Although her husband had treated her so badly, she had yielded to his earnest entreaties to conceal her identity and continue to pass as a man. She spoke and wrote English fluently, although he had made her promise not to let this fact be known.
Such was the story she told, and there was no doubt it was substantially correct. She considered that she had managed the crime so well that suspicion would never rest upon her, and, having carried out her deed of awful vengeance, she would be able to return to her own sun-scorched land.
That she would have succeeded in this was likely enough had Peter Brodie not been brought upon the scene. He had worked out the problem line by line, and at last, when it struck him that if Balfour was murdered he must have been murdered in Chunda’s room, he proceeded to examine the floor carefully on the night when he asked Jarvis to keep Chunda in conversation for half an hour. That examination revealed unmistakable traces of blood on the boards. Then it occurred to him that, as the house was an old one, it was more than likely there was some secret closet or recess in which the body had been hidden.
Chunda had evidently been well educated. In a postscript to her confession she said that, out of the great love she bore the man who had so cruelly deceived her, she had, at his suggestion, consented to pass herself off as his servant. He had assured her that it would only be for a short time, and that when he had his affairs settled, and sold his property, he would go back with her to India, and they would live in regal splendour to the end of their days.
That she loved him was pretty certain. That he shamefully deceived her was no less certain; and that love of hers, and that deception, afforded some palliation for her bloodthirsty deed of vengeance.
For some time after the double crime Corbie Hall remained desolate and lonely. It was now looked upon as a doubly-accursed place, and nobody could be found who would take it, so at last it was razed to the ground, and is known no more.
In pulling it down it was discovered that in Balfour’s room was a secret panel corresponding to the one in the next room, and that the stone stairs had at one time led to a subterraneous passage, which had an opening somewhere in Blackford Glen. It had no doubt originally been constructed to afford the inmates of the house means of escape in the stormy times when the building was first reared.
THE END.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.