“I am sure of it. He would have inevitably been taken for the murderer. Remember, we were all on the alert, ready to fix upon the first suspicious-looking person our memory could suggest to us.”
“Do you think Johnson would remember the man?”
Johnson was the proprietor of the Cheriton Arms.
“My dear fellow, did you ever find Johnson’s memory available about any transaction six months old? Johnson’s memory is steeped in beer, buried in flesh. Johnson is a perambulating barrel of forgetfulness—a circumambulatory hogshead of stupidity. Ask Johnson to tell you the Christian name of his grandmother, and I would venture a new hat he would be unable to answer you. There is nothing to be got out of mine host of the Cheriton Arms. Be sure of that.”
“I’m afraid you are right,” said Theodore.
He felt as if he had come to a point at which there was no thoroughfare. There was the pistol, with the initials “T. D.,” and he had made up his mind that the man for whom those initials had been engraved was the man who gave his name as Danvers when he called upon the house-agent, the man whose wife had been known for years as Mrs. Danvers. He had made up his mind that this man and no other had murdered Godfrey Carmichael—that many years after the wife’s death the husband had returned from exile or imprisonment, embittered so much the more, so much the more vindictive, so much the more malignant for all that he had suffered in that interval, and had taken the first opportunity to attack a hated household. That he would strike again if he should be allowed to live and be at large Theodore had no doubt. A second murder, and a third murder, seemed the natural sequence of the first. He remembered the murders of the Jermys at Stanfield Hall—the savage hatred which tried to slay four people, two of whom were utterly unconnected with the wrong that called for vengeance. In the face of such a story as that of the murderer Rush, who could say that Theodore’s apprehension of an insatiable malignity, wreaking itself in further bloodshed, was groundless?
He left Dovecotes disheartened, hardly knowing what his next step was to be, and very hopeless of tracking a man who had so contrived as to be unseen upon his deadly errand. He must have come and gone verily like a thief in the night, sheltered by darkness, meeting no one; and yet there was the evidence of the servants at the inquest, who swore to having heard mysterious footsteps outside the house late at night upon more than one occasion shortly before the murder. If the murderer had been about upon several nights, creeping round by the open windows of the reception rooms, watching his opportunity, what had he done with himself in the day? Where had he hidden himself; how had he evaded the prying eyes of a village, which is all eyes, all ears for the unexplained stranger?
CHAPTER XXIX.
“When haughty expectations prostrate lie
And grandeur crouches like a guilty thing.”