Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose

“It was blunt and rusty—a mere toy knife—not at all the sort of weapon a man would make use of who designed to commit a deliberate murder. The crime, if there WAS a crime (which we do not admit), must therefore have been wholly unpremeditated.”

I bowed my head. “For us who knew Hugo that goes without saying.”

She leaned forward eagerly. “Dr. Sebastian has pointed out to me a line of defence which would probably succeed—if we could only induce poor Hugo to adopt it. He has examined the blade and scabbard, and finds that the dagger fits its sheath very tight, so that it can only be withdrawn with considerable violence. The blade sticks.” (I nodded again.) “It needs a hard pull to wrench it out.... He has also inspected the wound, and assures me its character is such that it MIGHT have been self-inflicted.” She paused now and again, and brought out her words with difficulty. “Self-inflicted, he suggests; therefore, that THIS may have happened. It is admitted—WILL be admitted—the servants overheard it—we can make no reservation there—a difference of opinion, an altercation, even, took place between Hugo and Clara that evening”—she started suddenly—“why, it was only last night—it seems like ages—an altercation about the children’s schooling. Clara held strong views on the subject of the children”—her eyes blinked hard—“which Hugo did not share. We throw out the hint, then, that Clara, during the course of the dispute—we must call it a dispute—accidentally took up this dagger and toyed with it. You know her habit of toying, when she had no knitting or needlework. In the course of playing with it (we suggest) she tried to pull the knife out of its sheath; failed; held it up, so, point upward; pulled again; pulled harder—with a jerk, at last the sheath came off; the dagger sprang up; it wounded Clara fatally. Hugo, knowing that they had disagreed, knowing that the servants had heard, and seeing her fall suddenly dead before him, was seized with horror—the Le Geyt impulsiveness!—lost his head; rushed out; fancied the accident would be mistaken for murder. But why? A Q.C., don’t you know! Recently married! Most attached to his wife. It is plausible, isn’t it?”

“So plausible,” I answered, looking it straight in the face, “that… it has but one weak point. We might make a coroner’s jury or even a common jury accept it, on Sebastian’s expert evidence. Sebastian can work wonders; but we could never make—”

Hilda Wade finished the sentence for me as I paused: “Hugo Le Geyt consent to advance it.”

I lowered my head. “You have said it,” I answered.

“Not for the children’s sake?” Mrs. Mallet cried, with clasped hands.

“Not for the children’s sake, even,” I answered. “Consider for a moment, Mrs. Mallet: IS it true? Do you yourself BELIEVE it?”

She threw herself back in her chair with a dejected face. “Oh, as for that,” she cried, wearily, crossing her hands, “before you and Hilda, who know all, what need to prevaricate? How CAN I believe it? We understand how it came about. That woman! That woman!”

“The real wonder is,” Hilda murmured, soothing her white hand, “that he contained himself so long!”

“Well, we all know Hugo,” I went on, as quietly as I was able; “and, knowing Hugo, we know that he might be urged to commit this wild act in a fierce moment of indignation—righteous indignation on behalf of his motherless girls, under tremendous provocation. But we also know that, having once committed it, he would never stoop to disown it by a subterfuge.”

The heart-broken sister let her head drop faintly. “So Hilda told me,” she murmured; “and what Hilda says in these matters is almost always final.”

We debated the question for some minutes more. Then Mrs. Mallet cried at last: “At any rate, he has fled for the moment, and his flight alone brings the worst suspicion upon him. That is our chief point. We must find out where he is; and if he has gone right away, we must bring him back to London.”

“Where do you think he has taken refuge?”

“The police, Dr. Sebastian has ascertained, are watching the railway stations, and the ports for the Continent.”

“Very like the police!” Hilda exclaimed, with more than a touch of contempt in her voice. “As if a clever man-of-the-world like Hugo Le Geyt would run away by rail, or start off to the Continent! Every Englishman is noticeable on the Continent. It would be sheer madness!”

“You think he has not gone there, then?” I cried, deeply interested.

“Of course not. That is the point I hinted at just now. He has defended many persons accused of murder, and he often spoke to me of their incredible folly, when trying to escape, in going by rail, or in setting out from England for Paris. An Englishman, he used to say, is least observed in his own country. In this case, I think I KNOW where he has gone, how he went there.”

“Where, then?”

“WHERE comes last; HOW first. It is a question of inference.”

“Explain. We know your powers.”

“Well, I take it for granted that he killed her—we must not mince matters—about twelve o’clock; for after that hour, the servants told Lina, there was quiet in the drawing-room. Next, I conjecture, he went upstairs to change his clothes: he could not go forth on the world in an evening suit; and the housemaid says his black coat and trousers were lying as usual on a chair in his dressing-room—which shows at least that he was not unduly flurried. After that, he put on another suit, no doubt—WHAT suit I hope the police will not discover too soon; for I suppose you must just accept the situation that we are conspiring to defeat the ends of justice.”

“No, no!” Mrs. Mallet cried. “To bring him back voluntarily, that he may face his trial like a man!”

“Yes, dear. That is quite right. However, the next thing, of course, would be that he would shave in whole or in part. His big black beard was so very conspicuous; he would certainly get rid of that before attempting to escape. The servants being in bed, he was not pressed for time; he had the whole night before him. So, of course, he shaved. On the other hand, the police, you may be sure, will circulate his photograph—we must not shirk these points”—for Mrs. Mallet winced again—“will circulate his photograph, BEARD AND ALL; and that will really be one of our great safeguards; for the bushy beard so masks the face that, without it, Hugo would be scarcely recognisable. I conclude, therefore, that he must have shorn himself BEFORE leaving home; though naturally I did not make the police a present of the hint by getting Lina to ask any questions in that direction of the housemaid.”

