“Well, no. The fact is I didn’t. I gave it, the wire, and also a letter, to a coolie porter at a station just this side of Pinetown—I forget the name—to send for me.”
Elvesdon smiled.
“That accounts for the whole trouble,” he said.
All this time he had been taking stock of the newcomer. She was of fair height, and plainly but unmistakably well dressed. She had straight features and a reposeful expression, an abundance of light brown hair, and clear grey eyes. She had just missed being exactly pretty, yet the face was an attractive one, and there was an atmosphere of refinement and savoir faire about her that left no room for doubt as to her standing in the social scale. She seemed about two or three and thirty in point of age—in reality she was not more than twenty-eight. All this he summed up in a flash, as he went through the above preliminary formalities.
“This is Dr Vine, our District Surgeon, Miss Carden,” he said in introduction. “Are you travelling alone, may I ask?”
“Yes. This time I thought I’d spring a surprise on my unknown relative, so of course I was obliged to hire a cart at Telani—the driver is such a disagreeable old man, by the bye. And the horses are wretched beasts. Why I had to stop the night at a most abominable roadside place—an accommodation house, I think they called it—presumably because ‘accommodation’ in every sense, was the very last thing they had to offer.” She laughed, so did the two men.
“Then there was a monster centipede kept appearing and disappearing on the wall above my bed, so that I had to keep the light going all night, and hardly got any sleep at all. And now one of the horses is dead lame, and I am wondering how I am going to get on to Mr Thornhill’s—unless you can help me, Mr Elvesdon.”
There was a something in the tone of this tail-off that conveyed to the listeners the impression that she was very much accustomed to being ‘helped’—in things great as well as small—and made no scruple about requisitioning such help.
“Certainly I can, Miss Carden,” answered Elvesdon. “If you will allow me I shall be delighted to drive you out to Thornhill’s this afternoon. Meanwhile it is just lunch time—if you will give me the pleasure of your company—you too, doctor? Very well then, we may as well adjourn at once.”
During lunch Elvesdon was somewhat silent. He had directed his native servants when to inspan his spider and to transfer the visitor’s baggage to that useful vehicle—further, he had arranged matters with the driver of the hired cart, an unprepossessing specimen of what would be defined in the Southern States as ‘mean white,’ and while doing so, the astounding revelation made to him by Vine had come back to him with all its full force. He did not know what to think. Thornhill seemed to him the last man in the world to commit a cold-blooded murder—and that the murder of a woman—but—what if it was a hot-blooded one? Looking back upon his observation of this new found friend he recalled a certain something that contained the possibilities of such—goaded by the weight of an intolerable incubus. And his sons believed in him and his daughter did not? Well, Elvesdon leaned to the opinion of the sons, and all his official instinct weighed on that side. There was absolutely no evidence that any crime had been effected at all, and did not the legal text-books teem with instances of disappearance for which innocent people had been executed in the ‘good old times’? Why of course. No. He at any rate was going to keep an open mind, and turn into fact the time-worn legal fiction that the accused was innocent until he was proved guilty.