“Well, when I got back here and went to his cell I found him stone dead. He’d poisoned himself! Swallowed a strychnine pill.”
“Because he was the murderer of Arthur Rumbold,” I answered. “Miss Burnet will later on explain everything.”
“H’m,” he grunted. “A pretty complicated bit of business, when all the threads are gathered up.”
There were still a few other matters to investigate, I pointed out, and an hour later we went out to Sydenham Hill, and there saw Mrs Parham and Miss O’Hara. When we told the poor lady of her husband’s arrest, and the charge against him, she fainted. Then, presently, when she came to, she confessed that soon after her marriage she had had certain suspicions aroused, for she discovered that her husband was wanted by the French police for some offence committed in Bordeaux. The secret cavity had been made in the drawing-room floor by him, and in it he kept his private papers. Her own opinion was that the agents of French police wanted to search there for certain evidence, the evidence of that gruesome eye, no doubt, but knowing that no English magistrate would grant them a search-warrant they resolved to make a raid on the place, as though they were thieves. Though they overlooked the strange eye which, with some ulterior motive Parham had preserved, they nevertheless secured sufficient evidence to warrant them in applying for the man’s extradition for the murder of a banker at Bordeaux, which indeed the French Consulate-General had done three weeks previously. Miss O’Hara, it appeared, had accidentally discovered the cipher hidden behind a heavy wardrobe in one of the bedrooms, and by its means had read my messages and gone to Baker Street and to Dean’s Yard out of sheer curiosity.
Surely I need not dwell upon the boundless delight with which poor, ill-judged and helpless Sybil was hailed on her return to Grosvenor Street, or the sensation when that same evening in the drawing-room, before her mother, Jack, Cynthia and Lord Wydcombe, she repeated the whole of the strange circumstances, just as she had related them to me.
Jack was furious, for he saw how cleverly he had been fleeced by Ellice Winsloe, while I, on my part, turned to the little love of my youth, saying frankly,—
“As Tibbie seems to be still in fear that the French police may apply for her extradition on account of the sale of the naval secret to our Admiralty, she may be inclined to change her nationality in real earnest. She can do this by marriage, easier than by letters of naturalisation, and as we are man and wife and poor in the eyes of Camberwell, so, if Tibbie consents, will we become the same in the eyes of Society.”
For answer she clung to me quickly with a cry of joy, and allowed me to kiss away the tears from her dear face, while Jack clapped me heartily upon the shoulder and said,—
“Wilfrid, old fellow! It’s just as it should be. Tibbie’s loved you for years. Everybody who wasn’t blind has seen that. You’ve saved her, and you’ve a right to her.”
And five minutes later my well-beloved and I were receiving the congratulations of the whole family.