Part 41 (1/2)

”Why can't you wait until he's through?” Wilton objected roughly.

They heard people coming down the hall. Lucille, following Mrs. Brace into the room, went to her father. They could see, from her look of grieved wonder, that Hastings had told her of the charge against Wilton.

The sheriff's expression confirmed the supposition. His mouth hung open, so that the unsteady fingers with which he plucked at his knuckle like chin appeared also to support his fallen jaw. He made a weak-kneed progress from the door to a chair near the screened fireplace.

For a full half-minute Hastings was silent, as if to let the doubts and suspense of each member of the group emphasize his dominance of the situation. He reviewed swiftly some of the little things he had used to build up in his own mind the certainty of Wilton's guilt: the man's agitation in the music room at the discovery, not that a part of the grey envelope had been found, but that it contained some of the words of the letter--his obvious alarm when found quarrelling with Mrs. Brace in his office--his hardly controlled impulses: once, outside Sloane's bedroom, to accuse Berne Webster without proof, and, on the Sloanehurst porch last Sunday, to suggest that Sloane was guilty.

The detective observed now that he absolutely ignored Mrs. Brace, not even looking in her direction. He perceived also how she reacted to that a.s.sumed indifference. The tightening of her lips, the flutter of her mobile nostrils, left him no longer any doubt that she was in the mood to give him the cooperation she had so bitterly promised.

”To be dragged down by such a woman!” he thought.

”Mrs. Brace,” he said, ”I've charged Judge Wilton with the murder of your daughter. I say now he killed her, with premeditation, having planned it after receiving a letter from her.”

”Yes?” she responded, a certain tenseness in her voice.

She had gone to a chair by the window; and, like the sheriff, she faced the trio at the table: Wilton, Sloane, and Lucille, who stood behind her father, a hand on his shoulder.

Hastings slowly paced the floor as he talked, his hands clasped behind him and now and then moving the tail of his coat up and down. He glanced at Mrs. Brace over the rims of his spectacles, his eyes shrewd and keen.

He showed an unmistakable self-satisfaction, like the elation Wilton had detected in his bearing on two former occasions.

”Now,” he asked her, ”what can you tell us about that letter?”

Wilton, his chest pressed so hard against the edge of the table that his breathing moved his body, turned his swollen face upon her at last, his eyes flaming under the thatch of his down-drawn brows.

Mrs. Brace, her high-shouldered, lean frame silhouetted against the window, began, in a colourless, unemotioned tone:

”As you know, Mr. Hastings, I thought this man Wilton owed me money, more than money. I'd looked for him for twenty-six years. Less than a year ago I located him here in Virginia, and I came to Was.h.i.+ngton. He refused my requests. Then, he stopped reading my letters--sent them back unopened at first; later, he destroyed them unread, I suppose.”

She cleared her throat lightly, and spoke more rapidly. The intensity of her hate, in spite of her power of suppression, held them in a disagreeable fascination.

”I was afraid of him, afraid to confront him alone. I'd seen him kill a man. But I was in desperate need. I thought, if my daughter could talk to him, he would be brought to do the right thing. I suppose,” she said with a wintry smile, ”you'd call it an attempt to blackmail--if he had let it go far enough.

”She wrote him a letter, on grey paper, and sent it, in an oblong, grey envelope, to him here at Sloanehurst last Friday night. He got it Sat.u.r.day afternoon. If he hadn't received it, he'd never have been out on the lawn--with a dagger he'd made for the occasion--at eleven or eleven-fifteen, which was the time Mildred said in her letter she'd see him there. She had added that, if he did not keep the appointment, she'd expose him--his crime in Pursuit.”

”I see,” Hastings said, on the end of her cold, metallic utterance, and took from his pocket the flap of grey envelope. ”Is this the flap of that envelope; or, better still, are these fragments of words and the word 'Pursuit' in your daughter's handwriting?”

”I've examined them already,” she said. ”They are my daughter's writing.”

Her lips were suddenly thick, taking on that appearance of abnormal wetness which had so revolted him before.

”And I say what you've just said!” she supplemented, her eyebrows high upon her forehead. ”Tom Wilton killed my daughter. And, when I went to his office--I was sure then that he'd be afraid to harm me so soon after Mildred's death--I accused him of the murder. He took it with a laugh.

He said I could look at it as a warning that----”

”Wait!”

The interruption came from Wilton.

”I'm going to make a statement about this thing!” he ground out, his voice coa.r.s.e and rasping.

Hastings hung upon him with relentless gaze.