Manfred. “What is this story, Leon?”
“Perhaps his lordship will tell us,” said Gonsalez.
Lord Pertham looked round for something.
“I want a glass of water,” he said, and it was Leon who brought it.
“It is perfectly true,” said Lord Pertham after a while. “I recognised you fellows as two of the Four Just Men. I used to be a great friend of His Highness, and it was by accident that I was on board the yacht when you were taken off. His Highness told me a yarn about some escapade, but when I got to Spain and read the newspaper account of the escape I was pretty certain that I knew who you were. You probably know something about my early life, how I went before the mast as a common sailor and travelled all over the world. It was the kind of life which satisfied me more than any, other, for I got to know people and places and to know them from an angle which I should never have understood in any other way. If you ever want to see the world, travel in the fo’c’sle,” he said with a half-smile.
“I met Martha Grey one night in the East End of London at a theatre. When I was a seaman I acted like a seaman. My father and I were not on the best of terms and I never wanted to go home. She sat by my side in the pit of the theatre and ridiculous as it may seem to you I fell in love with her.”
“You were then married?” said Leon, but the man shook his head.
“No,” he said quickly. “Like a fool I was persuaded to marry her ladyship about three months later, after I had got sick of the sea and had come back to my own people. She was an heiress and it was a good match for me. That was before my father had inherited his cousin’s money. My life with her ladyship was a hell upon earth. You saw her tonight and you can guess the kind of woman she is. I have too great a respect for women and live too much in awe of them to exercise any control over her viperish temper and it was the miserable life I lived with her which drove me to seek out Martha.
“Martha is a good girl,” he said, and there was a glitter in his eye as he challenged denial. “The purest, the dearest, the sweetest woman that ever lived. It was when I met her again that I realised how deeply in love I was, and as with a girl of her character there was no other way—I married her.
“I had fever when I was on a voyage to Australia and lost all my hair. That was long before I met Martha. I suppose it was vanity on my part, but when I went back to my own life and my own people, as I did for a time after that, I had a wig made which served the double purpose of concealing my infirmity and preventing my being recognised by my former shipmates.
“As the little hair I had had gone grey I had the wig greyed too, had it made large and poetical—” he smiled sadly, “to make my disguise more complete. Martha didn’t mind my bald head. God bless her!” he said softly, “and my life with her has been a complete and unbroken period of happiness. I have to leave her at times to manage my own affairs and in those times I pretend to be at sea, just as I used to pretend to her ladyship that business affairs called me to America to explain my absence from her.”
“The man you shot was Martha’s half-brother, of course,” said Gonsalez, and Lord Pertham nodded.
“It was just ill luck which brought him to my house,” he said, “sheer bad luck. In the struggle my wig came off, he recognised me and I shot him,” he said simply. “I shot him deliberately and in cold blood, not only because he threatened to wreck my happiness, but because for years he has terrorised his sister and has been living on her poor earnings.”
Gonsalez nodded.
“I saw grey hair in his hands and I guessed what had happened,” he said.
“Now what are you going to do?” asked the Earl of Pertham.
Leon was smoking now.
“What are you going to do?” he asked in retort. “Perhaps you would like me to tell you?”
“I should,” said the man earnestly.
“You are going to take your bigamous wife abroad just as soon as this inquest is over, and you are going to wait a reasonable time and then persuade your wife to get a divorce. After which you will marry your Mrs. Prothero in your own name,” said Gonsalez.
“Leon,” said Manfred after Fearnside had gone back to the room above, the room he had taken in the hope of discovering how much Gonsalez knew, “I think you are a thoroughly unmoral person. Suppose Lady Pertham does not divorce his lordship?”
Leon laughed.
“There is really no need for her to divorce Lord Pertham,” he said, “for his lordship told us a little lie. He married his Martha first, deserted her and went back to her. I happen to know this because I have already examined both registers, and I know there was a Mrs. Prothero before there was a Lady Pertham.”
“You’re a wonderful fellow, Leon,” said Manfred admiringly.
“I am,” admitted Leon Gonsalez.
The Man Who Loved Music
The most striking characteristics of Mr. Homer Lynne were his deep and wide sympathies, and his love of Tschaikovsky’s 1812. He loved music generally, but his neighbours in Pennerthon Road, Hampstead, could testify with vehemence and asperity to his preference for that great battle piece. It had led from certain local unpleasantness to a police-court application, having as its object the suppression of Mr. Homer Lynne as a public nuisance, and finally to the exchange of lawyers’ letters and the
