The next day was a Sunday, but the Chief Inspector arranged that Russell should send off a wire to Mrs. Erskine breaking the news to her that an accident had happened to Robert in London, followed by another telling her that the accident had been fatal. By the afternoon they had the reply from Nice: “Starting at once. Erskine.” On Monday morning, however, came another cable from Mrs. Erskine, this time from Paris: “Ill. Doctor forbids journey.” It was sent from the Gare St. Lazare station. Mr. Russell and Pointer set out the same day for the French capital. It was to Mr. Russell, naturally, that the task of telling the mother the facts about her son's death fell. In any case Pointer would have seen to it that the man who knew only the general outline should be the tale bearer. He saw no good in harrowing Mrs. Erskine's feelings prematurely with an account of the wardrobe and the police certainty of foul play.
He walked about Paris the morning after his arrival, wondering, as so often before, at the city's reputation for beauty. Charming in parts, yes, but—to his mind—its general reputation rested on “mass suggestion,” so unspeakably dreary and sordid did he always find the greater part of it. The cafés with their comfortless chairs and tables at which people drank weirdly coloured drinks, of which—still according to him—the less said the better, were a back number compared with a London tea-room. He was glad when eleven struck, and he was shown into Mrs. Erskine's great bedroom. A thin figure, almost lost among her pillows on the couch, held out a trembling hand. Its chill told him how greatly Russell's story had drained the mother's vitality. He murmured some words of regret as he took a chair. The son had evidently inherited his mother's general air of pallor, and he saw where the young man had got his one peaked eyebrow from. The Abercrombie eyebrow, as Mr. Russell had called it. Mrs. Erskine had it very markedly, and its unlikeness to its fellow lifted her pale face out of the commonplace.
“Mr. Russell has just told me”—her voice was rather flat and toneless,—“all the details. I can't quite grasp what has happened yet, my only child. . . .”
Again he murmured a sentence of sympathy. “I wouldn't dream of intruding, madame,” he said earnestly, “but we want to clear up the motive for what has happened. Had Mr. Robert Erskine ever spoken of putting an end to his life before?”
Mrs. Erskine did not answer for a moment or two. When she did it was with a visible effort. The Chief Inspector guessed what it must cost an evidently reserved woman to lay bare her lack of any affection from her son. “Not exactly . . . but my unhappy son did not find in life all he hoped from it, I fear. He liked gaiety—as youth always does,—and perhaps . . . life disappointed him. His letters—he wrote infrequently, naturally, his very popularity left him little time for writing—his letters seemed to me to show but little real happiness.”
“Ah! his letters! May I see them?”
“Oh, I couldn't! My son's letters to me? Oh, no!” She shook her head resolutely, but he insisted, pointing out in his kindest way that the matter could not rest where it was, that some motive must have lain behind that draught of morphia, and that the letters might furnish the explanation. All of which was strictly true. Mrs. Erskine looked at him tragically.
“I cannot do it! I canna!” she whispered brokenly, but finally he persuaded her to draw out from under her cushion a leather pocket-book.
“Don't—don't misjudge him,” she pleaded earnestly, looking away. “He was a good son and loved me, but it's not easy for a lad to put his love into words, is it?”
Certainly Robert Erskine had made but little effort in that direction. The letters were only those of the current year, with the exception of his last Christmas letter. Each was the barest of prefaces to a demand for money to pay some pressing debt. In one he apparently half-shamefacedly had added that the devil only knew where all his own money went to. In another, evidently in answer to some suggestion of his mother about living with an object in view, was a caustic line as to the differing estimates put on objects by an old lady and a young man; as for himself, he added candidly, it was to “squeeze the most out of this rotten show.”