CHAPTER XV.

RECOUNTS PAUL’S DEFEAT

Again there was silence in that rustic arbour, broken only by the sighing of the wind amidst the trees and the soft splash of the waves as they rolled against the cliffs of clay that mark the boundary of the Yorkshire coast between Filey and Scarborough. This time it was Paul Renishaw who had to think deeply of the problem under discussion--to think too, free from any personal bitterness against the millionaire, to bring as it were an open but also a keen, alert mind to a consideration of Josiah Sawdry’s astounding story, so that he could dissect the man’s tale for himself, and see where it appeared truthful and where it might be, however cleverly framed, unreliable or false.

The Jew himself now seemed little concerned about the issue. For his part, he had placed his cards fully, frankly, and freely on the table; he was no longer a player; it rested with the journalist to make use of his hand, or to throw it on one side as useless. Leaning back there, however, puffing his pipe and immersed in a maze of hazy speculation, he was none the less conscious of the quick scrutiny to which Paul now and again subjected him, but oddly enough, these rapid surveys, which would have offended the pride of some men to such a pitch that they would have risen and protested hotly against them, caused him no confusion. Somehow he seemed to recognise that he stood in a parlous position in this matter of the murder of Aimée Blake--half-way, as it were, between the prosecution and the prisoner--at that moment untrusted by either side, but both equally sincere in their anxiety to turn him to their own account.

At length Paul sighed deeply, and roused himself from his reverie.

“I must admit,” he said, “that you have given me a bit of a shock, and almost enough food for speculation to last me a twelve month. Your story, of course, is plausible enough, particularly as you tell it with the background of your own blunders, your own failures, your own lurid experiences to get money somehow, anyhow, but at all events to get rich.

“At first sight, too, those points of yours about the disappearance at the time of the crime, and this discovery of the gold link and the insane desire for revenge--they are in a way conclusive, and one is tempted to jump at them, and to adopt them as the main clues in the future investigations. At the same time I am sure you will yourself admit there are some very extraordinary incongruities--to use no stronger term--in this theory that must sooner or later be accounted for. First and foremost I should like to ask you to explain how could a woman of the type of Rebecca Charlton personate a man of refinement and wealth of the stamp of Arthur Hudson?”

“Not easily, I admit, if she were an ordinary person,” retorted Sawdry, speaking in a quiet level tone as though he had no real concern in the issue of that conversation. “Only you have strangely misconceived my words if you think Rebecca is in any way normal. First, unlike her sisters, she is tall, fair, good figure, with bright blue eyes and a strong expressive face. Then for some reason or other--she may indeed have done it herself--her hair was clipped quite close, like a man’s, in the asylum. Ever since I knew her, she affected masculine traits, and not once, but scores of times before she was married, she played men’s parts in the private theatricals which the Kaufmanns used to get up in their own homes! Her presentation of young men about town, indeed, was almost perfect. She studied them first hand--and there wasn’t a characteristic trick of any of her subjects she couldn’t mimic either with natural complacency or quite a grotesque spirit of fun.”

“Well, I will concede that point--and now we come to another and, to my mind, a more difficult question. It is this: How could an office-cleaner like she was, admittedly disowned by her relatives, earning at the most not more than twelve or fifteen shillings a week, how could she get the money to procure a wig and other materials for disguise, to travel to Scarborough, to take a room here, and then in one wild burst at the end, hand out five hundred pounds to the telegraph-clerk, Drummond, on some wild cock and bull story as to the secret of tapping the Post-office wires?”

“But did she do that?”

“Certainly, she did. The man swore to it in his evidence at the police court this morning.”

“Of that I am perfectly aware--but that is not what I refer to. I asked, was it she who gave Drummond that five hundred pounds?”

“If she came down here, personated Hudson and murdered Aimée Blake as you assert,--then she did it, there can be no question,” returned Paul, rather nettled at finding himself suddenly the subject of cross-examination. “To me, it is as clear as daylight.”

