Trent's Last Case (19 page)

'Your uncle is the other. I sought him out last night and told him the whole story. Have you anything against it? I always felt uneasy at keeping it from him as I did, because I had led him to expect I should tell him all I discovered, and my silence looked like mystery-making. Now it is to be cleared up finally, and there is no question of shielding you, I wanted him to know everything. He is a very shrewd adviser, too, in a way of his own; and I should like to have him with me when I see Marlowe. I have a feeling that two heads will be better than one on my side of the interview.'

She sighed. 'Yes, of course, uncle ought to know the truth. I hope there is nobody else at all.' She pressed his hand. 'I so much want all that horror buried—buried deep. I am very happy now, dear, but I shall be happier still when you have satisfied that curious mind of yours and found out everything, and stamped down the earth upon it all.' She continued her reading.

QUITE RECENTLY, HOWEVER
[the letter went on],
FACTS HAVE COME TO MY KNOWLEDGE WHICH HAVE LED ME TO CHANGE MY DECISION. I DO NOT MEAN THAT I SHALL PUBLISH WHAT I DISCOVERED, BUT THAT I HAVE DETERMINED TO APPROACH YOU AND ASK YOU FOR A PRIVATE STATEMENT. IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY WHICH WOULD PLACE THE MATTER IN ANOTHER LIGHT, I CAN IMAGINE NO REASON WHY YOU SHOULD WITHHOLD IT.

I EXPECT, THEN, TO HEAR FROM YOU WHEN AND WHERE I MAY CALL UPON YOU; UNLESS YOU PREFER THE INTERVIEW TO TAKE PLACE AT MY HOTEL. IN EITHER CASE I DESIRE THAT MR. CUPPLES, WHOM YOU WILL REMEMBER, AND WHO HAS READ THE ENCLOSED DOCUMENT, SHOULD BE PRESENT ALSO.

FAITHFULLY YOURS, PHILIP TRENT.

'What a very stiff letter!' she said. 'Now I am sure you couldn't have made it any stiffer in your own rooms.'

Trent slipped the letter and enclosure into a long envelope. 'Yes,' he said, 'I think it will make him sit up suddenly. Now this thing mustn't run any risk of going wrong. It would be best to send a special messenger with orders to deliver it into his own hands. If he's away it oughtn't to be left.'

She nodded. 'I can arrange that. Wait here for a little.'

When Mrs. Manderson returned, he was hunting through the music cabinet. She sank on the carpet beside him in a wave of dark brown skirts. 'Tell me something, Philip,' she said.

'If it is among the few things that I know.'

'When you saw uncle last night, did you tell him about—about us?'

'I did not,' he answered. 'I remembered you had said nothing about telling any one. It is for you—isn't it?—to decide whether we take the world into our confidence at once or later on.'

'Then will you tell him?' She looked down at her clasped hands. 'I wish you to tell him. Perhaps if you think you will guess why . . . . There! that is settled.' She lifted her eyes again to his, and for a time there was silence between them.

He leaned back at length in the deep chair. 'What a world!' he said. 'Mabel, will you play something on the piano that expresses mere joy, the genuine article, nothing feverish or like thorns under a pot, but joy that has decided in favor of the universe? It's a mood that can't last altogether, so we had better get all we can out of it.'

She went to the instrument and struck a few chords while she thought. Then she began to work with all her soul at the theme in the last movement of the Ninth Symphony which is like the sound of the opening of the gates of Paradise.

CHAPTER XV

Double Cunning

An old oaken desk with a deep body stood by the window in a room that overlooked St. James Park from a height. The room was large, furnished and decorated by some one who had brought taste to the work; but the hand of the bachelor lay heavy upon it. John Marlowe unlocked the desk and drew a long, stout envelope the back of the well.

'I understand,' he said to Mr. Cupples, 'that you have read this.'

'I read it for the first time two days ago,' replied Mr. Cupples, who, seated on a sofa, was peering about the room with a benignant face. 'We have discussed it fully.'

Marlowe turned to Trent. 'There is your manuscript,' he said, laying the envelope on the table. 'I have gone over it three times. I do not believe there is another man who could have got at as much of the truth as you have set down there.'

Trent ignored the compliment. He sat by the table gazing stonily at the fire, his long legs twisted beneath his chair. 'You mean, of course,' he said, drawing the envelope towards him, 'that there is more of the truth to be disclosed now. We are ready to hear you as soon as you like. I expect it will be a long story, and the longer the better, so far as I am concerned; I want to understand thoroughly. What we should both like, I think, is some preliminary account of Manderson and your relations with him. It seemed to me from the first that the character of the dead man must be somehow an element in the business.'

'You were right,' Marlowe answered grimly. He crossed the room and seated himself on a corner of the tall cushion-topped fender. 'I will begin as you suggest.'

'I ought to tell you beforehand,' said Trent, looking him in the eyes, 'that although I am here to listen to you, I have not as yet any reason to doubt the conclusions I have stated here.' He tapped the envelope. 'It is a defense that you will be putting forward—you understand that?'

