“It’s a risk,” said he. “The doctor told me to be careful not to excite you too much. But suspense is always more intolerable than certainty, and you have heard too much to be left in ignorance of the rest.”
“Yes, yes,” I agreed feverishly, pressing his hand.
“It all came about through you,” he blundered on. “You told me of the fellow you saw riding away from The Whispering Pines at the time you entered the grounds. I passed the story on to the coroner, and he to a New York detective they have put on this case. He and Arthur’s own surly nature did the rest.”
I cringed where I lay. This was my work. The person who drove out of the club-house grounds while I stood in the club-house hall was Carmel—and the clew I had given, instead of baffling and confusing them, had led directly to Arthur!
Seeing nothing peculiar—or at all events, giving no evidence of having noted anything peculiar in my movement—Clifton went evenly on, pouring into my astonished ears the whole long story of this detective’s investigations.
I heard of his visit at the mechanic’s cottage and of the identification of the hat marked by Eliza Simmons’s floury thumb, with an old one of Arthur’s, fished out from one of the Cumberland closets; then, as I lay dumb, in my secret dismay and perturbation, of Arthur’s acknowledged visit to the club-house, and his abstraction of the bottles, which to all minds save my own, perhaps, connected him directly and well-nigh unmistakably, with the crime.
“The finger of God! Nothing else. Such coincidences cannot be natural,” was my thought. And I braced myself to meet the further disclosures I saw awaiting me.
But when these disclosures were made, and Arthur’s conduct at the funeral was given its natural explanation by the finding of the tell-tale ring in Adelaide’s casket, I was so affected, both by the extraordinary nature of the facts and the doubtful position in which they seemed to place one whom, even now, I found it difficult to believe guilty of Adelaide’s death, that Clifton, aroused, in spite of his own excitement, to a sudden realisation of my condition, bounded to his feet and impetuously cried out:
“I had to tell you. It was your due and you would not have been satisfied if I had not. But I fear that I rushed my narrative too suddenly upon you; that you needed more preparation, and that the greatest kindness I can show you now, is to leave before I do further mischief.”
I believe I answered. I know that his idea of leaving was insupportable to me. That I wanted him to stay until I had had time to think and adjust myself to these new conditions. Instinctively, I did not feel as certain of Arthur’s guilt as he did. My own case had taught me the insufficiency of circumstantial evidence to settle a mooted fact. Besides, I knew Arthur even better than I did his sisters. He was as full of faults, and as lacking in amiable and reliable traits as any fellow of my acquaintance. But he had not the inherent snap which makes for crime. He lacked the vigour which,—God forgive me the thought!—lay back of Carmers softer characteristics. I could not imagine him guilty; I could, for all my love, imagine his sister so, and did. The conviction would not leave my mind.