“You are probably right,” I answered. “But would he have a razor?”

“I was coming to that. No; certainly he would not. He had not shaved for years. And they kept no men-servants; which makes it difficult for him to borrow one from a sleeping man. So what he would do would doubtless be to cut off his beard, or part of it, quite close, with a pair of scissors, and then get himself properly shaved next morning in the first country town he came to.”

“The first country town?”

“Certainly. That leads up to the next point. We must try to be cool and collected.” She was quivering with suppressed emotion herself, as she said it, but her soothing hand still lay on Mrs. Mallet’s. “The next thing is—he would leave London.”

“But not by rail, you say?”

“He is an intelligent man, and in the course of defending others has thought about this matter. Why expose himself to the needless risk and observation of a railway station? No; I saw at once what he would do. Beyond doubt, he would cycle. He always wondered it was not done oftener, under similar circumstances.”

“But has his bicycle gone?”

“Lina looked. It has not. I should have expected as much. I told her to note that point very unobtrusively, so as to avoid giving the police the clue. She saw the machine in the outer hall as usual.”

“He is too good a criminal lawyer to have dreamt of taking his own,” Mrs. Mallet interposed, with another effort.

“But where could he have hired or bought one at that time of night?” I exclaimed.

“Nowhere—without exciting the gravest suspicion. Therefore, I conclude, he stopped in London for the night, sleeping at an hotel, without luggage, and paying for his room in advance. It is frequently done, and if he arrived late, very little notice would be taken of him. Big hotels about the Strand, I am told, have always a dozen such casual bachelor guests every evening.”

“And then?”

“And then, this morning, he would buy a new bicycle—a different make from his own, at the nearest shop; would rig himself out, at some ready-made tailor’s, with a fresh tourist suit—probably an ostentatiously tweedy bicycling suit; and, with that in his luggage-carrier, would make straight on his machine for the country. He could change in some copse, and bury his own clothes, avoiding the blunders he has seen in others. Perhaps he might ride for the first twenty or thirty miles out of London to some minor side-station, and then go on by train towards his destination, quitting the rail again at some unimportant point where the main west road crosses the Great Western or the South-Western line.”

“Great Western or South-Western? Why those two in particular? Then, you have settled in your own mind which direction he has taken?”

“Pretty well. I judge by analogy. Lina, your brother was brought up in the West Country, was he not?”

Mrs. Mallet gave a weary nod. “In North Devon,” she answered; “on the wild stretch of moor about Hartland and Clovelly.”

Hilda Wade seemed to collect herself. “Now, Mr. Le Geyt is essentially a Celt—a Celt in temperament,” she went on; “he comes by origin and ancestry from a rough, heather-clad country; he belongs to the moorland. In other words, his type is the mountaineer’s. But a mountaineer’s instinct in similar circumstances is—what? Why, to fly straight to his native mountains. In an agony of terror, in an access of despair, when all else fails, he strikes a bee-line for the hills he loves; rationally or irrationally, he seems to think he can hide there. Hugo Le Geyt, with his frank boyish nature, his great Devonian frame, is sure to have done so. I know his mood. He has made for the West Country!”

“You are, right, Hilda,” Mrs. Mallet exclaimed, with conviction. “I’m quite sure, from what I know of Hugo, that to go to the West would be his first impulse.”

“And the Le Geyts are always governed by first impulses,” my character-reader added.

She was quite correct. From the time we two were at Oxford together—I as an undergraduate, he as a don—I had always noticed that marked trait in my dear old friend’s temperament.

After a short pause, Hilda broke the silence again. “The sea again; the sea! The Le Geyts love the water. Was there any place on the sea where he went much as a boy—any lonely place, I mean, in that North Devon district?”

Mrs. Mallet reflected a moment. “Yes, there was a little bay—a mere gap in high cliffs, with some fishermen’s huts and a few yards of beach—where he used to spend much of his holidays. It was a weird-looking break in a grim sea-wall of dark-red rocks, where the tide rose high, rolling in from the Atlantic.”

“The very thing! Has he visited it since he grew up?”

“To my knowledge, never.”

Hilda’s voice had a ring of certainty. “Then THAT is where we shall find him, dear! We must look there first. He is sure to revisit just such a solitary spot by the sea when trouble overtakes him.”

Later in the evening, as we were walking home towards Nathaniel’s together, I asked Hilda why she had spoken throughout with such unwavering confidence. “Oh, it was simple enough,” she answered. “There were two things that helped me through, which I didn’t like to mention in detail before Lina. One was this: the Le Geyts have all of them an instinctive horror of the sight of blood; therefore, they almost never commit suicide by shooting themselves or cutting their throats. Marcus, who shot himself in the gun-room, was an exception to both rules; he never minded blood; he could cut up a deer. But Hugo refused to be a doctor, because he could not stand the sight of an operation; and even as a sportsman he never liked to pick up or handle the game he had shot himself; he said it sickened him. He rushed from that room last night, I feel sure, in a physical horror at the deed he had done; and by now he is as far as he can get from London. The sight of his act drove him away; not craven fear of an arrest. If the Le Geyts kill themselves—a seafaring race on the whole—their impulse is to trust to water.”