“—a young woman named Martineau threw herself, with a baby in her arms, from the fourth story of a house in the court, and was killed by the fall. The baby’s frock was caught by a projecting sign, and the child hung perilously in air. John Bolland, whose strong, stern face reveals a character difficult to surprise, impossible to daunt, jumped forward and caught the tiny mite as it dropped a second time. Mrs. Bolland still treasures a letter written by the infant’s unhappy mother, and prizes to the utmost the fine boy whom she and her husband adopted from that hour. The old couple are childless, though with Martin calling them ‘father’ and ‘mother,’ they would scoff at the statement. This, then, is the well-knit, fearless youngster who fought the squire’s son on that eventful night, and whose evidence is of the utmost importance in the police theory of crime, as opposed to accident.”
Colonel Grant went steadily through the neat sentences on which the Messenger correspondent prided himself. He was a man of bronze; he showed no more emotion than a statue, though the facts staring from the printed page might well have produced external signs of the tempest which sprang into instant being in his soul.
He read each line of descriptive matter and report. For the sorrows of Betsy, the final daring of George Pickering, he had no eyes. It was the boy he sought in the living record: the boy who fought young Beckett-Smythe to rescue the thoughtless child—for so Angèle figured in the text; the boy who repudiated with scorn the solicitor’s suggestion that he formed part and parcel of the crowd of urchins gathered in the hotel yard; the farmer’s adopted son, who spoke so fearlessly and bore himself so well that the newspaper noted his intelligence, his bright looks.
At last Colonel Grant laid down the sheet and lighted a fresh cigar. He smoked for a few minutes, watching the pool players, and declining an invitation to join in the game. He seemed to be planning some line of action; soon he went to the library and unrolled a large scale map of England. He found Nottonby—Elmsdale was too small a place to be denoted—and, after consulting a railway timetable, wrote a long telegram.
These things accomplished, he seized an opportunity to tell Lord Heronsdale that business of the utmost importance would take him away by the first train next morning.
Of course, his host was voluble in protestations, so the soldier explained matters.
“You asked me to-day,” he said, “why I turned my back on town thirteen years ago. I meant telling you at a more convenient season. Will it suffice now to say that a kindred reason tears me away from your moor?”
“Gad, I hope there is nothing wrong. Can I help?”
“Yes; by letting me go. You will be here until October. May I return?”
“My dear Grant——”