'Perfectly.' Marlowe was cool and in complete possession of himself, a man different indeed from the worn-out, nervous being Trent remembered at Marlstone a year and a half ago. His tall, lithe figure was held with the perfection of muscular tone. His brow was candid, his blue eyes were clear, though they still had, as he paused collecting his ideas, the look that had troubled Trent at their first meeting. Only the lines of his mouth showed that he knew himself in a position of difficulty, and meant to face it.

'Sigsbee Manderson was not a man of normal mind,' Marlowe began in his quiet voice. 'Most of the very rich men I met with in America had become so by virtue of abnormal greed, or abnormal industry, or abnormal personal force, or abnormal luck. None of them had remarkable intellects. Manderson delighted too in heaping up wealth; he worked incessantly at it; he was a man of dominant will; he had quite his share of luck; but what made him singular was his brainpower. In his own country they would perhaps tell you that it was his ruthlessness in pursuit of his aims that was his most striking characteristic; but there are hundreds of them who would have carried out his plans with just as little consideration for others if they could have formed the plans.'

'I'm not saying Americans aren't clever; they are ten times cleverer than we are, as a nation; but I never met another who showed such a degree of sagacity and foresight, such gifts of memory and mental tenacity, such sheer force of intelligence, as there was behind everything Manderson did in his money-making career. They called him the "Napoleon of Wall Street" often enough in the papers; but few people knew so well as I did how much truth there was in the phrase. He seemed never to forget a fact that might be of use to him, in the first place; and he did systematically with the business facts that concerned him what Napoleon did, as I have read, with military facts. He studied them in special digests which were prepared for him at short intervals, and which he always had at hand, so that he could take up his report on coal or wheat or railways, or whatever it might be, in any unoccupied moment. Then he could make a bolder and cleverer plan than any man of them all. People got to know that Manderson would never do the obvious thing, but they got no further; the thing he did do was almost always a surprise, and much of his success flowed from that. The Street got rattled, as they used to put it, when known that the old man was out with his gun, and often his opponents seemed to surrender as easily as Colonel Crockett's coon in the story. The scheme I am going to describe to you would have occupied most men long enough. Manderson could have plotted the thing, down to the last detail, while he shaved himself.'

'I used to think that his strain of Indian blood, remote as it was, might have something to do with the cunning and ruthlessness of the man. Strangely enough, its existence was unknown to any one but himself and me. It was when he asked me to apply my taste for genealogical work to his own obscure family history that I made the discovery that he had in him a share of the blood of the Iroquois chief Montour and his French wife, a terrible woman who ruled the savage politics of the tribes of the Wilderness two hundred years ago. The Mandersons were active in the fur trade on the Pennsylvanian border in those days, and more than one of them married Indian women. Other Indian blood than Montour's may have descended to Manderson, for all I can say, through previous and subsequent unions; some of the wives' antecedents were quite untraceable, and there were so many generations of pioneering before the whole country was brought under civilization. My researches left me with the idea that there is a very great deal of the aboriginal blood present in the genealogical make-up of the people of America, and that it is very widely spread. The newer families have constantly intermarried with the older, and so many of them had a strain of the native in them—and were often rather proud of it, too, in those days. But Manderson had the idea about the disgracefulness of mixed blood, which grew much stronger, I fancy, with the rise of the negro question after the war. He was thunderstruck at what I told him, and was anxious to conceal it from every soul. Of course I never gave it away while he lived, and I don't think he supposed I would; but I have thought since that his mind took a turn against me from that time onward. It happened about a year before his death.'

'Had Manderson,' asked Mr. Cupples, so unexpectedly that the others started, 'any definable religious attitude?'

Marlowe considered a moment. 'None that ever I heard of,' he said. 'Worship and prayer were quite unknown to him, so far as I could see, and I never heard him mention religion. I should doubt if he had any real sense of God at all, or if he was capable of knowing God through the emotions. But I understood that as a child he had had a religious upbringing with a strong moral side to it. His private life was, in the usual limited sense, blameless. He was almost ascetic in his habits, except as to smoking. I lived with him four years without ever knowing him to tell a direct verbal falsehood, constantly as he used to practice deceit in other forms. Can you understand the soul of a man who never hesitated to take steps that would have the effect of hoodwinking people, who would use every trick of the markets to mislead, and who was at the same time scrupulous never to utter a direct lie on the most insignificant matter? Manderson was like that, and he was not the only one. I suppose you might compare the state of mind to that of a soldier who is personally a truthful man, but who will stick at nothing to deceive the enemy. The rules of the game allow it; and the same may be said of business as many business men regard it. Only with them it is always wartime.'

'It is a sad world,' observed Mr. Cupples.

'As you say,' Marlowe agreed. 'Now I was saying that one could always take Manderson's word if he gave it in a definite form. The first time I ever heard him utter a downright lie was on the night he died; and hearing it, I believe, saved me from being hanged as his murderer.'

Marlowe stared at the light above his head and Trent moved impatiently in his chair. 'Before we come to that,' he said, 'will you tell us exactly on what footing you were with Manderson during the years you were with him?'

