The House of the Whispering Pines (13 page)

He stopped midway as Sweetwater turned towards him from the cupboard, but
immediately resumed his descent and was ready with his reply when Hexford
accosted him from the other end of the stable:

"An odd beast, this. They don't drive her for her beauty, that's
evident."

"She's fast and she's knowing," grumbled the coachman. "Reason enough for
overlooking her spots. Who's that man?" he grunted, with a drop of his
lantern jaws, and a slight gesture towards the unknown interloper.

"Another of us," replied Hexford, with a shrug. "We're both rather
interested in this horse."

"Wouldn't another time do?" pleaded the coachman, looking gravely down at
the flowers he held. "It's most time for the funeral and I don't feel
like talking, indeed I don't, gentlemen."

"We won't keep you." It was Sweetwater who spoke. "The mare's
company enough for us. She knows a lot, this mare. I can see it in
her eye. I understand horses; we'll have a little chat, she and I,
when you are gone."

Brown cast an uneasy glance at Hexford.

"He'd better not touch her," he cautioned. "He don't know the beast well
enough for that."

"He won't touch her," Hexford assured him. "She does look knowing, don't
she? Would like to tell us something, perhaps. Was out
that
night, I've
heard you say. Curious! How did you know it?"

"I've said and said till I'm tired," Brown answered, with sudden heat.
"This is pestering a man at a very unfortunate time. Look! the people
are coming. I must go. My poor mistress! and poor Miss Carmel! I liked
'em, do ye understand? Liked 'em—and I do feel the trouble at the
house, I do."

His distress was so genuine that Hexford was inclined to let him go; but
Sweetwater with a cock of his keen eye put in his word and held the
coachman where he was.

"The old gal is telling me all about it," muttered this sly, adaptable
fellow. He had sidled up to the mare and their heads were certainly very
close together. "Not touch her? See here!" Sweetwater had his arm round
the filly's neck and was looking straight into her fiery and intelligent
eye. "Shall I pass her story on?" he asked, with a magnetic smile at the
astonished coachman, which not only softened him but seemed to give the
watchful Hexford quite a new idea of this gawky interloper.

"You'll oblige
me
if you can put her knowledge into words," the man
Zadok declared, with one fascinated eye on the horse and the other on the
house where he evidently felt that his presence was wanted. "She was out
that night, and I know it, as any coachman would know, who doesn't come
home stone drunk. But where she was and who took her, get her to tell if
you can, for I don't know no more 'n the dead."

"The dead!" flashed out Sweetwater, wheeling suddenly about and pointing
straight through the open stable-door towards the house where the young
mistress the old servant mourned, lay in her funeral casket. "Do you mean
her—the lady who is about to be buried? Could
she
tell if her lips
were not sealed by a murderer's hand?"

"She!" The word came low and awesomely. Rude and uncultured as the man
was, he seemed to be strangely affected by this unexpected suggestion. "I
haven't the wit to answer that," said he. "How can we tell what she knew.
The man who killed her is in jail.
He
might talk to some purpose. Why
don't you question him?"

"For a very good reason," replied Sweetwater, with an easy good-nature
that was very reassuring. "He was arrested on the spot; so that it wasn't
he who drove this mare home, unharnessed her, put her back in her stall,
locked the stable-door and hung up the key in its place in the kitchen.
Somebody else did
that
."

"That's true enough, and what does it show? That the mare was out on some
other errand than the one which ended in blood and murder," was the
coachman's unexpected retort.

"Is that so?" whispered Sweetwater into the mare's cocked ear. "She's not
quite ready to commit herself," he drawled, with another enigmatical
smile at the lingering Zadok. "She's keeping something back. Are you?" he
pointedly inquired, leaving the stalls and walking briskly up to Zadok.

The coachman frowned and hastily retreated a step; but in another moment
he leaped in a rage upon Sweetwater, when the sight of the flowers he
held recalled him to himself and he let his hand fall again with the
quiet remark:

"You're overstepping your dooty. I don't know who you are or what you
want with me, but you're overstepping your dooty."

