Weary of myself, and sick of asking
What I am, and what I ought to be....
came into his brain, and gloomily he repeated them half aloud. Would Monimé marry him? Or would she, too, find him impossible? What a mess he had made of his life! Perhaps Dolly had been justified in her dislike of him.
With such thoughts as these he at last fell off to sleep.
Next morning, after breakfast, he picked up a newspaper in the smoking-room, and for some minutes read the foreign news without much interest. Then suddenly a set of headlines caught his attention, and caused him to sit up, aghast, in his chair. The printed words swayed before his eyes as he read the appalling news.
“Last night,” the story began, “the body of Mrs. Dorothy Tundering-West, widow of the late James Tundering-West, of the Manor, Eversfield, near Oxford, was found in a wood adjoining the grounds of the Manor. The back of the skull was smashed in, probably by a blow from a large stone which was found near by with bloodstains upon it. Mrs. West had been missing since four o’clock in the afternoon, and medical evidence indicates that death must have occurred at about that hour....”
With desperate haste his eyes travelled down the column. There was no doubt that she had been murdered, said the report, but the thick carpeting of damp leaves upon the ground had retained no impression of the offender’s footprints. She was lying on her face, and a second wound upon her forehead was probably caused by her fall. The motive was not apparent, for there had been no robbery, and there were no signs of a struggle.
The police, he read, attached some significance to the presence of a man of foreign appearance who was seen in the early afternoon picking berries from a hedge in the neighbourhood. In this connection it was recalled that Mr. Tundering-West had died by the hand of an assassin in Italy only a few months ago, and it was possible that the two crimes were both the outcome of some secret vendetta. What had induced the unfortunate lady to go into the woods was a mystery, and perhaps indicated that she had been lured to her doom.
Jim’s first emotions were those of extreme horror at the crime, and pity for Dolly. The manner of her death appalled him; and though he was not conscious of any binding relationship to her, the catastrophe of her murder swept across his being like a fierce wind, as it were, uprooting the plantations of his overstocked brain, or like a breaking wave thundering on to the shingle of his multitudinous thoughts.
It was fortunate that he was alone in the smoking-room, for his agitation was such that his exclamations were uttered audibly, and soon he was pacing the floor, the newspaper crumpled in his hand. It seemed to be his fate that the crises of his life should be announced to him through the columns of the daily Press. In this manner he had read of his inheritance, of his supposed murder at Pisa, and now of the death of his wife. It was as though roguish powers had selected him as a victim on whom thus to spring surprises.