his victim's escape he had not realized that he was holding it point upwards, and when he fell it had pierced him with all the force of his heavy body falling plump on it."

"Then you know it was an accident?" Edith Morriston drew a great breath of relief from the painful tension with which she had listened.

"I can see it was a pure accident," Gifford answered. "All the same it was an accident with an ugly look about it, and I quickly realized that I was in an equivocal--not to say dangerous, situation."

"It was a terrible predicament for you," the girl said sympathetically.

"It was indeed. And one which called for prompt action. Moreover the very fact that I was not in evening clothes made it all the more suspicious. I pulled my wits together and proceeded to make quite sure that the man was actually dead. That I found was beyond all doubt the case, and it now remained for me to make my escape before being found there in that hideous situation.

"I went out to the landing, closing the door after me, with the idea of getting down the stairs and escaping into the garden as secretly as I had come in. I had crept down a very few stairs when I found this was not to be. A chatter of voices just below told me that people were in the tower, and leaning over I could see couples pa.s.sing between the pa.s.sage to the hall and the room below me.

"At any moment, I realized, some of them might take it into their heads to explore the topmost room, when the result would be disastrous.

Certainly in my mufti I could not get past the next floor just then without exciting fatal notice, and to wait for an opportunity when the coast might be clear was too dangerous, seeing the risk of someone coming up.

"It was not easy to see my way of escape. I went to the top room and locked the door. My nerves were pretty strong, but they were severely tried when I shut myself in with the dead man and had the consciousness of having laid myself open to the charge of being his murderer. I stood there by the door thinking desperately what I could do. Fool that I had been to venture into the place in that garb. But who could have foreseen the result? Anyhow there was no time for reflection; it was necessary to act and seek a possible expedient. Hopelessly enough I went into the little inner room and struck a match. In a moment a thrill of hope came to me, for the first object the light showed me was a big coil of rope conspicuous among the odds and ends of lumber in the recess. The idea of escape by the window had only occurred to me to be dismissed as a sheer impossibility; the height of the tower made that quite prohibitive, but here seemed a chance of it. If only the rope was long enough.

"I got hold of the coil as my match burned out, and pulled it away from the surrounding rubbish. Its weight gave me hope that it would be sufficient. In haste I dragged it to the outer room into which the moonlight was now streaming. With a shuddering glance at the dead man, whose ashen face stared up in ghastly fashion in the moonbeams, I opened the window and looked out to make sure that no one was below. Satisfied on that point I brought forward the rope and began paying it out of the window. To my content I saw that there was a strong iron stanchion at the side which would allow of the rope being fastened to it.

"There was light enough just then to enable me to see pretty well when the end of the rope reached the ground, and upon examining what was left in the room I calculated that not much more than half was outside. In a flash the discovery gave me an idea. Why should I not simply pa.s.s the rope behind the stanchion and use it doubled? By that means I could pull it down after me when I reached the ground, and so not only effect my escape but also leave the fact unknown. That, together with the door locked on the inside, would tend to make Henshaw's death a mystery with a strong probability in favour of suicide, which would be altogether the happiest conclusion to arrive at. In fact my hastily formed calculation was, as we know, subsequently borne out and the suicide theory would probably have been quietly accepted had it not been for the intervention of Gervase Henshaw with his smartness and incredulity.

"That is practically the end of my story, Miss Morriston. I laid the chisel by the body, went to the window, pulled in the rope, carefully got the centre, adjusted it through the stanchion, and with a last look at the dead man, got out of the window, a rather nerve-trying business, and began to lower myself. I had calculated that the double rope was long enough to take me to within a few feet of the ground, and this proved to be the case. When I came to the end I let go of one side and pulled the other with me as I dropped. Then I drew the rope down, the latter half when released falling with a great thud. Hastily I set off for the lake, dragging the rope after me. At the landing-stage by the boat-house I coiled it up as best I could and threw it in. As I had antic.i.p.ated it was thick and heavy enough to sink without being weighted. Then with a last glance at the tower I made my way as quickly as possible to the hotel in a state of nerves which you may imagine, little thinking that my descent from the tower had been witnessed. My first intention was to abandon all idea of going to the dance, but on reflection I came to the conclusion that I had better at least put in an appearance there.

"Accordingly I changed and came on late to the ball, as you know.

Naturally a great curiosity possessed me to find out the girl who had played the third part in the drama which had been enacted in the tower.

But I had not seen her face, nor heard her voice sufficiently to be able to recognize it. There were several tall girls in the room, yourself among the number, but naturally it never occurred to me--"

He stopped awkwardly, just as by inadvertence he was about to say that which all along he had studiously refrained from suggesting.

"To suspect me," Edith Morriston completed his sentence with a smile.

"No," he continued frankly. "You would have been the last person to enter my head in that connexion. And then Kelson came out of the pa.s.sage from the tower with Miss Tredworth, to whom he had just proposed. He introduced me in a way which suggested their new relationship, and we had just began to chat when to my horror I noticed what to my mind went to prove that she was the person for whom I was looking. There were dark red stains on the white roses she wore on her dress. It was an unpleasant shock to me, placing me, as it seemed, in a terribly difficult position.

For, at the first blush of my discovery, it all seemed to fit in. Clement Henshaw had been, I imagined, in love with Miss Tredworth before Kelson appeared on the scene. She had thrown him over for my friend, and Henshaw, taking his rejection in bad part, had threatened to expose some questionable incident in her past. Now that is all happily explained away, and I won't retrace the steps by which my imagination led me on; but you see how painfully I was situated with respect to my friend.

"That is my story, Miss Morriston. Had I known what I know now I should not have kept it to myself so long; but up to a certain point, until the last few days, there seemed no reason for making the dangerous secret known to any one. Now, when it appears necessary to protect you from this man, Henshaw, the account of the part I played in the tragedy must be told in your interest."

Edith Morriston drew in a deep breath as Gifford ceased speaking. "It is very kind and chivalrous of you, Mr. Gifford," she said in a low voice, "to run this risk for me, although your telling me the story shall never involve you in danger."

"I am ready for your sake to face any danger the telling of my secret may hold for me," he responded firmly.

"I am sure of that, as I am sure of you," she replied. Then added with a change of tone, "You were certain for a while that Muriel Tredworth had not only been guilty of something discreditable in her past but had stabbed to death in your presence the man who knew her secret."

"I'm afraid there seemed to me no alternative but to believe it," he acknowledged.

"When you found out that you were mistaken in her ident.i.ty and that she had nothing whatever to do with the tragedy you would naturally transfer the opinion you had held of her to--to the other woman--the one who was actually there?"

The question was put searchingly and was not to be evaded.

"That would be a natural consequence," Gifford admitted frankly. "But there was in my mind always a growing doubt whether the wound had not been given accidentally. And that doubt became almost certainty when the real ident.i.ty of Henshaw's victim became apparent."

Edith Morriston looked at him steadily. "You know it--for certain?" she asked almost coldly.

"Naturally I cannot fail to know it now," he answered sympathetically.

She gave a rather bitter laugh. "I shall not deny it to you, Mr. Gifford, even if I thought it could be of any use. But, knowing so much, you owe it to me to hear my explanation of matters which look so black against me, and above all to accept my absolute a.s.surance that so far as I am concerned Clement Henshaw's wound was quite accidental. Indeed I never dreamt that he had been hurt until his body was found."

Gifford seized her hand by an irresistible impulse.

"Miss Morriston, if you only knew how glad and relieved I am to hear you say that!" he exclaimed.