‘And yet, Mr Sturgis, you do not believe that things passed in this commonplace, everyday fashion?’ said Lord Harrogate.
‘Argumentum ad hominem, my lord—argumentum ad—— Ah! whisssh!’ exclaimed Mr Sturgis, tottering to his feet and flourishing his arms like an insane semaphore—‘whisssh! you bloodthirsty animal!’
And as he spoke, he flung a short cudgel, that lay concealed among the leafy walls of the arbour, into a clump of rose-bushes a few yards distant. A large cat, scared by the hostile demonstration, scuttled hastily towards the boundary-wall, leaped into a tree, and regaining the neutral ground of the brickwork, turned, with arching back and swollen tail, and glared at its human enemy.
‘One of old Chutnee’s cats—the Colonel’s cats; Persians, he calls them; but they are neither deaf nor white, so that’s all nonsense—after my pigeons!’ explained Mr Sturgis. ‘I saw the brindled monster, the same that robbed me of two pretty fantails and a pouter, stealing like a tigerkin through the bushes. Most encroaching, unprincipled, odious, old fellow is that neighbour of mine. I wish he were back with his sepoys. I wish he had stopped in that detestable Bundelcund, the heathenish name of which he was pigheaded enough to get painted on this house of mine, as if I, of all people, were a Qui Hi, like himself.’
‘Uncongenial tastes,’ said Lord Harrogate, smiling, ‘must detract a great deal from the pleasures of good neighbourhood.’
‘Good neighbourhood indeed!’ cried Mr Sturgis irritably. ‘I might as well be cheek-by-jowl with a Pindharee or a Dacoo, or any other of the outlandish robbers that the Colonel spent such part of his life in hunting as he could spare from billiards and bitter beer and brandy pawnee. It’s not only his cats—it’s everything! His very hookah, in which he smokes rascally eastern drugs, to which tobacco is harmless, poisons the air. He trespasses on everything. He ground-baits for fish until the dace in the river turn up their noses at paste or gentle. He lets long lines, all over hooks, trail down the current, entangling the tackle of other anglers. There’s nothing, really nothing, of which that redfaced Half-pay is not capable, and until he dies of apoplexy, there will be no comfort for me!’
It was evident that there was a standing feud between the man of war and the man of peace. It cost Lord Harrogate some trouble to divert the ex-lawyer’s mind from Colonel Chutnee and his misdoings to his own reminiscences as to that sad little episode that had been enacted years before at Holly Cottage. And it proved impossible to pin so slippery a witness to the point as concerned his own impressions with respect to the cause of the catastrophe. Mr Sturgis was one of those casuists who have been blessed, or the reverse, with that peculiarly legal intellect which takes delight in the niceties of mental straw-splitting, and the edge of which is too fine for the practical work of this rough-and-ready world. He was timid too, and nervously reluctant—having the fear of the law of libel perpetually before his eyes, wherever Colonel Chutnee was not the subject of discourse—to speak his mind. Nevertheless, Lord Harrogate gathered from the ex-solicitor’s guarded talk that the speaker’s delicately balanced opinion inclined towards the hypothesis that there had been something wrong. It was singular that the poor little thing’s body had never been recovered. Men had been dragging, dragging night and day; and not the river Thames alone, but every creek, backwater, weir, and pool had been examined within miles. That the infant had been murdered, was a supposition grossly improbable. It was no one’s interest to make away with the heiress of a barren title. Kidnapping was, under the circumstances, almost as unlikely as murder. Gipsies, credited in popular belief with such offences, had never been taxed with stealing a child too young to beg, and who would therefore be useless to the strolling tribe. Nor would the lithest Zingari be bold and deft enough to venture on a theft so audacious, so difficult, and so unprofitable.
Yet, though Mr Sturgis glibly enumerated all the grounds on which a verdict of ‘Accidental drowning’ might be returned by a coroner’s jury, Lord Harrogate felt more and more convinced that the little lawyer in his heart of hearts believed that something was amiss.
‘Rumours were afloat at the time,’ said Lord Harrogate; ‘and unless I am greatly mistaken, inquiries were made?’
Mr Sturgis assented. ‘Idle tongues wagged,’ he said, ‘in various circles of society; and we sifted, as was our duty—I speak of myself and of my esteemed coadjutors, Messrs Pounce and Pontifex—much loose gossip, and found a residuum of—nothing. There was much assertion, but not an iota of proof.’