Never had they been happier together—perhaps never so happy—for John Treverton’s mind was no longer burdened with the secret of an unhappy past. Today it seemed to both as if there was not a cloud on their horizon. They strolled about orchard and garden until the church clock struck nine, and then John went straight to the hall door, where his handsome bay stood waiting for him, and where Laura’s ponies were rattling their bits, and shaking their pretty little thoroughbred heads, in a general impatience to be doing something, were it only running away with the light basket carriage to which they were harnessed.
“Oh, there is your tenant,” said Laura, as she and her husband came round the gravel drive from the adjacent garden, “standing at the hall door waiting for you.”
“Is that he?” exclaimed Treverton. “He looks uncommonly like a Londoner. Well, my good fellow,” he began, going up to the man, hunting-crop in hand, ready to mount his horse, “what is your business with me? Please make it as short as you can, for I’ve six miles to ride before I begin my day’s work.”
“I shall be very brief, Mr. Treverton,” answered the stranger, coming close up to the master of Hazlehurst Manor, and speaking in a low and serious tone, “for I want to catch the up-train at 11:30, and I must take you with me. I’m a police officer from Scotland Yard, and I am here to arrest you on suspicion of having murdered your wife, known as Mademoiselle Chicot, at Cibber Street, Leicester Square, on the 19th of February, 187‒.”
John Treverton turned deadly pale; but he faced the man without flinching.
“I’ll come with you immediately,” he said; “but you can do me one favour. Don’t let my wife know the nature of the business that takes me to London. I can get it broken to her gently after I am gone.”
“Don’t you think you’d better tell her yourself?” suggested the detective, in a friendly tone. “She’ll take it better from you than from anyone else. I’ve always found it so. Tell her the truth, and let her come to London with us, if she likes.”
“You are right,” said Treverton, “she’ll be happier near me than eating her heart out down here. You’ve got someone with you, I suppose. You didn’t reckon upon taking me single handed?”
“I didn’t reckon upon your making any resistance. You’re too much a gentleman and a man of the world. I’ve no doubt you can clear yourself when you come before a magistrate, and that the business will go no further. It was your being absent from the inquest, you know, that made things look bad against you.”
“Yes, that was a mistake,” answered Treverton.
“I’ve got a man inside,” said the detective. “If you’ll step into the parlour, and have it out with your wife, he can wait in the hall. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind ordering a trap of some kind to take us to the station. It might look better for you to go in your own trap.”
“Yes, I’ll see to it,” assented John Treverton, absently. “Answer me one question, there’s a good fellow. Who set Scotland Yard on my heels? Who put you up to the fact that I am the man who called himself Chicot?”
“Never you mind how we got at that, sir,” replied the detective, sagely. “That’s a kind of thing we never tell. We got the straight tip; that’s all you need know. It don’t make no difference to you how we got it, does it now?”
“Yes,” said John Treverton, “it makes a great difference. But I daresay I shall know all about it before long.”
XXXIX
On Suspicion
Mr. Treverton’s hunter was taken back to his loose-box, where he executed an energetic pas seul with his hind legs, in the exuberance of his feelings at being let off his day’s work. Mr. Treverton himself was closeted with his wife in the book-room, but not alone. The man from Scotland Yard was present throughout the interview, while his subordinate, a respectable-looking young man in plain clothes, paced quietly up and down the corridor outside.
Laura bore this last crushing blow as she had borne the first—with a noble heroism. She neither wept nor trembled, but stood by her husband’s side, pale and steadfast, ready to sustain and comfort him, rather than to add to his burden with the weight of her own grief.
“I am not afraid, John,” she said. “I am almost glad that you should face this hideous charge. Better to be put upon your trial, and prove yourself innocent, as I know you can, than to live all your life under the shadow of a groundless suspicion.”
She spoke boldly, yet her heart sickened at the thought that it might not be easy, perhaps not even possible, for her husband to prove himself guiltless. She remembered what had been said at the time of the murder, and how every circumstance had seemed to point at him as the murderer.
“My dearest, I shall be able to confront this charge,” answered John Treverton. “I have no fear of that. I made a miserable mistake in not facing the difficulty at the time. The business may be a little more troublesome now than it would have been then; but I am not afraid. I would not ask you to go to London with me, darling, if I feared the result of my journey.”
“Do you think I would let you go alone, in any case?” asked Laura.
She was thinking that even
