In the Mayor's Parlour

by J. S. Fletcher

He turned at the foot of River Gate into Farthing Lane, the long, winding, tree-bordered alley that ran beneath the edge of the town past the outer fringe of houses, the alley wherein Hawthwaite had witnessed the nocturnal meeting between Mrs. Elstrick and Krevin Crood. Brent remembered that as he hastened along, running between the trees on one side and the high walls of the gardens on the other. But he gave no further thought to the recollection—his brain was not yet fully recovered from the shock of Krevin Crood's last words, and it was obsessed by a single idea: that of gaining the garden entrance of the Abbey House and confronting the woman whom Krevin had formally denounced as the murderer of Wallingford. And as he hurried along he found himself saying certain words over and over again, and still again....

"I'm not going to see a woman hang!—I'm not going to see a woman hang! I'm ... not ... going ... to——"

Behind this suddenly aroused Quixotic sentiment he was sick with horror. He knew that what Krevin Crood had told at last was true. He knew, too, that it would never have come out if Krevin himself had not been in danger. A feeling of almost physical nausea came over him as he remembered the callous, brutal cynicism of Krevin's last words, "If it's going to be my neck or hers, I prefer it to be hers!" A woman!—yet, a murderess; the murderess of his cousin, whose death he had vowed to avenge. But of course it was so—he saw many things now. The anxiety to get the letters; the dread of publicity expressed to Peppermore; the mystery spread over many things and actions; now this affair with Mallett—there was no reason to doubt Krevin Crood's accusation. The fragments of the puzzle had been pieced together.

But as he ran along that lane, and as his mental faculties regained their normality Brent himself did some piecing together. Every word of Krevin Crood's statement had bitten itself into his intelligence. Now he could reconstruct. It seemed to him that he visualized the Mayor's Parlour on that fateful evening. An angry, disillusioned, nerve-racked man, sore and restive under the fancy, or, rather, the realization of deceit, saying bitter and contemptuous words; a desperate, defeated woman, cornered like a rat—and close to her hand the rapier, lying on the old chest where its purchaser had carelessly flung it. A maddened thing, man or woman, would snatch that up, and——

"Blind, uncontrollable impulse!" muttered Brent. "She struck at him, at him—and then it was all over. Intentional, no! Yet ... the law! But, by God, I won't have a hand in hanging ... a woman! Time?"

He knew the exact location of the door in the garden wall of the Abbey House and presently he ran up to it, panting from his swift dash along the lane. Not five minutes had elapsed then since his slip out of the excited court. But every second of the coming minutes was precious. And the door was locked.

The garden wall was eight feet high, and so built that on all the expanse of its smoothed surface there was no foothold, no projection for fingers to cling to. But Brent was in that frame of mind which makes light of obstacles: he drew back into the lane, ran, gathered himself for an upward spring at the coping of the wall, leapt, grasped it, struggled, drew up his weight with a mighty effort, threw a leg over, and dropped, gasping and panting, into the shaded garden. It was quiet there—peaceful as a glade set deep in the heart of a silent wood. He lay for a few seconds where he had dropped; then, with a great effort to get his breath, he rose and went quickly up the laurelled walks towards the house. A moment more and he was abreast of the kitchen and its open door, and in the presence of print-gowned, white-aproned women who first exclaimed and then stared at the sudden sight of him.

"Mrs. Saumarez?" said Brent, frightened at the sound of his own voice. "In?"

The cook, a fat, comfortable woman, turned on him from a clear fire.

"The mistress has not come in yet, sir," she said. "She went out very early this morning on her bicycle, and we haven't seen her since. I expect she'll be back for lunch."