The Moon Rock

by Arthur J. Rees

It was from Mrs. Pendleton that Mr. Brimsdown gained his first real knowledge of the drama of strange events surrounding Robert Turold’s death. In response to his call at the hotel she came down from her room fingering his card nervously, her eyes reddened with weeping, and an air of tremulous bewilderment about her which sat ill on her massive personality.

The lawyer greeted her with formal courtesy. He was newly shaved and bathed, his linen was spotless, and his elderly grey eyes looked out with alert watchfulness on a world of trickery.

“As your late brother’s legal adviser for many years, I felt it incumbent upon me to come down,” he said, fixing a grave glance on the distracted lady before him. “It seemed to me that I might be of some use, perhaps, assistance. That is the object of my call.”

The fact that she had not seen Mr. Brimsdown before did not lessen the hysterical gratitude with which Mrs. Pendleton received this piece of information. The events of the last forty-eight hours had shaken her badly. Her brother’s tragic death, and the terrible suspicion which enveloped Sisily, had stripped her of her strength, and left her with a feminine longing to cast her burden on a man’s shoulders. She had discovered to her dismay that a husband who has been snubbed and kept under for twenty years is apt to prove a thing of straw when a woman likes to feel that the male sex was devised by Providence to take the wheel from female hands if the barque of life drifts on the breakers. But Mr. Pendleton had revealed no latent capacity to play the part of the strong man at the helm in the crisis. He had shown himself a craven and kept out of the way, leaving his wife to her own resources. The appearance of Mr. Brimsdown was as timely to her as the arrival of a heaven-sent pilot in a storm.

“Thank you,” she murmured incoherently. “Such a dreadful end. Poor dear Robert.” She sobbed into her handkerchief.

“A deplorable loss to his family—and England,” assented the lawyer. “I am glad to see you. They ascertained your address for me at the hotel where I am staying. I have been resting after travelling all night, and I shall go and see the police in the morning. So far I have only read the reports in the London evening papers, and there may be intimate particulars which were not disclosed to the press. If such exist, perhaps you will impart them to me. You need not hesitate to disclose to me all you know. Your late brother honoured me with his confidence for nearly thirty years.” Mr. Brimsdown coughed discreetly.

His tone invited confidences which Mrs. Pendleton, in her perplexity of spirit, was only too anxious to impart to a sympathetic ear. Mr. Brimsdown, sitting stiffly upright, his eyes fixed on a portrait of Royalty glimmering inanely down at them through a dirty glass frame on the opposite wall, listened with unmoved front. Yet the story had its surprises, even for him. Not the least of them was the fact that Mrs. Pendleton’s description of her niece tallied with the appearance of the girl whose identity he had tried to recall at Paddington. He was chagrined to think he had failed to recognize his late client’s daughter, but he recalled that it was ten years since he had seen Sisily, who was then a dark-eyed little girl. At Norfolk. Oh, yes! he remembered her readily enough now, playing innocently about some forgotten tombstones in a deserted graveyard on a wild grey coast, while her father wrested savagely with the dead for his heritage. Strange that he should have met her again at the moment of her flight, when he was setting out for Cornwall in response to her dead father’s letter! Life had such ironical mischances.

He said nothing of this chance encounter, or of Robert Turold’s letter, to the dead man’s sister who was now pouring out her fears and suspicions to him. He was a receptacle into which confidences might be emptied, but he gave nothing in return. Mrs. Pendleton did not need that. Her state of mind compelled her to speak, and her impulsiveness hurried her along on the high tide of a flood of words. The story she had to tell oppressed her listener with the sense of some great unknown horror. It was like trying to see a dark place by lightning. The flashes of her revelations revealed a distorted surface, but not the hidden depths. Mrs. Pendleton’s agitated mind, doubling in and out a maze of conjectures like a distracted hare, turned again and again to the question of Sisily’s complicity in her father’s death.

“I can hardly believe it even now,” she said with a shudder. “Such a sweet pretty girl! And yet—there was something strange in her manner. I remarked it to Joseph—my husband—before this happened.” She pressed her handkerchief to her eyes.

The lawyer, with a sideways glance at the Royal portrait opposite, which seemed in the act of smiling blandly at his companion’s grief, reflected, soberly enough, that sweet and pretty girls were as human as the rest of creation, if it came to that.