'We were on very good terms from beginning to end,' answered Marlowe. 'Nothing like friendship—he was not a man for making friends—but the best of terms as between a trusted employee and his chief. I went to him as private secretary just after getting my degree at Oxford. I was to have gone into my father's business, where I am now, but my father suggested that I should see the world for a year or two. So I took this secretaryship, which seemed to promise a good deal of varied experience, and I had let the year or two run on to four years before the end came. The offer came to me through the last thing in the world I should have put forward as a qualification for a salaried post, and that was chess.'

At the word Trent struck his hands together with a muttered exclamation. The others looked at him in surprise.

'Chess!' repeated Trent. 'Do you know,' he said, rising and approaching Marlowe, 'what was the first thing I noted about you at our first meeting? It was your eye, Mr. Marlowe. I couldn't place it then, but I know now where I had seen your eyes before. They were in the head of no less a man than the great Nikolay Korchagin, with whom I once sat in the same railway carriage for two days. I thought I should never forget the chess eye after that, but I could not put a name to it when I saw it in you. I beg your pardon,' he ended suddenly, resuming marmoreal attitude in his chair.

'I have played the game from my childhood, and with good players,' said Marlowe simply. 'It is an hereditary gift, if you can call it a gift. At the University I was nearly as good as anybody there, and I gave most of my brains to that and the OUDS and playing about generally. At Oxford, as I dare say you know, inducements to amuse oneself at the expense of one's education are endless, and encouraged by the authorities. Well, one day toward the end of my last term, Dr. Munro of Queen's, whom I had never defeated, sent for me. He told me that I played a fairish game of chess. I said it was very good of him to say so. Then he said, "They tell me you hunt, too." I said, "Now and then." He asked, "Is there anything else you can do?" "No," I said, not much liking the tone of the conversation—the old man generally succeeded in putting people's backs up. He grunted fiercely, and then told me that enquiries were being made on behalf of a wealthy American man of business who wanted an English secretary. Manderson was the name, he said. He seemed never to have heard it before, which was quite possible, as he never opened a newspaper and had not slept a night outside the college for thirty years. If I could rub up my spelling—as the old gentleman put it—I might have a good chance for the post, as chess and riding and an Oxford education were the only indispensable points.'

'Well, I became Manderson's secretary. For a long time I liked the position greatly. When one is attached to an active American plutocrat in the prime of life one need not have many dull moments. Besides, it made me independent. My father had some serious business reverses about that time, and I was glad to be able to do without an allowance from him. At the end of the first year Manderson doubled my salary. "It's big money," he said, "but I guess I don't lose." You see, by that time I was doing a great deal more than accompany him on horseback in the morning and play chess in the evening, which was mainly what he had required. I was attending to his houses, his farm in Ohio, his shooting in Maine, his horses, his cars, and his yacht. I had become a walking railway-guide and an expert cigar-buyer. I was always learning something.'

'Well, now you understand what my position was in regard to Manderson during the last two or three years of my connection with him. It was a happy life for me on the whole. I was busy, my work was varied and interesting; I had time to amuse myself too, and money to spend. At one time I made a fool of myself about a girl, and that was not a happy time; but it taught me to understand the great goodness of Mrs. Manderson.' Marlowe inclined his head to Mr. Cupples as he said this. 'She may choose to tell you about it. As for her husband, he had never varied in his attitude towards me, in spite of the change that came over him in the last months of his life, as you know. He treated me well and generously in his unsympathetic way, and I never had a feeling that he was less than satisfied with his bargain—that was the sort of footing we lived upon. And it was that continuance of his attitude right up to the end that made the revelation so shocking when I was suddenly shown, on the night on which he met his end, the depth of crazy hatred of myself that was in Manderson's soul.'

The eyes of Trent and Mr. Cupples met for an instant.

'You never suspected that he hated you before that time?' asked Trent; and Mr. Cupples asked at the same moment, 'To what did you attribute it?'

'I never guessed until that night,' answered Marlowe, 'that he had the smallest ill-feeling toward me. How long it had existed I do not know. I cannot imagine why it was there. I was forced to think, when I considered the thing in those awful days after his death, that it was a case of a madman's delusion, that he believed me to be plotting against him, as they so often do. Some such insane conviction must have been at the root of it. But who can sound the abysses of a lunatic's fancy? Can you imagine the state of mind in which a man dooms himself to death with the object of delivering some one he hates to the hangman?'

Mr. Cupples moved sharply in his chair. 'You say Manderson was responsible for his own death?' he asked.

Trent glanced at him with an eye of impatience, and resumed his intent watch upon the face of Marlowe. In the relief of speech it was now less pale and drawn.

'I do say so,' Marlowe answered concisely, and looked his questioner in the face. Mr. Cupples nodded.

'Before we proceed to the elucidation of your statement,' observed the old gentleman, in a tone of one discussing a point of abstract science, 'it may be remarked that the state of mind which you attribute to Manderson—'

'Suppose we have the story first,' Trent interrupted, gently laying a hand on Mr. Cupples's arm. 'You were telling us,' he went on, turning to Marlowe, 'how things stood between you and Manderson. Now you tell us the facts of what happened that night?'