The House 'Round the Corner

"Yes," and Marguérite's "chosen mate" looked him very searchingly and squarely in the eyes.

"My name is Morand," said the other. "I am sent here by the India Office to tell you – " he glanced around in momentary hesitation.

"Pray, go on," said Dalrymple, as Armathwaite must be described henceforth. "There is nothing that the India Office has to communicate which I am not willing that all the world should hear."

"Happily, Sir Robert, this is a communication which all the world ought to hear. The Maharajah of Barapur is dead. He was assassinated last Monday while driving through the bazaar. His prime minister, Chalwar Singh, was with him, and was mortally wounded at the same time."

"Then India is well rid of two pestilent scoundrels," said Dalrymple unconcernedly.

"That is the view now held by the Government," was the grave answer.

"A death-bed conversion, of a sort," commented his hearer dryly.

"A death-bed confession, too," said Morand. "It was a fortunate thing that both men lived long enough to reveal that they had concocted the whole story of the Maharani's pearls in order to get you shelved. Your administration was too honest. They played on your well-known carelessness in trivial matters of detail, and bribed your native secretary, Muncherji, to include in your correspondence the letters which seemed to prove your complicity in a serious breach of trust. Muncherji, by rare good chance, was not in Barapur when the Maharajah and Chalwar Singh were riddled with bullets, so he was arrested before he knew of the affair. He, too, has confessed. In fact, I can convey everything in a sentence. The Government of India has reinstated you in the High Commissionership, and you are gazetted as absent on leave. I am the bearer of ample apologies from the India Office, which will be tendered to you in person by my chief when he meets you in London. Meanwhile, I am to request you to allow the announcement to be made public that you will return to India on a named date, while the appointment of your deputy is left open for your recommendation."

Dalrymple paled slightly, which was the only evidence he gave of the effect such a statement was bound to produce on a proud and ambitious nature, but Sir Berkeley Hutton was irrepressible.

"By gad!" he roared, "somebody's gold lace has been rolled in the dust of Calcutta before the India Department climbed down like that. I never heard anything like it – never! 'Pon me soul! Won't Mollie be pleased?"

Yet the man to whom the path of empire was again thrown open spoke no word. It was good to have his honor cleared of the stain put on it by a scheming Indian prince and his henchmen. It was good to find himself standing once more in the high place he had won by self-sacrificing work and unflinching adherence to an ideal of efficient government. But his thoughts were with a sorrow-stricken girl speeding to a sad tryst with a mother who might bring tidings that would blight her life for many a year.

Morand grew anxious. He shared Dalrymple's knowledge of the tremendous issues bound up with an affair of State of real magnitude, and he did not want to fail in this, his first confidential mission.

"If there is anything else I can say, Sir Robert – " he began, and his voice disrupted a dream.

"It's all right, Morand," said the other, letting a hand rest on the shoulder of the younger man in that characteristic way of his. "I'm not such a cur as to snarl when I have been proved right, and my traducers are ready to admit their blunder. I didn't yelp when the blow fell. I'm not going to kick up a bobbery now when I'm given back my spurs. Tell your chief that I'll come to him soon, within a week, if possible. I have business on my hands here that calls imperatively for settlement. I'll deal first with that; then I'll come. Are you returning to town at once?"

"By the first available train. More than that, I am to telegraph your decision to Whitehall. Between you and me, some people are in a howling funk lest a question should be put in the House."

"That isn't the frontier method. Men who appeal to Parliament when things go wrong are of no value to India. But I don't want to preach."

"Won't you come in?"

"If you'll pardon me, I'll hurry back to Nuttonby. That telegram is called for urgently. What about your deputy?"

"Collins was transferred to Oudh because he supported me. Send him to Barapur. The natives will understand that better than a dozen gazettes."

"Thanks. That clinches it, Sir Robert. Mr. Dobb, do you mind if we start immediately?"

Mr. Dobb did mind. For one thing, he had not spoken a word to Sir Robert Dalrymple yet. For another, Nuttonby loomed larger in his mind than some wrangle in far-away Hindustan, and Nuttonby was seething with rumors anent present and past inhabitants of the Grange.

"We, like the State of Barapur, have our little troubles," he said guardedly. "Sir Robert has shown already that he appreciates their gravity. My car will take you to Nuttonby, Mr. Morand, and come back for me."

The representative of the India Office was only too pleased to get away on any terms. He knew that a reassuring message was wanted in Whitehall. There were wheels within wheels. A question was put in the House that night, and an Under-Secretary scoffed at the notion that Sir Robert Dalrymple, "a trusted servant of his country, whose splendid work on the Indus was most thoroughly appreciated by the Government of India," had been requested to resign. As a matter of public interest, he was pleased to inform the honorable questioner that Sir Robert Dalrymple, only that day, had put forward the name of Mr. Mortimer Collins, I.C.S., to act as his deputy in Barapur until he returned from short leave granted on "urgent private affairs."

The motor was already trumpeting its way through a mob of Elmdale urchins, who seldom saw a car, and had never before seen two in one day, when Dalrymple found himself regretting he had not inquired how Morand contrived to get on his track so easily. Some weeks elapsed before he learned that the only friend in London who knew his whereabouts thought it a duty to speak when the hue and cry went forth from the India Office.

Dalrymple was with his friend, a retired general, in his club when the vexed administrator announced his intention to retire from the arena and take a well-earned rest.

"I'll assume my mother's name, Armathwaite," he had said, "and rusticate in some place where Barapur is unknown and India never mentioned. Let's have a look at the map!"

