“And you take it that he was particularly vindictive?”
“He was as vindictive as a cur can be.”
“And was his anger strongest against the lady, do you suppose, or against the gentleman?”
“Decidedly against the gentleman. He was full of envy and hatred and all uncharitableness towards Mr. Dalbrook. He affected to think contemptuously of his talents and to belittle him in every way, while he was bursting with envy at his growing success. He was jealous and angry as a husband, no doubt; but he was still more jealous and still angrier as a disappointed man against a successful man. He was as venomous as conscious failure can be. And now, sir, that I have spoken so freely about this little domestic drama, which was all past and done with twenty years ago, and in which I only felt interested as a man of the world, now may I ask your name, and how you come to be so keenly interested in so remote an event?”
“My name is Dalbrook,” replied Theodore, taking out his card and lying it upon the agent’s desk.
“You don’t mean to say so! A relation of Lord Cheriton’s?”
“His cousin, a distant cousin, but warmly attached to him and—his. The motive of my inquiry need be no secret. A dastardly murder was committed last summer in Lord Cheriton’s house——”
“Yes, I remember the circumstances.”
“A seemingly motiveless murder; unless it was the act of some secret foe—foe either of the man who was killed—or of his wife’s father, Lord Cheriton. I have reason to know that the young man who was killed had never made an enemy. His life was short and blameless. Now, a malignant cur, such as the man you describe—a man possessed by the devil of drink—would be just the kind of creature to assail the strong man through his defenceless daughter. To murder her husband was to break her heart, and to crush her father’s hopes. This man may have discovered long beforehand how my cousin had built upon that marriage—how devoted he was to his daughter, and how ambitious for her. Upon my soul, I believe that you have given me the clue. If we are to look for a blind unreasoning hatred—malignity strong enough and irrational enough to strike the innocent in order to get at the guilty—I do not think we can look for it in a more likely person than in the husband of Mrs. Danvers.”
“Perhaps not,” said Mr. Adkins, keenly interested, yet dubious. “But, granted that he is the man, how are you to find him? It is about four and twenty years since he stood where you are standing now, and I have never set eyes on him from that day to this—close upon a quarter of a century. I can’t tell you his calling, or his kindred, the place where he lived, or even the name he bore, with any certainty. Danvers may have been only an assumed name—or it may have been his name. There’s no knowing—or rather there’s only one person likely to be able to help you in the matter, and that is Lord Cheriton.”