“I am sorry,” answered Sawdry softly, “that it is not quite so obvious to me. In the first place, you must recollect that Drummond specifically swore that Arthur Hudson was not the man he had that encounter with, and hence, if Rebecca Charlton were got up to resemble Arthur Hudson, then he didn’t either have that scene with the person we are speaking of. In the second place, Drummond said quite frankly he thought the person he spoke to was a madman escaped from a York Asylum. Now have the police troubled to enquire whether a patient with possibilities of wealth has recently escaped from any of the York Asylums? Not a bit of it. They waved it aside, because it might prove an inconvenient clue--and yet it might supply the gist of the telegraph-tapping mystery and cut off Drummond’s evidence at one stroke, for understand, there are several important private asylums at York in which are taken very rich patients. In the third and last place, you must ask yourself what motive had Rebecca Charlton for troubling her distracted brain about the Post-office at all: and also that, knowing she was a woman and enmeshed in a disguise that any moment might be pierced, was it likely she would run the risk of attacking a powerfully-built and determined-looking man like this telegraph clerk?”

“She was mad. She would do anything,” observed Paul stolidly. “The commission of a brutal murder like that was sufficient to dethrone her reason absolutely, and to send it careering wildly through space. So that she would seize on the first object that attracted her gaze--in this case the telegraph wires running alongside of the road.”

“Well, I will concede you that victory,” said the Jew, suddenly shifting his ground. “We will say you are prepared to believe Rebecca might have done the deed if you had satisfactory evidence that she could gain possession of a big sum over five hundred pounds. At this moment you contend the assertion is preposterous, simply because she was a poor cleaner of City offices, earning at the most not more than twelve or fifteen shillings a week.”

“I do; I don’t see how you can get over it.”

“That is because you will not look deep enough,” retorted Sawdry quietly and confidently. “Clear your mind for a second of all prejudice, and consider in an unbiased way the trust that most merchants and solicitors place in the women who clean their office. As a matter of fact, in the best regulated establishments in the City of London it is impossible to lock everything up. A great deal of property, millions of pounds worth of property I should think, is bound to be left within reach of these poorly-paid, half-starved creatures. More than that, reflect how the best managers and assistants are not perfect--how a moment of blank forgetfulness overtakes the wisest, the cleverest, the most trusted of us! Then ask yourself quite seriously if it may not have been possible for Rebecca Charlton to have found the safe or cash-box open one morning early when she went to clean one of the offices entrusted to her charge--whether the sight of so much wealth may not have suggested to her: ‘Ah! here at last are the means of gratifying the revenge I have hugged to myself all those weary years of confinement in an asylum.’ Surely, I assert, there is nothing wonderful in the fact that she might have seized the chance so offered and have gone off to Scarborough, careless of what happened so long as she met Aimée Blake and extracted ‘a life for a life’!”

Paul paused for a few seconds and pondered deeply. Then he nodded his head. “It is quite possible I admit,” he said. “Almost thou persuadest me to believe it was not Ventris Blake who did the deed after all, but this woman Charlton.”

“My entire future depends on the truth of what I have stated,” added Sawdry. “If I prove to be wrong I am doubly unfortunate, for I shall have offended the millionaire beyond redemption, and I shall have missed my way entirely with you and Mr. Hudson.”

“Well, I have a certain amount of opportunity of learning even more about the Charltons than you can tell me,” said Paul guardedly. “As it happens, Mr. Hudson has already got certain suspicions of them, and so, before he was arrested, he set a firm of private detectives to work on their past and present proceedings. As a consequence, to-morrow morning I shall receive a report from this agency as to what they have done of late. If it confirms what you have stated, I am not sure we should not act on your information.”

“Unfortunately, to-morrow morning may be too late,” replied the man. “Look here. I received this telegram just as I left Scarborough.” And he pushed his band into his pocket and handed Paul a telegram.

“There is not a minute to spare,” he said.