"He's right," muttered Hexford. "Better let the fellow go. See! one of
the maids is beckoning to him."

"He shall go, and welcome, if he will tell me where he gets his taste for
this especial brand of whiskey." Sweetwater had crossed to the cupboard
and taken down the lower half of the broken bottle which had attracted
his notice on his first entrance, and was now holding it out, with a
quizzical look at the departing coachman.

Hexford was at his shoulder with a spring, and together they inspected
the label still sticking to it—which was that of the very rare and
expensive spirit found missing from the club-house vault.

"This is a find," muttered Hexford into his fellow detective's ear. Then,
with a quick move towards Zadok, he shouted out:

"You'd better answer that question. Where did this bit of broken bottle
come from? They don't give you whiskey like this to drink."

"That they don't," muttered the coachman, not so much abashed as they had
expected. "And I wouldn't care for it if they did. I found that bit of
bottle in the ash-barrel outside, and fished it out to put varnish in. I
liked the shape."

"Broken this way?"

"Yes; it's just as good."

"Is it? Well, never mind, run along. We'll close the stable-door for
you."

"I'd rather do it myself and carry in the key."

"Here then; we're going to the funeral, too. You'd like to?" This latter
in a whisper to Sweetwater.

The answer was a fervent one. Nothing in all the world would please this
protean-natured man quite so well.

O, treble woe
Fall ten times treble on that cursed head,
Whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense
Depriv'd thee of!—Hold off the earth awhile,
Till I have caught her once more in my arms.

Hamlet
.

"Let us enter by the side door," suggested Sweetwater, as the two moved
towards the house. "And be sure you place me where I can see without
being seen. I have no wish to attract attention to myself, or to be
identified with the police until the necessity is forced upon me."

"Then we won't go in together," decided Hexford. "Find your own place;
you won't have any difficulty. A crowd isn't expected. Miss Cumberland's
condition forbids it."

Sweetwater nodded and slid in at the side door.

He found himself at once in a narrow hall, from the end of which opened a
large room. A few people were to be seen in this latter place, and his
first instinct was to join them; but finding that a few minutes yet
remained before the hour set for the services, he decided to improve them
by a rapid glance about this hall, which, for certain reasons hardly as
yet formulated in his own mind, had a peculiar interest for him.

The most important object within view, according to his present judgment,
was the staircase which connected it with the floor above; but if you had
asked his reason for this conclusion, he would not have told you, as
Ranelagh might have done, that it was because it was the most direct and
convenient approach to Carmel Cumberland's room. His thoughts were far
from this young girl, intimately connected as she was with this crime;
which shows through what a blind maze he was insensibly working. With his
finger on the thread which had been put in his hand, he was feeling his
way along inch by inch. It had brought him to this staircase, and it led
him next to a rack upon which hung several coats and a gentleman's hat.

He inspected the former and noted that one was finished with a high
collar; but he passed the latter by—it was not a derby. The table stood
next the rack, and on its top lay nothing more interesting than a
clothes-brush and one or two other insignificant objects; but, with his
memory for details, he had recalled the keys which one of the maids had
picked up somewhere about this house, and laid on a hall table. If this
were the hall and this the table, then was every inch of the latter's
simple cloth-covered top of the greatest importance in his eyes.

He had no further time for even these cursory investigations; Hexford's
step could be heard on the verandah, and Sweetwater was anxious to locate
himself before the officer came in. Entering the room before him, he
crossed to the small group clustered in its further doorway. There were
several empty chairs in sight; but he passed around them all to a dark
and inconspicuous corner, from which, without effort, he could take in
every room on that floor—from the large parlour in which the casket
stood, to the remotest region of the servants' hall.

The clergyman had not yet descended, and Sweetwater had time to observe
the row of little girls sitting in front of the bearers, each with a
small cluster of white flowers in her hand. Miss Cumberland's
Sunday-school class, he conjectured, and conjectured rightly. He also
perceived that some of these children loved her.

