Theodore explained the positions of Lord Cheriton and the race that preceded him as owners of the soil, and Juanita’s suspicion of some unknown member of the Strangway family; but the detective rejected this notion as unworthy of professional consideration.
“It is like a young lady to get such an idea into her head,” he said. “If the estate had changed hands yesterday—well, even then I shouldn’t suspect the former owners of wanting to murder the purchaser’s son-in-law; but when you reflect that Lord Cheriton has been in peaceful possession of the property for more than twenty years the idea isn’t worth a moment’s thought. What put such a fancy into the lady’s head, do you think, Mr. Dalbrook?”
“Grief! She has brooded upon her loss until her sorrow has taken strange shapes. She thinks that it is her duty to help in bringing her husband’s murderer to justice. She has racked her brains to discover the motive of that cruel crime. She has conjured up the image of incarnate hatred, and she calls that image by the name of Strangway. I have pledged myself to act upon this idea of hers as if it were inspiration, and the first part of my task will be to find out any surviving member of Squire Strangway’s family. He only left three children, so the task ought not to be impossible.”
“You don’t mean, sir, that you are going to act upon the young lady’s theory?”
“I do mean it, Mr. Churton, and I want you to help me; or at any rate to give me a lesson. How am I to begin?”
He laid his facts before the detective, reading over the notes which he had elaborated from Jasper Blake’s reminiscences and from his own recollection of various conversations in which the Strangways had figured.
Churton listened attentively, nodded, or shook his head occasionally, and was master of every detail after that one hearing.
“Jersey is not a large place. If I were following up this inquiry I should go first for the son who is supposed to have died in Jersey,” he said, when he had heard all. “I should follow that line as far as it goes, and then I should hunt up the particulars of the Colonel’s death, the gentleman who was drowned at Nice. If any Strangway had a hand in the business, it must have been one of those two, or the son of one of them. But I tell you plainly, Mr. Dalbrook, that I don’t put any faith in that poor lady’s notion—no, not that much,” said the detective, snapping his fingers contemptuously.
“Yet it was you yourself who first mooted the idea of a vendetta.”
“So it was; but I didn’t mean a vendetta on such grounds as that. An estate changes hands, and—after twenty years and more—the original holders try to murder the son-in-law of the purchaser! That won’t hold water, sir. There’s not enough human passion in it. I’ve had to study humanity, Mr. Dalbrook. It’s been a part of my profession, and perhaps I’ve studied human nature closer than many a philosopher who sits in his library and writes a book about it. Now, there’s no human nature in that notion of Lady Carmichael’s. A man may be very savage because his spendthrift father has squandered his estate, and he may feel savage with the lucky man who bought and developed that estate, and may envy him in his enjoyment of it—but he won’t nurse his wrath for nearly a quarter of a century, and then give expression to his feelings all at once with a revolver. That isn’t human nature.”