He glanced at a motoring road-book lying on the club table.

"Here we are!" he laughed. "Judging by the condition of the highways, there are backwoods near Nuttonby, in Yorkshire. My postal address will be Armathwaite, near Nuttonby, for some months. But I'll write."

So that was how it happened that Sir Robert Dalrymple came to the Grange, and met Marguérite Ogilvey. Some part of the outcome of that meeting was foreshadowed while Smith of the Begonias was unlocking the gate, because a procession of three appeared in the porch.

Dr. Scaife and a nurse were carrying Percy Whittaker between them. The doctor's distress was almost comical when he caught sight of Dalrymple. He shouted brokenly, being rather breathless:

"For goodness' sake – Mr. Armathwaite – come and persuade this young man – to remain here. He insists – on being taken away – at once!"

CHAPTER XV

THE LAYING OF THE GHOST

It has been seen that Dalrymple had a short way with the Percy Whittakers of this world. He strode up the garden path and confronted Whittaker, who was standing on one foot and clinging in pain and terror to Dr. Scaife and the nurse.

"You had better remain here," he said sternly. "Miss Ogilvey has only gone to meet her mother at York. Both ladies will probably arrive this evening. Why are you making yourself a nuisance when everyone is doing all that is possible to serve you?"

Whittaker clutched the doctor even more tightly.

"He says that before witnesses," he quavered, "yet less than an hour ago he tried to strangle me."

"Stuff and nonsense! I don't believe it!" protested Scaife emphatically.

"I frightened him, undoubtedly," said Dalrymple. "It was necessary. Sometimes a threatened spanking is as effectual as the real thing, and Mr. Whittaker's nervous system has led him to take an exaggerated view of my intentions. The fact is that he himself was responsible for a show of violence on my part. Meanwhile, Marguérite Ogilvey, whom you have always known as Meg Garth, Dr. Scaife, has promised to become my wife, so Mr. Whittaker and I have no further cause for quarrel. Indeed, by the time he is able to walk downstairs unassisted, his own good sense will come to the rescue, and blot out any unpleasant memories as between him and me… Now, Percy, my boy, let me use my muscles to better purpose than choking the life out of you. I'm going to carry you back to bed again."

His air of quiet domination, no less than the news which sounded the knell of Whittaker's hopes, seemed to mesmerize the neurotic youth into silence and submission. Dalrymple took him in his arms, lifted him off the ground with gentle care, and carried him to the bedroom he had insisted on leaving. The nurse followed, and he left the invalid in her care.

Hastening to the porch, he found Dr. Scaife mopping his forehead; the worthy doctor was more upset by the frenzied statements made by Percy than by the physical effort involved by carrying him downstairs.

"Wait one moment," he said. "I'm bringing in some men whom you know. Then I shall explain everything."

He passed on to the gate.

"I want you, Hutton, and you, Mr. Dobb, to come into the house. Those police officers also had better join us. Who is the other man?"

"Mr. Banks, of the Nuttonby Gazette," said the baronet.

"Very well. Let him come, too. Better tell him what he must not say rather than correct his blunders subsequently in a court of law."

Mr. Dobb, being a lawyer, doubted the wisdom of admitting a representative of the press to their conclave, but Dalrymple's air of authority kept him dumb. During the drive from Nuttonby the delegate of the India Office had discoursed on the important position this stranger occupied in India, and it was not for a country solicitor, who hardly guessed what was coming, to question his decision before he knew its scope.

And therein Dalrymple showed his genius. Banks, already in a flutter because of certain indiscretions in his printed references to the inquest, was at once soothed and gratified by the great man's tact. The police superintendent found the ground cut away from beneath his feet by the full and complete version of recent events which Dalrymple supplied. Sir Berkeley and the doctor listened to the recital with ill-suppressed amazement, but, at the end, they agreed, each and all, with Dalrymple's suggestion that judgment should be suspended until Mrs. Ogilvey was in Elmdale.

He did not attempt to argue that the law should not take its course.

"During the past ten years," he said, "I have held the lives and liberties of two millions of people in my keeping, so I need hardly say that I am a most unlikely person to fly in the face of authority. But there are circumstances connected with this inquiry which call for careful treatment. Some man died here, and was buried, and the law must be satisfied that Mr. Stephen Ogilvey was either ignorant of the occurrence, or had no guilty knowledge of it – which is not quite the same thing – before he can be exonerated from the grave suspicion at present attached to his actions of two years ago. Now, I have not the honor of knowing either Mr. Ogilvey or his wife, but I do hold that they could not have won the respect of their neighbors during twenty years of residence in this house and yet be capable of planning and committing an atrocious murder. I would point out that Mrs. Ogilvey shares some of the blame, or the guilt, of her husband. If he is a criminal, she knows it. The law looks with lenient eyes on a woman who shields a man in such conditions, but that element in human affairs only goes to strengthen my contention that Mrs. Ogilvey can, if she chooses, throw a flood of light on this strange problem. She is now on her way North. Her daughter has gone to York to meet her. In all likelihood, one or both ladies will be in Elmdale to-night. Is it not reasonable to ask that investigation by the police into a singular occurrence now two years old should be postponed till to-morrow? Gentlemen, I promise you this. Come here to-morrow, say, about two o'clock, and you will be placed in possession of every fact then known to me. It is obvious, in my opinion, that the police can hardly adopt any other course, but I am bound to point out to Mr. Banks that the man who writes, and the newspaper which publishes, theories or speculations with regard to this matter before it is fully cleared up through the proper channel, will incur a most serious responsibility."