Near them sat a few relatives and friends. Among these was a very, very
old man, whom he afterwards heard was a great-uncle and a centenarian.
Between him and one of the little girls, there apparently existed a
strong sympathy; for his hand reached out and drew her to him when the
tears began to steal down her cheeks, and the looks which passed between
the two had all the appeal and all the protection of a great love.

Sweetwater, who had many a soft spot in his breast, felt his heart warm
at this one innocent display of natural feeling in an assemblage
otherwise frozen by the horror of the occasion. His eyes dwelt
lingeringly on the child, and still more lingeringly on the old, old man,
before passing to that heaped-up mound of flowers, under which lay a
murdered body and a bruised heart. He could not see the face, but the
spectacle was sufficiently awe-compelling without that.

Would it have seemed yet more so, had he known at whose request the huge
bunch of lilies had been placed over that silent heart?

The sister sick, the brother invisible, there was little more to hold his
attention in this quarter; so he let it roam across the heads of the
people about him, to the distant hall communicating with the kitchen.

Several persons were approaching from this direction, among them Zadok.
The servants of the house, no doubt, for they came in all together and
sat down, side by side, in the chairs Sweetwater had so carefully passed
by. There were five persons in all: two men and three women. Only two
interested him—Zadok, with whom he had already made a superficial
acquaintance and had had one bout; and a smart, bright-eyed girl with a
resolute mouth softened by an insistent dimple, who struck him as
possessing excellent sense and some natural cleverness. A girl to know
and a girl to talk to, was his instantaneous judgment. Then he forgot
everything but the solemnity of the occasion, for the clergyman had
entered and taken his place, and a great hush had fallen upon the rooms
and upon every heart there present.

"
I am the resurrection and the life
."

Never had these consoling words sounded more solemn than when they rang
above the remains of Adelaide Cumberland, in this home where she had
reigned as mistress ever since her seventeenth year. The nature of the
tragedy which had robbed the town of one of its most useful young women;
the awful fate impending over its supposed author,—a man who had come
and gone in these rooms with a spell of fascination to which many of
those present had themselves succumbed—the brooding sense of illness,
if not of impending death, in the room above; gave to these services a
peculiar poignancy which in some breasts of greater susceptibility than
the rest, took the form of a vague expectancy bordering on terror.

Sweetwater felt the poignancy, but did not suffer from the terror. His
attention had been attracted in a new direction, and he found himself
watching, with anxious curiosity, the attitude and absorbed expression of
a good-looking young man whom he was far from suspecting to be the secret
representative of the present suspect, whom nobody could forget, yet whom
nobody wished to remember at this hallowed hour.

Had this attitude and this absorption been directed towards the casket
over which the clergyman's words rose and fell with ever increasing
impressiveness, he might have noted the man but would scarcely have been
held by him. But this interest, sincere and strong as it undoubtedly was,
centred not so much in the services, careful as he was to maintain a
decorous attitude towards the same, but in the faint murmurs which now
and then came down from above where unconsciousness reigned and the
stricken brother watched over the delirious sister, with a concentration
and abandonment to fear which made him oblivious of all other duties, and
almost as unconscious of the rites then being held below over one who had
been as a mother to him, as the sick girl herself with her ceaseless and
importunate "Lila! Lila!" The detective, watching this preoccupied
stranger, shared in some measure his secret emotions, and thus was
prepared for the unexpected occurrence of a few minutes later.

No one else had the least forewarning of any break in the services. There
had been nothing in the subdued but impressive rendering of the prayers
to foreshadow a dramatic episode; yet it came, and in this manner:

The final words had been said, and the friends present invited to look
their last on the calm face which, to many there, had never worn so sweet
a smile in life. Some had hesitated; but most had obeyed the summons,
among them Sweetwater. But he had not much time in which to fix those
features in his mind; for the little girls, who had been waiting
patiently for this moment, now came forward; and he stepped aside to
watch them as they filed by, dropping as they did so, a tribute of
fragrant flowers upon the quiet breast. They were followed by the
servants, among whom Zadok had divided his roses. As the last cluster
fell from the coachman's trembling hand, the undertaker advanced with the
lid, and, pausing a moment to be sure that all were satisfied, began to
screw it on.