“I mean that the murder was not premeditated; that is my sure conviction. It was the result of a sudden frenzied impulse finding the means ready to its hand. The man had plotted, but not that. Why should he, since it meant the ruin of his visions?”
“Ah! You forget, Baron——”
“We will come to that. What I want to impress upon you at the outset is that Ridgway was at soul a gambler. Circumstance, accident, may have made him a detective: if it had made him a bishop it would have been all the same. That fire, that energy, kept under and banked down, would as surely have roared into flame the moment Fate drew out the damper. That moment came, and with it the vision. He saw in it certain hazards, leading to certain ruin or certain fortune; like a gambler he counted the cost and took the odds, since they seemed worth to him. What he failed to count on was a certain contingency which a less imaginative man than he might have foreseen—the possible treachery of a confederate.”
“And such a confederate.”
“Exactly. It was to sin most vilely against all his instinctive code; and worse—it was to stab him with a double-edged dagger.”
“I th-think I can pity him for that.”
“And so can I; and for this reason. Coolness is, or should be, the first quality of a gambler; gamblers, for that reason, do not easily fall in love. But when they do fall they fall hard, they fall headlong, they do not so much fall as plunge, as a gambler plunges, all heaven or all hell the stake. There is no doubt that Ridgway’s passion for this girl was a true gambler’s passion. To gain or lose her meant heaven or hell to him.”
“I can quite believe it, Baron. But, d-damn it! how much longer are you going to keep me on tenterhooks?”
Le Sage laughed. They had been strolling, and pausing, and strolling again, until they had approached by degrees the upper boundary of the estate, where, amid great bushes of lavender and sweet marjoram, stood a substantial thatched summer-house, cosily convenient for the view. “Let us go and sit in there,” he said, “and I will unfold my tale without further preamble.”
As he spoke a figure dodging about among the raspberry canes came into view.