This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.”
That ghastly idea mooted by Cuthbert Ramsay—the idea of an unsatisfied hatred still hovering like a bird of prey over the heads of Juanita and her child, ready to make its deadly swoop in the hour that should see her most helpless and unprotected—gave a new impetus to Theodore’s mind, and he applied himself again to the apparently hopeless endeavour to find the motive of the murder and the person of the murderer.
As an initial step he invited Mr. Churton to dine with him at his chambers, entertained that gentleman with a well-chosen little dinner sent in from a famous tavern in the Strand, and a bottle of unexceptionable port after dinner; and by this innocent means got the detective into an expansive frame of mind, and induced him to discuss the Cheriton murder in all its bearings.
The result of the long evening’s talk differed in hardly any point from the opinion which Mr. Churton had formulated at Cheriton. The motive of the murder must be looked for in some past wrong, or fancied wrong, inflicted upon the murderer. And again Mr. Churton returned to his point that there was a woman at the bottom of it.
“Do you mean that a woman fired the shot?”
“Decidedly not. I mean that a woman was the motive power. Women are not given to avenging their wrongs with their own hands. They will instigate the men who love them to desperate crimes—unconsciously perhaps—for they are the first to howl when the crime has been committed, and the lover’s neck is in danger. But jealousy is the most powerful factor of all, and I take it jealousy was at the bottom of the Cheriton crime. I take it that some intrigue of Sir Godfrey’s youth was at the root of the matter.”
“Strange as you may consider such a belief, Mr. Churton, I am inclined to think that Sir Godfrey’s youth was innocent of intrigues—that he never loved any woman except my cousin, whom he adored from the time he was eighteen, when she was a lovely child of eleven. It was a very romantic attachment, and the kind of attachment which keeps a man clear of low associations.”
“You and Lord Cheriton tell me the same story, sir,” said the detective, with a touch of impatience; “but if this immaculate young man never injured anybody, how do you account for that bullet?”
“It is unaccountable, except upon a far-fetched hypothesis.”