The telegram itself however seemed frank enough. It had been, it appeared, despatched by the man Charlton to Sawdry’s private address at Islington, from whence it had been re-transmitted to the Grand Hotel, Scarborough, and it set out:--

“The wife been gone some days now. This morning she writes to me from The Retreat, Scalby, just three miles out of Scarborough. Begs me to forgive her. Says she has come into a fortune. Will you go and see her about it to-morrow afternoon certain, as it will pay you? Depend on me to pay expenses.

Charlton.”

Paul read and re-read this message several times before he vouchsafed any remark. There were a good many things about it that were not very clear, particularly the reference to the fortune, and the request that Sawdry, and not her own husband should go and look after the woman. But, apart from those defects, the story, such as it was, seemed reasonable enough.

“At all events,” said Paul quite frankly, “this will give me a very good opportunity of testing what you have told me. I’ll own at once I am impressed by it, but not convinced.”

“At present you don’t know how far you dare trust me,” put in the man, rising and shrugging his shoulders. “I quite understand that. You can’t forget that I stole your watch: I came here at the bidding of your arch enemy, Ventris Blake; I have gone about under a false name and description, as Silas Q. Pinkerton, the great New York detective. Were I in your place, I should feel very much as you feel.”

“Indeed you would,” answered the journalist, “and I will tell you the reason. Because it was not your own piece of mind, your own innocence, or your own security you were fighting for! You see, I am here in Scarborough as the one reliable friend and representative of that poor fellow who has been so unjustly arrested and detained in the local police-station here, on the gravest of charges--murder. Any mistake I make now I shall not pay for--he will. A slip on my part, a failure to stick to the right track, a waste of precious time on a wild-goose chase--and he may be brought up at York Assizes and condemned to death before I could lift one little finger to help him--I, the one man in the wide world whom he has trusted to vindicate his good name and to save him.”

“I quite appreciate the gravity of the situation,” replied the Jew earnestly, knocking the ashes out of the bowl of his pipe and giving Paul a steady straightforward look. “Indeed, that is why I have not tried to force your hand unduly; and I am sure if you quietly review the conversation we have just had, you will see that all through I have tried to be scrupulously fair to yourself.”

“There is, however, one other question I should like to put to you before we return to the town,” proceeded Paul, rising too and walking by the side of Sawdry in the direction of the market gardener’s gate. “It is this. You know, of course, that Arthur Hudson is alleged to have married Aimée Blake at the Registry Office at Peterborough. Do you believe he did so?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you believe that he had any part, or lot, or knowledge of that ceremony?”

“I am sure he had not.”

“Then who was the scoundrel who got himself up to resemble him, made use of his name, and passed himself off as the genuine man?”

“I don’t know, I only wish I did,” replied Sawdry. “As I told you when I started my story to you this afternoon, my first idea when I got to know Blake was to blackmail him. Oddly enough too, I discovered about this marriage of his wife’s to Hudson; and read some private memoranda in a diary of the millionaire’s that suggested the whole affair was a gigantic imposture--but never could I get farther than that. In the course of my inquiries into the mystery, however, I picked up with the Charltons, but, press how I would, tempt how I would, I could never persuade Rebecca to say one word on the subject. Indeed, whenever I mentioned it to her, her face would go ghastly pale and she looked, as no doubt she really felt, absolutely terrified.”

“But do you think that she really learned who it was who was pretending to be Hudson?”

“I am certain she did. Once I got her so far as to tell me she could make ten thousand pounds any day she cared to open her mouth about it, but she dared not for fear of the consequences!”

“Why? She was very poor. She had little to lose.”

“True, that was another thing about her I could not make out. Put in a corner, she would almost always relapse into a kind of gibberish, out of which I could make nothing coherent except the words: ‘Three Glass Eyes.’ It was in vain I tried to chaff her and to say, why ‘three,’ why ‘glass,’ and whose ‘eyes’? At those times she seemed to have a kind of shivering fit of horror, and, if I carried the joke too far, she would go into convulsions--froth at the mouth--and finish with a long spell of insensibility.”

