"I want you, Hutton, and you, Mr. Dobb, to come into the house. Those police officers also had better join us. Who is the other man?"
"Mr. Banks, of the Nuttonby Gazette," said the baronet.
"Very well. Let him come, too. Better tell him what he must not say rather than correct his blunders subsequently in a court of law."
Mr. Dobb, being a lawyer, doubted the wisdom of admitting a representative of the press to their conclave, but Dalrymple's air of authority kept him dumb. During the drive from Nuttonby the delegate of the India Office had discoursed on the important position this stranger occupied in India, and it was not for a country solicitor, who hardly guessed what was coming, to question his decision before he knew its scope.
And therein Dalrymple showed his genius. Banks, already in a flutter because of certain indiscretions in his printed references to the inquest, was at once soothed and gratified by the great man's tact. The police superintendent found the ground cut away from beneath his feet by the full and complete version of recent events which Dalrymple supplied. Sir Berkeley and the doctor listened to the recital with ill-suppressed amazement, but, at the end, they agreed, each and all, with Dalrymple's suggestion that judgment should be suspended until Mrs. Ogilvey was in Elmdale.
He did not attempt to argue that the law should not take its course.
"During the past ten years," he said, "I have held the lives and liberties of two millions of people in my keeping, so I need hardly say that I am a most unlikely person to fly in the face of authority. But there are circumstances connected with this inquiry which call for careful treatment. Some man died here, and was buried, and the law must be satisfied that Mr. Stephen Ogilvey was either ignorant of the occurrence, or had no guilty knowledge of it—which is not quite the same thing—before he can be exonerated from the grave suspicion at present attached to his actions of two years ago. Now, I have not the honor of knowing either Mr. Ogilvey or his wife, but I do hold that they could not have won the respect of their neighbors during twenty years of residence in this house and yet be capable of planning and committing an atrocious murder. I would point out that Mrs. Ogilvey shares some of the blame, or the guilt, of her husband. If he is a criminal, she knows it. The law looks with lenient eyes on a woman who shields a man in such conditions, but that element in human affairs only goes to strengthen my contention that Mrs. Ogilvey can, if she chooses, throw a flood of light on this strange problem. She is now on her way North. Her daughter has gone to York to meet her. In all likelihood, one or both ladies will be in Elmdale to-night. Is it not reasonable to ask that investigation by the police into a singular occurrence now two years old should be postponed till to-morrow? Gentlemen, I promise you this. Come here to-morrow, say, about two o'clock, and you will be placed in possession of every fact then known to me. It is obvious, in my opinion, that the police can hardly adopt any other course, but I am bound to point out to Mr. Banks that the man who writes, and the newspaper which publishes, theories or speculations with regard to this matter before it is fully cleared up through the proper channel, will incur a most serious responsibility."
Sir Berkeley Hutton, of course, had a word to say.
"Mr. Garth, or Mr. Ogilvey as you now call him, is an old and valued friend of mine," he declared, "and it is my fixed and definite belief that if he was stung by a wasp he would find some excuse for a poor insect which was only trying to protect itself from imaginary danger. Stephen Garth kill anybody! Stuff and nonsense!"
Mr. Dobb, too, was incredulous in so far as his friend's criminality was concerned.