Paul, who had seen something of those three terrible moving eyes in operation in the millionaire’s garret did not wonder at the poor creature’s terror, particularly when he recalled the awful effect a glimpse of them had had on her own sister, Eleanor Kaufmann. Nevertheless he said nothing of his weird experiences with them to Sawdry, but once again attacked the critical point in dispute:--“Could, or could not, they hope to get the information as to the man who carried off the sham marriage now Rebecca Charlton was away from London and apparently out of the radius of Ventris Blake’s baleful influence?”

The Jew thought a moment before he answered. Then he raised his head and his face brightened. “Honestly,” said he, “I think we can get it. Let us frighten her with a story that her husband has been suspected of it, and has been arrested for it. Nothing else on this earth, I am sure, would force her to speak, but that will--for, blackguard though he is, she still recognises that she is married to him, and owes him certain duties as his wife.”

“Very well,” replied Paul firmly, “we will go to her after I have called at my hotel and settled up with my news-lads.”

They turned into the high road and set their faces northward, but they had not proceeded many yards before they were conscious of the hurried tramp of many feet in their direction, and all at once there burst into view a howling mob of men and boys who immediately they caught sight of them, doubled their speed and redoubled their cries.

“What the deuce can have happened?” queried the Jew anxiously, for his conscience, not being of the easiest, was ever a prey to a thousand unformed apprehensions. “Can your friend Hudson have escaped--”

“Or been set free?” corrected Paul, his own face flushed with excitement.

“Or can Rebecca Charlton have been found by the police, and have made a full confession of the murder?” suggested Sawdry, nervously increasing his speed.

Luckily, he had not long to wait for an answer to his question. Just then the breathless leaders of the crowd arrived, dragging a small newsboy, aged about twelve, along with them.

“The Notes! The Notes!” they cried, shrill with pleasurable anticipation. “This youngster has done the trick. Here are the Notes. Five hundred pounds worth as promised. Congratulate you, sir. Where is the reward?”

Paul promptly produced a five pound Bank of England note and handed it to the youngster, also the crown he had promised him for taking part originally in the search. Then, yielding to the hint of a bystander he cordially passed over a sovereign wherewith the crowd generally might have the opportunity of drinking his health and the poor prisoner’s health, and of also wishing him good luck. A few minutes later the whole of the newsboys he had borrowed from the _Scarborough Daily Post_ office arrived on the scene. They had heard too that the notes had been found and given over to their temporary employer, and all they cared about now was to draw their own payments, which they did, and to hasten pell-mell back to the town to take up the “special murder edition” which was awaiting their return.

Paul himself carefully bestowed the precious bundle of notes, having previously counted them, inside his breast pocket and buttoned up his coat. Josiah Sawdry watched him do this in silence, but as they fell into step again, he turned and asked his companion what he intended to do with them.

“Why, take them up to London and trace the Bank they were paid from, and the person they were paid to, of course,” rejoined Paul, his heart beating with pleasurable anticipation of the chase.

“I shouldn’t if I were you,” said Sawdry quietly. “It would only be a waste of time!”

“Why--how--what do you mean?” spluttered Paul.

“Well, first of all, the police of Scarborough could claim them and take them from you? No doubt, when they hear of the find they will, for they are most valuable material evidence, and they don’t even belong to you. Now why not make a virtue of necessity and let them have them? After all, they are bound to handle the matter honestly, and to find out who got them--where they came from--and what the original owner was doing with them in so large a sum. Any evidence they get on these points will be more valuable than any you could procure, for theirs will be held to be fairly impartial, whereas, at the best, yours must be _ex parte_. As a matter of fact, you can much better employ your time looking up Rebecca Charlton. I have a great idea as to the wonderful results that will accrue from this visit of ours. Hence don’t let us waste any time, but let us go to her at once.”

Paul hesitated--but all the same the Hebrew had won.

As a consequence the notes were forwarded to the Chief Constable of Scarborough by the first policeman they met, when they reached Ramshill Road; and then these two oddly assorted companions turned off the South Cliff, and made their way as rapidly as they could across the Valley to Scalby.